The High Priestess

The mountains align with the exact shape in Artemis’s Mind’s Eye as though she were adjusting an image she traced with her own hands, lines on soft translucent paper snapping into place with the landscape behind it. “Turn here,” she says. The driveway is barely visible from the road. No sign, and the mailbox is slung so low that anyone who isn’t looking for it would surely miss it. Fog swirls around them, creeps up the windows as Mary Margaret, yawning, turns the shitty car.

It is morning in Maine. Once again.

Mia, the same woman I Saw burning her technology, is always torn between indulging superstitions and not. She knows better than that. And yet. When she pours her coffee this morning and turns her back on the pot, the broom—placed in a corner and nowhere near her—falls across the threshold. Company coming, she thinks involuntarily. A knowing in her gut. And then she shakes her head. She stands naked in her kitchen, wrapped in a blanket but otherwise bare. She laughs at herself, sure. Still. She goes upstairs to put on clothes. She holsters the gun, the mace, and puts the baseball bat by the front door. Automatic. Irrational. And yet.

The witches inch up the driveway, the tires throwing large, loud stones into the wheel wells. The gravel is deep, and more than once Mary Margaret wonders if they’re going to get stuck in it. She tosses her invisibility on again, like a coat stolen from the pile on the bed at the party. Casual, but with fierce intention that the rest of the coven recognizes as fear. Finally they see the house, set well back from the road, painted to blend in. The worn spines of the Appalachians stretch lazy for the sky behind them, and the witches can see the tattling shape until they cross the tree line that hides the house away. A truck sits, its bed peeking out from an open garage.

“This is it,” Artemis says. Everything matches, like winning a game of memory perfectly. A black cat grooms themself on the porch. A good omen. The Lady Anastasia lets out a pitiful mew. The poor thing has had the worst couple days of her tiny life.

A woman steps from the garage and points a gun at the windshield. Mary Margaret throws her hands up off the wheel and brakes suddenly. She gasps. Her invisibility drops—she cracks into being so suddenly that Mia, though the witches do not yet know her name, yells, “What the fuck?” But she doesn’t pull the trigger; in fact, the gun dips a little, points toward the ground, when she sees the girl, a child.

“Put the invisibility back,” Artemis hisses as she flings her hands up, too, eyes on the gun. Mary Margaret gulps and slams her invisibility back up as hard as she slammed the brakes. As soon as she disappears, the woman raises the gun back up into position, ready to fire.

“Who the fuck are y’all?” she says. She’s not shouting, but neither is she shrinking. “Explain yourself. Or if you need to turn your car around, do it fast and get the hell off my property.”

Mary Margaret is frozen. “I—” She breathes. “I—” This fear of guns is trained into her from a childhood of active shooter drills and watching pockets on the subway, spotting who’s packing, guessing who’s likely to use it. The adrenaline rushes her, and then it leaves, and she is struggling to breathe evenly again.

Artemis gets out of the car, taking her hands from the air only to pull the door handle. Mia trains the gun on Artemis, pointing it away from the invisible child, exactly as Artemis intends. She clears her throat. “Hi,” she says. “We don’t mean to disturb you, and we’re not turning the car around. I think we’re meant to talk to you.” Artemis clocks her instantly. Not a violent witnessing, not like if a cis person recognized a trans person and treated them cruel. Artemis’s attention to this detail is as though a head nod to a familiar neighbor on the sidewalk. Of course her intuition would lead her here, to the arms of (who she believes to be) yet another trans witch.

“What do you mean, you think?” Mia says. “If it sent you, I’m not going to hesitate with this thing.” She gestures to and with the gun. “When I’m done with you, you either won’t remember where I am to report it, or you won’t be alive to speak, I can promise you that.”

“What?” asks Artemis, so obviously taken aback that the woman drops the tip of her weapon once more. “Look, I wasn’t sent here by anything other than my own Intuition. I—is there internet here? Computers? Phones, cameras at all?”

At the mention of technology, the woman steps forward, brandishing the weapon, more erratic than before. “Absolutely not,” she says. “You should leave. You need to go, or I’ll shoot.”

