50+ Ways to Annoy the Death Witch: Chapter 3

(Originally posted here on July 1, 2025) 

Chapter 3: Having to talk about my fucking feelings

The stone had been smashed. There was a chunk of it sitting there, still.

“Where’d the rest of the gravestone go?” I asked.

“I think it’s all mixed in with the dirt,” Jacob said. “I thought they’d take it for evidence, but it was still here after the cops left. And the OSBI people, the first time they came out. Maybe whoever came out with the backhoe took it?”

I nodded. “Possibly.” I drank some more water, and then knelt down next to the pile of dirt. It had rained a couple of times, and so it was mostly kind of a mound of not quite mud, but it also meant that digging around in it didn’t really give me any hints. If there’d been anything mixed in with the dirt, it was fine enough that I couldn’t figure out what it was. I also couldn’t find any bits of the gravestone around the edge, but I wasn’t willing to stick my whole arm in there and be certain.

“What do you think?” Callahan asked.

“I don’t know shit,” I snapped.

“Hey, I was just askin,” he said.

I sighed. “Sorry,” I said. “I just- it’s been too long, and there’s no signs of how they did it. No clue at all.”

“You don’t usually need that. Usually they leave a trail,” he said.

“They usually do, but this time they didn’t,” I said, shaking dirt off my hands. But it was, as I’ve said, mostly mud, so it stuck to my hands. “They didn’t leave anything. It’s like they cut all the death magic out of the ground. Surgical and neat. This is someone who really knows what they’re doing.” I wiped the rest off on my jeans. Or tried, anyway, it mostly smeared on my jeans and my hand.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Like, the real deal. An actual Necromancer.”

“Fuck shit,” he said.

I was trying not to be scared as hell, and failing. I didn’t really know how they’d done this. Accessing magic that is not a source you can use is incredibly difficult. Whoever did this knew what-

The dead flower beds.

The dead flower beds, with nothing in them. That should have immediately twigged me. How could there be nothing in them? No dead bugs? No long forgotten buried pet? Nothing? I didn’t look that hard, but-

“What do we do now?” Dylan asked.

Callahan. “Well, we split up,” he said. “I need you boys to go look for your mom, the cops aren’t gonna look hard enough.”

“C’mon, man, I know you have some stupid thing about how ‘she’s your mom, you’ve gotta love her’, but she sucks,” Jacob said.

“Someone who knows what they’re doing is stealing witch corpses,” I said. Callahan got there before me, didn’t he? That’s why he was splitting the kids off. “Easiest way to get a witch corpse is find a witch and turn them into a corpse, and a drug addict who’s a flake and goes off radar for months at a time-”

“Oh, shit,” Dylan said.

“She sucks, I believe you, but I’d bet you’d rather she be alive,” I said.

“I’d rather she fuckin sober up,” Jacob said. “She’s actually okay, when she’s clean.”

“We need to talk to the Council and make a plan,” Callahan said. “We’re gonna make sure you boys are involved, alright? And know what’s going on, nobody’s gonna forget that it’s your grandparents we’re looking for, but we gotta act quick. Word’s gonna spread that the Council’s looking into this, and that’s liable to make things move very fast.”

Dylan nodded, looking thoughtful. He stuck his hands in his pocket. “Do you need another bottle of water, Miss Tabby?”

“Sure, kiddo,” I said. I thought maybe he wanted a minute to think.

He was definitely the younger of the two, and this was some shit to be dealing with at any age. Anyway, it was warm and I felt like shit, the water wouldn’t do me much harm.

“Here, you ready to get up?” Callahan asked, offering me his hand.

“I’ve got mud-” “You know I don’t give a shit,” he said, his voice fond, so I let him pull me to my feet. “You okay? You look like you’re gonna faint.”

“I don’t feel that great, no,” I admitted.

Dylan came back with another bottle of water.

I watched Dylan hand the bottle to his brother. “She needs-”

“Oh,” Jacob said. “You said you’re not feeling good. Water magic doesn’t really heal you that much, but it can give you a little boost, if it doesn’t freak you out or whatever. Some people don’t like it.”

“Only if it won’t cost you too much,” I said.

“Nah, it’s easy,” he said, turning the bottle in his hand. Nothing seemed to happen, but I could smell water suddenly, fresh water, like a creek was nearby.

“Thanks,” I said.

“We’re gonna get her a meal and a nap before we go much farther, it’s part of why we’re splitting,” Callahan told them.

“Good,” Dylan said.

I took a long drink. It was the most refreshing water, and for a moment I missed my granny so intensely that I could barely speak. “This is real good. Granny was a water witch, too,” I told Jacob.

