The Path of Perfect Logic, for kribban
Title: The Path of Perfect Logic
Recipient: kribban
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 8,200
Warnings: Candid discussion of abortion and teen pregnancy
Author's Notes: Thanks to my marvellous beta for encouragement, inspiration, and mad skillz!
Summary: Allison thought her devotion to logical pragmatism had been stretched to its limits when she got pregnant at sixteen. She had no idea how much closer a pair of terrifying stalkers in a classic car could come to shattering it altogether.
Allison had considered all the factors and closely observed the situation for days now, and felt it was safe to infer that the owner of the flashy black muscle car was stalking her.
The most logical choice for her stalker, of course, was Zeke, but Allison had eliminated him. She didn’t know where he would get a car like that, for one, nor would he like the 50-year-old gas-guzzler, the make and model of which she had identified through hours of rigorous research on classic car enthusiast websites, and combing through pages of Google images. Secondly, Zeke had already graduated and left for college; he had to take a few summer prep courses as a condition of being accepted to the University of Southern California, where he would start this fall with a full ride football scholarship.
Most pertinently, since he didn’t know she was carrying his baby, he would have no reason to stalk her.
She paused, pencil poised over her calculus notebook, and frowned at the last thought. The phrase was outdated and sexist, and worse, illogical. In no way was it his baby, especially considering he had not intended to conceive it, did not think he would, and presumably had no interest in it.
Still, he was the only real candidate for her stalker that Allison had been able to come up with. It was only because of her that Zeke had made it into USC on scholarship, as he had acknowledged more than once. He had brought her multiple thank you gifts, ignoring her when she told him that the money she received through the school tutoring program was the only reward she sought.
She had considered the whole thing very carefully, writing down things he had said and observing the patterns of his behavior, and she was now sure it was misplaced gratitude that had led to his choice to have sex with her, too.
Getting pregnant at sixteen was widely considered one of the biggest mistakes a person could make, but Allison did not make mistakes. She had worked hard all her life to ensure that she did not. That night had been a conscious choice, and if anything, a gamble. She had looked ahead at her life for the next several years, considering factors such as her social status and skills, how focused she was on her studies, and the things she valued most, and decided she should exploit the opportunity to have a sexual experience, since it was likely to be her only chance in the foreseeable future.
She very rarely gambled, either, so that was the only true out of character moment, when they had established that neither of them had a condom, Zeke had made some ignorant noises about how he thought a girl couldn’t get pregnant on her first time, and she had done some quick calculations about her menstrual cycle and decided the risk level was acceptable.
Leaning back in her chair to stretch her back, she ran her hand over the growing bulge that was the consequence of acceptable risk. She glanced at the clock and then out the window, and sighed. 11:15, and the black car was still there, parked in the pool of darkness made by the gap between streetlights and partially screened by the Trellis family’s bushes. She supposed her stalker thought she couldn’t see the car, and if she hadn’t known to look for it, she wouldn’t have.
She preferred to study and keep an eye on the car until it left, but she was very tired. The regimen of moderate exercise, excellent nutrition, and adequate sleep that she had always maintained as a means to her goals was apparently not sufficient to prevent the fatigue commonly experienced in the third trimester of pregnancy.
She should go downstairs and double-check all the locks before bed; her mom might have used one of the doors without Allison noticing, and she was terrible about remembering to lock things. Maybe she should even tell her mom about the stalker, but she had already predicted her mother’s actions should she do so, and there was no benefit to either of them. She gave in and crawled into bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.
* * *
“Oh, Ally-bug. What happened?”
It was the most familiar voice in the world. Allison supposed that was because it was her mind’s own voice. It belonged to someone who did not exist except in her little used-well, never used, now that she knew better-imagination. The voice gave her a nickname that she had never actually had, though she’d thought she should, given her strong interest in entomology. She’d thought her mother might start calling her that, but Mom had only been upset and repulsed by all the jars of insects, and the specimens pinned to cards, and had said, “Well, as long as it’s for science.”
She sat up. Weems was sitting on the end of her bed, his mullet-framed face creased with compassion. She’d always liked his face. She supposed it only made sense that she would make up a sweet, compassionate face, though she didn’t really know why she’d made up the mullet, too-tight jeans with flab drooping over them, and tattered rock band T-shirt. She had always been into fitness, and had never been into 70s rock.
She was into music, though, and some of that hard rock guitar had really grown on her. She had to admit she was proud of the amazing air guitar solos her mind had produced via Weems, its most detailed projection.
She squinted at him, amazed as she always was, when she remembered her imaginary friend, at how real he seemed. It had been over nine years since she’d decided, on her path to pursuing perfect logic, that it was silly and wrong to have an imaginary friend, and had stopped seeing him. The human mind, as she well knew, was an incredible thing, and she had read reports of pregnant women having especially vivid dreams, so perhaps it made sense that she saw Weems now.
Sitting up, she ran her hand over her belly. “What do you mean, what happened? You know what causes this.”
“I don’t mean that,” said Weems kindly. “I mean, with the violin. And the bug collection, and writing stories. You were so good at all that stuff, and you stopped.”
She’d given up orchestra this year when it conflicted with AP History. She used to love playing the violin, and later kept it up because it would look good on her college application, but she had decided taking every AP course her high school offered would look better. It was why she’d chosen not to graduate early, as she could have done this year. She’d split all the AP courses between her junior and senior year instead, partly because the school wouldn’t let her take too many at once. Entomology had played itself out as a possible career path by middle school.
She chose to answer the part of the question she was least sure about first. “I haven’t written stories for years,” she said. “I stopped not long after the last time I saw you.”
“But why?”
Illogically, Allison felt tears come to her eyes. It must be hormones. She never cried-she didn’t believe in it-but like his face, she had always loved Weems’s voice, and though it made no sense, she couldn’t entirely dismiss the overwhelming feeling of having missed it.
“I wanted to know what happened to Ally the bug princess and all her faithful subjects,” Weems continued sadly. “And I thought you were gonna start a band that made violin the most rock ‘n roll instrument ever.”
“I had more important things to spend my time on,” Allison said, though a hollow feeling was rising in her at those memories. “If I was going to get into my college of choice, I had to study hard… and I did, I got early acceptance at Stanford. They have this thing now where if your parents make less than $125,000 a year, you get tuition free. And you know my mom doesn’t make a third that much. I even qualify for free room and board.”
“That’s amazing, Ally-bug! I knew you could do whatever you wanted to do,” said Weems.
It was strange that he would say that, as part of Allison’s mind, because she didn’t know that. She didn’t believe it at all, though her mom said it a lot, and so did some of her favorite teachers. For example, she knew, logically, that she could not become a gymnast. Her mother had put her in classes when she was going on eight, after the last time she’d seen Weems. Which was why he wasn’t asking her about giving that up, she guessed. She had taken classes for two years and even competed a little; she’d been pretty good. But she’d gotten a growth spurt, and become the tallest girl in the amateur league she was in. She’d done a growth projection calculation and realized that, if she did not experience the delayed puberty that was said to sometimes stunt female gymnasts’ growth, she would be at least five-seven when she was finished growing, and that was far too tall to be competitive. So she’d quit.
In fact, she was closer to five-eight, so she knew she’d made the right decision.
“Ally,” said Weems. “I have to tell you something important. I know you’re done with imaginary friends, so I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important.”
“You’re not bothering me,” Allison said. She figured that Weems was the voice of her subconscious, and though psychology was too soft a science to appeal to her much, she knew enough of it to understand that it was important to listen to the subconscious mind, and that failure to do so could cause mental illness, which was the last thing she needed. “What is it?”
Weems was gazing at her, fondly and sadly. She fought the nostalgic urge, no doubt brought on by pregnancy hormones, to bust out her violin so they could play one of their epic duets, with Weems playing his blistering air guitar solos while she played along, harmonizing and improvising in crazier and crazier ways until her mother walked in and said, “Honey? What you’re playing sounds wonderful, but don’t you think you should be practicing your recital pieces?”
Her mother didn’t like anything too weird. That was why she’d steered Allison away from writing fanciful stories and collecting bugs, and toward things like chess and being a mathlete, and Allison was glad, because as her mother always said, she didn’t want to end up in a dead-end job like her.
What her mother didn’t say, because she didn’t have to, was that she also didn’t want to end up a sociopath who died in prison, like her father. So she’d always tried to follow a strong moral compass, and to listen to her subconscious during the rare times, as now, that it spoke to her.
“You know you’ve always been special, Ally-bug,” Weems was saying. “And some… some more people have noticed that, especially now that you’re…” He gestured to her belly.
“Pregnant,” said Allison said dryly. “We can use the proper words for things, Weems. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I won’t subscribe to the language of shame or use childish euphemisms for something I am perfectly capable of describing more accurately.”
“Of course,” Weems acknowledged, but he seemed… sad, or even disappointed.
