Chapter Twenty-Four – Stephanie

 

I’d never even fired a gun before I tried firing Ryder’s. It jumped back in my hands, and the stock slammed hard into my shoulder.

Esther screamed and went flailing back from the shoulder full of rock salt, and I went stumbling right back out of the bar with a dead arm and the shotgun falling from my numb fingers. It landed on the floor by the open doorway.

I hit the wall and slumped to my butt, right in the glass.

At the bar, Ryder roared as he launched himself across the bar at Esther, landing on top of her.

“Ryder!” I yelled again, scrambling to my feet. I ran forward, practically on all fours, and scooped the shotgun up from the carpet, darting inside.

“Dammit, Ryder,” Esther yelled. She flung him again with that weird magic of hers, and he rose from on top of her like he was a cartoon character riding Old Faithful in an old film, his back slamming hard into the ceiling. But, unlike with even animated physics, Ryder stayed pinned to the ceiling, his legs and hands kicking and flailing as he seemed to desperately try and find a grip somewhere. “Listen to me!” she shouted again from where she still lay on the floor.

“Let him go!” I yelled as loudly as I could, the shotgun raised again. This time, it was firmly against my shoulder.

“Dammit, Stephanie,” Esther said as she turned her eyes to me. “You know me! You know I’m a good person!”

I waved the barrel at her. “Don’t lie! You’re a witch!”

“Witches are just people!” she shouted, her eyes wide and frantic. “If you two would just listen to me for one—”

“Shoot her!” Ryder yelled. “Don’t let her try anything.”

He was right. I couldn’t let her have even a moment’s rest, or a chance to defend herself. I pulled the trigger.

She just blinked at me as nothing happened. No bang. No boom. Nothing.

“Pump the damn thing!”

“Oh,” I said, almost to myself, as I worked the pump and put another shotgun shell in the chamber. “Right.”

Before I could pull the trigger, though, she’d already slapped the gun from my hand with whatever weird power she had.

I followed it with my gaze as it went spinning from my hands, my stomach sinking as it slapped with a metallic thunk against the front of the bar before landing in the pile of broken bar stool Ryder had left behind moments before.

There was our hope. There it was, lying what might as well have been a mile away.

“Stephanie,” Esther said, her voice pleading as she kept Ryder pinned against the ceiling with one raised hand, “please, listen to me!”

I backed away slowly, trying to think of what to do next. Maybe I could leap for the shotgun? Get it before she turned her attention to me, and smacked me down again with her weird power?

Esther didn’t pause, just continued trying to reason with me. “I know about your mother coming back. I know about the people turning into cats. I even know about Ryder, and who he is. What he is!”

I stopped. What Ryder was?

“Stephanie,” Ryder said, his voice breathless and airy, almost like he was running out of air. “Stop her.”

Oh no! She was crushing the air from him by holding him up like that. She was going to kill him! I took a step towards her. “Esther, just put him down! You’re really hurting him!”

Her eyes flickered up to the man I cared so much about, her eyes going wide in surprise. A little gesture that, in most circumstances, probably wouldn’t have meant anything. But in this one? In this one, it was like a glimpse into her soul. She wasn’t evil, and something told me she wasn’t behind this.

Because, in that one little expression, I’d seen the old Esther I’d always known. The woman who’d come over every now and then for a brandy, just to see how my mom was feeling. Then, later, to see whether the treatments were helping at all. Who’d made casseroles for me while Jeff and I tried to plan the funeral. Who’d come and sat.

“Oh, fiddlesticks,” she said, waving her hand a little, dismissing whatever force she was using on Ryder. He seemed to drift slowly down till he was about four or five feet off the ground, when the power suddenly disappeared entirely, and he just dropped to the ground with a surprised look on his face. “Sorry!”

He was back up in a heartbeat, though, his eyes bright and flashing with those same shimmering greens I’d seen for the first time the night before, his irises suddenly vertical.

“Ryder!” I said, leaping between him and the witch, putting my body fully in his path. “I believe her! No!”

He brought himself up short, shaking his head roughly as I put my hands on his chest.

I didn’t know what I could do if he decided to go after her, but right now this was the only plan I had.

He was soon done, though. He looked at me with the same, normal, human eyes he’d had his whole life. “What?” he asked, disbelief filling his voice. “You actually believe her?”

I glanced back over my shoulder, my hand still on his broad chest. I nodded as I looked at the strained, but concerned, older woman I’d known my whole life. “She’s Esther,” I said as I turned back to him. “Of course I believe her.”

“Why?” he growled, looking as if he were about to sweep me aside and out of the way.

“Because she could have killed you just now,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “But she didn’t. What kind of bloodthirsty monster would let you go when she could have just continued crushing the air from your lungs?”

Ryder took a step back. A careful, well-measured step back as all the tense muscles in his body seemed to relax as one. “Okay,” he said with a slow nod, “if you believe her, I guess I’ll give her a shot, too.”

Behind me, Esther let out a relieved breath, like she’d been holding it since I’d gotten between the two of them. “Thank God. Does this mean you two will finally listen to me?”