Around five, his dad came home through the store entrance.
Henry was a very ordinary man by all standards. Not tall nor short, not poor or rich, honest to a fault and a cleaner. People often assumed he was an entrepreneur of his own company when he told them what he did for a living, and he was always quick to correct them; he was proud of his job, especially when it took him to the places where people needed him most. Hospitals, elderly housing, disability care.
Finn had occasionally heard people speculating what exactly Erica had seen in Henry. He wasn't that keen on the topic himself, but he knew that Henry possessed the kind of magic some witches sought after: he had a way of looking directly at his conversation partner, straight in the eyes, and making them feel like they were the only person in the whole world.
No matter their stature, Henry made everyone feel important. He got along with everyone without compromising his values; he didn't agree with everyone, but he respected everyone he met. More people in town knew Henry the janitor-or-was-it-cleaner, I-thought-he-is-an-entrepreur-with-his-own-cleaning-company than his eccentric, witchy wife, but usually if you talked about one in the manner of idle neighborhood gossip, the other came up as well.
"Hey, kid," Henry greeted and headed over to ruffle Finn's hair. Finn scoffed and waved the touch away, but half-heartedly.
"Hey," he replied and finished locking the cash register for the day. "How was work?" Henry let out a heavy groan as he left his rain-stained coat inside the door leading to the apartment.
"Business as usual," Henry replied with a smile. "Nothing interesting happened today. What about you? You look awfully cheerful." For a non-witch, Henry was always very aware of the moods of his children. Finn wondered if it meant he had latent magical abilities, or if this just made him a good parent.
"It's been a good day," he replied and smiled, locking the cash register. "Mom's bringing takeout for dinner today."
"Takeout," Henry echoed and looked down at his slightly plump stomach with a sigh, before smiling. "Well, every now and then it should be just fine. Besides, I'm starving. Ain't nothing like folding towels for one hour and then walking through an entire hospital complex to make you hungry."
Finn locked the store door and followed slightly after his father. He wondered if he would be even more alienated at school if it wasn't for this window to normalcy he had lived with his whole life. Henry had very ordinary problems, ordinary concerns, ordinary kind of love.
There was a chance, somewhere in between Erica's teachings and Lucas's faith, that at least one of them could have turned like Henry. It wouldn't have been a sad or unhappy life, just a different one. Finn wondered if to their father him and Lucas were one and the same, both fascinated by things he could respect if not understand.
Finn himself could not help but see differences everywhere he looked.
While it was true both of them had been growing knowing the impossible was true, Lucas had questioned more. Nobody knew where his faith had risen from. Finn had overheard Erica call it his 'teenage rebellion' once in a fond but huffed conversation, and it had coloured his opinion of Christianity for a long time.
Perhaps it had started as a way to rebel against Erica and her teachings, but as years passed by, Lucas's faith didn't wane, it grew. Henry was not a believer, Erica was a witch, and Finn had always followed in every footstep of his mother.
That Lucas would become a priest in that kind of environment made Finn believe in a god just a little. Not enough to feel any kind of faith in his own heart, but enough to not dismiss Lucas completely.
Finn withdrew to his room and inhaled the familiar scent of herbs, brushed away some scattered lavender buds from his duvet and slumped down to sit. His fingers found the latch on the window and took out two glass jars he had left outside when the weather forecast had said it would be raining. Both of them were filled to the brim.
"Rainwater," he muttered aloud as he wrote the words to a piece of tape and plastered it on both, then closed one. For the other one he had other plans, and he took out a pouch of sage and a bundle of mint in the other.
It was important to make use of rainwater when it was available. Just like some foods, or even ingredients used in chemistry, alchemy or modern medicine, some spellcraft ingredients were perishable - rain water would be okay in the fridge for a week or so, but depending what you wanted to use it on, you might not want to drink it after that point.
Potions that were intended for drinking and required rainwater weren't very well-preservable. If you wanted a similar effect, you could either wait for the rain or seek a workaround.
Finn closed the second jar and looked at it thoughtfully. Then he opened his palm in front of him and placed the empty pouch on it, imagining it lighting up. It started to glow gentle, faint, dim light.
Just the sight of it was enough to make his heart beat faster again. It felt warm, like the kind of magic he knew existed but that often chose to show itself in very invisible ways. He closed the pouch inside his fist and focused on making the light disappear, and slowly the small, fragile glow inside his fist faded.
He dropped the pouch on his nightstand and stared at his ceiling, feet drumming restlessly against the mattress.
Tomorrow simply couldn't arrive quickly enough.
***
It wasn't always effortless to try and manage life with school, witchcraft and a part-time job. It felt like choreography, but as with everything in life, practice made perfect.
Finn timed his rituals to the schedule of garbage pick-up so that he would have time both for "so mote it be" and taking out his share of the recyclables. He utilized the walks to school by gathering reagents - the downside of it was that he had to carry them at school, which was okay with rose petals and acorns but not so much with live frogs and paws carved from a roadkill hedgehog.
Being a witch melded effortlessly to his everyday life, the only real downside of it being that it marked him as Other. Nobody bullied him, he had friends - or, acquaintances, or at least people he chatted with at school - but neither had someone ever visited his house. On some days he thought it was for the better, that someone might start asking questions about his mother's work, or even start making fun of her.
Or then they would just prefer Lucas like everyone else did.
Of course there were the occasional people who came to him with words such as "so hey, you do magic or some shit, right". And it wasn't that he didn't or that it was a secret, but their idea of magic and what magic really was were two completely separate things.
Magic wasn't fiery bolts and flashes of light, it was opening a salt package from an instant food joint and pouring it on your tray when someone was being negative or hostile.