The latter was too much. Was this some subconscious shame over being pregnant that had finally manifested itself, after all her mother and the school administers had done to try to bring it out, if only so she would reveal who’d gotten her pregnant? But for her imaginary friend to be disappointed in her…
She went on speaking to cover the surge of emotion. “Anyway, being pregnant hardly makes me more special,” she said contemptuously. “Most women can do it, and plenty of other girls my age have done it even at my school.” Her mother had scraped together enough money to rent the crappiest house in a nice neighborhood, so that they would be in the district of the charter school she’d gotten into on academic merit.
“I’m talking about the… special stuff you were doing when I met you, Ally. Remember? It used to scare you, so we would hide under the bed together, and you asked me to help you stop doing it. And it did stop. Didn’t it?”
“It never happened in the first place,” Allison said coldly. “It was just my imagination. Like you.”
Weems looked extremely uncomfortable, which made sense, because this subject made Allison feel that way, more than anything else. She did not like remembering how she’d imagined, when she was four or five, that she saw things in her room that weren’t really there. She especially did not like remembering how she’d wanted to throw something at the things to make them go away, and as she decided that, her shoes had flown across the room and hit the wall, scattering the shadows that had frightened her.
It had happened a few times, that she had imagined throwing things without touching them, and her mother had been very upset with her when she’d told her about it. At her most stern, she had told Allison that imagining things like that was bad for her mind, and that she should focus on other things to leave no room for undesirable thoughts. She’d had Allison start taking violin lessons the very next day, and had taught her to play chess and gotten her involved in junior tournaments shortly after that.
Weems never thought it was so weird. He’d helped her with it, and when she said she wanted it to stop, he’d helped with that, too. “So why are you bringing it up now?” she asked him sharply.
“Like I said, there are people who might-”
“Does this have to do with my stalker?”
Weems looked alarmed for a moment before he covered it up. “You have a stalker?” he said.
“Yep,” said Allison coolly. Maybe that was all this was-her subconscious telling her she needed to do something about the stalker, that he was a real danger. If it had something to do with being pregnant, maybe it was Zeke after all. Or maybe he’d hired the person in the black car to keep an eye on her.
She walked to the window. “He’s still there,” she said, pointing to the clump of flat blackness in the shadows across the street, broken by a faint glint of chrome. “He usually leaves before this time of night, but sometimes he parks near my school, too.”
Weems followed the line of her finger, and sighed in relief. “Oh,” he said. “They’re not stalkers. They’re… friends of mine, sort of. Well, more like friends of a friend, but they agreed to help me, and you.”
“I wasn’t aware I needed help.”
“Like I said, there are people who…”
“That’s enough,” said Allison, losing patience suddenly. She was tired, her back hurt, and she had to pee, like she always did for the last couple of weeks, and she was done. Her AP calculus test was in less than two days, she hadn’t gotten as far as she wanted in her prep book that night, and she should not be indulging herself with childish fantasies.
“I’m not special,” she continued. “The only special things about me are things I’ve worked hard for. I’m smarter than average; that’s it. There are no psychic powers. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Having an… an imaginary friend at sixteen doesn’t make sense. So I’m going to stop having this dream now.”
“OK,” said Weems quickly, holding up his hands. “OK, just one more thing. Tomorrow, those two guys with that car you’ve been seeing are going to come to your door. They look scary, but they’re really not. They’re going to say they need to inspect your house for gas leaks or… I forget what, but please just let them in and answer their questions-”
Allison squinted her eyes closed and held her head, which had begun to ache. “No,” she said. “No more. I’m going to wake up now.”
She stood still for a moment, having gotten to her feet as she got upset. The silence was deep. She opened her eyes cautiously.
Weems was gone. Of course, she reminded herself-he had never been there in the first place. A light breeze stirred her curtains and brought the sounds of a solitary car on the street through her open window; the night was otherwise still. She peered across the street, and the black car was gone; a cat ran out of the shadows where it had been, passing under the streetlight.
She tried not to wonder, after going to the bathroom and settling down in bed again, why she never felt like she had woken up, exactly, and why she was standing up in the middle of her room when she opened her eyes. She lay on her side and rubbed her belly, and silently fought the tears that tried to leak out as memories, sweet yet strangely painful, carried her back to sleep.
* * *
Sunday mornings were Allison’s favorite time. Her mother was at work; Sunday brunch was the busiest time at the diner she helped manage. Allison had the run of the house and always got up early to get all of her best studying done before her mother returned.
That morning, though, she was distracted and could not think why. She had promised herself she wouldn’t slack simply because she was pregnant; she refused to use it as an excuse not to focus. She ate an extra cup of Greek yogurt when she was still hungry after her good balanced breakfast, and sat down with her calculus prep book, determined to get through it by noon to leave her ample time for review.
She frowned when the doorbell rang, feeling an unaccustomed thrill of fear. She realized she’d entirely forgotten to check for the stalker’s car this morning, and this made her think there was something else she’d forgotten, too. She could not think what. She went to the door and peeked cautiously through the peephole.
Two men stood there in gray coveralls. A phrase randomly trailed across her mind: they look scary, but they’re really not…
She did not have to open the door; it wasn’t a good idea. If her mother had contacted anyone for repairs, she would know. It was totally out of character, therefore, that she promptly unbolted the door and swung it open.
“Hi there,” said the shorter of the two very tall, intimidating men. He was suspiciously handsome and had a salesman’s grin that she instantly distrusted. They both briefly flashed some sort of ID badge. “We’re from Clapton Pest Control. We’re here to inspect for possible termites.”
There was nothing familiar about these men, but… Allison knew that déjà vu had a rational neurological explanation. The two sides of her brain were simply unsure of which side should handle this situation, which had both logical and social-intuitive elements.
She did not know why she suddenly felt cold all over and her lips felt numb. She wished she had not opened the door. “We don’t have termites,” she said firmly, and tried to close it, but the taller one, with a small, apologetic smile, put his long arm above hers and stopped the door.
“If we could just come in to make sure,” he said gently, pressing forward and forcing her to step back. “We won’t take too much of your time, Miss Sendak.”
“Any relation to Maurice?” said the first man, stepping inside as if he owned the place. “You know…” he prompted when she looked at him blankly. “Where the Wild Things Are?”
“No,” she said, but not in answer to his question. No to them coming in to “check for termites”. No to the fake memory creeping in, of her childhood imaginary friend speaking to her, warning her of this. No to the idea that she had just let not one, but two large, dangerous stalkers or grifters into her home, and her mother would not be home for hours.
It’s OK, Ally-bug, said a voice in her mind. Just answer their questions and they’ll go away…
“I’ll check upstairs,” said the man with the salesman grin.
“And I just need to ask you a few questions,” said the taller, but less frightening man. Less was relative-Allison backed away from him, her heartbeat accelerating.
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted, as if that were not blatantly obvious. “We can’t have any poisonous chemicals in the house.”
“No chemicals, I promise,” said the second man. The first had already climbed the stairs. “My name is Sam. Can we sit down?”
She nodded; she didn’t have much choice at this point. She was afraid she’d faint if she didn’t sit. Sam followed her into the living room and sat at a safe distance across from her as she half-collapsed onto the couch.
Her mind was spinning. She had no control of this situation. She really, really didn’t like not being in control. She barely heard Sam as he asked her nonsensical questions that had nothing to do with termites. It was like he wasn’t even trying to fool her. She answered mechanically. There were no strange smells or flickering lights in the house. She hadn’t noticed any objects that weren’t where they were supposed to be, or that-and here she felt a strange, deep pang-seemed to move on their own.
There was a brief silence as Sam ran out of questions, and the other man returned. “No EMF or… anything,” he said, making himself comfortable on the couch next to her. Allison scooted away. She felt a flare of irritation, and it roused her from her frightened stupor. He acted like she wasn’t even there.
“What does EMF stand for? Why are you two really here?”
They glanced at each other. “It’s a… technical pest control term,” said Sam. “We’re just-”
“Pest control isn’t technical. You find pests, you fumigate, which I’ve already told you you can’t do. And very few people have termites in this climate. If they did, cold spots in the house would have nothing to do with them.” Her heart was pounding, but she felt better now that she could talk. “I know my mom didn’t call you. We don’t have anything worth stealing…” She gulped, trying to keep the edge of pleading out of her voice.
The nameless man scowled. “Hey, listen-”
“Don’t, Dean. She’s already scared to death.”
“No I’m not,” Allison quipped automatically. Never let the bullies know you were scared. Never be scared. Be logical. Be right.
The two men exchanged another look. Sam looked at her compassionately. “Listen, Ally-”
“It’s Allison.” Why had she told him that? Why had she let them in, given them information, made herself a target? She fought rising hysteria. Logic could fix everything, but not in a situation where there was no logic-none at all, though her mind fought to find it, fought to reject strange memories and weird things she’d seen from the corner of her eye and the voice that sounded like a friend, like someone she could trust…
“Hey,” said Sam, in a gentle voice that seemed used to quelling panic. “Hey, everything’s OK. We’re here to help, I promise.” He did not touch her, but held up his hand as if he’d thought about it, showing that it was empty, and Dean did the same and did not speak, and she thought, they’ve done this a hundred times. Maybe it was part of their grift, or their kidnapping method, because that was surely what was about to happen…
She sat up straight and tried to rally. “I didn’t know I needed help,” she said, and had déjà vu again, the sure feeling she’d just said the same thing to someone else. “Anyway, how is stalking help? With termites?” She said the last with dripping scorn, made sharper, as her tongue always was, with fear.
