"-Jesus-fucking-Christ-on-a-goddamn-upside-down-fucking-cross, why did you say that to Bethany?"

A portly, dark-haired man in a filthy apron roared it as he burst out of the restaurant's back exit. Behind him followed a skinny boy who looked as though he could be bent in half by the other, far younger, man.

The boy allowed the door to close behind him, his hands twitching from both the cold and his nerves.

"I-I-I-I don't think that she's really representing our flavors anymore, Dill. I agreed to work with her on the condition that - that we would experiment with - with the food, we would be the cutting edge -"

"Frankie, I hate to break it to ya," the man said, pulling a cigarette out of his apron's right pocket, preparing to light it. "but she picked you out of a Burger Laird uniform. Can't be a chooser, sorry. And anyway, what does "foodie" mean any-fucking-way, eh? Buncha bullcrap, thinking you can outsmart the line. It's worked this way for forever for a reason - it works. Your way -" he made a chopping motion with his furry, pudgy hand. it don't."

The man paused, lighting his cigarette with a triumphant flourish of his lighter. "Cash is king, brotha, and she knows how to feed the shit that those hipster, whiny shits wanna eat." He took a drag of his cigarette, then gesticulated, throwing his arms out. "End of story!"

The boy blushed, so that it was visible even in the falling snow.

"That's not... entirely fair, man. I just - I wish that there was room here for more than one Vegan restaurant in town, or that... Bethany would call it quits..." He leaned against the brick wall, thrusting a hand through his overgrown hair, grown greasy from the hours in the hairnet.

Dill laughed heartily in the middle of taking a drag on his cigarette. His exhalation looked like a dragon belching smoke. "That's rich. Kid, don't let me hear you say that shit ever again - crazy bitch is what she is, but that's right along with bread n' butter, don't you go forgetting that. D'ya smoke, wanna drag or two or three offa Papa Dill's cig?"

The boy, a defeated look on his face, muttered, "I don't smoke - at least, not tobacco -"

"Hey," a woman's voice called out.

The boy leaped, his prey-like fear obvious on his face. It was only wiped when he looked up at the hooded woman that had appeared at the end of the alley and she called out again.

"I need to speak to your chef de cuisine."

The boy answered, stuttering out, "W-w-we're in the middle of dinner rush - Beth-Bethany doesn't even take breaks during light lunches -"

Dill interrupted, saying, "Look, what the kid's tryna say is - hell no. We're not that packed tonight, go inside and get a table, then if you really wanna speak to Bethie, tell your server that you think the food sucks. That'll get you a real quick conversation with the chef inna hurry." He chuckled thickly before coughing for a number of seconds.

"No. I need to see her, out here."

In the swirl of snow and with the shitty streetlight that illuminated the end of the alleyway, they could make out only the vague silhouette of her, especially in that black that she wore.

Her voice - it didn't sound right, lacked certain energy to it that made it sound, well, like a - a -

The boy shivered, then shuddered as he got the sudden impression of danger that licked up his spine. "L-listen, ma'am -"

"Hey, lady," Dill interrupted, cigarette resting at the red-stained spot on his right side of his apron. "we gotta get back inside in -" he raised his wrist up to his face, examining the face of his watch for a moment before he lowered his arm and said, "-three minutes and forty-nine seconds, else the chef is gonna raise fucking hell. Do me a favor, lemme enjoy my break."

The woman didn't move.

Leaning in closer to Franklin, Dill said, "Jesus, this lady's giving me the crazy vibes. Fuck this cigarette," he said, pressing the ember at the end out before depositing it back in his apron. "I'll go inside and ask Bethany if she knows any psychos. This one could be her sister, she sure acts like she's on the rag as much as Bethie."

Dill walked inside, and Franklin only realized that the older man was essentially leaving him out alone to deal with the woman when he had gone inside.

Franklin was loathe to do it, but he turned ot look at the woman, as though seeing the movement of a predator out of the corner of his eye.

Man-eater, he thought suddenly.

After ten seconds, Franklin felt pressured to say something.

He felt his mouth opening, and he said, "A-a-ah, Benthany will be out in a minute, I think. M-more like a few seconds."

The woman said nothing.

Franklin winced, then lowered his hand in what he hoped was a nonchalant way to press against his left knee that had begun to shake violently through his apron.

"H-hey," he said, understanding too late that he should have said nothing. He should have walked after Dill like the good boy that mom had always told him he was. "she'll be out soon."

The woman said nothing.

Franklin felt himself muttering Dill's favorite blasphemy under his breath as he backed up to the door.

The woman was easily fifteen feet away from him, and they looked to be about the same height, there was nothing that he should have been frightened of about her.

He could reach the door in fifteen seconds, flat, and that was if he kept on inching to it the way that he had been doing without realizing it.

He felt his face stretching in a rictus smile, hoping that his movements weren't going to attract her anger. Or whatever it was that animated that woman inside of that dark, human-sized shadow who stood at the end of the alley.

She could reach me in an instant, if she wanted to.

