City of Night

The Witch-girl opened the door and peered out into the damp night. The street was deserted, a matte black ribbon cutting through the cold cement of the city. A slight smile curled the corners of her mouth. No one had followed her here, no minders, no concerned friends. She had even slipped her brother’s watchful eye.

Cautiously, she stepped through the doorway. Thin strips of moonlight shimmered against the silver fabric of her dress. Her eyes, blue like the streaks in her black hair, moved restlessly up and down the street. Still no signs of life, not even a rat, not even one of the small, dirty brown sparrows that dared nest this far into the Night. She was completely, gloriously alone. The feeling was heady enough to let her pretend that she had never tried this before.

A few more steps and she let the doorknob slip from her grasp. The sound of her boot heels on the cold pavement echoed. It seemed deafening in the midnight silence. She shivered.

“You don’t scare me,” she whispered.

She looked back. The doorway made a white triangle of light against the gray-black of the city around her. It was comforting, a bright umbilical to the illuminated world that lay behind her.

“You don’t scare me,” she repeated confidently, now speaking instead of whispering. And again, “You don’t scare me!” Now she was defiant, grinning, drunk on her own courage and on the knowledge that this time was it, this was the moment. This was the night that Morgan Silver walked out into the dark and was not afraid.

And then a gust of wind blew the door shut with a sharp crack, and all the light went out.

Her words choked to a stop in the back of her throat. She looked up to the moon, but it was a thin crescent, mostly obscured by black ribbons of cloud, and it wasn’t enough. She brought her hands up in front of her face, to prove that she could still see them, and she could, but just barely, only barely.

“You don’t scare me,” Her voice came back to her, but it was different now. Not a declaration but a plea. “You don’t scare me. You don’t scare me you don’t scaremeyoudon’tscare…” rising in panic and then dropping to a terrified whine, her voice faded out with the light.

It was then that the shadows came, bits of black within that circled closer and closer. No one believed her when she said that this was what it was like, like they were living things attacking her, but she could feel them melting inside her, moving through her mind and pulling at her memories. It wasn’t long before her fifteen-year-old self was ripped away from her, and she was ten years old again.

It was dark and quiet, terrifyingly silent in a place that should have been filled with happy noise. A dull, warm breeze moved through her fingers, carrying what felt like dust. Or ashes. The strongest sense coming from the void in front of her, though, was the smell. Awful, ugly smoke, and blood so strong she felt as though she could taste it, and she choked, stumbling blindly through emptiness until she tripped over something that was soft under her shoes. Suddenly, she found herself lying beside a body, a body that was cold, unmoving, and bent in all the wrong places. She was close enough to see it, and she recognized the face.

She screamed, a blind animal wail of horror and pain, clawing at her face as if she could tear away the smell and the face and the awful, awful dark.

* * *

“Morgan!” Toby Silver called out into the echoing dark. “Morgan!” It was the third time this month. The third time he’d opened her door and found her bed empty. The third time he’d run out after her into the night, alone, unable to feel which way she’d gone, tired and helpless and filled with an anger he could neither direct nor repress. It was the third time this month that he’d felt his stomach fill with cold terror at the feeling that this time was it, this was the moment. This was the night that Morgan Silver walked out into the dark and did not come back again.

A sound, then, a voice in the darkness, and he was running toward the screams of a little girl. The dark, empty streets, normally so familiar, so comfortable, were suddenly menacing as they rushed past. Every corner was the same, dirty monochrome towers rising out of cracked pavement, and he didn’t seem to be getting any closer. His mind raced as fast as his legs. So many people who could find her out here, alone. The other gangs, grown cocky by his lack of a presence on these outer streets. The police, with their guns and their false ideals. So many people who could hurt her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a vague shimmer. Hadn’t she been wearing her silver dress, the family colors, when he’d seen her last, quiet and restless in the lobby that evening? A few more steps and he saw her, a thin spectre coming into focus out of the dark. She was alone, and that should have been enough to calm him, to let relief flood through his worried thoughts. But it was just the opposite, because Morgan didn’t know she was alone. She screamed and lashed out into the night, fighting off something only she could see. As he ran to her she turned on him, fingers curled like claws, as though he was one of the ghosts that haunted her waking dreams.

“Get away from me! Get away!”

“Morgan, it’s me!” he said, backing away, “It’s only me.”