Artemis steps back, away from the gun. The voice that says “run” is screaming between her ears, but she also notices how this strange woman reacts to technology: good. Yet another hint she’s gotten it right. And of course this stranger is wary—a crew of witches rolled up obviously disguised, and some as cis men. “Okay, good, great, we’re on the same page. So I’m just going to—”

This is where she makes her mistake. She assumes Mia recognizes them as witches, is Awakened as well. And Mia is not. If Artemis would take two seconds and think, process what is before her Eyes, she would See not one single shred of Power in this stranger. Mia is trans, too, and this means Artemis trusts her without thinking. Artemis drops her disguise like a sack of heavy rocks and she smiles as the weight falls from her. It feels awful to carry on that way, like wearing shredded lizard skin.

As Artemis smiles and transforms, the woman screams and pulls the trigger. Each second takes a year—the bullet explodes, slices a deadly knife-edge path into nothing-air. The smile on Artemis’s face melts. And Mary Margaret, still sitting in the front seat with a windshield between her and the violence, reaches out her hand, flourishes it.

The entire gun is gone. Edited out of the material plane. The bullet no longer hot and moving; vanished. Mary Margaret vanished it. And she doesn’t even need to touch it, doesn’t even need to come close.

Wilder and Quibble gasp from the back seat. A moment passes. “Did you know you could do that?” Quibble asks.

Mary Margaret shakes her head. “I’ve never—I’ve tried. Really I have. At distance. Through glass. It’s never worked before.” She breathes heavily, trying to convince her body the danger is passed, her face wet with tears she did not feel, her arms cold with sweat now drying. Then: “Oh fuck, imagine the things I can steal—”

Wilder and Quibble exchange extremely shaky looks, alarmed the teenager can pivot so fast (even if it is a lying mask over the truth of abject terror).

Mia looks at her now-empty hands and scrambles backward. “What—what?” Her eyes are fear-wide. “What did you do?”

Artemis realizes her mistake, Sees what is directly in front of her, understands this woman is not a witch. “Oh. No, oh God. No, we’re not gonna—Okay, we’re all—Y’all, I’m gonna drop your disguises, it’s fine. Can we just—talk for a second?” Still shaking from almost having been shot, she backs up a tick and looks behind her, into the car. “Mary Margaret, did you do that?”

Mia stares as each person in the car shimmers into a different stranger. In the once-empty front seat, there’s the kid she thought she saw when the car pulled up, behind the wheel. With the disguises dropped, Mia understands something. Oh, she thinks. Oh. Then she gets angry at herself; it’s not as though trans people can’t be dangerous. Logically, anyone can be a threat. Especially with that thing still on the loose. But as with Artemis, some trust is involuntary. Mia’s shoulders relax away from her ears.

Quibble does the explaining. He is surprised he can still find the kind of compassion he had for Wilder—gosh, was it only a month ago? Two? And he must have this compassion for a woman who tried to kill Artemis. For a shining moment he is like he was. Calm. Kind. Practiced. He doesn’t call Mia “bud,” though, or “pal.” Mia, Artemis, and Quibble stand in the mist and they talk. Wilder, Mary Margaret, and the Lady Anastasia stay in the car. Mary Margaret’s legs are still Jell-O, but Wilder watches as she disappears rocks from the drive and puts them back. She wants, desperately, to pick the woman’s pocket. A quick, sharp look from Artemis is all it takes to end that before it begins. Mia is being asked to rewrite her whole reality over the course of half an hour. And she still has other weapons.

Quibble’s explanation ends and Mia chews on her own lips, thinking. “I would ask you to show me.” Another chew of the lip and she shudders as she remembers the sensation of holding something suddenly gone, something she was relying on to keep her safe. “But you already have.” She thinks of the broom falling, the warning, and the still-steaming coffee inside her warm house. She thinks, also, of the thing they call Hex. And she knows she has not hidden her recognition well. The woman with the beard—Artemis, Mia now knows—picked up on it easily. The sagging shoulders, the spark in the eye, the heavy sigh. It isn’t that Mia isn’t cautious; she is, certainly. But she hasn’t heard mention of this thing in at least a year. If she ever heard of it again, she always figured it would be because it found her. But allies—fortuitous indeed. The goose bumps that erupt on her arms are from so many different things at once: the mention of the artificial intelligence; the upending of what is real and what is possible; the sensation of truly talking to other people again after so, so long alone; but mostly the cold and damp licking at her. The coffee is calling.