"Look, I only got this job not too long back," he said, hearing his midwest accent, the thing that he loathed more than Dill or even Bethany, more than the small town he had come from itself, creeping back into his voice, an unwanted guest. "I just wanna cook, ya know? Please." He didn't know what he was asking, only that he needed to then, more than he had ever asked for anything in all of his life. "Please."

The only thing he thought he could see, as he strained to see that shadowed face, were what seemed like two twin pits of flame.

She did not move.

Franklin felt his back hit the brick wall.

He leaped at the feeling, then felt his hand shoot out to grasp the door's metal handle. He fell back inside the safe warmth of the kitchen, heart pounding in his ears, eyes never leaving the two blood-red orbs that beckoned to him with promises of destruction, set in the shadow's face.

"-you tell whoever's got a problem with me to come in through the front at least, next time, Orville," The Chef de Cuisine yelled back through the opened back door.

She let the door slam behind her as she snapped her gaze out to the alleyway.

When she saw nothing, she hissed out, "Simpletons," before she set to open the door once more. And then the wind was knocked, violently, out of her.

The woman collapsed to the ground under the weight of the person that had leaped on her.

The Chef managed to croak out a shocked squeak, the air broken out of her lungs. Before she had a chance to react, she heard a woman's voice, unfamiliar, but cold, in her ear.

"What's your name?"

The Chef gasped in a breath of air, winced, dazed, as she felt the blood coat her mouth.

"Bethany," she grunted out. "and whatever this' about -"

In spite of the cruel words that she spoke, the woman's voice seemed to be perfectly, emotionlessly, modulated. "Shut the fuck up, bitch. I'm going to tie your hands behind your back, and you're gonna sing a few songs for me, little birdie. They'd better be songs I like, or else I'll torture you before I kill you."

Bethany chuckled.

The hooded woman stilled on top of her for a moment before she forcibly shoved the chef's hands into some zip ties.

She then flipped the woman onto her back, not sparing her from a hard hit that made the chef lose her breath once more. When she did get her breath back, the chef chuckled again.

The hooded woman leaned in close to the chef's face and when she spoke, her voice was cold. "This isn't funny, I can assure you of that."

The chef was crying as she laughed, hard. "This is rich. Do you know who I am, little bitch? Huh?"

She looked up into the black abyss of the woman's hood-shadowed face, saw in a grab of light for a moment a pattern reminiscent of bones on black. The woman's lower half of her face was covered by something that turned the lower half of her face into a skeleton's.

She had had a look at her eyes - the chef recognized that she saw fire looking back at her from where eyes should be. Recognition seized her, as perhaps for the first time in decades, the chef - who was not, at least, fully - human felt something she was unused to experiencing.

Fallibility.

Her laugher stopped, choked in her throat.

The hooded creature stood up, dusting Its hands off.

"This is a bad place for work. I'll just have to take you, then come back here and do a memory wipe -"

The chef laughed again, ego winning over a moment's fear. "That'll be hard to do."

"I wouldn't count on that as a reason for me to spare you."

"Oh, I wasn't referring to that. You see, you asked my name, and I told you Bethany. In reality," the chef's voice lowered until she was at a whisper. She looked up at her attacker meaningfully, and spoke only when she had bent down to her face. "my name is - go fuck yourself."

In a moment, the attacker's world transformed.

She fell back as though she had been burned. The images - of creeping death on the walls, the screaming that bubbled up from the groun, the thing that the laughing chef on the ground had morphed into - struck fear into her heart before she had a chance to realize what was going on -

And could stop it.

Until she had met Ashwood, Netta was sick - often - as a child. It seemed to correspond with time in which her father would leave.

One of the first instances of the "sicknesses" that she suffered from was when three of her Sisters had tied Netta to a decaying tree.

Netta remained there for two days, visited by no one, the dry heat of the desert branding tender flesh that was cursed to restructure itself. Nerves healed every night, only to be seared away come the unbearable heat of the noontime sun. They had stripped her of clothes, then spat at her.

The girl was cursed by her immortality. It was not a choice she could make, before the inevitability of her puberty would make magic her elixer of longevity as it did all Witches.

After the ordeal of suffering from severe sunburn, Netta thought that she imagined voices, telling her things that could not be. They had called her Kali, the damned, the savior, the mother, the destroyer.  Among them, she thought she had heard the voice of her Father, heralding her as his Queen, rubbing cold clay on her face as though baptizing her with it.

Thinking that she was still hallucinating, when Netta saw Millicent, as though waiting for her to lift her tired head up to speak, it was nevertheless enough to bring a breath of relief to Netta. She was the first hallucination that Netta had not had to listen to berate, then seem to praise, her.

"Millie," she said to the younger girl, wiggling once more in her binds. "thank the Goddess. Please, help me out of this. I think the knot's just to the rightmost back -"

Millicent, a thin girl with waistlength dark, dark red hair and large, seemingly guileless brown eyes had her hands behind her back.

She cocked her head to the side, as though in confusion.