She hated fear. She had told herself she would never again be afraid of people. Arming herself against her peers with confidence and clever words, her intelligence against their stupidity and ignorance, had been working most of the time for years. Doing her best not to care about their petty cruelties had helped with whatever pain was leftover. The problem was that the fear these men brought did not seem to come from pettiness or ignorance. It felt real in a way nothing had, nothing since she was six years old and hiding under the bed…
“This isn’t working.”
Allison looked around wildly and jerked upright at the sound of the voice. It was terribly familiar, but did not belong to a person in the room. Or… a person at all.
Yet this not-person, this imaginary friend, stood in broad daylight next to two very real human beings, who were looking at him and speaking to him as if they heard and saw him just as well as she always had.
“Weems,” she whispered, and all three men-was Weems a man?-stopped talking at once and looked at her.
“Ally-bug,” he said softly, with so much concern, kindness, and compassion packed into a mere three syllables that she knew she was truly, honestly in big trouble. She immediately began to cry, hating every tear as it squeezed its way out.
“You’re right that there are no termites. I’m sorry they lied. Ally, we’re gonna tell you the truth…” Weems approached carefully and sat down next to her, between her and Dean, and it was the most natural thing in the world to lean on him and weep on his shoulder while he held her, and nothing else felt natural or right at all, so she did.
“Better tell it fast,” said Dean bluntly, and then… Allison heard a sound of fear she couldn’t describe, something between a squeal and a gasp, and realized she had made it. Dean pulled out a gun-a real gun! and pulled the thing out of it that Allison thought was called a clip. “I’m not loaded with witch-killing bullets.”
Weems hugged her tightly. “It’s OK,” he whispered. “Ally, we have to get away from here… can you come with us?”
“My calculus test,” she choked.
“You’ll take it, and you’ll rock it, because you are so smart,” said Weems. “But you’re not safe here right now. Look, is this too much? You wanna go to sleep for a while? We’ll take you somewhere else, and we can talk.”
“Yes,” she managed. “Too much…”
Then, of all things, she thought Weems gave her a flower to smell, and she was gone; gone from this place where fear held sway and nothing made sense and where she’d never, ever wanted to be.
* * *
She had always known logic would betray her.
It was a strange thought for someone who believed logic was her saviour. She did not like TV much, except for old Star Trek reruns, because of Mr. Spock. She had started watching them in the days after Weems but before the torment of middle school-before she had been mocked for raising one eyebrow and calling her peers illogical. They were, of course, but she had learned to keep that to herself, mostly.
She had looked to logic for answers, identifying her worst problems as caused by its lack and systematically eliminating all the illogical things that fed the fear she refused to feel-starting with Weems. But she had known, was the thing. There was a girl who loved to play weird, wild violin solos, who saw a secret world among the insects and told its stories, who loved to jump, turn cartwheels and swing from bars and practically fly through the air even if she would never be the best at it.
Who believed, before her mother infused her with terror about it, in magic.
Old car had a scent just like new car did. Allison remembered a joyride without seatbelts, which her mom had been very angry about. Weems had been there, too, and her dad, before he died. The car was a sports car, Dad had said, but it didn’t look like one, big and old and with a bench seat in the back where she sat, with Weems clutching her in lieu of a seatbelt, keeping her safe.
Weems was here now, as he had been then. She lay with her head in his lap and smelled old vinyl while her ears grasped for the words starting to form.
“-mom’s not one anymore,” said Weems. “I don’t know how, but it wasn’t a temporary patch like a zanna can do, like I did with Ally. I think it was permanent.”
“So grandma’s dead, and mom was born a natural witch but isn’t anymore. So Ally is the only one in danger.” Dean, Allison remembered.
“No,” said Weems with exaggerated patience. “The baby is. Ally’s number six. She’s in danger because it’s in her, but it’s the baby, the seventh generation, that they’re after.”
Allison sat bolt upright, knocking Weems’s arm out of the way. “Somebody wants my baby?” she blurted.
She was in the scary black muscle car. Looking out the window, she saw wheat fields flashing by, too fast.
They all looked at her, even Dean, who was driving. He peered at her in the rearview mirror.
She had thought she would say, let them have it. I was going to give it up for adoption. To someone who wants it…
Her. She was going to give her up. But she didn’t say it.
“Danger?” she said instead, when they all exchanged looks instead of answering her. “What danger?”
She sat, numb but somehow unsurprised, as Weems explained. Her daughter would be a seventh generation witch. All female witches, which Weems said made it not just unusual, but unique in modern times, and incredibly powerful.
A witch. Like her, and her mother.
She’d always known.
“What did my mother do? You said she isn’t… one anymore.”
Sam answered her. “I’m thinking she must have had someone do the spell on her that we want to do on you,” he said. “Or your baby, I mean. It drains a witch of her power, which the spell caster siphons into a vessel of some kind-”
“And then blows it up.” Dean interrupted. “Because there is no way we’re leaving that sitting around for someone like Rowena to find.”
“We can find a safe way to get rid of it,” Sam agreed.
“What about me? I’m not a…” She could not say the word “witch”. “I… was one. But I’m not anymore. Right?” She looked at Weems.
She could not believe she was having this conversation, in a seedy car far from home with two terrifying strangers and a figment of her imagination, but she let that thought go. If logic was going to abandon her, as she had always known it would, she could abandon it right back.
Weems gave her a sad, kind smile. “No, Ally-bug. I don’t have the power to make you not a witch. But when it scared you so much, I… put it to sleep. Now that you’re almost grown up, it could wake up at any time. That’s why I started visiting every couple of weeks, to see if there were any signs, and make sure you were safe if there were. And see if you had any interest in witchcraft.”
“He knew the covens were gonna come recruiting,” said Dean, with a hard edge to his voice.
She didn’t like Dean. She couldn’t help but love and trust Weems, even now that she was somehow coming to accept that he was an actual person and not a part of her own psyche, and she had not made up her mind about Sam yet. But Dean felt… dangerous. Was dangerous, she was sure.
“And I just wanted to make sure you didn’t get taken in by a bad one, if that happened,” Weems said. “But it was worse than I knew, because when I saw that you were gonna have a baby, I knew they’d never leave you alone.”
“We’ve been through this. There are no good covens,” Dean growled.
“And I told you that’s your opinion,” said Weems, as close to angry as Allison had ever heard him.
“Not an entirely accurate one, Dean,” said Sam, in a tone she recognized. It was the same voice she sometimes used, when she was trying to explain logic to those who would never understand it.
She might like Sam.
“There are white witch covens,” Sam was saying. “I’m not saying she should run off and join one,” he said, when Dean gave him a snarling look. “I’m just saying that not every witch is gonna kill her in a blood sacrifice to take her power and the baby’s.”
Allison felt her face drain of blood, and ice filled her stomach. Maybe she didn’t like Sam after all.
After a strained moment, Sam flinched belatedly, looking at her over the seat back. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Allison. I didn’t mean-”
“That’s why we had to take you away, Ally,” Weems said. “I’m sorry to scare you. But if you know, that will help you decide what to do. That’s what growing up is about. You have to know, even things you wish weren’t true.”
Allison frowned. Did he think she didn’t know that by now?
She sat up straight and took a deep breath. Maybe logic wasn’t a total loss. Maybe it could still help her, even in the most illogical situation ever.
“So, let’s summarize,” she said. “My baby is the seventh female witch in a line, which means she… has powerful magic.” It was still hard to use these words. “I also have magic, which started showing up when I was little and could throw things around the room without touching them, and… and I could see things. And Weems, who was my imaginary friend, but is actually real, helped me when I got scared of these powers by making them go away temporarily. My mom did something similar, but more permanent, when she was a child, to suppress her power. Do I have all that right?”
“Good summary, Ally! I only made it so you couldn’t see it to use it,” said Weems. “I think your mom had hers drained, so it’s really gone. Now that I’m thinking about what Sam said, it was probably her mother who did it. When your mom, maybe as a teenager, didn’t want to be a witch, I bet your grandma took her power for herself.”
“And probably messed with your mom’s memory so she could forget about it and live a normal life,” said Sam.
“My mom was always obsessed with living a normal life,” Allison acknowledged. “And she had some pretty weird stories about grandma. They didn’t get along. My mom left home fairly young to get away from her.”
“That might explain why your mom was so stern and got so freaked out when you turned out to be special, too,” added Weems.
Allison nodded, thinking hard. “So, the solutions available to me are, I could… be a witch, and join a white witch coven with my daughter. They might protect us from bad witches. Or I could let you do a spell on me to drain my power and my baby’s. Or I could decide you’re all crazy, go back home right now and take my AP calculus exam, find a nice family to adopt my baby like I planned, and go off to college a year from now and leave this all behind me.”
There was a brief, stunned silence. “You can’t really do that last one,” Dean said gruffly. “I already had to off two witches who came after you, and Sam took a hex bag out of your mom’s car and another one out of your locker at school.”