It didn’t really do much for the various aches and my headache, but it did settle my stomach and cool me off.

“Is your family from here?” Jacob asked.

I nodded.

“Water witches are pretty common around here,” Dylan said.

“Common everywhere,” Callahan said.

“Dad’s a water witch too. I got a touch of the Sight,” Dylan admitted.

And he got his magic from their mother, who had been an addict his whole life.

Ah. Okay.

“Did your grandma also have the Sight?” I asked.

Dylan nodded.

Depending on how strong in the Sight someone was, they can see glimpses of the future. Sometimes they can see a bit into the past, too, and usually even a touch can give you the ability to find something or someone, if you’re familiar enough with that person or thing.

“Could a Necromancer use that?” Callahan asked. “His grandma’s magic, I mean.”

“Yes,” I said. “Theoretically, anyway. We’re kinda getting outside of my sphere of knowledge, here, if I’m honest.”

“We’re getting out of everybody’s sphere of knowledge,” Callahan said. He sighed. “Alright, let’s get everybody’s numbers and stuff. You boys, if you find your mom but you think she’s in a jam you can’t get her out of? Call us.”

“Hundred percent,” I said. “You’re the best judge, if you think we’d be more harm than help, that’s fine, but text us and let us know if you’re walking into a situation you’re unsure of, so we can come check on you in a bit. I know outsiders swoopin in on family business can just make things worse, and us being around might escalate shit that doesn’t need to get escalated, but we’d feel responsible as hell if something happened to you two kids, and the Council would string us up for it. And we’d deserve it.” I wanted them to understand that we trusted them to be adults, but we also were responsible for their safety for other reasons- young people don’t like being treated like they’re fragile babies, in my experience.

“We’ll text,” Jacob promised. “Probably she’s just, you know, she’s got a few boyfriends she runs through. We haven’t really looked that hard, you know? But you’re right, we need to at least know where she is, and that she’s okay. If we tell her the cops are looking for her, that should solve the other problem.”

“She’ll hit the Red River before sundown,” Dylan said, sounding glum.

“It’ll keep her safe from this,” I said.

“We’ll straighten things out with the cops after,” Callahan promised. “So she can come back.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dylan said.

Callahan started a group chat and put all our phone numbers into it, so we could get in touch with each other, and the boys took off, talking about where they were gonna start the search as they got in the car.

“Make sure you finish that water, Miss Tabby!” Dylan called, as he got in, and I waved to them, and dutifully drained it off.

He was right about it, that kind of magic faded quickly.

Callahan sighed, and for a moment, I thought he was gonna say something about me letting Dylan call me Tabby, and we were gonna end up yelling at each other in the damned graveyard.

“That house, you said there wasn’t anything in the flowerbeds, remember?”

“Yep. Yep. I just had that thought,” I said. “But we don’t have the stuff to start right now.”

“No. We’ll need to go to your place and put some stuff together. If that’s alright. Yours is closer.”

“Fine by me.” You don’t do spellwork somewhere unshielded and setting up shielding at a hotel or something would take as long as going home would. “Is it gonna do us any good to call the Council?”

“I’m gonna do that, yeah, but we’re the people on the ground,” he said. “They have a lot less practical experience than we do, they’re not gonna pull us. Particularly not you.”

“Well, I figured.” We are the ones who deal with the undead issue, they’re not gonna have more practical experience than we do. “Do they have a way to get supplies or spells to us quickly enough, though? Some other kind of help?”

“I don’t know, we’ll have to ask. You ready to go?”

I looked around. “Yeah, we should get,” I said. I still didn’t know what kind of witch had done this, they could have watchers here that we couldn’t see.

“Are you hungry?”

I opened my mouth.

“Trick question, you threw up bile, you need to eat,” he said.

“I have food at home,” I said.

“Good for you. There’s a Braum’s in Tecumseh.”

“I’m not going to faint before we get-”

“There’s a Braum’s about 10 minutes away, and I’m buying,” he said. “If we go to Braum’s, we can get you a cup with some ice for your caffeine disaster.”

My energy drink was warm, now. “Fine,” I said.

He started driving. “I thought your grandma was a healer,” he said.

“Different grandmother,” I said. “Dad’s mom was a water witch.”

“Oh,” he said. “I guess I don’t know much about your dad’s side.”

“Grandpa was a weather witch, they moved to Oklahoma after their first son died. He got sick, I don’t know what with, they didn’t like to talk about him much. Dad was their miracle baby, they didn’t think that Granny would catch again.”

“What kinda magic did your dad have?”

