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Rio can still feel the ghost’s presence hovering in the room, faint and fading, but menacing even now. The others had followed Agatha up the ladder and back onto the Road, but Rio lagged behind, letting them go. There was Alice to deal with, for one thing. But more importantly—
“Leaving so soon?” she calls, twisting a hand.
Wind whips around the room, magic and molecules snaking together, and after a moment Evanora Harkness comes back into unearthly view. She flickers a few times as she tries to dissipate, but Rio holds her firmly on this plane with a clench of her fist.
The apparition glances around, looking bewildered to find herself here again. When her eyes reach Rio her gaze sharpens into a glare; she curls her lip, haughty and disdainful.
Well. I guess we know where Agatha gets that look, anyway.
“Hi,” Rio says, waggling her fingers in a wave. “Me again.”
“Why have you dragged me back here?” Evanora demands. “I cannot help you now. You allowed Agatha to leave this place, and in so doing damned your coven and yourself.”
Rio chuckles. “Yeah, well. Little late to the party on that one.”
“Let me go. The trial is ended.”
“Yours, maybe,” Rio says, crossing her arms. “Mine’s just getting started.”
“You can be good for me, can’t you?” Rio purred, raking her eyes over Agatha’s writhing body. Hair like a mad halo around her head; back arched as she pressed into Rio’s hand. The frantic sounds she made as she fought against the ties that held her fast at the wrists and ankles.
“Please,” Agatha panted as Rio pulled her hand away again. “No – Rio, please.”
“This is your own doing,” Rio reminded her. “I wouldn't have to tie you up if you were more obedient.”
Agatha frowned, lips pouting so perfectly that Rio nearly gave in and kissed her, nearly brought teeth to draw blood. Nearly.
“You always tie me up,” she said, sulking.
“Do I?” Rio asked innocently, moving to kneel between her thighs. “I suppose that must mean you’re always disobeying.”
Agatha cried out again as Rio curled her tongue, lapping at her now, slow, leisurely. Agatha was overstating things – Rio didn’t always tie her up. Half the time it was Rio on her knees, struggling to maintain enough focus to follow Agatha’s orders. And sometimes she preferred to leave Agatha the use of her hands, for self-evident reasons.
But there was something so satisfying about restraint, Rio thought, wrapping her arms around Agatha’s thighs to hold her steady against her mouth. Something about forcing this woman who never stopped moving, or talking, or thinking, to surrender and simply feel.
Agatha rocked against Rio’s tongue, groaning, panting, gasping Rio’s name, moaning words like yes, like please, like don’t stop, and soon – Rio – too soon – the register of her voice dropped, growing suddenly low and urgent – Rio, I’m—
“No,” Rio said sternly, lifting her head. “Not yet.”
She held Agatha’s gaze as she returned to her work, maintaining the same languid pace. Teasing her, toying with her. Agatha scrabbled at the bindings around her wrists, trying to twist away from her, trying to obey, and Rio took the opportunity to release a long, cruel moan.
“Rio,” she groaned. “Please, I can’t – I can’t—”
“Yes you can,” Rio said, pulling back, thumb taking the place of her tongue, brushing over her torturously slowly, up and down. “You can be good for me.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. Say it. Tell me.”
“Rio,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“Hmm.” Rio moved her hand away. “Shall I stop?”
Agatha gave a panicked whine. “No – don’t stop—”
“Then say it.”
“I’ll be good,” Agatha panted, “I will, I’ll be good for you, I can be good—”
If Rio hadn’t known her as well as she did, she would have missed it: the slight intake of breath, the way the tension in her body shifted from desperate need to self-protective cover. It was nearly imperceptible, but to Rio it felt like stepping from moonlight into darkness.
“Agatha?”
She pushed herself up onto her knees. Agatha was still breathing heavily, but she’d turned her head to avoid her gaze.
Rio flicked a wrist and the restraints vanished.
“…Are you alright?” she asked cautiously.
Agatha cleared her throat. “Fine,” she said, drawing her arms and legs in toward herself.
It was such an obvious lie that Rio didn’t bother responding. She followed Agatha’s movements with her eyes as she sat up, stood. She began walking around the room, gathering her clothes, every sound magnified in the heavy silence. But when she passed near again Rio reached out a hand, capturing her by the wrist.
“Agatha.”
“I’m fine,” Agatha said, flashing a smile. It took on an edge as she stared down at Rio’s fingers wrapped around her wrist, but Rio didn’t let go, and Agatha didn’t pull away.
“Agatha,” she said again.