“You scratched up my lock!” She didn’t know why that mattered, except that it now made sense.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “Sorry.”
She didn’t ask what a hex bag was; the context told her enough. She squinted cautiously at Dean in the rearview; he returned her gaze impassively.
“Witch-killing bullets?” she asked.
Dean raised his eyebrow, just like Mr. Spock. “That’s right. But I’m out now; used my whole clip. Gotta make more when we get home.”
“You’re taking me to your home.”
“Yes,” Sam answered. “That’s where we have the ingredients for the spell. And it’s a hard place to find, so witches shouldn’t come looking for you.”
“Did anyone call my mom?”
* * *
No one had, and her mom was frantic when Allison called her from the honest-to-goodness bunker the men-brothers, she learned-took her to. She was calm and cool as always when she talked to her, and, not having written any fiction in years, Allison had to admit she was impressed with herself for coming up with a perfectly rational (or at least, rationally irrational) story that her mother swallowed almost without question.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you to get home before I left, and I must have lost the note I wrote you somehow,” she said. “But I think I… finally really started to freak out about… you know. Being pregnant. I have to figure out what to do, Mom.”
“I’m glad you’re thinking about it, honey. But couldn’t you think about it at home, and after your calculus test?”
“I can reschedule the calculus test, and the rest of my classes are over, so I won’t be missing anything else. I just needed some space, Mom. I might meet with a couple who wants to adopt a baby,” she improvised.
“But where are you? Do you have a safe place to sleep?”
The conversation went on thusly, with Allison adding made-up details and half-truths until her mother was satisfied. She hung up Sam’s phone and handed it back to him. “Tell me about this spell,” she said.
* * *
Sam told her all about it, and about other things. He was nice, and said nothing about when they should do the spell, nor did he offer any opinion about what option she should choose. Dean, though he was gone a lot, stopped saying such terrifying things, and even offered to teach her to use a gun. She actually considered it, but she hadn’t taken him up on it yet.
Weems stuck around, showing up in her bedroom whenever she woke from the extreme nightmares that began to plague her, to talk to her and comfort her and when it was hardest, play their old games, until she was able to fall back asleep. Somehow having a grown man in her bedroom wasn’t creepy. The bunker was creepy, but it was growing on her. She felt safe there, and more at home than she ever had in her sterile suburb.
She had even registered with an online adoption service, and considered the couples looking to adopt with great care. They seemed like good, normal, stable people. Sam sometimes sat with her at his laptop and talked to her about the couples. “This one lives near a friend of ours,” he said, pointing out a couple in South Dakota she had flagged as a possibility. “She has two adopted kids, actually-pretty close to your age. I could introduce her to you, and she could keep an eye on your daughter, make sure she’s doing all right with these people. You know-if you want.”
The choice, it was implied-every choice-was hers.
Allison was an extremely decisive person. She didn’t believe in fence-sitting. She considered all the information available to her, looked logically at each choice, and committed wholly to the best one.
Usually. Actually, always, before this.
There simply was no right decision. What was logically right felt utterly wrong, and any other choice was wrong, she was sure. She did not know what to do, and she hated it.
So weeks went by, and she made placating calls to her mom every two days, and still she had not decided.
She tried to get Weems, as the person she trusted most here, to decide for her. When that didn’t work, she tried Sam. His noncommittal response led her to the desperate act of asking Dean, who decided rather too easily and emphatically.
Both Winchesters started to be gone more often, and sometimes they came back with small injuries or covered in someone (or something) else’s blood, and the bunker seemed less safe. Weems explained the zanna to her, and what his job was, and told her about the little boy he was helping now. When she told him she was all right alone, he showed up less often, visiting that other little boy who needed him more.
She slept more and more poorly as her belly grew, until one day she woke up and turned over the month on the paper calendar Dean had dug up for her on request (it had a half-naked woman on it). She saw the red X she’d put there, and it was only four days away.
Her due date.
She had to decide today, she realized. She got out her notebook, with her list of pros and cons, the graphs and probability charts Dean had shaken his head at, and stared at it until the words blurred on the page.
She knew, at last, why she couldn’t decide.
It was the same reason she could not have an abortion. She had gone through this same process when she’d found out she was pregnant, considering all the variables as logically as possible. She could not be a mother at sixteen without giving up on her goals, and she did not think being a parent was something someone should do without wanting it. That would not be in the baby’s best interest either. She knew that Zeke would not be a good father, at least not now, and letting him know about her pregnancy would cause more problems than it would solve. It might hurt her chances of getting into a good college if they found out she had been a teen mother, and a pregnancy would be hard on her body and interfere with her studies. So that night, with the positive pregnancy test stuffed at the bottom of the trash can, she had gone to sleep believing she would have an abortion.
She woke up knowing she couldn’t.
Her asshole father had once told her, when he was drunk, that he’d urged her mother to have an abortion. They were young and stupid and they fought like cats and dogs, he’d said, and neither of them could count on support from their families. They should just get it over with, break up, and go back to their lives.
In the middle of this speech he seemed to realize, in his dim way, that it was a terrible thing to say to his daughter, and he’d added, quickly, “But then we wouldn’t have you, and life would be terrible without you, baby,” and he’d given her a sloppy, drunken hug she’d wriggled out of as quickly as she could.
Later, drunker, he’d said, “I should’ve married your mom, is what I should’ve done. We should’ve stuck it out for you. My little princess.”
He’d had no idea how much she hated him for that conversation, and for so many other things.
She realized that logic or not, she could never have an abortion.
In this same way, there was a different choice she could not make for her unborn daughter. She threw her pros and cons notebook on the floor and went to find Sam.
* * *
She found both him and Dean at the map table where they liked to sit with morning coffee. She was nervous, but she stood up straight and spoke clearly, as she’d learned to do in her speech and debate class.
Someday, she would like to know the whole story of why, but she knew, partly from arguments she’d overheard, that Sam really, deeply understood the importance of choice. So she looked at him while she spoke.
“I don’t want to be a witch. I don’t know what to do with these powers, and I already had a plan for my life. I want to go through with that. I also want to make it so no one can… can hurt my baby, or will look for her after she’s born. I want you to do the spell. And it should be soon, because I could have her any time now. Then I… want to meet that couple in South Dakota. And… your friend Jody.”
They both looked vastly relieved, but she thought Sam looked a little sad, too. He said, “I’ve got all the materials. We can start getting ready as soon as you want.”
“Um, that’s not all,” Allison said. Her nervousness was peaking. She looked at Dean now, who narrowed his eyes at her. He seemed to have some idea what was coming.
“I want you to take the power from my baby-from both of us-and lock it up somewhere safe here in the bunker, where no one can find it. I want you to keep it… for her. So when she’s old enough to decide, it’s still there for her. If she wants it.”
A long argument followed. Dean, predictably, was totally against the idea. Sam countered his arguments partly with logic, and partly with the emotional weight that both of them carried about choice. The latter worked better, though Dean seemed satisfied when Sam described the curse box he could build that would make the power invisible to all but the blood it came from, so even if witches got into the bunker, they couldn’t recognize what they were looking for.
Weems came back as she was preparing for the spell, which involved a “cleansing ritual” she had to perform before Sam could start. Weems held her while she cried for a long, long time. She cried all the tears that had gathered in her since she’d refused them, sworn off weeping when she picked her path of perfect logic and pragmatic ambition. She cried because she had no friends, and for the cruelty of kids at school. She cried about Zeke, because she didn’t love him and he didn’t even know her at all, yet they had created a child together, and he would never know it, or want to. She cried for her mother, for what was taken from her and what she had tried to take from Allison, with her obsession with normalcy and ambition. She cried because her mother loved her and was doing her best, even if her best hurt Allison sometimes. She thought of her father and wept tears of rage and, though she hated that he could make her feel it, grief. She cried for Weems because she had pushed him away when she still needed him, and because he was so good, and she didn’t know if she deserved him.
“You do, Ally-bug,” he said. “You deserve all the best of everything, and as for me? If you ever need me, you just call.”
He promised that he would look in on her daughter, or have another zanna do so. “But I don’t think she’ll need us,” he said.
He held her hand while Sam worked the spell. Sam’s hands hovered over her belly and she felt a pull. The baby kicked hard inside her. The room suddenly filled with white light, brighter than the sun, and they were all blinded as Sam’s voice rose to a shout, concluding the spell. The light was suddenly cut off and the well-lit room seemed almost black in the aftermath. She heard the sound of Sam stoppering the sacred clay vessel the spell required, and as her vision slowly returned, watched him lock the vessel in the box covered with many sigils that she had helped him carve.
Everyone’s voices sounded far away as she lay still, breathing, empty. Words, voices, reassurances failed to reach her. Eventually, they all left her alone to recover and think.
Except she was not alone. Not empty. Someone moved inside her, a whole new person she had made, with every decision in front of her. Everything to learn and do, and all of life, its pains and its glory.
She would meet her soon. Soon after that, she would say goodbye.
But not forever. Or maybe, she mused, not at all.
After all, she’d learned, the path of perfect logic left room to change her mind.
