"This is a detour," Netta announced as they got out of the car in front of the Tarot Cafe. A quick glance out of the car showed what Netta knew already. It was closed, indefinitely.

Ophelia, who got out of the backseat cautiously, looked up at the building, her brows gathered tight.

"What is this?"

"It's where Calliope lives - used to live." Netta looked around the empty street, feeling a sudden paranoia hit her that a human might hear her. "It's cold out here - let's go inside."

Netta approached the old storefront and was submerged back in time.

She felt herself speaking. Perhaps it was because of a sense of formality she felt, approaching the place where Calliope had spent so much of the latter half of her life in.

"This store was opened in the summer of nineteen sixty-nine. It was one of the only times I ever returned home."

"Huh." The girl paused. "Like that song?"

Netta paused for a moment to recall what the Witch was talking about. When it occured ot Netta, she laughed.

"I guess so."

As they approached the door, Netta saw as the door opened from inside.

Jumping back, Netta heard Ophelia say his name before she had a chance to. Ash stood with the door opened, an impatient look on his face.

"If the both of you could get inside, we can begin, I don't know, ransacking this place."

Coming up to the door, Netta allowed Ophelia to pass through into the building first. Glancing at Ash, she asked, "How did you get in here? There were wards -"

"The wards break like snapped chain links once the Witch who made them dies." Locks are child's play to me, I hope you know.

Netta chose to ignore his speaking in her mind, brushing past him. The barely repressed animosity that she heard in his voice, aloud and in her mind, disturbed her.

As she walked inside, however, she found that her anxiety that was caused by Ash left her mind.

It was the sight of the old shop. It had transformed into a place, dark, symbolic of the life force of the odd little shop. It seemed to have died alongside its master. Gone was the magic that had increased the small space tremendously. The air smelled dank, musty - as though it had been unoccupied for some time.

Faced with the real size of the place - approximately the size of a small pantry - Netta felt her heart shrink.

"Oh -" Netta rose a hand to cover her mouth, a weak emotion choking her.

Are you okay?

I'm - I'm fine, she found herself unerringly answering back without even thinking about it.

On the other side of the small room, Ophelia looked around her with her arms raised in surprise before slamming them down to her sides.

"What's with this place? I mean, it's ridiculously small -"

"What's the opposite of a reduction spell, young Witchling?" Ash asked, walking up close to Netta.

Netta braced herself to feel him wrapping his arms around her, and when he didn't, she felt as though she could breathe again.

Ophelia crossed her arm and glowered at him, saying nothing. Netta, sighing, took a step forward and made for the back room, hoping that based on the negative energy between the two that she was with, that it would prove to be the same size as aways.

As Netta opened the door, she heard Ophelia speak up.

"Wait - I thought that she died in here, how come this place isn't cordoned off -"

Netta answered as she opened the back door, the sudden memory of the death refreshed in her mind with unwanted clarity.

"Because - there was no body to find, even if my family's failsafe of wiping human's collective memories of her existence didn't work, then a Witch who's completed the Ritual of Binding with a spirit forfeits her body to the nonmaterial world. There was no body, by the time anybody would have gone looking for her, and at the same time she turned to dust, this place likely turned back into - this."

Netta realized, as she pushed the door opened, that she was one of those Witches now.

When she died, there would be no body, only ashes.

She didn't realize that she had mused on that point, her thoughts projecting into words through the mental tether that connected her and Ash until she recanted.

Better living happily than to have the distinction of being a corpse.

Trying to ignore how the now rapidly becoming familiar feel of Ashwood's preseance in her mind, Netta walked into the back room.

Hesitating for a moment, Netta fumbled for the light switch on the rightside wall next to the door.

She slammed her eyes shut as the single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling shuddered to life.

Opening her eyes, Netta was relieved to find that she had been right about the corpse not being there.

Looking around the room, she first looked at the desk that she had found Calliope's corpse on.

Walking over to it, Netta dragged her finger along the clean surface of it.

Clean, Ash added in a grim voice. Someone's cleaned up Auntie Callie's remains, it seems.

Netta bit her lip, winced. She had hoped that she would find something here. Some piece of a puzzle that she had no knowledge of. As time passed, it seemed overwhelmingly unlikely.

Shit.

"Let's take a look, see if there's anything here." Ophelia said.

All three started to search then, looking through the stacked cartons in the corner, the inside of the desk or in Ophelia's case, walking out of the room to look through the interior of the storefront.

After some silence, Ophelia spoke. "So - this woman - the one who died - did you two get along?"

Ash, busy digging through a shoebox marked, "Tax Paperwork '90-'91", said, "As much as you can, with a shitty excuse for a person."

