She had wanted to just go through the drive-through part of the bank, but Calliope had warned her to not be parted from the blank card for too long or to keep up a large sized physical distance from it. So, there Netta was, dumpy and haggard, waiting in line, looking every bit as exhausted as she felt.

After the line ahead of her moved an inch or so and Netta crept up a bit, she heard Ash say, "Just let me do something about this. Why are we waiting in line, if you're really worried that your Sisters are in some sort of danger?"

Netta leaned back into the calmingly oppressive warmth of her heavy winter coat.

"Forcing your will on people is a clear abuse of power."

Ash paused before he snapped out, "So?"

"And that's wrong. As in, not the right thing to do, quite the opposite?"

"That never stopped your sisters, y'know. Just you." The Monster sighed, rolling Its head back on Its neck, making the Adam's apple jut out of Its throat.

"Yeah, well, I'm different. They never let me forget that anyway, why stop now?" She was talking to herself, but in the hours since seeing the apparent horrible truth of the Chronicle, Netta found that she stopped caring about what the humans thought of her.

Well, for the most part.

They were silent for a long time, enough for two more, older people to be helped by the pretty young women at the three opened booths up at the front of the line. Before turning to walk away, the old woman turned to look at Netta was as though she was looking at some particularly unfortunate bum who had just asked her for her last dollar.

Anger flamed up in Netta's chest for a moment and she clenched her hands tight. If only I knew the incantation to make her begin to experience bowel discomfort.

Next to her, Ash bent close to her and said, "No use in treating humans too well. They can be an uppity bunch, Lovely."

"Shut up."

When their turn came, Netta hurried up to the girl behind the booth. she sat both her withdrawal slip with her blank card down.

The girl greeted her her eyes seemed to blink rapidly and she smiled a mannequin's dead stare at Netta. It made Netta flinch, recalling a similar look that she would give customers after a particularly hard day of work.

"Hell-o?" Netta asked, nevertheless annoyed when the girl did not seem to react to what she told her. When, finally, the girl seemed able to animate her stiff face once more, Netta tapped on her bank card. "I need to withdraw this much." She turned the card and the slip so that it was readable to the girl.

The girl peered down at the slip and her eyes widened.

"I think you might have put in too many zeroes."

Netta, who had been wondering if she had sounded too harsh, felt as though anger splintered her.

"I assure you, that's the correct amount."

The girl made a glancing pass-over on what Netta was wearing. After a telling pause, she made a fake smile through her heavy smear of shiny lip gloss. "I'll have to check with my supervisor before I can authorize anything like this."

Netta smiled an almost identical smile back at the girl.

"Make sure to tell her that you don't want to keep the bitch waiting, now, shall you?"

She watched as the girl tried to simultaneously keep her poise while also hurrying away. The illusion was spoiled when she forgot the withdrawal slip and had to scramble back to pick it up.

Once she had gone, a sense of guilt invaded Netta.

"Oh - that was overboard. I went a bit far with that one, didn't I?"

When Ash didn't answer her, Netta turned to her right to look at the Monster. "...right?"

Ash was quiet, with an odd, implacable expression on Its face. When Netta, uneasy, leaned over to shake Its arm, the Monster jolted as though out of some sort of an odd reverie.

"Hm, what?" Ash's voice sounded thick, distracted.

"What's gotten into you? I was just thinking that I went a bit, um, far with that conversation that I had with that teller."

Ash shook Its head gently, then turned to give her a rather intense gaze. "Humans forget their place too often, Lovely, and should be reminded of it, as often and roughly as is possible." To her, he sounded as though he was speaking - almost from some kind of authority.

Netta regarded his gaze with a twinge of unease. She glanced over at her credit card as it lay on the counter.

As long as it stayed within ten feet or so of her, the card appeared to have the photograph of a frolicking otter on the cover, small brown-black paws splayed out as if in preparation for a hug or to dive at something. The embossed and raised face of the letters on the front read, "Neith Oleander."

Netta sighed. "I think that I'm just tired. It wasn't right to take it out on someone like her..."

She bit her lip as she considered the cause of her bias towards these people - not only the teller who was likely just having an off day, but every other human. Some days it became clearer and clearer to Netta that even though her blood brought her closer to these people than anything, her long-liveliness and potential made her feel closer to Ashwood.

As if sensing her thoughts towards It, Ash edged closer to her, so that Its breath warmed her forehead.

"I told you that you should have slept like you had planned..."

Netta shooed the Monster away, relieved in no small part that Its obsessive staring had finally finished.

"I need to sleep on the plane. Sleeping will give me something else to do besides wanting to have a panic attack." Damned human technology. Witches never did have a track record of being able to handle their inventions with grace and total dignity.

They stood there for some time more until the teller returned from the back area. When she returned, it was with a severe-looking woman with strangely offsetting pink glasses.

"Miss... Oleander?" She said, addressing Netta as though she were pronouncing something in an alien language.

Netta shifted her weight to one foot, then back onto her other foot.

"Yes?"

"I'm afraid that I have to tell you that we do not have any records of any account of yours..."

Netta pushed her card across the counter front and was all too happy to give the woman a large and taunting grin. "Try again by giving this a swipe. My inheritance is most certainly there."