The End
Recipient: kribban
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 8,200
Warnings: Candid discussion of abortion and teen pregnancy
Author's Notes: Thanks to my marvellous beta for encouragement, inspiration, and mad skillz!
Summary: Allison thought her devotion to logical pragmatism had been stretched to its limits when she got pregnant at sixteen. She had no idea how much closer a pair of terrifying stalkers in a classic car could come to shattering it altogether.
Allison had considered all the factors and closely observed the situation for days now, and felt it was safe to infer that the owner of the flashy black muscle car was stalking her.
The most logical choice for her stalker, of course, was Zeke, but Allison had eliminated him. She didn’t know where he would get a car like that, for one, nor would he like the 50-year-old gas-guzzler, the make and model of which she had identified through hours of rigorous research on classic car enthusiast websites, and combing through pages of Google images. Secondly, Zeke had already graduated and left for college; he had to take a few summer prep courses as a condition of being accepted to the University of Southern California, where he would start this fall with a full ride football scholarship.
Most pertinently, since he didn’t know she was carrying his baby, he would have no reason to stalk her.
She paused, pencil poised over her calculus notebook, and frowned at the last thought. The phrase was outdated and sexist, and worse, illogical. In no way was it his baby, especially considering he had not intended to conceive it, did not think he would, and presumably had no interest in it.
Still, he was the only real candidate for her stalker that Allison had been able to come up with. It was only because of her that Zeke had made it into USC on scholarship, as he had acknowledged more than once. He had brought her multiple thank you gifts, ignoring her when she told him that the money she received through the school tutoring program was the only reward she sought.
She had considered the whole thing very carefully, writing down things he had said and observing the patterns of his behavior, and she was now sure it was misplaced gratitude that had led to his choice to have sex with her, too.
Getting pregnant at sixteen was widely considered one of the biggest mistakes a person could make, but Allison did not make mistakes. She had worked hard all her life to ensure that she did not. That night had been a conscious choice, and if anything, a gamble. She had looked ahead at her life for the next several years, considering factors such as her social status and skills, how focused she was on her studies, and the things she valued most, and decided she should exploit the opportunity to have a sexual experience, since it was likely to be her only chance in the foreseeable future.
She very rarely gambled, either, so that was the only true out of character moment, when they had established that neither of them had a condom, Zeke had made some ignorant noises about how he thought a girl couldn’t get pregnant on her first time, and she had done some quick calculations about her menstrual cycle and decided the risk level was acceptable.
Leaning back in her chair to stretch her back, she ran her hand over the growing bulge that was the consequence of acceptable risk. She glanced at the clock and then out the window, and sighed. 11:15, and the black car was still there, parked in the pool of darkness made by the gap between streetlights and partially screened by the Trellis family’s bushes. She supposed her stalker thought she couldn’t see the car, and if she hadn’t known to look for it, she wouldn’t have.
She preferred to study and keep an eye on the car until it left, but she was very tired. The regimen of moderate exercise, excellent nutrition, and adequate sleep that she had always maintained as a means to her goals was apparently not sufficient to prevent the fatigue commonly experienced in the third trimester of pregnancy.
She should go downstairs and double-check all the locks before bed; her mom might have used one of the doors without Allison noticing, and she was terrible about remembering to lock things. Maybe she should even tell her mom about the stalker, but she had already predicted her mother’s actions should she do so, and there was no benefit to either of them. She gave in and crawled into bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.
* * *
“Oh, Ally-bug. What happened?”
It was the most familiar voice in the world. Allison supposed that was because it was her mind’s own voice. It belonged to someone who did not exist except in her little used-well, never used, now that she knew better-imagination. The voice gave her a nickname that she had never actually had, though she’d thought she should, given her strong interest in entomology. She’d thought her mother might start calling her that, but Mom had only been upset and repulsed by all the jars of insects, and the specimens pinned to cards, and had said, “Well, as long as it’s for science.”
She sat up. Weems was sitting on the end of her bed, his mullet-framed face creased with compassion. She’d always liked his face. She supposed it only made sense that she would make up a sweet, compassionate face, though she didn’t really know why she’d made up the mullet, too-tight jeans with flab drooping over them, and tattered rock band T-shirt. She had always been into fitness, and had never been into 70s rock.
She was into music, though, and some of that hard rock guitar had really grown on her. She had to admit she was proud of the amazing air guitar solos her mind had produced via Weems, its most detailed projection.
She squinted at him, amazed as she always was, when she remembered her imaginary friend, at how real he seemed. It had been over nine years since she’d decided, on her path to pursuing perfect logic, that it was silly and wrong to have an imaginary friend, and had stopped seeing him. The human mind, as she well knew, was an incredible thing, and she had read reports of pregnant women having especially vivid dreams, so perhaps it made sense that she saw Weems now.
Sitting up, she ran her hand over her belly. “What do you mean, what happened? You know what causes this.”
“I don’t mean that,” said Weems kindly. “I mean, with the violin. And the bug collection, and writing stories. You were so good at all that stuff, and you stopped.”
She’d given up orchestra this year when it conflicted with AP History. She used to love playing the violin, and later kept it up because it would look good on her college application, but she had decided taking every AP course her high school offered would look better. It was why she’d chosen not to graduate early, as she could have done this year. She’d split all the AP courses between her junior and senior year instead, partly because the school wouldn’t let her take too many at once. Entomology had played itself out as a possible career path by middle school.
She chose to answer the part of the question she was least sure about first. “I haven’t written stories for years,” she said. “I stopped not long after the last time I saw you.”
“But why?”
Illogically, Allison felt tears come to her eyes. It must be hormones. She never cried-she didn’t believe in it-but like his face, she had always loved Weems’s voice, and though it made no sense, she couldn’t entirely dismiss the overwhelming feeling of having missed it.
“I wanted to know what happened to Ally the bug princess and all her faithful subjects,” Weems continued sadly. “And I thought you were gonna start a band that made violin the most rock ‘n roll instrument ever.”
“I had more important things to spend my time on,” Allison said, though a hollow feeling was rising in her at those memories. “If I was going to get into my college of choice, I had to study hard… and I did, I got early acceptance at Stanford. They have this thing now where if your parents make less than $125,000 a year, you get tuition free. And you know my mom doesn’t make a third that much. I even qualify for free room and board.”
“That’s amazing, Ally-bug! I knew you could do whatever you wanted to do,” said Weems.
It was strange that he would say that, as part of Allison’s mind, because she didn’t know that. She didn’t believe it at all, though her mom said it a lot, and so did some of her favorite teachers. For example, she knew, logically, that she could not become a gymnast. Her mother had put her in classes when she was going on eight, after the last time she’d seen Weems. Which was why he wasn’t asking her about giving that up, she guessed. She had taken classes for two years and even competed a little; she’d been pretty good. But she’d gotten a growth spurt, and become the tallest girl in the amateur league she was in. She’d done a growth projection calculation and realized that, if she did not experience the delayed puberty that was said to sometimes stunt female gymnasts’ growth, she would be at least five-seven when she was finished growing, and that was far too tall to be competitive. So she’d quit.
In fact, she was closer to five-eight, so she knew she’d made the right decision.
“Ally,” said Weems. “I have to tell you something important. I know you’re done with imaginary friends, so I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important.”
“You’re not bothering me,” Allison said. She figured that Weems was the voice of her subconscious, and though psychology was too soft a science to appeal to her much, she knew enough of it to understand that it was important to listen to the subconscious mind, and that failure to do so could cause mental illness, which was the last thing she needed. “What is it?”
Weems was gazing at her, fondly and sadly. She fought the nostalgic urge, no doubt brought on by pregnancy hormones, to bust out her violin so they could play one of their epic duets, with Weems playing his blistering air guitar solos while she played along, harmonizing and improvising in crazier and crazier ways until her mother walked in and said, “Honey? What you’re playing sounds wonderful, but don’t you think you should be practicing your recital pieces?”
Her mother didn’t like anything too weird. That was why she’d steered Allison away from writing fanciful stories and collecting bugs, and toward things like chess and being a mathlete, and Allison was glad, because as her mother always said, she didn’t want to end up in a dead-end job like her.
What her mother didn’t say, because she didn’t have to, was that she also didn’t want to end up a sociopath who died in prison, like her father. So she’d always tried to follow a strong moral compass, and to listen to her subconscious during the rare times, as now, that it spoke to her.
“You know you’ve always been special, Ally-bug,” Weems was saying. “And some… some more people have noticed that, especially now that you’re…” He gestured to her belly.
“Pregnant,” said Allison said dryly. “We can use the proper words for things, Weems. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I won’t subscribe to the language of shame or use childish euphemisms for something I am perfectly capable of describing more accurately.”
“Of course,” Weems acknowledged, but he seemed… sad, or even disappointed.
The latter was too much. Was this some subconscious shame over being pregnant that had finally manifested itself, after all her mother and the school administers had done to try to bring it out, if only so she would reveal who’d gotten her pregnant? But for her imaginary friend to be disappointed in her…
She went on speaking to cover the surge of emotion. “Anyway, being pregnant hardly makes me more special,” she said contemptuously. “Most women can do it, and plenty of other girls my age have done it even at my school.” Her mother had scraped together enough money to rent the crappiest house in a nice neighborhood, so that they would be in the district of the charter school she’d gotten into on academic merit.