Her eyes flickered up to meet Rio’s gaze. Rio wasn’t sure what she found there, but after a moment she sighed, and relented, and slid down next to her.
They sat side-by-side for what felt like a very long time, staring straight ahead, silent. Rio let the quiet stretch as long as it needed to.
“Do you think some people are born… wrong?” Agatha asked finally.
“Wrong?”
“Bad.”
Rio shrugged. “People have always believed that about witches.”
Agatha nodded easily. Too easily – which meant it was the wrong answer, and Agatha simply wanted to be done with the conversation. Rio cast around, trying to understand.
I can be good—
“Who told you that you were born bad?” she asked.
Agatha didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was astringent, bitter, the flavor of unripe grapes and dandelion greens. “My darling mother,” she said, mouth twisting.
“Your mother is an idiot.”
“My mother,” she said, “is dead.”
“Good.”
“I killed her.”
Rio blinked. Well — “Good,” she said again.
Agatha turned toward her, an entirely new sort of plea on her lips. “Is it?”
She understood that Agatha was asking something of her, something important, but even so – Rio wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. There was still so much she simply didn’t know about her. She had the feeling, sometimes, of floating on the surface of the sea with her, dark shapes passing beneath. Creatures; monsters.
But Rio never had been particularly afraid of monsters.
“Good and bad are not fixed points,” she told her. “They depend on where you are standing.”
“I killed my coven.”
“I know.” Agatha’s eyes cut over to her, and Rio shrugged. “I’ve heard the stories.”
Agatha’s smile was sharp and jaded. ”And what do the stories say?”
“That you are a power-hungry witch who killed your own sisters for their magic.”
“I don’t suppose any of the stories mention that they were trying to kill me?” Agatha sighed and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, so Rio did too. “My mother wanted me dead.”
Rio’s sudden anger was like a coiled thing in her chest, snake-like, venomous. “Your mother arranged for your coven to kill you?”
“Mm,” Agatha nodded. She licked her lips. “They tied me to a stake. Tried to… burn me, from the inside out. The pain was…”
She trailed off, eyes fixed on something very far away.
“Agatha?”
It was a long moment before she seemed to come back to herself. She cleared her throat. “I don’t know how I did it,” she said. “Something… shifted inside me. I couldn’t control it. Their power became my power, and it killed them.” She gave a small shrug. “The thing inside me never shifted back.”
Rio turned onto her side to look at Agatha, who was staring up at the ceiling, worrying her perfect lower lip. She reached over, tracing the path of the tears falling from the corner of her eye down into her hair.
“It was instinct,” she said to her.
“She must have seen it in me. She must have known—”
“When a wolf kills a deer,” Rio said to her, “we don’t call it wrong.”
Agatha gave the ceiling a sad smile.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But no one loves the wolf for it.”
Rio stalks a slow, predatory circle around Agatha’s mother, running the sharp blade of her knife – well, shiv – across her fingertips. God, she hates ghosts. They’re just water vapor and heightened emotion: all the most annoying things about human beings, with none of the fun parts. Nothing she can wrap her hands around and strangle. Nothing she can stab.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing she can do.
“So here’s the thing,” she tells Evanora. “They don’t usually let me kill people. It’s gotta be the ‘right time.’ Can’t be too early or it throws off the balance of the universe, blah blah blah.”
“What—”
“But you,” Rio continues in a harder voice. “You’re already dead. There are no rules about what I can do to you.” She tilts her head. “Do exorcisms hurt ghosts? Like, will there be screaming? I really hope there’ll be screaming.”
Evanora studies her for a long moment. “Who are you?” she asks finally.
Rio tilts her head back and forth, sucking air through her teeth. “That’s a… complicated question. Who are any of us, really, at the end of the day?” Evanora just looks baffled, and Rio rolls her eyes, dropping the pretense. “I’m here for Agatha.”
The ghost curls her lip. “Of course you are. Another deceived by the devil.” Her eyes harden, as much as smoke can be said to harden. “You must listen to me: she is not what she seems. You are walking side-by-side with evil. Agatha—”
“Agatha,” Rio interrupts, “is brilliant. She is fucking extraordinary.”
“She is lying to you. She was born wrong. Only misery and death follow her path.”
Rio laughs. “Half-right, anyway.” She points her knife up at Evanora. “Agatha might not be ‘good,’ but you tried to execute your own child. Forgive me if I’m not impressed with this whole righteous-anger act.”