Finally, the ghost of ten year-old Morgan let go its hold. She looked up at him, and he was caught off guard by the depth of his inability to understand her. He couldn’t understand why she did this to herself, week after week, bruising herself against the walls of an old fear, but more than that, he couldn’t understand the fear itself. They were Witches, he and Morgan, meant for the gloaming, meant for the thin twinkle of stars across the sleeping city. But Morgan Silver was afraid of the dark.

* * *

“Shh, it’s okay now,” Toby murmured, and she watched him looking down at her as if she were a child just woken from a nightmare. He brushed the tears from her cheeks, and then, with a low, tuneless song on his breath, drew his fingers over the scratches she’d raked into her face, and brushed those away too.

She would never tell him, but at times like these his resignation hurt her. His thin, desperate belief that this was normal, just a brother caring for his sister. The way he clung to the last possible threads of hope that his sister wasn’t mad.

When her tears were dried and scratches healed, her breathing slowed to normal and her mind firmly back in the present, he pulled her into a quick embrace, and then lifted her up as if she were still a little girl. She buried her head in his shoulder and didn’t cry, just like she hadn’t cried in that parking lot five years ago, after the body she’d clung to and tried so desperately to keep finally gave up its dust to the stars. Toby started murmuring under his breath, as if she couldn’t hear. As if she didn’t know she was too old, too heavy for him to carry, so much that he had to sing a spell to keep holding her like this. He still did it, though. Every time he found her like this he carried her home. She was too heavy, but still he carried her.

* * *

Across the city another girl, in another world, walked down her upstairs hallway, wishing she were blind. Sandy Banks didn’t usually have this reaction to hallways, but what lay at the end of this particular hallway caused a vague, sick feeling to grow in the pit of her stomach as her shoes sunk soundlessly into the soft beige carpet at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t anything too horrible. It was a normal thing for a house to have, really. She certainly knew that her mother hadn’t thought anything of it when she hung it there a few years ago to brighten up the space. It was really nothing too terrible at all; it was only a mirror.

Each night, as she ascended the stairs and began the long walk to her bedroom door at the end of the hall, it was Sandy’s greatest fear.

Sometimes she took the long walk with her eyes closed, but once she had tripped and twisted her ankle, and it had been difficult to explain to her mother. Sometimes she looked to the side, counting the doors down until three, her door and the her escape from the mirror’s unforgiving silver shine, but tonight she was exhausted, and had no energy for such games. She had been up late studying, and later still watching the news. She was alone; her mother had been called to the hospital for an emergency and wouldn’t be back for hours. Ten people were badly burned; one news show was already calling it a witch attack, while another cited it as a warning against the dangers of unrestricted magic use.

Usually even if she looked into the mirror all the way to her room she could make it to bed without crying for too long, but that night she felt brave. Brave and angry. She stared boldly at the thing at the end of the hall, as if the reflection in the mirror was just some ghost that followed her, something that could be braved, fought, chased away. She started at her shoes. They were the easiest. Black patent leather Mary Jane shoes, they were just like everybody else’s shoes. Then there were the legs that rose out of them, covered by opaque white tights, leading up to a grey pleated skirt, conservatively cut below the knee. Once she got passed that, though, the problems started. There were no problems with the white blouse and grey cardigan sweater than completed her school uniform. Everyone else had one just the same. It was the glimpses of her arms that caused trouble. Even at a glance, something was not quite right. Blue spider-web veins spread out, just a little too visible, across skin that was curiously similar in color to her white tights.

At that point she was at the end of the hallway and she couldn’t stop, even though she wanted to. She looked up, looked the alien thing in the mirror straight in the eyes, and took it all in. The thing had skin like a ghost’s. Barely a hint of color in its cheeks, its lips. Its eyes were wide, too big for the narrow face they dominated, and an orange color that nearly glowed against the white skin, even hidden behind black-framed glasses. Its face was framed by limp, grandmother-white hair that hung straight to its shoulders. Its face. Her face. Its face. It had been a long time since Sandy had looked in the mirror and seen anything but an it.

She stood that way for a long time, standing very still until her hands curled to fists and her whole body started to shake just a little. She blinked, and watched the thing in the mirror blink back at her. She watched it again, and again, and again, not moving except for the slowly building shaking in her limbs, and her blue-veined eyelids moving up and down. Her hands clenched tighter and tighter, but she didn’t feel it when her fingernails broke the skin of her palms. All her energy, everything she had, was focused on the thing in the mirror and how, no matter what she did, not matter how she tried, she could never make it go away.