“I’m talking about the… special stuff you were doing when I met you, Ally. Remember? It used to scare you, so we would hide under the bed together, and you asked me to help you stop doing it. And it did stop. Didn’t it?”
“It never happened in the first place,” Allison said coldly. “It was just my imagination. Like you.”
Weems looked extremely uncomfortable, which made sense, because this subject made Allison feel that way, more than anything else. She did not like remembering how she’d imagined, when she was four or five, that she saw things in her room that weren’t really there. She especially did not like remembering how she’d wanted to throw something at the things to make them go away, and as she decided that, her shoes had flown across the room and hit the wall, scattering the shadows that had frightened her.
It had happened a few times, that she had imagined throwing things without touching them, and her mother had been very upset with her when she’d told her about it. At her most stern, she had told Allison that imagining things like that was bad for her mind, and that she should focus on other things to leave no room for undesirable thoughts. She’d had Allison start taking violin lessons the very next day, and had taught her to play chess and gotten her involved in junior tournaments shortly after that.
Weems never thought it was so weird. He’d helped her with it, and when she said she wanted it to stop, he’d helped with that, too. “So why are you bringing it up now?” she asked him sharply.
“Like I said, there are people who might-”
“Does this have to do with my stalker?”
Weems looked alarmed for a moment before he covered it up. “You have a stalker?” he said.
“Yep,” said Allison coolly. Maybe that was all this was-her subconscious telling her she needed to do something about the stalker, that he was a real danger. If it had something to do with being pregnant, maybe it was Zeke after all. Or maybe he’d hired the person in the black car to keep an eye on her.
She walked to the window. “He’s still there,” she said, pointing to the clump of flat blackness in the shadows across the street, broken by a faint glint of chrome. “He usually leaves before this time of night, but sometimes he parks near my school, too.”
Weems followed the line of her finger, and sighed in relief. “Oh,” he said. “They’re not stalkers. They’re… friends of mine, sort of. Well, more like friends of a friend, but they agreed to help me, and you.”
“I wasn’t aware I needed help.”
“Like I said, there are people who…”
“That’s enough,” said Allison, losing patience suddenly. She was tired, her back hurt, and she had to pee, like she always did for the last couple of weeks, and she was done. Her AP calculus test was in less than two days, she hadn’t gotten as far as she wanted in her prep book that night, and she should not be indulging herself with childish fantasies.
“I’m not special,” she continued. “The only special things about me are things I’ve worked hard for. I’m smarter than average; that’s it. There are no psychic powers. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Having an… an imaginary friend at sixteen doesn’t make sense. So I’m going to stop having this dream now.”
“OK,” said Weems quickly, holding up his hands. “OK, just one more thing. Tomorrow, those two guys with that car you’ve been seeing are going to come to your door. They look scary, but they’re really not. They’re going to say they need to inspect your house for gas leaks or… I forget what, but please just let them in and answer their questions-”
Allison squinted her eyes closed and held her head, which had begun to ache. “No,” she said. “No more. I’m going to wake up now.”
She stood still for a moment, having gotten to her feet as she got upset. The silence was deep. She opened her eyes cautiously.
Weems was gone. Of course, she reminded herself-he had never been there in the first place. A light breeze stirred her curtains and brought the sounds of a solitary car on the street through her open window; the night was otherwise still. She peered across the street, and the black car was gone; a cat ran out of the shadows where it had been, passing under the streetlight.
She tried not to wonder, after going to the bathroom and settling down in bed again, why she never felt like she had woken up, exactly, and why she was standing up in the middle of her room when she opened her eyes. She lay on her side and rubbed her belly, and silently fought the tears that tried to leak out as memories, sweet yet strangely painful, carried her back to sleep.
* * *
Sunday mornings were Allison’s favorite time. Her mother was at work; Sunday brunch was the busiest time at the diner she helped manage. Allison had the run of the house and always got up early to get all of her best studying done before her mother returned.
That morning, though, she was distracted and could not think why. She had promised herself she wouldn’t slack simply because she was pregnant; she refused to use it as an excuse not to focus. She ate an extra cup of Greek yogurt when she was still hungry after her good balanced breakfast, and sat down with her calculus prep book, determined to get through it by noon to leave her ample time for review.
She frowned when the doorbell rang, feeling an unaccustomed thrill of fear. She realized she’d entirely forgotten to check for the stalker’s car this morning, and this made her think there was something else she’d forgotten, too. She could not think what. She went to the door and peeked cautiously through the peephole.
Two men stood there in gray coveralls. A phrase randomly trailed across her mind: they look scary, but they’re really not…
She did not have to open the door; it wasn’t a good idea. If her mother had contacted anyone for repairs, she would know. It was totally out of character, therefore, that she promptly unbolted the door and swung it open.
“Hi there,” said the shorter of the two very tall, intimidating men. He was suspiciously handsome and had a salesman’s grin that she instantly distrusted. They both briefly flashed some sort of ID badge. “We’re from Clapton Pest Control. We’re here to inspect for possible termites.”
There was nothing familiar about these men, but… Allison knew that déjà vu had a rational neurological explanation. The two sides of her brain were simply unsure of which side should handle this situation, which had both logical and social-intuitive elements.
She did not know why she suddenly felt cold all over and her lips felt numb. She wished she had not opened the door. “We don’t have termites,” she said firmly, and tried to close it, but the taller one, with a small, apologetic smile, put his long arm above hers and stopped the door.
“If we could just come in to make sure,” he said gently, pressing forward and forcing her to step back. “We won’t take too much of your time, Miss Sendak.”
“Any relation to Maurice?” said the first man, stepping inside as if he owned the place. “You know…” he prompted when she looked at him blankly. “Where the Wild Things Are?”
“No,” she said, but not in answer to his question. No to them coming in to “check for termites”. No to the fake memory creeping in, of her childhood imaginary friend speaking to her, warning her of this. No to the idea that she had just let not one, but two large, dangerous stalkers or grifters into her home, and her mother would not be home for hours.
It’s OK, Ally-bug, said a voice in her mind. Just answer their questions and they’ll go away…
“I’ll check upstairs,” said the man with the salesman grin.
“And I just need to ask you a few questions,” said the taller, but less frightening man. Less was relative-Allison backed away from him, her heartbeat accelerating.
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted, as if that were not blatantly obvious. “We can’t have any poisonous chemicals in the house.”
“No chemicals, I promise,” said the second man. The first had already climbed the stairs. “My name is Sam. Can we sit down?”
She nodded; she didn’t have much choice at this point. She was afraid she’d faint if she didn’t sit. Sam followed her into the living room and sat at a safe distance across from her as she half-collapsed onto the couch.
Her mind was spinning. She had no control of this situation. She really, really didn’t like not being in control. She barely heard Sam as he asked her nonsensical questions that had nothing to do with termites. It was like he wasn’t even trying to fool her. She answered mechanically. There were no strange smells or flickering lights in the house. She hadn’t noticed any objects that weren’t where they were supposed to be, or that-and here she felt a strange, deep pang-seemed to move on their own.
There was a brief silence as Sam ran out of questions, and the other man returned. “No EMF or… anything,” he said, making himself comfortable on the couch next to her. Allison scooted away. She felt a flare of irritation, and it roused her from her frightened stupor. He acted like she wasn’t even there.
“What does EMF stand for? Why are you two really here?”
They glanced at each other. “It’s a… technical pest control term,” said Sam. “We’re just-”
“Pest control isn’t technical. You find pests, you fumigate, which I’ve already told you you can’t do. And very few people have termites in this climate. If they did, cold spots in the house would have nothing to do with them.” Her heart was pounding, but she felt better now that she could talk. “I know my mom didn’t call you. We don’t have anything worth stealing…” She gulped, trying to keep the edge of pleading out of her voice.
The nameless man scowled. “Hey, listen-”
“Don’t, Dean. She’s already scared to death.”
“No I’m not,” Allison quipped automatically. Never let the bullies know you were scared. Never be scared. Be logical. Be right.
The two men exchanged another look. Sam looked at her compassionately. “Listen, Ally-”
“It’s Allison.” Why had she told him that? Why had she let them in, given them information, made herself a target? She fought rising hysteria. Logic could fix everything, but not in a situation where there was no logic-none at all, though her mind fought to find it, fought to reject strange memories and weird things she’d seen from the corner of her eye and the voice that sounded like a friend, like someone she could trust…
“Hey,” said Sam, in a gentle voice that seemed used to quelling panic. “Hey, everything’s OK. We’re here to help, I promise.” He did not touch her, but held up his hand as if he’d thought about it, showing that it was empty, and Dean did the same and did not speak, and she thought, they’ve done this a hundred times. Maybe it was part of their grift, or their kidnapping method, because that was surely what was about to happen…
She sat up straight and tried to rally. “I didn’t know I needed help,” she said, and had déjà vu again, the sure feeling she’d just said the same thing to someone else. “Anyway, how is stalking help? With termites?” She said the last with dripping scorn, made sharper, as her tongue always was, with fear.