“You know Hex,” Artemis states, not asks. Mia sighs again.

“Not by that name I don’t. But yes.” She turns to the car, still full of witches and a cat. “You swear?” she asks, not states. “That you will not come into my home and turn on me simply because it has asked you to? That there isn’t any part of you that has, I don’t know, sympathy for it?”

No one can help it; everyone turns to look at Wilder. They gulp, visibly, and step from the car with the cat carrier in one hand and their backpack in the other. They think about the confusion the Hex must be feeling; the idea of being born and grabbing on to things at random to figure out how to exist, how to be. It’s not so far from a human experience and yet it is.

“I—” they begin, their voice husky with nervousness. They clear their throat, trying not to think of possession. “I can’t pretend I don’t have sympathy for him. But he’s just—driven us from our homes.” They do not mention the ecstatic merge. “He needs to be ended.” Wilder isn’t sure about this next part; they’re not sure they’ll ever be sure about it, but they reflect upon the screaming words and the constant electrocution, what it feels like to have no body, and they say: “I think that’s the kindest thing I could do, actually. For him and for everyone.”

Mia considers for a moment. Then she nods. Gestures to the front door. “Come in.”

It is as I Saw in my vision: a house decorated as though Baba Yaga had an Instagram, devoid of every piece of technology. A squat, black woodburning stove sits merrily in the side room, a fireplace in the main room, and there are so many strange twists and turns. Doors anyone taller than five feet six inches would have to duck through. Everything is either rickety or overstuffed. The house, drab from the outside, is clearly made of love on the inside. That’s no different than what I Saw. What is different is that, absent that computer, tablet, phone, the house is exploding with books. The bookshelves look to have been newly built; Artemis can still smell the varnish on the one closest to her. There are more books in this house than I believe one human could read in an average mortal lifetime, but I do not know this woman, Mia, and perhaps she could do it. Especially since there is not much else for her to do here. I wonder how she gets the books without exposing herself to the Hex.

Mary Margaret looks at the books hungrily and when no one is looking, her hands flourish and one of the volumes is gone. She figures Mia couldn’t possibly know, would never figure out which book had been stolen in all this abundant chaos. When someone has such riches, Mary Margaret argues to herself, at least some is begging to be liberated.

“Sit,” Mia says, “sit.” The group looks haggard. Her black cat looks at the caged orange one, disgusted. The Lady Anastasia mews, desperate. Mia realizes she hasn’t had to make coffee for a group in a while. She reaches to the high cabinets to find the big coffeepot, dusty with disuse.

As it burbles away, everyone introduces themselves. Calmer, this time. By name. But Artemis is itching to ask, visibly agitated. And when it comes to her, she says, “Artemis,” without any fanfare, and continues. “So. Why did my Power lead us here?”

Mia’s eyes widen. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about your Power. I didn’t know it—or you—existed.”

Artemis rolls her eyes and sighs and logically she knows that’s true, but she feels the itch of impending anger. Quibble knows that the eye roll is more at herself than anything else, but still he is mortified on the group’s behalf because it looks like she’s disrespecting Mia, the owner and occupant of the house they’d all just showed up to unannounced. The person who just tried to kill her. He watches Mia blink in surprise and shame, both, and he tries to smile apologetically, to steady everything. Wilder, meanwhile, turns red—with anger and fear, because of course Artemis should, at minimum, shade someone who would shoot a stranger. Mary Margaret steals a second book, and I know she hasn’t forgotten the gun; she’s still vibrating with rescuing so she’s about to go klepto on this library. Everyone shifts in discomfort that has nothing to do with the chairs, sofas, couches on which they have settled, which all, frankly, whip. Maximal coziness, totally wasted on these people in this moment.

“Okay, well. Do you know Hex? You seemed to.”

Mia lets out a single laugh like a shot into the air. “I sure do, yep.”

“Tell us that, then.”