“She had a corrupted soul—”
“She had power. And it scared you. And people want to kill the things that scare them.” She looks the woman up and down, voice dripping with scorn. “Same witch hunt, different witchers.”
Evanora flinches back like she’d slapped her.
“You judge me,” she hisses, “when Agatha sold her own son for the Darkhold?”
Rio’s rage crackles through her like lightning, and her hair lifts in a wind she knows she must be generating. “Do not speak to me about things you don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? She will trade everything for power. There is an emptiness inside her, and she will devour everything in her path to fill it. Her mother. Her coven. Her child. You.”
Rio takes a long breath, trying to regain control. She forces a lightness into her voice that she doesn’t feel. “I’m pretty okay with being devoured by Agatha, actually.”
“Don’t be crass. You have no idea—”
“No, you have no idea,” she says, stepping forward, knife raised. “I know everything about her. Every story. Every scar.”
“Ah,” Evanora says. From the look on her face, she’s clearly taking some pleasure in throwing Rio off balance. “Well, perhaps you two were made for one another. Two blights of darkness on the world, God help us.”
“Perhaps we were,” she retorts with a smile like a razorblade.
Evanora shakes her head. “You take such pride in it. Whatever is between you, do not make the mistake of thinking it is good. Nothing beautiful or pure can come from that girl.”
“Pure?” Rio laughs, but the word has bite. “You’re right: it’s not beautiful. It’s not good, and it definitely isn’t pure. It just is. The sun rises, and I love Agatha. Even when I wish I didn’t. Even when I hate her.” She shakes her head. “It just – is.”
Agatha’s house was big. Dark. Gabled. Runes carved into the trim, protection spells draped like invisible cobwebs in every room. A magical fortress. It was exactly the sort of place Rio would have imagined Agatha.
Except for the child.
Rio didn’t bother asking where he came from – who his father was, where his father was. They’d always been free to do whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted, and besides, Rio had been gone for the past few years. Work to do, souls to reap. If Agatha wanted to tell her what she’d missed, she’d tell her.
In the meantime, though, there was a small yelling thing running around her kitchen.
“Well, he’s got your lungs,” she shouted to Agatha across the kitchen table. Agatha smirked, twisting her hands into a shrug with her usual flourish.
“What can I say? He’s got charisma, like his mother.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?” Rio asked, watching the boy charge into a kitchen cabinet at full speed, bounce off, and roll across the room. “Charisma?”
Agatha’s eyes followed his path; she winced as he slammed into another cabinet door. “Alright… maybe we’ve got more enthusiasm than charisma today. Nicholas,” she called, interrupting him before he could gear up for another go. “Come here. Come say hello.”
The child didn’t stop running, but he veered himself around and threw himself into Agatha’s arms, climbing up into her lap. Agatha leaned down. “This,” she said into his ear, pointing across the table, “is Rio.”
Rio nodded. “Hello,” she said stiffly. She’d been more comfortable in the boy’s chaos; in its sudden absence, she was once again forced to confront the fact that she really, really didn’t understand the point of children.
“Wee-oh,” Nicholas said.
“Rio,” Rio corrected him.
“Wee-oh.”
“Ree. Oh,” she said, carefully annunciating each syllable.
“Wee-oh.”
She glanced up at Agatha. “He’s broken.”
“He’s two,” Agatha said as he slid off her lap. “Behave.” Rio wasn’t sure if the admonition was aimed at her or the child.
Nicholas toddled up to her, and she stared down at him for a long moment. It was strange, seeing the parts of him that looked like Agatha – her eyes, her mouth – on someone else’s face.
“Hi,” she said, trying again. “Uh… do you like flowers?”
She conjured a colorful blossom in her palm, and held it out to him.
“Oh, hang on,” she said at the last second, conjuring one in her other hand and giving that to him instead. “There. This one’s not poisonous.” She glanced up at Agatha. “Pretty sure. …Maybe don’t let him eat it.”
Nicholas took the bloom from her and studied it for a moment. And then he held out his own tiny palm and conjured one just like it.
“Whoa!” Rio jumped up from the table so quickly that her chair clattered to the floor behind her. Immediately, almost without thinking, she cast a shielding spell on the boy.
“No!” Agatha yelled, throwing a hand out.
An electric blast of purple hit Rio’s chest like a bullet, sending her crashing into a wall across the room. She crumpled to the ground and lay unmoving for a moment, trying to catch her breath.
“Ow,” she snarled finally, picking herself up off the floor. Agatha’s hands crackled again, but Rio was ready for it this time. She dodged, rolling toward Agatha and rushing her, pinning her to the wall and trapping her hands.