She hated fear. She had told herself she would never again be afraid of people. Arming herself against her peers with confidence and clever words, her intelligence against their stupidity and ignorance, had been working most of the time for years. Doing her best not to care about their petty cruelties had helped with whatever pain was leftover. The problem was that the fear these men brought did not seem to come from pettiness or ignorance. It felt real in a way nothing had, nothing since she was six years old and hiding under the bed…
“This isn’t working.”
Allison looked around wildly and jerked upright at the sound of the voice. It was terribly familiar, but did not belong to a person in the room. Or… a person at all.
Yet this not-person, this imaginary friend, stood in broad daylight next to two very real human beings, who were looking at him and speaking to him as if they heard and saw him just as well as she always had.
“Weems,” she whispered, and all three men-was Weems a man?-stopped talking at once and looked at her.
“Ally-bug,” he said softly, with so much concern, kindness, and compassion packed into a mere three syllables that she knew she was truly, honestly in big trouble. She immediately began to cry, hating every tear as it squeezed its way out.
“You’re right that there are no termites. I’m sorry they lied. Ally, we’re gonna tell you the truth…” Weems approached carefully and sat down next to her, between her and Dean, and it was the most natural thing in the world to lean on him and weep on his shoulder while he held her, and nothing else felt natural or right at all, so she did.
“Better tell it fast,” said Dean bluntly, and then… Allison heard a sound of fear she couldn’t describe, something between a squeal and a gasp, and realized she had made it. Dean pulled out a gun-a real gun! and pulled the thing out of it that Allison thought was called a clip. “I’m not loaded with witch-killing bullets.”
Weems hugged her tightly. “It’s OK,” he whispered. “Ally, we have to get away from here… can you come with us?”
“My calculus test,” she choked.
“You’ll take it, and you’ll rock it, because you are so smart,” said Weems. “But you’re not safe here right now. Look, is this too much? You wanna go to sleep for a while? We’ll take you somewhere else, and we can talk.”
“Yes,” she managed. “Too much…”
Then, of all things, she thought Weems gave her a flower to smell, and she was gone; gone from this place where fear held sway and nothing made sense and where she’d never, ever wanted to be.
* * *
She had always known logic would betray her.
It was a strange thought for someone who believed logic was her saviour. She did not like TV much, except for old Star Trek reruns, because of Mr. Spock. She had started watching them in the days after Weems but before the torment of middle school-before she had been mocked for raising one eyebrow and calling her peers illogical. They were, of course, but she had learned to keep that to herself, mostly.
She had looked to logic for answers, identifying her worst problems as caused by its lack and systematically eliminating all the illogical things that fed the fear she refused to feel-starting with Weems. But she had known, was the thing. There was a girl who loved to play weird, wild violin solos, who saw a secret world among the insects and told its stories, who loved to jump, turn cartwheels and swing from bars and practically fly through the air even if she would never be the best at it.
Who believed, before her mother infused her with terror about it, in magic.
Old car had a scent just like new car did. Allison remembered a joyride without seatbelts, which her mom had been very angry about. Weems had been there, too, and her dad, before he died. The car was a sports car, Dad had said, but it didn’t look like one, big and old and with a bench seat in the back where she sat, with Weems clutching her in lieu of a seatbelt, keeping her safe.
Weems was here now, as he had been then. She lay with her head in his lap and smelled old vinyl while her ears grasped for the words starting to form.
“-mom’s not one anymore,” said Weems. “I don’t know how, but it wasn’t a temporary patch like a zanna can do, like I did with Ally. I think it was permanent.”
“So grandma’s dead, and mom was born a natural witch but isn’t anymore. So Ally is the only one in danger.” Dean, Allison remembered.
“No,” said Weems with exaggerated patience. “The baby is. Ally’s number six. She’s in danger because it’s in her, but it’s the baby, the seventh generation, that they’re after.”
Allison sat bolt upright, knocking Weems’s arm out of the way. “Somebody wants my baby?” she blurted.
She was in the scary black muscle car. Looking out the window, she saw wheat fields flashing by, too fast.
They all looked at her, even Dean, who was driving. He peered at her in the rearview mirror.
She had thought she would say, let them have it. I was going to give it up for adoption. To someone who wants it…
Her. She was going to give her up. But she didn’t say it.
“Danger?” she said instead, when they all exchanged looks instead of answering her. “What danger?”
She sat, numb but somehow unsurprised, as Weems explained. Her daughter would be a seventh generation witch. All female witches, which Weems said made it not just unusual, but unique in modern times, and incredibly powerful.
A witch. Like her, and her mother.
She’d always known.
“What did my mother do? You said she isn’t… one anymore.”
Sam answered her. “I’m thinking she must have had someone do the spell on her that we want to do on you,” he said. “Or your baby, I mean. It drains a witch of her power, which the spell caster siphons into a vessel of some kind-”
“And then blows it up.” Dean interrupted. “Because there is no way we’re leaving that sitting around for someone like Rowena to find.”
“We can find a safe way to get rid of it,” Sam agreed.
“What about me? I’m not a…” She could not say the word “witch”. “I… was one. But I’m not anymore. Right?” She looked at Weems.
She could not believe she was having this conversation, in a seedy car far from home with two terrifying strangers and a figment of her imagination, but she let that thought go. If logic was going to abandon her, as she had always known it would, she could abandon it right back.
Weems gave her a sad, kind smile. “No, Ally-bug. I don’t have the power to make you not a witch. But when it scared you so much, I… put it to sleep. Now that you’re almost grown up, it could wake up at any time. That’s why I started visiting every couple of weeks, to see if there were any signs, and make sure you were safe if there were. And see if you had any interest in witchcraft.”
“He knew the covens were gonna come recruiting,” said Dean, with a hard edge to his voice.
She didn’t like Dean. She couldn’t help but love and trust Weems, even now that she was somehow coming to accept that he was an actual person and not a part of her own psyche, and she had not made up her mind about Sam yet. But Dean felt… dangerous. Was dangerous, she was sure.
“And I just wanted to make sure you didn’t get taken in by a bad one, if that happened,” Weems said. “But it was worse than I knew, because when I saw that you were gonna have a baby, I knew they’d never leave you alone.”
“We’ve been through this. There are no good covens,” Dean growled.
“And I told you that’s your opinion,” said Weems, as close to angry as Allison had ever heard him.
“Not an entirely accurate one, Dean,” said Sam, in a tone she recognized. It was the same voice she sometimes used, when she was trying to explain logic to those who would never understand it.
She might like Sam.
“There are white witch covens,” Sam was saying. “I’m not saying she should run off and join one,” he said, when Dean gave him a snarling look. “I’m just saying that not every witch is gonna kill her in a blood sacrifice to take her power and the baby’s.”
Allison felt her face drain of blood, and ice filled her stomach. Maybe she didn’t like Sam after all.
After a strained moment, Sam flinched belatedly, looking at her over the seat back. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Allison. I didn’t mean-”
“That’s why we had to take you away, Ally,” Weems said. “I’m sorry to scare you. But if you know, that will help you decide what to do. That’s what growing up is about. You have to know, even things you wish weren’t true.”
Allison frowned. Did he think she didn’t know that by now?
She sat up straight and took a deep breath. Maybe logic wasn’t a total loss. Maybe it could still help her, even in the most illogical situation ever.
“So, let’s summarize,” she said. “My baby is the seventh female witch in a line, which means she… has powerful magic.” It was still hard to use these words. “I also have magic, which started showing up when I was little and could throw things around the room without touching them, and… and I could see things. And Weems, who was my imaginary friend, but is actually real, helped me when I got scared of these powers by making them go away temporarily. My mom did something similar, but more permanent, when she was a child, to suppress her power. Do I have all that right?”
“Good summary, Ally! I only made it so you couldn’t see it to use it,” said Weems. “I think your mom had hers drained, so it’s really gone. Now that I’m thinking about what Sam said, it was probably her mother who did it. When your mom, maybe as a teenager, didn’t want to be a witch, I bet your grandma took her power for herself.”
“And probably messed with your mom’s memory so she could forget about it and live a normal life,” said Sam.
“My mom was always obsessed with living a normal life,” Allison acknowledged. “And she had some pretty weird stories about grandma. They didn’t get along. My mom left home fairly young to get away from her.”
“That might explain why your mom was so stern and got so freaked out when you turned out to be special, too,” added Weems.
Allison nodded, thinking hard. “So, the solutions available to me are, I could… be a witch, and join a white witch coven with my daughter. They might protect us from bad witches. Or I could let you do a spell on me to drain my power and my baby’s. Or I could decide you’re all crazy, go back home right now and take my AP calculus exam, find a nice family to adopt my baby like I planned, and go off to college a year from now and leave this all behind me.”
There was a brief, stunned silence. “You can’t really do that last one,” Dean said gruffly. “I already had to off two witches who came after you, and Sam took a hex bag out of your mom’s car and another one out of your locker at school.”
