The morning after my failed almost-lunch-date with Calen, I sat on my sofa with my legs crossed and my tarot cards spread out.

I didn't do this often. In fact, I actively tried to avoid doing this.

The Threads seemed immutable at first, but they did have the ability to shift. I'd been known to try and subvert them many times as a child, but it never worked... until I figured out that you had to not so much push the Threads out of the way as gradually untangle them. You had to plan around them. You had to nudge them gently until they moved your way.

A week or two away from a tragic event wasn't much time, to be fair. It would take a lot of messing around, and I'd have to do it frequently, but I thought it would still be possible to save his life without immediately backlashing that violent death onto another poor, random, nearby person.

That was the way the Threads worked. If I cut something and stopped a car crash at the last minute, there would be one somewhere else instead. If I started weeks ahead and made little adjustments leading up to, say, the would-be driver completely losing his keys that morning? That could work quite well as a way to scoot the Threads the way I wanted without moving energy in life-altering ways.

I couldn't let Dante just die. I couldn't. I certainly couldn't if his death was in any way related to his involvement in protecting me.

He didn't deserve that.

I hadn't done this before, hadn't untied lifelines like this, but I learned a long time ago that the Threads wanted to move for me. If I focused on Dante's energy, I could access the Threads, and simply allow them to move where I willed.

It wasn't too hard to find him. His energy was familiar to me, enough that I didn't need something like a tag lock to trace it— no pieces of hair, no personal items, no blood or sweat or saliva. I just needed to settle in on the image of his face and the tone of his voice, and the location of his Threads stood out to me.

There were, as I noticed before, knots in the ends. They were thick and ugly, and the cut cords fraying out the other side were worn to bits. They also didn't seem to like it when I touched them, recoiling back in a way that almost looked like magical snakes, but I didn't let up.

It took some urging and prying at the knots to get them to slip free, and the longer I worked, the more I was certain that I'd need to double check these over the next few days. The energy was almost warm to the touch, tingling in an unpleasant way that pricked at my fingers, but the Threads did move for me.

There was one main Thread I needed to adjust, though.

On the fifth or sixth try, I finally found it.

Dante's lifeline, the main Thread connected to the continuation of his existence, glowed a bright cyan among the many other colors of Threads. This one was thicker, stronger, pulsing like a heartbeat in the way the others didn't... and it was fading.

The pulse was slow, the light was dim. It looked like everything had been choked off around it, and it was so sad that I found myself murmuring under my breath as I sat with my eyes closed, pulling at the knot that kept it from reaching for the rest of the universe.

"It's okay, buddy," I whispered. "We'll fix you right up."

The Thread responded to me, the heartbeat pulse increasing and light growing as I worked. It wanted to grow. It wanted to continue onwards. That was a signal to me, too— this fate was one someone intended to impose upon Dante, one outside the natural order of things. His very lifeline didn't like what was written, and it was more than happy to help me out.

Without the knot at the end, the Thread was free to grow. That meant that the majority of my work, at least for today, was done. Threads had a way of finding their own paths, and for the most part, that was alright so long as they grew in place themselves. The hard parts were retying Threads I'd cut myself, rerouting energy to somewhere else. This wasn't Dante's problem, though. I'd simply unblocked things to allow them to finish growing, like opening a window for a plant to bask in the sun.

Now that the knot at the end of Dante's lifeline was untied, it would mend all on its own. That was, at least, my biggest concern taken care of.

However, the energy of the violent death was still there to some extent. I'd have to reroute it if I wanted to make sure it stuck.

Energy doesn't just sit. It wants to move places, and witches could naturally exploit that ability by moving it in the directions we wanted. Easy, right?

Wrong. It takes energy to move energy, and I'd need to meditate on it for a while to make it work. That's where the spell came in.

Witches in folklore were known for chanting and rhyming, but really, it's a meditative energetic practice simplified down to a poem said once on screens. The poetry was to help casters concentrate while they work with the energy, to keep their mind from wandering, and it's meant to be spoken aloud. The rhyming was to help them remember it. If a witch could say a spell so much that they're chanting it in their sleep, that made a big spell more likely to work. Every time those words came out, they were subconsciously molding the energy to their will.