Netta ignored him, said, "She was - loyal to my Mother, the Coven matron." She swallowed a heavy lump that seemed to have appeared in her throat. "She participated in the Awakening ceremonies that they put on, but I think that she held back on cruelty." Unlike most of the other ones.

"Awakening ceremonies?" Ophelia had stopped looking and was now turned, staring at Netta. "What are those?"

Ash spoke again, his voice flat, and he spoke fast, barely repressing an obvious anger. "Just some old fashioned nonsense that, somehow, a Witch who does not show "talent" for magic can be made to be, I don't know," he let out a breath of air as a hiss, "made to better express it by having the shit beaten out of her. Or just plain tortured."

Netta stared at him, watching as the angry, large Monster tore through the shoebox before he tossed it onto the ground, the box partially shredded, before he kicked it away and moved onto another one.

His features seemed to have been drawn tight - and Netta could see how the muscles of his right arm seemed to be tensed, like a spring set to burst.

She hesitated.

Ash...

She wondered, then, if this show of emotion from him was due to his rage at what she had gone through. For some reason, the thought that he had been enraged by her treatment - her torture - so shocked her that for a moment, all she could do was stand there, staring at him.

Netta shook her head, then turned to look at Ophelia. For some reason, she could not make herself damn her Sisters then for what had happened, perhaps out of some old, reflexive sense of duty.

"That wasn't - totally all there was to it. They - Mother thought that I needed to have my power awoken, or else I would - I would live as a human."

She never could abide weakness, least of all from her own blood. And I was weak - I took a powerful creature on as a friend, without being able to tell the danger in it.

She continued, not bothered then by the fact that Ash could surely freely read her thoughts then if he so wanted to. "And it wasn't just - torture. They - there was a methodology to it, they practiced old methods of awakening magic, by causing stress in the body and having magic rise up in response to the immediate threat..." She trailed off, feeling then the weight of Ophelia's gaze on her, enigmatic.

The teenager quietly spoke then. "I wouldn't know anything about that. Miss Kienna would never let any of us do that - when Anais was slow to show signs of magic, we never - she never had us try to hurt her."

Ophelia swallowed, then looked down at the ground. "I dunno. That - that just sounds cruel. I don't know if this woman - the dead one - sounded like a very nice Witch when she was alive, to help with - that."

Ash said nothing. Netta turned then, and saw the name of the Witch whose back room they were in, engraved in a dust-covered plaque on the wall. She stared at it for a moment, remembering the feel of the woman's arms around her.

She remembered, unpleasantly, how hollow the feeling of the weight of her arms felt - how the supposedly intimate, kindly moment had been overwhelmed by a shadow of past pain, anguish.

Netta decided that she would go upstairs, into what had once been Calliope's old apartment. She dug through the old writing desk that Calliope had put against a wall in the living area.

The whole apartment felt desolate, haunted, with only the rhythmic sound of the black cat wall clock to add anything resembling a heart beat to the place. With its owner gone, the clock only made Netta feel uneasy. She wanted to throw it out, but fought the urge.

Netta looked once more through the entirety of the contents of the two-hundred plus year old's desk (disappointingly only finding office supplies and a burnt out repellant ward for vermin made out of a heavily worn Joker playing card).

She was interrupted when Ash said, "There's something sad about this painting, you know."

Netta glanced around and saw Ash, looking positively gigantic in the small space of the kitchen. He was staring with almost laughable focus at the pastoral re-re-reprint that Calliope had kept on the wall.

Netta sighed and went back to packing the desk back up.

"Yeah - she probably got that from a Sears catalogue for more than what the price of the plastic and the paper that it's made out of."

"Nettles, you misunderstand me - there's something wrong about this, inherently awful. It's like - it's calling to me -"

At that moment, Ophelia made a re-appearance, opening the door to the bedroom and leaning out of it.

"Unless you would call the oddly specific collage your elder Witch made up of pages from Playgirl circa the nineteen-eighties "anything of interest", I can't find anything. Did you find anything in here?"

Netta sighed and looked over at Ash.

Pushing away her dismay at the fact that they had not uncovered anything, she asked her Familiar, "What's so odd about the painting? ...Ash?"

He had become focused on it - and Netta, for the first time ever, looked - and really saw - the painting for the first time.

It was really nothing more than one of those cliche pastoral scenes that depicted a picturesque day in the grass. A freshly painted red barn stood behind a rolling green hill. The sky was blue, the horses kept in the pen to the left of the barn looked like they were content to munch on the grass, with one looking back at the barn.

It looked warm, pleasant, if not generically so.

She was ready to glance away from it, and to question Ash, when she saw the face in the leftmost side of the barn.

She remembered, then, seeing that face in a window in the barn before - and a time before that, seeing a person standing once in the field.

A jolt shot through her, and Netta was overcome with despair.