She brought a fist up into the mirror. The shattered glass hit the floor in a cascade of broken music. Silently, she turned and walked into her bedroom, closing the door behind. She pulled off her uniform and replaced it with a nightgown. A little bit of the blood from her hands stained the one of the sleeves of her sweater as she pulled it off. Pulling back her comforter, she crawled into bed, and as she drifted off to sleep, she did not cry. She did not cry.

The next morning Sandy woke suddenly, as if she had never slept. The last pink remnants of the sunrise glowed around the edges of her window. She padded downstairs in her bare feet to retrieve a broom and dustpan from the kitchen, and then back up to clean the broken glass off the floor. Her alarm rang just as she was finishing, and she ran into her room to turn it off before it woke her mother. She hoped her mother had been too tired to notice the glass whenever she had finally come home.

She showered and dressed for school, just like she did every morning. Just like everyone did. Back downstairs to the kitchen, and this time the heels of her shoes clicked rhythmically against the linoleum floor. She pulled the lunch she’d packed the previous night out of the refrigerator and slipped it into her backpack. When she closed the front door behind her, she made sure to do it quietly as her mother slept upstairs.

Walking down the sidewalk to the corner where the bus would be picking her up any moment, she thought briefly of the fire the previous night. The house she and her mother shared was in a nice neighborhood, but close to the border that separated the Sorcerers’ city from the parts that had been left over to the Witches. She wondered if it was safe, really, being out alone this early.

A sudden glare of the bright morning sun chased the thoughts away, as she squinted her eyes uncomfortably. Most of her classmates would probably be happy for such a nice day. Sandy had never been much for sunny days. They burned.

* * *

From her fourth story window, Morgan watched the sun rise over the city, burning up the previous night and all it terrors. Below her, doors opened and closed and muffled footsteps echoed. She had a full floor between her room and the rest of the gang. Everyone else stayed on the first two floors of the building. Closer to friends, and the light was less likely to attract attention if it was lower down, blocked by other buildings. The abandoned hotel that currently housed the Witches and Warlocks of the Black Lightning gang had been build to accommodate hundreds. It now housed thirty-two.

The door sounds were gradually increasing. People were starting to come home for the day, after completing their night business while the Sorcerers safely slept. They would all be asleep by mid-morning, but Morgan had slept the rest of the night away after Toby brought her home. She was wide awake now, and with all the coming and going downstairs, no one would notice if she slipped out. If they did, they wouldn’t pay much attention to where she was going.

One by one she emptied the drawers of her dresser onto the floor. She pulled the silver dress over her head and replaced it with jeans and a worn red tee shirt. Two more tee shirts went into her backpack, along with another pair of jeans and, after a moment of hesitation, the dress. She went into the bathroom and added a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and a bar of soap. Then to the nightstand for her flashlight and the batteries she’d traded for at a premium from the scrawny kid with the ring through his eyebrow last week.

She closed the pack, grabbed a rubber band and used it to pull her hair into a loose ponytail. Pulled her boots back on and laced them up. And then she remembered what was in the bottom drawer of her nightstand. She took three trips to the door and back, stopping just before she touched the doorknob, before she sat back down on the bed and pulled out the wrinkled piece of lined paper. It was a drawing, in green crayon, of three figures, an adult, a child, and a baby in the adult’s arms. They were labeled, in a child’s writing, some of the letters backwards and with creative capitalization. Daddy, Morgan, and me.

Toby had drawn it when she was a baby, or at least that’s what she figured. She had taken in the nightstand in her father’s room before Toby and the others had come to clean it out, just before they had moved from their homes into the hotel. She almost put it in her pocket, then in her backpack, then back in the dresser, then in her pocket again. Finally, she left it on the bed and, swinging her backpack to her shoulders, walked quickly to the door before anything else could stop her. She would leave it there, and maybe he would find it and maybe it would mean something to him. The rest of her life was in a pile in front of the dresser. She closed the door behind her.

She made it down the stairs without seeing anyone. Once she was in the empty hallways that lead to the front door, she didn’t worry about running into someone anymore. They never used the door that opened onto the street. It was a sort of unwritten rule, like the ban on living in the higher floors. From the street, the whole building looked empty.