My poem was short and simple, and also the easiest and least harmful way I could think of to redirect a whole load of violent energy.

If I had the time, I could reshape it into something else or disperse it entirely, but this was more complicated and energy-intensive than I'd planned for already. It was probably best to keep it simple. Simple things tended to work better, and I'd chosen the simplest of all for this spell.

I held the excess energy in my hands like an invisible ball. I can't tell you how I knew it was there, exactly, but I could feel it. Holding energy was something like holding a balloon between your hands, where you can feel the pressure but not the weight. You could also think about it like a phantom limb, if you wanted.

And then I started to chant.

"To you who plans this awful fate— beggar, borrower, stealer, or lender— take it back upon yourself. Hear what I say: return to sender," I murmured.

Return to sender spells weren't difficult. They were some of the first ones witches learned. Anyone who has ever heard "I am rubber and you are glue" has heard the most common return to sender spell in the English language. You're pushing their own bad intentions right back where they came from, just perhaps a little faster than the universe would have done on its own, and avoiding those bad intentions yourself in the process.

Part of me felt a little guilt, but... Frankly, returning the energy to whoever had planned to cause that violent death in the first place seemed like the best way to go about it.

And, knowing Dante's position, it was likely planned.

It was a struggle to keep my enunciation clear, and I felt a little silly the first few times, but as I slowly sunk into the meditative state of chanting, mentally brushing away the energy of Dante's would-be fate off towards some other destination, I felt more and more stable.

By the time I finally looked up, an hour had gone. I'd sat with my eyes closed on the sofa for an hour, repeating that poem that I certainly hated by now. Weren't there any better rhymes for "sender?"

I stretched my wobbly legs, massaging my knees and calves. That was two rules broken in two days. My track record wasn't looking great, but... I mean, could I have ever really predicted life threatening situations would come up like that? Really?

Surely I could give myself a pass for this one.

... That was what I said when everything went wrong last time, though.

Grabbing a notepad and pen, I mentally went through the timeline of everything that had happened since the day someone almost turned me into human toast at the shop.

That was, fittingly, a Sunday.

On Monday, I'd gone to meet Calen and the other witches of the newly named Virginia Witches' Collective. That was also the night when the vampire attacked me.

On Tuesday, Calen came to see me at the shop.

Now it was Wednesday, and I'd opted to close the store for the day on the pretense of a "family emergency." Three attempts on my life in a matter of days? No, thank you. I wanted to make it to my date alive on Friday.

At that point, I did at least realize it would be good to ask for help or seek shelter somewhere. I wasn't stupid. I was just stubborn... and in this case, maybe a little stupid.

I was also a little stuck, though. I wasn't sure if I wanted to trust Dante and the Sylvan Council. They could be planning anything at all behind the Veil! As much as I wanted to trust Dante as an individual, I had to admit that Calen's general Sylvan distrust was understandable.

Calen's offer was a problem, too, though. It was still just another form of caging me, and I had about as much information on the witches involved in his operation as the Sylvans from the Council and Court.

At this point, I could flip a coin and have about the same chances.

The other option, of course, was—

My phone vibrated loudly against the kitchen countertop, where I'd absentmindedly set it down earlier before working on Dante's Threads. It was perfect timing, in a way. My third option had called me before I even had a chance to think it through, but she'd always been uncanny in that way.

"Hey, mom," I said, trying and failing to keep the fatigue out of my tone.

"Did you see there was a dead vampire reported in the Sylvan Chronicle?" Mom asked, entirely foregoing a greeting. "They think it was a witch who killed him."

It wasn't unusual for her to jump right into questioning, so I just went along with it. I was tired from working with the Threads, annoyed at having to plan around someone trying to magically end my life, and generally frustrated with the very limited options available to me for help. In essence, I really was not paying attention to anything coming out of my mouth at the moment.

"It wasn't," I said without thinking. "And since when do you follow the Chronicle, anyways?"

I immediately regretted it.

"And you know this... how?" Mom asked carefully. I didn't have to see her face to know exactly what thoughts were going through her head.

