Chapter 20
-Thirty minutes (alternatively: three days) later-
Telling David Wymack that she had poisoned and killed all of his players went about as badly as Scarlet expected it to.
“You WHAT?!” He cried angrily.
“I killed all of your foxes,” She replied “All of them, every last one. Boyd. Dead. Wilds? Dead. Minyards? Dead and Dead. Gansey? Dead, for the third time. Shall I go on or are you going to continue asking unnecessary questions?” Scarlet didn’t have time for this, she was in a hurry.
David lunged at her. The Gray Man caught him and held him still, David thrashed in his grip, trying to get free, but The Gray Man was firm.
“David I would love to fight you another time, god knows we’ve been due for a good brawl forever, but we don’t have time,” Scarlet tried to explain, but David only seemed to get more agitated as she talked.
“Murderous bitch!” David yelled. He looked up at the Gray Man “You too Dean? Don’t you see how wrong this is?”
“David, shut the fuck up!” Scarlet took a deep breath “You know me, I wouldn’t have killed them if I didn’t have some sort of contingency plan,” Wymack stopped fighting and hung his head, defeated.
“You can’t bring people back from the dead, Scarlet, I know, I’ve tried,” the pain in David’s voice was almost tangible “You’re right, I do know you, and your ambition has just killed fifteen kids! Fifteen innocent children, Scarlet. That’s on you, Scarlet, their blood is on your hands,”
“Sixteen actually, are we done? Gray, drop him,” The Gray Man dropped him on the floor, and Wymack dropped to his knees, shaking. “Enough of this, you can grieve if I fail, now call the rest of your coven so we can get this over with,” she tossed him his phone David looked up at her with profound hatred, she looked back with studied disinterest.
He picked up the phone and pressed a number that was on speed dial. “Abby, I need you to get Betsy and get here, stat, it’s important, I’ll explain when you get here, bring the supplies,”
Scarlet reached into her pocket and pulled out Calla’s tarot card, The Fool. Please work. Please, please, please work.
///////////
-Twenty minutes (alternatively two days) later-
Betsy, as usual was a creature of furious faith. She cast a short truth telling charm over Scarlet, much like the spell she had put on Matt earlier, but stronger and longer-lasting “You can bring them back?” was all she asked.
Scarlet felt the free will that kept her from being truthful leave her, her emotions were suppressed and all she could feel, was the compelling need to be truthful, she nodded.
Betsy was satisfied “She’s not lying. What do we have to do?”
“It’s a simple ritual,” Scarlet began, before Abby shook her head disapprovingly.
“You know better than to mess around with rituals,” Abby chided “The ancient ways are not always the best ways,”
“The ancient ways get results,” Scarlet replied, Wymack was sulking in a corner, eyes full of smoldering rage. “David, if you aren’t going to help get your kids back, could you at least go out and keep Gray company? He deserves better than to be bored to death, I don’t want him to be alone in an unfamiliar situation,” Wymack stomped outside.
“I didn’t think Dean had any magical ability,” Abby observed, laying out candles.
“He goes by Gray now actually. And he doesn’t, he was just the first remorseless killer that came to mind,” Scarlet said.
“Crimson wasn’t available?” Betsy asked, and oh had it been forever since Scarlet had heard that name, since she had been one out of many. Scarlet and Crimson, taking on the world, one’s dead, the other’s gone batshit crazy. “How is she doing by the way?”
“Rosie’s dead,” Scarlet answered, lightly. “MJ too, if you were wondering,” Scarlet pulled out her matchbox to light the candles. “Their deaths were caused due to unforeseen circumstances when communing with the other side,” Scarlet sounded like a medical report and she knew it, but there simply wasn’t any other way to react.
There was a moment of silence before Abby said “Scarlet I’m, so so sorry,”
“Why? There’s nothing you could have done. Can’t fix it now anyway, it’s too late to revive her. So your sorry isn’t doing anything but wasting time,” Scarlet stated. She was being rude and she knew it.
“They were good witches,” was all Betsy said.
“They were foolish for casting without me there to act as a peacekeeper,” Scarlet said indifferently “Can we please stop talking about problems we can’t fix and move on to ones that we can, please?”
Betsy looked like she wanted to take apart and examine every layer of Scarlet’s fragile psyche while she was incapacitated, god knows she had done it before (though that was when Scarlet was less under the influence of a truth spell), and if this went well, she would have time to do it after, but she left it alone for now.
Scarlet lit the last candles and inhaled the Jasmine incense burning on the sixth point of the septagram the witches had drawn on the floor.
All right, let’s begin.
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-Twenty minutes (alternatively two days) later-
“Thank you so much for all your help,” Scarlet said, hugging Abby and Betsy “I couldn’t have done this without you,”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Abby said, gently shoving Scarlet’s arm “you’re more than capable, but it was fun having you as a caster again,”
Betsy said nothing, she went to the small bag that held her casting supplies, she pulled out a pouch of herbs and a small glass jar of some brown powder. “A protection charm in the herbs, a cheer-up charm in the hot chocolate, use with milk for best effect, but water works too,”
“Thank you, Betsy, you have no idea what this means to me,” Scarlet thanked her. Betsy grabbed the lapel of Scarlet’s red leather jacket and pulled her down so she could look into Scarlet’s eyes.