“None,” I said.

“None?”

“Yeah. Skipped a generation.” That happens, sometimes.

“That’s weird. Wasn’t your mom in the running to be on the Council?”

I sighed. “Yeah,” I said. I turned to look out the window for a moment. I do not love to talk about my mom.

“She was a great healer, everybody said. Better than your grandma. And your grandma was pretty legendary in her own right. She was, what, 99 when she died?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And suddenly your dad takes you, and your mom just- poof. Disappeared. Out of sight. My mom thought that your dad basically kidnapped you, to get custody, and it broke your mom’s spirit. She says your grandma says that her magic never recovered.”

I snorted. “Of course it wasn’t,” I muttered. The problem with being a witch is, no matter how big the country is, the community is small as hell. Everybody knows everybody’s business. Especially since my mom’s family is from the same town as Callahan’s, originally. “Look. It’s been 30 years, do we really need to dredge all this shit up?”

“I’ve just always wondered if, you know, if your dad took you because your mom couldn’t handle you, coming into your power and all that. That’s when I started coming into mine. And usually that’s- it can be pretty explosive, sometimes.”

Wait. “You think I hurt my mom?” I asked.

“Not on purpose! Of course, not on purpose. You were just a kid. But you’re really powerful. Granny said that you and your mom weren’t really getting along, and I know you’ve said you don’t talk to her, I-” He sighed. “It just would explain to me why your mom kind of shut up and didn’t- like, if you’d been really taken from her, she would have howled for blood, right? I only met her the once, but she’s the type.”

Here’s the thing. I really didn’t want to talk about this. But we’ve both been somewhat adjacent to each other for long enough that he’d clearly built up a lot of misinformation that definitely shaped how he saw me.

I had to tell him something.

Fuck.

“I didn’t hurt anybody,” I said. I turned back towards him. “I was six when I came into my magic.”

“That’s young,” he said.

“Yeah. Mom and I were staying with Grandma and Grandpa, and Dad was working in Chicago, trying to find us a place to move. He’d gone ahead, right?”

“Right,” Callahan said.

“I stepped on one of those little frogs. Grandma and Grandpa’s place always had a ton of them, in the spring, and you had to watch where you stepped. I was six, I was clumsy, I stepped on one by accident.”

“Right.”

“I was real upset about it, and I picked it up. I don’t know why, I guess to try to take it to Mom and bury it, maybe?”

He nodded.

“It came to life in my hands. I didn’t really do it on purpose, I just wanted it to stop being dead. Grandpa saw it. I didn’t realize he’d been watching me, but he’d come up from the barn and saw the whole thing. He snatched the frog out of my hands, and threw it down, and stomped on it, and grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down into the storm cellar, and locked me in.” I hadn’t understood, and pushed and scrabbled at the door, sobbing apologies.

I’ve had recurring nightmares about the ground swallowing me ever since.

“For how long?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A couple of hours, I guess.” I tried to sound like it wasn’t a big deal, but my voice was shaking even just talking about it. “It was dark when they came and got me. They told me there was something very wrong with me, and I had a bad, evil kind of magic that would make me a terrible person if I ever used it, but they could fix it. I just had to wear a special bracelet, and then I would be able to be a normal kid. I wouldn’t have magic, but in my case, that was better. They didn’t say ‘otherwise we’re locking you in the cellar forever’, but that’s what I thought they meant.”

“They bound you,” he said.

“Yep. And siphoned my magic. Mom never had much magic on her own, she could heal because she was using me as a fuel source. Healing requires a lot of power.”

He looked upset. “Siphoning someone’s magic is dangerous,” Callahan said. “Even when they have to do it to a full grown adult, it’s very dangerous, and you can’t do it long term. People die.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was destined to be an evil necromancer, so when it did kill me, that was probably for the best, right?”

He flinched.

“In the meanwhile, they could use my magic to do some real good.”

“Jesus Christ,” he breathed. “When did your Dad find out? That’s why he took you, right?”

I nodded. “He didn’t know, he thought I was just sick. He couldn’t see the binding, obviously.”

“How sick did you get?”

“They were making funeral plans,” I said.

“Shit.”

“Yep. A doctor at the hospital saw that my magic was bound, though, and reported it anonymously to the Council, who investigated, and put a stop to it.” It’s the reason I’ll do work for them.

“And hushed it all up,” he said.

“I’m glad they did,” I said. “Plenty of people would have been a hell of a lot more sympathetic to Mom than me, at the time. Satanic panic, and all.” Witches were not immune to that moral panic. Some will tell you that we were, they’re full of shit.