It was making your bed every morning, not because you were a particularly tidy person (Finn wasn't) but because it was a ritual. In the process you purged the nightmares and stress, and blessed your bed for the night to come. It was taking five extra seconds before you drank your morning tea, coffee or orange juice to bless it with positivity.
Magic really wasn't that big of a deal.
But explaining this to someone who already had a prejudice was difficult. That's not magic, they would say. That's where all magic begins, Finn thought but rarely had the energy or willingness to start fighting over it. Energy was a finite resource, and he preferred to use his on things that mattered.
Such as summoning demons.
Leif lived in an old house. There were many houses like that in town - weathered, slightly worn, seen through many generations of people, left as an inheritance to people who moved away, no longer in touch with their relatives or roots. Houses that were first sold for full-price, then half-price, and finally fraction price to someone who did want to stay.
Finn had seen larger cities before and could understand the appeal of wanting to live there, but contrary to most professions he realized it would be difficult to make a living as a witch in a major city. Unless you were a media personality, the type to film either short entertaining clips or long informative - yet charismatic - hot takes for the rest of the world to see.
As he was neither of those things, he recognized that he would probably do better in a middle-sized city or town. Not small enough so that the local denizens would be superstitious to the point of making his mailbox explode, and not large enough so people would only consider anything worthwhile they could watch an entertaining dance video about.
He didn't know much about Leif, but he knew that the older witch was from a very small village, had moved to a very big city, and had finally arrived here. Witches were creatures of communities, so in a space where everyone knew a little something about everyone else, it simultaneously struck weird and understandable that people knew very little about Leif.
Weird, because it meant he had no roots in this community or his earlier ones, for one reason or another. Understandable, because small-knit circles were always full of gossip. It didn't matter if it was a small town community or a coven which had all its members in different cities - when people gathered and their lives converged, someone always knew someone.
He knocked, and after hearing the call from the inside, entered.
The house was just as dark and cool on the inside as it was on the outside, but littered with the kind of items Finn had learned to associate with witchcraft at his home. Empty, half-filled or overflowing jars and bottles, sand of every color, gravel, pine cones.
Leif stood at the doorway. When he had arrived at the shop he had looked every bit like a gentleman, but now he was wearing only a nightgown and a bathrobe, his hair still slightly disheveled from sleep, and was holding a cup of coffee. His fingers kept stirring the spoon steadily and determinedly clockwise.
"Good morning, pardon my appearance. I was staying up late," he greeted Finn. Finn bit his lip and nodded to avoid either laughing or commenting how four in the afternoon was no longer considerable as 'morning'. Be respectful, he told himself. He could do that, at least in theory. It was one of those things that was easier inside your head than in actual real life situations.
Finn followed Leif into a kitchen that didn't look like there was a project going on in there - in fact, it looked more like four or five separate projects, all of which seemed to require copious amounts of paper and material. Or perhaps five people had been sitting at the desk, each with their own notes and ingredients. Or perhaps one person had been sitting at all five spots.
"Sorry about the mess." Leif swiped two of the places clean, crumbling some of the papers in process. He sat down on one of the vacant places, and Finn took the other one. From the kitchen window he could see six ravens, all huddled up on a gate in the bare garden that seemed to lead to nowhere, all bobbing and cocking their heads curiously and looking towards the warm glow of the window.
One of them seemed to stare directly at him with a petulant gaze. Finn looked away first, not because he was a coward but because Leif addressed him.
"So, where to start." Leif picked up two papers from the table and eyed them half-heartedly, before tossing them to the pile with others. "Do you think you could tell me a bit about yourself? Like, hm. In a job interview, or something like that."
Finn straightened his back. He had never been in a job interview before, but he figured he could imagine being in one.
"Okay, so, I have been taught witchcraft by Erica since I was four," he started as he tried to remember everything in the correct order. Memory was such a fickle thing. "I know most of the basic stuff, I'd say. Visualization, rituals, a lot about spell ingredients and how to prep 'em. Uh, herbs..."
"Good, good," Leif stated and stopped him. "But you didn't come here to learn about herbs, right? You approached me because you wanted to learn something different." Leif leaned forward and stared at him intently, two bright blue eyes. Finn nodded. From the corner of his eye he saw one of the ravens spreading its wings and taking flight.
"So. What do you know about the thing you want to learn about? Dark arts, if we wanted to be, hm. Poetic."
Leif's eyes were mirror-like and his tone was unreadable, and for a moment Finn wondered what exactly was he being interviewed for. Then he pushed away the thought and straightened his back again.
"I mean, not much," Finn admitted. "Mom calls it forbidden knowledge, and that it can be dangerous if mishandled. I know it has to do with, well. Interfering with cycles that don't normally get interrupted." Cycle of life and death was the most clear example of what was achievable with the kind of magic Erica had mentioned with dark arts.
"Never do it," she had made him promise. "It's dangerous, and most often it won't work. And when it does work, it will leave you wishing it didn't." She always refused to elaborate, but Finn had heard bits and pieces. Erica had never touched the dark arts herself, but every witch had a relative, an aunt, a cousin, a distant grandmother, who had finally given into the curiosity.
Some went crazy. Others gave up witchcraft permanently. A couple of them suffered permanent injuries to their physical body. And then there were some names that simply had gone missing for good, never to be heard from again.
But would it all be worth it, if he could rub it in Lucas’s face?
Fuck yes it would.
"I would imagine that is how she would refer to it, yes," Leif said and nodded, leaning back in his chair. "Could you close up the curtains for me? Everything except this one." He nodded towards the window where the ravens were still standing on the gate. Finn got up and pulled the dark blue curtains in front of each window. The kitchen seemed less dark now that the lack of light outside was blocked.
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