“Stop fighting me,” she growled into her ear. “It was a shield. I wasn’t trying to hurt him.”
Agatha’s voice was venomous. “I know what it was.”
Nicholas began wailing somewhere behind her, a delayed reaction to the sudden violence, and Rio stepped back, releasing Agatha and holding her own hands in the air. She wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but she had enough sense not to stand between Agatha and that boy.
Agatha went to him without a backward glance at Rio. She leaned down and lifted him into her arms, murmuring into his hair, soothing him. His cries faded into small hiccups at the sound of his mother’s voice; before long he was fighting to be released from her arms, all fear forgotten.
Memory like a goldfish, Rio thought. God, kids were pointless.
Agatha put him down, shooting her a murderous look as she did.
“Okay,” Rio said in a light voice. “Well, that was fun. I mean, you don’t usually start throwing me into walls until my clothes are off, but I’m not complaining.”
She kept one eye on Agatha’s hands as she spoke; they were curled into claws, fingers twitching, emitting tiny sparks that Agatha didn’t seem to notice.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“He’s a child, Agatha. He needs to be shielded.”
“No.”
Rio sighed. “Come on. He could light his own baby… bed…”
“Crib.”
“—on fire. He could seal his airway shut. He could teleport himself into the middle of the ocean.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not shielding him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I—”
Agatha’s mouth stayed open as she searched for the words, but she didn’t seem to be able to find them.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” she said finally, and someone who wasn’t Rio might have believed that the derision in her voice was more than just a cover for whatever feeling she was too afraid to touch. “You’re practically feral. What do you know about raising a child?”
“Raising one? Nothing,” Rio admitted. “But I know a lot about all the ways they can die.”
Agatha’s face hardened, her eyes taking on an ominous purple tinge. “I think it’s time for you to go.”
Rio scoffed; if she left every time Agatha tried to kick her out, they wouldn’t have spent more than ten minutes together since the day they met. “No.”
“Get out,” she growled.
“No.” Rio crossed her arms. “This is about her, right? Your mother?”
Agatha’s gaze snapped to hers, her expression suddenly furious enough to confirm Rio’s suspicions. Not that it had been difficult to guess; whatever Agatha’s problem was, it was almost always about that woman.
A small, nasty smile flitted across Agatha’s face. “Fuck you.”
“Language, Agatha,” Rio tsked. “Little pitchers.”
Agatha shot her a look so deliciously lethal that Rio had to fight the urge to press her up against a wall again, run her teeth up the delicate curve of her neck, give her somewhere to focus all that pent-up aggression. And she might have, in another time and place – long experience had taught her that sometimes the best way to help Agatha was to make her bruises real, give them shape and substance, something for Agatha to study later, to grit her teeth and press.
Except here, now, there was a toddler staring up at them. Rio wasn’t great at gauging this sort of thing, but she figured the violent ends probably wouldn’t justify the violent delights, what with him standing right there. Agatha probably wouldn’t like it.
So. Words, then.
“So she – what? Shielded you?” Rio asked. “That’s what parents are supposed to do.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Agatha was standing in one place, arms crossed. She seemed to be trembling, like the anger coursing through her was at the very edge of her control.
“They’re supposed to lift it, too, right?”
Understanding dawned, and Rio exhaled a weary sigh. She should have guessed – but Evanora’s cruelty had a way of surprising even her. “She kept you shielded.”
“She cut me off from my power,” Agatha spit. “Refused to teach me. Refused to let anyone else teach me.”
“Yeah, there was clearly something wrong with her. But—”
“I was nine before I finally discovered how to lift the shield. Nine years without magic. When my mother realized what I’d done she finally brought me into the coven. I remember being so... happy,” she says, a dangerous smile playing on her lips. “But it wasn’t real. They were all just there to watch me, keep me under control. So I taught myself. They accused me of stealing knowledge, practicing dark magic, but what choice did I have? I had to be ready to stop her from taking it all away again.”
They tied me to a stake…
“Okay,” Rio tells her. “Alright. I get it. But you wouldn’t do that to him.”
“You don’t know what it was like,” Agatha said in a low voice. “Feeling all that power, knowing it was there, and not being able to touch it.” She met Rio’s eye. “I don’t want him to feel that. Ever.”
Rio opened her mouth to make a hundred different arguments, but Agatha was gazing at her – defiant witch, broken girl – and all of them vanished on her tongue.
“Yeah,” she sighed finally. “Okay.”
Agatha looked skeptical. “You agree with me?”