“You bring them back, are we clear? If it’s a choice between you or them, you had better choose them without a moment’s hesitation, you are the one that put them where they are, so it is your responsibility to bring them back, and if you fail to do so, make no mistake, I can and will end you,” Betsy said gravely.
“Understood,” Scarlet said.
She went out into the hallway to see how David and Gray were doing, they were having a drink, David had a split lip, Gray had a swollen eye, both looked significantly more at peace than they did before.
“Men,” Scarlet said, and then left the apartment without saying goodbye to David, he would not want it, and she did not particularly want to say it to him, even though it might have been the last time he ever saw her.
She waited for Gray to say his goodbyes and join her in the car.
“You know what you have to do, right?” Scarlet asked him, without making eye contact. “You have the vial?”
“Yes,” The Gray Man answered. “Scarlet?”
Scarlet looked at the Gray Man from the driver’s side seat “Yes?”
“Good luck,” He answered “Be careful,”
Scarlet smiled “When have I ever not been careful? Punch it.”
The Gray Man pulled out of the driveway and sped towards an unknown destination.
“So why did you decide to help me?” Scarlet asked as the car’s speedometer rose higher and higher over the speed limit.
“You smashed a bottle of wine over my head and tied me up in the back of my car to get me to listen to one of your crazy ideas, it reminded me why we were friends in the first place, and I know you’re going to call me sentimental or make some other vague comment about my supposed inability to care for others being a farce, so you might as well go ahead,”
“I guess the way to a man’s heart is through his fight or flight reflex,” Scarlet supplied.
“There it is,” The Gray Man replied, making a sharp turn.
Scarlet grabbed her seat to keep from sliding around and continued on her train of thought. “Yeah, but that’s not what I meant, I meant after, when it all went to shit,”
“In the warehouse, you mean?” The Gray Man asked, he cracked his neck, like he was uncomfortable. “I’m not quite sure, I think it was because of pity at the time, then the ritual happened, and I saw all the destruction and carnage in the war on the other world. I couldn’t just leave all those people,” The answer satisfied Scarlet more than she could say, and she nodded gratefully.
Her emotions were beginning to return in full force.
“Are you headed to the old river path?” Scarlet asked, suddenly sentimental.
“I thought it a suitable place to wait alone for a while, David gave me some beer, maybe I’ll have a drink,” The Gray Man shrugged as they came to an empty stretch of road, cars rarely turned onto the forest path.
“If you dig near that one tree, you could probably find that bottle of cheap wine that MJ buried, it’s technically been aging in a cool, dark space for twenty years, it’d be a pretty pricey bottle now,” Scarlet laughed.
“Oh I remember that,” The Gray Man said pleasantly. “She made us promise we would come back in thirty years and have a toast,”
“Twenty years will have to do. Hey, if you’re drinking, remember the-,”
“Yes I’ll remember the time limit,”
“And the-,”
“The mindset I’ll have to ‘adopt’, I know,”
“Well, if you’re so confident, I think I’ll begin,” Scarlet sighed
“I’m not quite sure what the etiquette is for this situation, should I say goodbye?”
“Maybe not goodbye?” Scarlet contemplated “Maybe ‘see you later’?”
“Until next time then,” The Gray Man agreed. Scarlet shot him a glowing smile.
Scarlet took a deep breath and looked at herself in the car mirror. Two eyes, dark brown, almost black, a nose, kind of snubby, but what could one do about un-snubbing a nose, a pair of lips, painted bright red. She supposed she was kind of pretty, wearing this face. She was sad it would have to change. Her true appearance wasn’t something she really liked.
She flicked up the mirror and turned on the radio. Then she opened a soda, dropped in some poison, and chugged it down.
She wondered if the world would miss her when she was gone, she didn’t think it would, or at least this one wouldn’t. She thought, with a sudden burst of optimism, about what she would do if the plan worked perfectly, if everyone made it out alive.
She would go back to Henrietta with Gray and go see Calla again. Practice useless mundane spells until her very bones sang with magic. She would start going by ‘Aliya’ again, maybe change up her look, stop wearing red all the time. She would get a job, singing, maybe. Maybe she would finally put her English degree to good use, Fox Way could use another provider.
Maybe, she would make a fortune off the stock market and give half the money to Adam Parrish, and the other half to Andrew Minyard. Maybe she would join David Wymack’s coven. Maybe she would get in touch with Henry Cheng’s mother or Declan Lynch or Ichirou Moriyama and supply them all with enough magical artifacts to make them each a large sum of money.
Maybe she would stop doing magic all together, maybe she would run off to France or Sweden or Ghana or Japan and send the occasional postcard to her friends, to just let them know she was all right. Maybe she would fake her own death and never correspond with any of them again.
Maybe the plan would fail again and all of her wondering would be for naught.
Scarlet died looking out the window, watching streetlights and stars pass by, singing along to a cheesy love song on the radio, thinking about old loves and new, tragically short loves and women with lips painted dangerously purple. Two of these ideas were the same thing.
It was a good death she supposed, peaceful, not as painful as it should have been, she was only in possession of her positive feelings. It was not the death she wanted, it certainly wasn’t the best death she could have had, but it definitely wasn’t the worst.
At this moment in time, Scarlet died forever, and was never resurrected.
Aliya Khan died too, but she still (hopefully) had a chance.