"Nettles, you can't leave, not yet. Mother said that you need to stay out here until you manifest some magic for her to see. Break out of those bonds, Ne-ttl-es. Do it."

Netta gained a sudden burst of energy and struggled against the bonds until, Netta gave up with an exhausted sob. Her wrists were chaffed raw, her flesh seemed to scream in agony as it rebuilt.

Millicent gave her an apologetic, soft look, pouting. "Aww, can't do it? I can, though. If I were tied to a tree like a lamb left out for a wolf, I could burst those ties off of me, easy as pie." She tapped her finger to her lips, as though deep in thought. "Then again, I'm a Witch."

Netta said nothing, turning her head to the ground.

Millicent continued, her voice seeming to, never for a moment, lose its chirping innocence. "I mean, you're basically a human that can't be killed naturally. A living weed of a human. You know, when your Mother found me, I had been locked up in a cell. Yessum. I had been experimenting on compounds found in potatoes. Not the vegetable, mind you. The plant itself. I got the idea when I heard of how that stupid human Walter Raleigh managed to induce the English Queen into a bout of uncontrollable vomiting. Want to know who my test subjects where?"

When Netta did not answer, staring, blindly, down at the ground, Millicent spoke again then, her voice warm, bubbly. "When my Dadums got really ill, I decided to make him a soup that revived him.   When he recovered, I told him that I knew what to put into his food to make him better. I told him how I can dream up how a person can feel, and then they feel that. Do you know what he did?"

Slowly, Netta lifted her head, blinking, tiredly, at her Sister. Swallowing, she managed to corak out, "What did he do?"

Millicent smiled, and it was almost warm. "He had me strapped to a tree, then he whipped me. Want to know what my drink did to him?"

"What?"

Millicent pulled something - a canteen that she had strapped to her hip - and brandished it at Netta. "I have something that might cheer you up, first. Even humans gotta drink, right?"

Netta felt a cold worry begin in the put of her stomach. Not even the promised relief of liquid amifst her dehydration could entice her. "I - I don't want anything." Still Netta felt her tongue reaching out to dart against her dry, cracked bottom lip.

Millicent gave her a radiant smile. "Oh no no. You don't think I'm capable of poisoning a member of my Coven, do you? Well, go ahead, admit it, Nettles. Say what you were thinking of me in your mistrusting mind."

Netta told Millicent what she wanted to hear, and Millicent almost knocked into Netta's teeth as she jammed the metal mouth of the canteen past her lips.

The girl tilted the canteen up and the contents washed her mouth out.

For a moment, Netta felt relief. In the next moment, however, she tasted the bitter, sickening flavor in the water.

She tried to spit it out, but Millicent had only jammed the canteen further in.

The force of the water rushing into her mouth more than made up for any of Netta's attempts to spit it out. Only when the contents of the canteen had emptied into Netta's mouth did Millicent pull away.

"What was that?" Netta croaked out.

"A concoction that I made. I'm sorry to tell you that it's not a tonic. The symptoms of the plants I compounded in the last few days include, but are not limited to: nausea, diarrhea, hallucinations and, oh, I can't forget about internal bleeding, now, can I? My father, if he had lived, certainly would not have."

"Millie, please," Netta cried out. "please, help me -"

"Oh, I do have the antidote in my satchel here, but I went to so much trouble making that for you, and all you do is spit it back out. You know I didn't even have to go to the trouble of giving you poison, let alone concocting a unique rendition of the one that I used on my family. If I had wanted to, I coud have willed those symptoms on you - but, then where's the fun in that? Huh?"

Netta cried out, tried once more to struggle free.

Millicent's voice had risen and she sounded happy, celebratory. "Frankly, I'm offended by your refusal to drink what I give you. Oh well. Hey," she leaned over and tapped Netta on the shoulder before turning around to walk away. "at least you can't die, right? I'll just sit this antidote by this tree over here, and if you get a chance to walk around a bit, you know where to find it."

Netta cried out for her Sister until she grew too hoarse to whisper.

Not long afterwards, she vomited.

Laying back against the tree, Netta felt her determination all but die in her chest. As she shut her eyes, she felt a jolt as the world transformed.

She dreamed she danced, as the world beneath her both ended and began, anew.

Outside of the high tower she danced in, the Old Earth was falling in pieces to the ground of the New, baptizing it in flame. It was the end of one cycle and a sign of the next.

A sight that no one could ever live through, to see the beginning of one as well as the end the previous.

And yet, with the beautiful, terrible sight outside, she could not take her gaze from her partner.

Her dance partner was hideous, dark as though he was living, slithering shadow, then beautiful in the light of the flames that fell outside. He almost radiated with the energy, the joy of life itself beating in him, pure.  A love that was sightless, without reason.

When she had at last finished their dance, he whispered her truth into her ear with an intimacy that an innocent child could have no knowledge of.

She wept, knowing only when she woke that she would never be happy if his words - prophecy - ever came true.

She remembered it as a nightmare when, at last, she woke.