“No. I think he’s going to burn your house down. But… it’s your house.”
Agatha uncrossed her arms, finally, and strode over to the kitchen table. “It is my house,” she said, haughty, poised, descending into her chair like it was a throne. Rio shook her head, amused. Argument won; back to her old self again. Like the fight had never happened.
“So – will you be staying long?” she asked Rio breezily, and everything about her tone and body language indicated that she couldn’t care less about the answer. And maybe she couldn’t – or maybe she wanted Rio to think the answer didn’t matter to her. Maybe she knew Rio would see right through her; maybe this was all part of a game. It was hard to tell, with Agatha. Manipulation upon manipulation – it was part of why she’d always liked her. Agatha was a lot of things, but she certainly wasn’t boring.
Before Rio had the chance to respond, Nicholas toddled back up to her, fistfuls of petals in his fat baby hands. With a flourish that rivaled his mother’s, he threw them all over Rio’s feet.
“Wee-oh,” he said by way of explanation.
She stared down at him, this small thing Agatha had created, this little piece of her walking around in the world.
“Okay,” she said grudgingly. “I still think he might kill us all, but… that’s kinda cute.”
Agatha comes up out of the mud coughing and retching, grasping onto Rio so hard she nearly topples them both back into the sludge. Rio just keeps pulling until Agatha falls forward into her arms, and does her best to hold her up as she gasps for air. After a minute or so Agatha seems to finally catch her breath; she straightens up, pushing away from Rio and pawing at her clothes as though it might do more than smear dirt around.
“Cut it a little close there, don’t you think?” she snaps, wiping mud off her face.
Rio just rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. You’re fine.”
“Where are the others?”
Rio gestures with her chin to a fallen tree a little farther down the Road, where Jennifer and Lilia are sitting, caked in mud and not moving much. “Something’s wrong with them. Like. More than usual.”
“Yeah, they’re possessed,” Agatha says. “Hence the attempted murder.”
“Since when do people need to be possessed to want to kill you?”
Agatha scrunches her face up at her. “Cute.” She glances over her shoulder, eyes roaming around. “As it turns out, Baby Boy Maximoff likes me about as much as his mother did.”
Rio raises her eyebrows. “Oh man. I missed the big reveal?”
“Not really what I had in mind when I told him to take off the training wheels, but that’s my fault, I guess. That one’s on me.”
Rio gives a low, mocking whistle. “The Scarlet Witch’s kid. You just make friends everywhere you go, don’t you?”
Agatha is still glancing around, tense and jittery. “You didn’t see him while you were—”
“Saving your life?” she asks pointedly. “No.”
“Oh – I’m sorry,” Agatha says, placing a dramatic hand over her heart. “Is my personal crisis overshadowing your moment in the sun? Thank you so much for pulling me out of a mud puddle, Rio. Just tell me where to send the medal.”
Oh, Rio realizes. She’s really freaked out.
And so instead of needling her she waits, expectant but patient, until Agatha sighs and lets her hand drop.
“…Thank you,” she says grudgingly, after a moment.
“Sure thing.”
And then they stare at one another, the weight of everything that just happened heavy between them: Agatha’s possession, Alice’s death, Nicholas’s voice.
“Did it work, at least?” Rio asks her quietly. Agatha shakes her head, once, almost imperceptibly, and Rio sighs.
“Well… I have something that might cheer you up.”
She’s not sure whether now is the right time; she’s never been very good at judging that sort of thing. But it’s not often that she gets to hand death to someone like a gift. She feels like a cat with a bleeding mouse in its mouth, trembling with a savage sort of anticipation at the idea of laying it at Agatha’s feet.
“What?”
Agatha’s still distracted, rattled by the last trial, looking around for the next threat. Rio tilts into her line of sight.
“I got you a present.”
This piques her interest. “What kind of present?”
“Did a little experiment,” Rio tells her. “And it turns out, exorcisms do hurt ghosts. Or they seem to, based on all the screaming.”
It takes a moment for Agatha to grasp what she’s saying. “You…”
“Mm-hmm,” Rio says, biting her lip and giving her a wide-eyed smile.
“She’s gone?”
“She’s gone, gone.”
Agatha breaks into a slow grin that makes Rio want to stretch and curl up somewhere warm, feline and contented.
“Gone,” Agatha says softly. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back, and between the long shadows of the trees Rio sees her as she is: the wolf and the deer, the witch and the woman, unripe grapes, dandelion greens, fistfuls of petals strewn across a wooden floor.
Somewhere, the sun rises.