The door, once she finally reached it, opened with a screaming creak of unused hinges. She stopped short for a moment, looking around warily, and then stepped outside. Most likely no one had been near enough to hear it anyway. She looked up for a moment at the building she was leaving. A broken green sign hung above the doorway, reading “Holiday Inn.” They’d starting calling the place the Holiday as soon as they moved in. As if a nickname could lend it cheer. Even so, there was a whisper of sadness to this, her leaving. Memories were being left behind here, even if a lot of them weren’t very good ones.

The excitement of what she was about to do overshadowed the nostalgia. The morning mist was rising up from the street in a low fog that swirled around her feet. It was going to be a nice day, sunny. A perfect day for a long, long walk. She turned to start walking, but a familiar voice rang out behind her.

“Morgan!” She turned to see a Warlock standing in the street behind her, as if he had been there the whole time. A few years older than she was, he was very tall and walked with a slight slouch, as if he knew he was too tall for his own good. Rail thin, with a habit for wearing only black and dying his hair to match, he looked like an otherworldly scarecrow. His name was Vince, and he was her brother’s best friend.

“Hi, Vince,” she smiled and waved, even though she knew it looked forced. She didn’t spare a second thought to how he’d managed to get here. Vince had a way of knowing things one didn’t expect him to, and turning up at odd moments to share them.

“What are ya doin’ up so early?” he asked.

“You know I sleep at night, Vince,” she said, feeling tired and anxious at the same time, and wanting him to leave so she could get moving.

“Yeah, guess you’re right. Not usually out so early, though. I’ve never seen you use this door before, either. I do it sometimes, when I wanna get out without anyone botherin’ me. Thought I was the only one. So,” he grinned, “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

She grinned back. She couldn’t help it. It was impossible not to smile when Vince smiled. “No, it’s okay. Maybe I don’t want to be alone as much as I thought I did. I’m headed out for a walk though. I should get going.”

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“I…well, I kind of-”

“I know. You need some time alone. I get that. Just give me maybe a couple blocks, okay?”
She smiled again, a small, wry smile. “Deal.” She turned, letting him catch up, which didn’t take him long with his long legs. He came up beside her and put a hand gently on her shoulder.

“You doin’ okay, Morgan?” He looked down at her with concerned eyes and it drove her crazy, because she couldn’t get irritated at him. She got irritated at Toby when he looked at her like that, but with Vince, everything he did was so frustratingly sincere.

“Yeah,” she said. “Are you?”

It took him a moment to answer. She figured she’d surprised him. “I’m doin’ just fine. The thing is, you’ve been going out a lot at night lately, Morgan.”

“And?”

“Morgan, I know what you’re doing here, and I think I know why.”

“Enlighten me.” Now she was getting frustrated. She started to walk faster. Vince, he always wanted to help. That was fine. The problem was that he always thought he could, and this…Vince was a good listener, the sort of person you went to and told about your problems. But this was beyond his depth.

“You think that he’ll be better off if you leave.”

“What?” That was ridiculous. It had nothing to do with why she was going.

“You think maybe he’ll forget all about you, and then his life will be easier and he’ll just get back to business.” They had reached the corner of the second block.

“I think your time’s up, Vince.” She stopped, and tried to look as impatient as she could as she looked at him.

“Morgan, don’t do this. As a friend to a friend-”

“You’re Toby’s friend!” She glared up at him. “You’re Toby’s friend, checking up on his little sister for him, and you think because you’re a couple years older than me, that you know me, that you can for some reason understand what I’m going through? You go out at night. You help Toby, instead of wearing him down, one day at a time, when the last thing he needs is someone else to worry about. You have no idea, Vince. You have no idea what I’m trying to do, and you have no idea why I have to do it.”

It felt good, to say those things, to lash out, finally, at someone, but the look in his eyes made her regret it.

“I’m Toby’s friend, huh? I always thought I was your friend, too.”

She sighed. “I know, I’m sorry, I just…”

“I care about ya. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I do. I’m glad you care about me, Vince.”

“I can’t stop you, can I?” The way he looked at her now, the sadness, made her breath catch in her throat.

She looked up into his eyes and said, as evenly and calmly as she could, “no.”

“Morgan?”

“Yeah?”