Part of her probably wondered if it was just a guess. Any normal person might brush it off as a hunch, but we weren't normal people. I wasn't even normal for a witch, and my mom had been hearing things like that come out of my mouth for a long, long time.

Stop here, mom, that car is going to run the light.

Go to the other corner store. Something bad is happening at the usual one.

No, that man on the news isn't the murderer. It was the other one, the one from the interview.

By now, she was used to weird flags in my speech, though part of that was just being a mom. For the most part, I'd learned to stifle them. I didn't want to freak her out, after all. The problem was that things still slipped out now and then, and whether or not they had anything to do with my knowledge of the Threads, Mom had a way of clocking when I knew more than I was saying.

This one wasn't Thread related, of course... but it also was. A little. Kind of.

"Sunday," she prodded, and I knew she wasn't about to let this go.

I took a deep breath, trying to come up with the gentlest way to put this.

"You remember when I was little, and I used to tell you that I could see the way things were going to turn out?" I asked carefully. That definitely wasn't all I'd said, but it was probably the gentlest way to put it.

"... Yes," my mom confirmed, but I could hear the worry in her voice.

"I think more people know about it now." I was glad she couldn't see me wincing, couldn't tell from my body language that I was struggling to stay calm.

"What do they think you can do? What do they want?" Her voice was high and tense, and she spoke just a little more quickly than normal, but it wasn't an all-out panic. That was good. Mom was someone who automatically panicked, and getting her to stay calm long enough to explain was already a win.

"I don't know," I sighed. Though... it was certainly clear that at least one person out there wanted me dead.

It wasn't like I could just tell my mother that someone wanted me dead, though, much less my grandmother. They'd have their own opinions on what to do, and most of them probably involved relocating, going into hiding, or generally stopping my entire life.

I was all for staying alive, but those states of being alive weren't the same as living to me. I'd absolutely wither in hiding, and I didn't have the money to just stop everything and hunker down.

"Maybe you should come home for a while, just to be safe," Mom suggested.

"You want me to move back in? You know how well that didn't work last time," I said with a sigh.

I was near constantly at odds with my grandmother, who also lived with Mom. We loved each other, but we could not live in the same house. Our opinions and lives were too different, and in the end, all we did was stress out Mom.

Not to mention, I was a maximalist kind of decorator. I tended to collect stuff from all around, and there wasn't enough room to move me back in even without my collecting tendencies. I'd fill up my room and the basement, we'd have two dining tables, two copies of kitchen supplies, a whole additional bed to store... it wouldn't be good.

"Well, then maybe some extra security around the apartment?"

"What, you want me to get a doorbell cam?" I laughed, rolling my eyes, but there was a long pause from the other end of the phone.

"Maybe?" Mom hazarded.

"I don't think a digital doorbell will solve the violence issues, but if it'll make you feel better, I'll order one the next time I pay myself from the shop."

Honestly, it might not be a bad idea. Two day delivery was one of the perfectly modern, non-witchy services that did come in handy. I could hide out here in my wards for a couple of days, order a camera to keep an eye on things, and reassess the situation before my date on Friday.

I was not missing that date. No way.

After that cleared, I could think about Dante's offer a little more. Extra security would buy me time, and it would probably make everyone a little more comfortable knowing that, if things got worse, I could just push a button to at least alert mundane help.

I wasn't really sure how a mundane rescue team might fare against Sylvans, but my wards had me metaphysically protected. I could buff them up a little this afternoon, restock some brews, and do some of the shop tasks that didn't require me to be on site.

"Anything else you're worried about?" Mom sighed. "You just sound like there's something on your mind."

"Nothing," I said, brushing her off. "Just some weird dreams freaking me out."

"Like what?" she asked, immediately on alert.

I fought not to curse. That was twice in one conversation, too.

I should have known better. Weird dreams might be a perfectly normal excuse to a mundane person, but to witches, dreams were inherently tied to fate and prophecy. That meant, in my case, it was probably even more serious.

"Clowns," I finally said. "You know how much I hate clowns."

I could hear my mom scoffing on the other end of the line. She didn't believe it for a second, but at least she didn't press for information. That was about all I could ask for at the moment.