“You think that’s why?” he asked. “Not that they were embarrassed that you almost died on their watch?”

“The why doesn’t matter to me that much,” I said. “They helped Dad get custody of me, and kept an eye on me to make sure nobody was doing that to me again. They bound Mom’s magic for 5 years, and pushed her out of the circles of power. And took all the spells she’d built with my magic, she’d been saving my magic for years, and they didn’t let her keep any of it.”

He nodded. “Oh, good.”

“They made sure I had access to what information they had on my kind of magic, which is spare, and even let me look at the restricted Necromantic stuff when they reckoned I was old enough, when I wanted to learn how to avoid dipping into that stuff. It’s one of the reasons I know so much about Necromancy. They helped me study it. And they kept my abilities secret, up until they put you on my trail.” I was still a bit annoyed about that, actually.

“They didn’t do that,” he said, after a minute.

“What?”

“My family knows your family,” he said. “I knew you had, you know. A certain type of magic, and then your great uncle got up out of his grave, I-”

“And you let me think the Council set you on me?” I asked.

“The Council set me on the case, he was your great uncle and he’d just died and you’re a Death Witch, Tabitha. You’ve said it yourself. It’s almost always someone who knows them-”

“I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup if you had a gun to my head!”

“Well, I know that now, but I don’t think I’m crazy for my mind jumping to you that one time.”

“You’ve let me believe, for years, that they sent you after me for the sheer fact-”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I took a deep breath, and held it.

“I didn’t mean to actually imply that, okay? I didn’t realize until later that you thought that. I knew you were a Death Witch because Mom knew, because her momma is friends with your grandma. I’d seen you at the funeral, I knew you were in town.”

“Right,” I said. That actually did make sense.

“I keep coming to you for help because you’re smart and powerful and know a lot about this kind of magic. The second time, I asked the Council if we knew any experts, and they pointed me back to you. You are the expert on this kind of magic. I’ve been coming to you ever since.”

“So you accusing me every time has been your own invention, and not the council’s.”

“Yeah. And I knew your grandparents had helped with you when you were little, so I took your grandmas proclamations about how you were gonna turn evil one day- I thought that maybe she saw something in you, I don’t know. It’s not a good excuse, I should have asked you a long time before now, okay? It didn’t seem like the you I knew, but I know people are different around your family. And from that point of view, the fact that you don’t seem to talk to your mom or her folks seems… Well, I thought it was worrying, but now that I know what I know, I’m shocked you were at any family funeral.”

“Grandma’s real good at convincing people of things,” I said. “So’s Mom.” This might sound crazy, but I actually felt so relieved to get to the root of why he was treating me the way he’d been treating me.

There’s always that fear, that there’s something about me that twigged him, that made him not trust me. That maybe I really was the evil, horrible person they swore I would become. That the roots were really there.

That my grandfather had been right, when he’d locked me in the suffocating dark.

“People magic?” he asked.

“Yeah, both of em,” I said. He meant their source was people- not other people’s magic necessarily (although they could, it was harder for most people to do that, but pretty easy for that type of witch) but just being around people. They were charismatic and good at convincing people of things and good at de-escalating conflicts-

Wait.

“You too, huh?” I asked.

Of course. What a perfect witch to set to investigating things.

“I don’t have much of much,” he said. He sounded almost panicky. “I’ve never used my magic on you, I only ever use it when I’m trying to convince people not to hit each other, or something like that.”

“Not actively, but you do it passively, to read people,” I said. “That’s why you always ask me a question, but then trust my answer. You use magic to make sure I’m telling the truth.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Sure, that’s- but that’s not the same as influencing someone’s mind with magic. I only ever do that to avoid violence, I know how bad that kind of shit is. I just use it to get people to calm down, and-”

“Hey, are you freaking out?” I asked.

“I’m already in hot water with you! I don’t want you to think I’m like the people who hurt you, and I-”

“I don’t think you are,” I said.

He took a deep breath. “Right,” he said.

“I know I bitched you out earlier, but I do trust you. You just piss me off, sometimes. But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you. I just wish you trusted me.”

“You were right to bitch me out,” he said. “And I’m sorry as hell for how I’ve been treating you, you were right. But I do trust you, there’s nobody in the world I trust more with this shit. I just couldn’t let go of this shit I’d heard, but-” He sighed. “Fuck. I apologize. I did not realize how poisonous that was to you, but you deserved to be treated better. I won’t let it happen again.”

“Well,” I said. “Thanks.”

He nodded.

“Come on, let’s go in and eat,” I said, because I didn’t really know how else to react to that.

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