“If I let you turn that corner, I need you to promise me one thing.”

“Sure, Vince, what?”

“I need you to promise me that if I let you turn that corner, and I head back to the Holiday and go about my day like nothin’ happened, that I’ll see ya again sometime.”

She took a breath. “Vince, don’t start being all melodramatic.”

“I’m not being melodramatic, and you’re not goin’ anywhere without that promise.”

“How are you planning on stopping me? Picking me up and carrying me back home?”

“If I have to.” He gave her a playful punch on the shoulder, but he was serious when he said it.

“Vince,” she said. “I promise that this will not be the last time you see me.”

“Okay,” he said, “okay. Thank you. I guess I’ll see ya ‘round, then.”

“Yeah,” after all that, she wasn’t sure she really wanted to turn the corner. “I’ll see you around.”

“Okay,” he turned, probably because he knew she didn’t want to be the first to go. “You have a good walk.,” he said as he started to walk away. “And remember, you’re not the only one in the world who’s ever left someplace while everyone else was sleepin’, hopin’ no one would see.”

She walked around the corner and then stopped, and listened to his footsteps fade away. Vince was the newest member of the gang. Most of them had been born into it, but Vince had turned up on their doorstep about a year before. He had no family name, because he didn’t want to tell them where he came from. So maybe she had been too quick to tell him that he didn’t know anything about what she was about to do. But she couldn’t hear his footsteps anymore, so there was nothing left to do but start walking.

* * *

Sandy stared glassy-eyed at the television during the morning news report in homeroom, exhausted from her late night and from some bigger, duller tiredness she couldn’t pinpoint. The other students never seemed to have any trouble. Watching the television quietly and attentively, they were polite and studious, the definition of good students in their matching uniforms. So perfect, all together like that, that they made the whole idea of perfection obsolete.

A familiar face appeared on the screen. The chief of police and acting mayor, the man’s name was Davis. A plain-looking man in his forties, he had an open, honest face. They were playing an excerpt from the speech he had given the previous night to the city police. She had already seen most of it on the late news.

“This anarchy that still thrives in our fair city must be destroyed!” he said, and even as his face twisted in anger, it was as if you could see his belief in the City of Light shining through. It was almost as if the light in the room shone just a little brighter around the podium where he stood. She had never been much for anti-Witch speeches, but the way he spoke made her feel like this man must be a good leader for the City of Light to have, even if he wasn’t a true Wizard.

The Wizard, when he returned, would be the true ruler of the city. This she knew from her lessons and history books. A being of unbelievable power, magic stronger than that of any Sorcerer or Witch, he would solve all the city’s problems with the wave of a hand. But Davis was no Wizard, and neither had the last Wizard been, the one who had died fifteen years ago, when Sandy was a year old. That Wizard had only been the latest in a long line of frauds. That was not in the history books, but it was widely whispered. Sandy believed it, because if there had been a true Wizard in the city, there would have been no need for Chief Davis to declare martial law when he became chief of police.

“These outlaws, thieves and murderers who choose to live outside our society, in a scar of crumbling buildings piercing the very heart of the City of Light, must be eradicated before our city can be truly whole again.” A map replaced Davis on the television, showing the island on the Dragon River on which they all lived. Dragon’s Eye Island was an oval, with the nearly circular City of Light in its center, giving it its name. Across the city, curving in a claw shape towards the center, was the territory the Witches still controlled. She and the rest of the students were particularly familiar with this map, as their district lay almost on the border of the Witches’ territory, and they received more than the usual warnings on the dangers of straying too close. She couldn’t help but wonder what Davis meant by “whole again,” though. The Witches had always been there, hadn’t they? Her history books were a little bit unclear on that part.

In the end, she respected Davis for abandoning the faux-title when he came to power. The magic of the Wizard was lost now, most likely, just like the magic of the Power, the spells wielded by the heroes of old.

Her classes went the same as usual. She tried to stay awake in her classes, and tried to ignore the things people whispered around her as she passed them in the halls. “Ghost” was the most popular, probably. “Witch-girl” was next. And then there was plain old “freak.” She felt like she should be used to it, by now. It had been going on as long as she could remember. The year had been particularly hard because she had no classes with Angie, her best friend. Especially hard because Angie was the only friend she really had.