The teller snatched her card and gave it a swipe through her card reader. There came a long pause after some quick typing on her computer. The older woman hovering behind her jerked, a look of surprise on her face.

Soon afterward, with the added, nerve-riddled apology from the supervisor, came a hastily filled paper envelope that had been carefully counted out to Netta. It had indeed been packed with a hundred thousand dollars.

Netta was about to take the money when Ash shot a hand out to stop her from accepting it. "Be kind of hard, breaking hundreds, won't it?"

Its grin was goading, temptingly bitter.

Netta repeated what the Monster said, feeling an almost identical grin spreading on her face.

The manager leaned over the teller, partially squashing her as she pulled money out of the drawer in quick movements. She pulled a number of the hundreds out, counted them to Netta, and then gave her an assortment of fifties, twenties and tens, counting it out quickly to her before handing her back her now thoroughly overstuffed paper envelope.

"We're sorry," the woman said, finally leaning away from the teller to breathe, "I've never seen that before. Usually, looking up an account pulls the information up immediately - it's like the system didn't register your account..." She trailed off, her hands gesturing blindly to some apologetic end.

Netta gave a quick glance at the teller who made a point to keep her eyes trained on her computer before she answered, "Understandable. I just wish that you people would have some consideration for people's time."

They walked out of the bank, with Netta feeling as though she could finally breathe in the fresh air outside of the building.

Ash glanced over at her. "You know they're all thinking that either this is the down payment for some sort of a consensual sex slave agreement or you're cashing out after your old geezer of a husband died of a rather unfortunate accident, aren't you?"

Netta said nothing as they walked to the car, unable to think of what to say back to the Monster.

As she had started the engine in the vehicle, finally, she said, "One would have to wonder which of those options is the more morally repugnant one, knowing your nature."

Ash laughed.

"-Damn weather, that fucking bitch at the bank - fuck everything, fuck me, I'm going to miss the plane."

Netta slammed her forehead down against the increasingly familiar material of the faux leather of the steering wheel cover. She found that she didn't give a good damn if it left a mark or not.

"For a woman that could make that airport stop in time to make sure that you get there with time to spare, you sure do seem as though you're bound by the laws of mortals."

Ash leaned back in his seat. giving her a glance from underneath the aviators that It had taken to wearing.

Netta sat back up in her seat and stared forward. "Yeah, and I would rather I not give some humans a reason to think that magic exists."

How could this traffic possibly be real?

Why in the hell would anyone want to be driving around in this weather when there weren't even much in the way of familial obligations to shove someone out in this unseasonably snowy weather - so close to the desert?

"More Witch bullshit." Ash snorted. "You could have had the humans eating out of your hands, back before they drove out so much of the magic in the world. Humanity is bullshit, and the ones that were almost killed along with the werewolves should have not martyred themselves in the hopes that the humans would forget about them."

"Well, Destroyer, not everyone wants to hear the lamentations of their women as their lullabies. For the most part, humans are - they're alright. Just not right now. With all of them in front of me on the road - holy shit, what is everyone doing out right now, anyway?"

She glanced up at the ceaseless lines of vehicles on the road ahead. Netta wondered if she was seeing an optical illusion.

"Some football event, I think. Sports. I don't know. Typical human bullshit." Ash leaned back deeply in Its seat and gave Netta a knowing look. "You've got a choice here - stay here, deadlocked, or we can make for the airport and do it in, oh, three minutes."

The urge to tell Ash to keep Its attempts at corrupting her to Itself stuck in her throat. She considered being stuck behind all of these unmoving cars.

Finally, Netta clicked her tongue. "No, I couldn't use magic. Too visible, and-"

"And?"

"And they're going to charge me for this car, once I go back to my old life, go back to working and living. Oh, also, magic like that would require the use of your help, there's the small matter of that."

Ash laughed harshly and it was like electric through Netta's veins.

"Give me a break - is the chance that I would somehow manage to overpower you, take control of you after just one measly little piece of heaven worth living like this?" The Monster removed Its glasses, the purple of Its eyes for a moment betraying a deeper, more familiar color beneath the surface as It looked at her. "Wake up call: there's a reason that Witches do not live in human metropolis'. And why they covet a Familiar."

Netta felt a rush of recognition at his words and the deep, blood-rose color that seemed to bloom around the irises of Its eyes.

For a moment she felt an emotion that she had not allowed herself to feel in a long while, a rush reminiscent of what a river crocodile felt as it gripped a lion in its maw. And, oh, how she wanted to spring, to feel flight as it tickled her to her core.

It overcame her in an instant; the urge to experience what no human could ever.

Wordlessly, Netta turned around and began to dig in the back seat for her bags.

Ash followed her lead without a word, grabbing two of her bags and following her out of the vehicle.

After the Monster had rejoined her in front of her car, Netta turned to look at Ash and for a moment. She hesitated.

It was bad enough, she figured, that these people in their cars could see floating bags follow ing the woman trudging up the road in the

snow. What harm could it do to take to some unnatural speed?

As she was whisking along through the line of cars, running with the wind whistling along with her, she could hear Ash.

"I said fly - fly -"

No, Ash, I won't be tempted that easily.