“You scratched up my lock!” She didn’t know why that mattered, except that it now made sense.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “Sorry.”
She didn’t ask what a hex bag was; the context told her enough. She squinted cautiously at Dean in the rearview; he returned her gaze impassively.
“Witch-killing bullets?” she asked.
Dean raised his eyebrow, just like Mr. Spock. “That’s right. But I’m out now; used my whole clip. Gotta make more when we get home.”
“You’re taking me to your home.”
“Yes,” Sam answered. “That’s where we have the ingredients for the spell. And it’s a hard place to find, so witches shouldn’t come looking for you.”
“Did anyone call my mom?”
* * *
No one had, and her mom was frantic when Allison called her from the honest-to-goodness bunker the men-brothers, she learned-took her to. She was calm and cool as always when she talked to her, and, not having written any fiction in years, Allison had to admit she was impressed with herself for coming up with a perfectly rational (or at least, rationally irrational) story that her mother swallowed almost without question.
“I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you to get home before I left, and I must have lost the note I wrote you somehow,” she said. “But I think I… finally really started to freak out about… you know. Being pregnant. I have to figure out what to do, Mom.”
“I’m glad you’re thinking about it, honey. But couldn’t you think about it at home, and after your calculus test?”
“I can reschedule the calculus test, and the rest of my classes are over, so I won’t be missing anything else. I just needed some space, Mom. I might meet with a couple who wants to adopt a baby,” she improvised.
“But where are you? Do you have a safe place to sleep?”
The conversation went on thusly, with Allison adding made-up details and half-truths until her mother was satisfied. She hung up Sam’s phone and handed it back to him. “Tell me about this spell,” she said.
* * *
Sam told her all about it, and about other things. He was nice, and said nothing about when they should do the spell, nor did he offer any opinion about what option she should choose. Dean, though he was gone a lot, stopped saying such terrifying things, and even offered to teach her to use a gun. She actually considered it, but she hadn’t taken him up on it yet.
Weems stuck around, showing up in her bedroom whenever she woke from the extreme nightmares that began to plague her, to talk to her and comfort her and when it was hardest, play their old games, until she was able to fall back asleep. Somehow having a grown man in her bedroom wasn’t creepy. The bunker was creepy, but it was growing on her. She felt safe there, and more at home than she ever had in her sterile suburb.
She had even registered with an online adoption service, and considered the couples looking to adopt with great care. They seemed like good, normal, stable people. Sam sometimes sat with her at his laptop and talked to her about the couples. “This one lives near a friend of ours,” he said, pointing out a couple in South Dakota she had flagged as a possibility. “She has two adopted kids, actually-pretty close to your age. I could introduce her to you, and she could keep an eye on your daughter, make sure she’s doing all right with these people. You know-if you want.”
The choice, it was implied-every choice-was hers.
Allison was an extremely decisive person. She didn’t believe in fence-sitting. She considered all the information available to her, looked logically at each choice, and committed wholly to the best one.
Usually. Actually, always, before this.
There simply was no right decision. What was logically right felt utterly wrong, and any other choice was wrong, she was sure. She did not know what to do, and she hated it.
So weeks went by, and she made placating calls to her mom every two days, and still she had not decided.
She tried to get Weems, as the person she trusted most here, to decide for her. When that didn’t work, she tried Sam. His noncommittal response led her to the desperate act of asking Dean, who decided rather too easily and emphatically.
Both Winchesters started to be gone more often, and sometimes they came back with small injuries or covered in someone (or something) else’s blood, and the bunker seemed less safe. Weems explained the zanna to her, and what his job was, and told her about the little boy he was helping now. When she told him she was all right alone, he showed up less often, visiting that other little boy who needed him more.
She slept more and more poorly as her belly grew, until one day she woke up and turned over the month on the paper calendar Dean had dug up for her on request (it had a half-naked woman on it). She saw the red X she’d put there, and it was only four days away.
Her due date.
She had to decide today, she realized. She got out her notebook, with her list of pros and cons, the graphs and probability charts Dean had shaken his head at, and stared at it until the words blurred on the page.
She knew, at last, why she couldn’t decide.
It was the same reason she could not have an abortion. She had gone through this same process when she’d found out she was pregnant, considering all the variables as logically as possible. She could not be a mother at sixteen without giving up on her goals, and she did not think being a parent was something someone should do without wanting it. That would not be in the baby’s best interest either. She knew that Zeke would not be a good father, at least not now, and letting him know about her pregnancy would cause more problems than it would solve. It might hurt her chances of getting into a good college if they found out she had been a teen mother, and a pregnancy would be hard on her body and interfere with her studies. So that night, with the positive pregnancy test stuffed at the bottom of the trash can, she had gone to sleep believing she would have an abortion.
She woke up knowing she couldn’t.
Her asshole father had once told her, when he was drunk, that he’d urged her mother to have an abortion. They were young and stupid and they fought like cats and dogs, he’d said, and neither of them could count on support from their families. They should just get it over with, break up, and go back to their lives.
In the middle of this speech he seemed to realize, in his dim way, that it was a terrible thing to say to his daughter, and he’d added, quickly, “But then we wouldn’t have you, and life would be terrible without you, baby,” and he’d given her a sloppy, drunken hug she’d wriggled out of as quickly as she could.
Later, drunker, he’d said, “I should’ve married your mom, is what I should’ve done. We should’ve stuck it out for you. My little princess.”
He’d had no idea how much she hated him for that conversation, and for so many other things.
She realized that logic or not, she could never have an abortion.
In this same way, there was a different choice she could not make for her unborn daughter. She threw her pros and cons notebook on the floor and went to find Sam.
* * *
She found both him and Dean at the map table where they liked to sit with morning coffee. She was nervous, but she stood up straight and spoke clearly, as she’d learned to do in her speech and debate class.
Someday, she would like to know the whole story of why, but she knew, partly from arguments she’d overheard, that Sam really, deeply understood the importance of choice. So she looked at him while she spoke.
“I don’t want to be a witch. I don’t know what to do with these powers, and I already had a plan for my life. I want to go through with that. I also want to make it so no one can… can hurt my baby, or will look for her after she’s born. I want you to do the spell. And it should be soon, because I could have her any time now. Then I… want to meet that couple in South Dakota. And… your friend Jody.”
They both looked vastly relieved, but she thought Sam looked a little sad, too. He said, “I’ve got all the materials. We can start getting ready as soon as you want.”
“Um, that’s not all,” Allison said. Her nervousness was peaking. She looked at Dean now, who narrowed his eyes at her. He seemed to have some idea what was coming.
“I want you to take the power from my baby-from both of us-and lock it up somewhere safe here in the bunker, where no one can find it. I want you to keep it… for her. So when she’s old enough to decide, it’s still there for her. If she wants it.”
A long argument followed. Dean, predictably, was totally against the idea. Sam countered his arguments partly with logic, and partly with the emotional weight that both of them carried about choice. The latter worked better, though Dean seemed satisfied when Sam described the curse box he could build that would make the power invisible to all but the blood it came from, so even if witches got into the bunker, they couldn’t recognize what they were looking for.
Weems came back as she was preparing for the spell, which involved a “cleansing ritual” she had to perform before Sam could start. Weems held her while she cried for a long, long time. She cried all the tears that had gathered in her since she’d refused them, sworn off weeping when she picked her path of perfect logic and pragmatic ambition. She cried because she had no friends, and for the cruelty of kids at school. She cried about Zeke, because she didn’t love him and he didn’t even know her at all, yet they had created a child together, and he would never know it, or want to. She cried for her mother, for what was taken from her and what she had tried to take from Allison, with her obsession with normalcy and ambition. She cried because her mother loved her and was doing her best, even if her best hurt Allison sometimes. She thought of her father and wept tears of rage and, though she hated that he could make her feel it, grief. She cried for Weems because she had pushed him away when she still needed him, and because he was so good, and she didn’t know if she deserved him.
“You do, Ally-bug,” he said. “You deserve all the best of everything, and as for me? If you ever need me, you just call.”
He promised that he would look in on her daughter, or have another zanna do so. “But I don’t think she’ll need us,” he said.
He held her hand while Sam worked the spell. Sam’s hands hovered over her belly and she felt a pull. The baby kicked hard inside her. The room suddenly filled with white light, brighter than the sun, and they were all blinded as Sam’s voice rose to a shout, concluding the spell. The light was suddenly cut off and the well-lit room seemed almost black in the aftermath. She heard the sound of Sam stoppering the sacred clay vessel the spell required, and as her vision slowly returned, watched him lock the vessel in the box covered with many sigils that she had helped him carve.
Everyone’s voices sounded far away as she lay still, breathing, empty. Words, voices, reassurances failed to reach her. Eventually, they all left her alone to recover and think.
Except she was not alone. Not empty. Someone moved inside her, a whole new person she had made, with every decision in front of her. Everything to learn and do, and all of life, its pains and its glory.
She would meet her soon. Soon after that, she would say goodbye.
But not forever. Or maybe, she mused, not at all.
After all, she’d learned, the path of perfect logic left room to change her mind.
The End