She almost didn’t blame them, the way she had when they’d first started avoiding her on the playground, when they learned what it was to be good little Sorcerers and Sorceresses. Being a good citizen of the City of Light meant fitting in, it meant being the same, it meant staying in line with the people around you. She tried, but her body itself betrayed her.

She felt relief flood through her when she arrived at her last class, Magic III. Forty-seven more minutes and she could go home. The four crescent-shaped wounds in each of her palms were starting to ache, and she wanted to be away from the whispers and stares even more than usual.
The class itself was a joke. It was a lot like Magic II and Magic I, and both of those had been a lot like Preliminary Magic. Their first unit had been magical safety, which meant long lists of reasons not to use magic, ways to get around magic use, and endless justification for why they were only beginning to weave real spells now, in October of junior year, even though everyone became able to use magic when they turned thirteen. Today was the day, she realized suddenly. The first day of real magic. They were going to be lifting small objects. It was a start. She’d always wanted to learn real magic. She almost smiled to herself.

Suddenly, something crashed into her. She was knocked from her feet, her books flying from her hands, and when she looked up a boy was standing over her, looking horrified.

“By the Wizard, I am so sorry,” he said, holding out his hand to help her up. She thought she recognized him, one of the seniors, but she didn’t know his name.

“It’s okay,” she started to say, reaching for the offered hand. It was just nice that he cared enough to help her up.

But he kept talking, “I though I just walk right through you!” He pulled his hand away, and he and the crowd that had gathered to watch burst into laughter. He walked around her and her books and continued on his way.

“Clever,” she said under her breath. “No one’s ever though of that one before.”

By the time she had gathered up her things she was late to class. She opened the door as quietly as she could and stepped through. As she crossed the threshold into the room, a pencil came flying at her head. Without thinking, she reached up and snatched it out of the air.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Brown,” one of the students in the front row said, speaking to the teacher but looking strangely at Sandy. “The door startled me and I lost control of the spell.”

“That’s okay, William,” said Ms. Brown. “This is just our first day working with this spell, and it looks like no harm was done.” Ms. Brown was in her late thirties, tall, with short, mousy brown hair and a look of perpetual weariness that made Sandy want to like her. “And Sandy, I’m glad you could join us. Normally I’d have to write you up for tardiness, but since you’ve clearly done so much studying for this outside of class, I think I can let it slide this once.”

For a minute, Sandy didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she realized that the pencil wasn’t in her hand. It was floating about six inches above it. She could feel something between her hand and the pencil, something she couldn’t describe, and couldn’t see. Magic? Had she just done magic?

“You can take your seat now, Sandy,” said Ms. Brown. The class was staring at her and bubbling with whispers, things like “learned it from the Witches” and “how is the freak better at this than I am?” She looked around, but didn’t move.

“Sandy, why don’t you put the pencil down and-” Ms. Brown suddenly looked very worried. “Is that blood on your sweater?” Sandy felt a wave of nausea sweep over her. She had forgotten to wash the sweater after what had happened last night. Ms. Brown walked a few steps closer. “Sandy, what happened to your hands? Do you need to go to the nurse?” She couldn’t distinguish what the rest of the class was saying now, and she didn’t want to know. They couldn’t know, couldn’t know this. Couldn’t know that she’d done something crazy, something wrong. Not with just who she was being so wrong to begin with. But it was too late. Ms. Brown had seen the marks on her hands.

“Sandy…did you do that to yourself?” The pencil snapped with a crack, falling to Sandy’s feet in a rain of splinters. “Okay Sandy,” Ms. Brown said, in a quiet wavering voice that Sandy thought must contain an inner monologue chanting “just stay calm, just stay calm.” Sandy had the same inner voice but she couldn’t hear it anymore. “You just sit tight, I’m going to call someone to watch the class and then I’ll walk you to the nurse.”

She couldn’t go to the nurse. She couldn’t explain this. They’d call her mother, and…and what had she done to the pencil? She wasn’t supposed to be able to do something like that. She started to back out of the doorway and into the hall.

“Sandy, wait,” said Ms. Brown. She followed Sandy into the hall, but the rest of the class and their whispers came with her. Sandy was still backing slowly away. She could hear movement in the other classrooms, doors opening around her to see what was going on. Ms. Brown was watching her, looking worried and helpless. The rest of the class, some of them were snickering and whispering, but most were staring wide-eyed at what was unfolding in front of them.

It was going to be okay, Sandy told herself. She was going to take a deep breath, and come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, and she wasn’t going to do any more magic without meaning to, and there would be no calls to the principal or her mother, and everything was going to be just fine. Sandy took a deep breath. She held it for a long time, waiting for everything to be okay.

And then she turned and she ran.

There was a moment of silence, and then someone shouted out, “Run, witchie, run!” And then another, “Yeah! Run!”

“Stop it!” Ms. Brown’s voice was shrill and panicked behind her. “Stop it, all of you, you should be ashamed—Sandy!” But Sandy had reached the stairwell. She flung the swinging door open and stumbled through. One of her heels caught on the first step, and she tumbled down half a flight of stairs. Landing hard on the cold tile floor, she scrambled back to her feet and kept going. She couldn’t stop now. Not after what had happened in class, and after running. It was too late, and then she was down the stairs and at the heavy double doors out the back of the building, and then she was outside, running across the soccer field. Mud spattered her tights. She slipped a few times, but managed to keep her feet until she reached the sidewalk.

She ran across the street without looking. Cars horns blared angrily behind her, but she was past them already and she could barely hear it over the sound of her own heart pounding in her ears. Her shoes made sharp, violent sounds against the cement of the sidewalk. People turned to stare at her as she passed them, but she ignored them. She turned down a narrow alleyway, and another, and another, until she no longer knew which way she was going, and until there were no longer any passerby to watch her frantic flight.

She didn’t stop until she reached a dead-end alley and could go no further. As soon as she stopped moving she collapsed to the pavement, drawing great gasping breaths and feeling the searing pain in her legs for the first time. After a few breaths, the fog in her mind started to clear, and she got slowly to her feet. The muscles in her legs shook and twitched under her, and she wondered just how long she had been running. She looked up, and was shocked to see the sky darkening in sunset.
Walking shakily, she made her way out of the alley and back onto the nearest street. It looked like a shopping district, but all the shops were closed, some simply with signs, others with boarded-up windows that looked like they hadn’t been touched in some time. The sidewalk itself was rough and cracked, the whole place giving off an air of neglect and disrepair.

She was in the borderlands, she realized with a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, the part of the city on the edge of the territory that was still controlled by witch gangs. It wasn’t all that far from school, but a long way to run, and someplace she had been warned never to go.

It didn’t seem to matter so much, though, because she couldn’t go back. The borderlands were as good a place as any for no one to recognize her, for no one coming after her to look.
Her stomach growled. It was probably almost dinner time. She looked around, and saw one shop that actually looked open at the end of the block. Walking towards it, she saw it was a small convenience store. The door and windows were covered with thick metal bars, presumably to prevent theft. She’d never seen such strong measures taken to keep people out, but she opened the door nonetheless.

She stepped through the threshold and into the shop. The place was dim and dusty. Before she had a chance to look around, a rough voice interrupted her.

“Get out.”

“What?” She looked up at the angry-looking middle-aged man who stood behind the counter.

“You heard me.” She was taken aback by the way he glared at her, but she was hungry.

“Are you closing? I’ll just be a minute.”

“Read the sign.” He gestured to a sign on the counter. It read, “No Witches.”

“No witches? I don’t understand, I-”

“I know a witch when I see one. I don’t even want to know where you got that uniform. Now get out of here before I call the police.”

She didn’t know what to do. Any words she thought of caught in her throat, and she finally turned and left. She made if halfway down the block before what had just happened really hit her.

“I’m a witch,” she murmured to herself. “Look at me, I must be a witch, they’ve always said I was a witch, look at me…” She stopped, and screamed out into the empty street, “I’m a witch! Am I? Am I? Am I a witch?” The darkness across the street gave no reply, and she realized that it was darker than where she stood. The streetlights had come on, but only on one side of the street. Strange, she thought, that one side of the street would have power and the other wouldn’t, and then she understood. The other side of the street didn’t have power because it wasn’t connected to the city electricity. The man in the shop, the bars on the windows, they suddenly made more sense. She wasn’t in the borderlands. This was the border itself. She looked into the empty blackness across the street.

“I’m a witch, am I?” She said to the blackness. She took a slow step off of the sidewalk and into the street. “Maybe this is where I belong then.” She walked until she reached the sidewalk on the other side, and kept walking.

Sandy Banks walked into the City of Night.