He should have taken the pills in the bathroom, Ash realized, bitterly.

Winnie ripped the opened bottle of sleeping pills out of his hand as he swallowed a few from the cap. She examined the label on the pharmacy bottle before she turned to look at him, her face twisted in her own tired anger.

"This? Again? I felt like we just talked about you and sleeping pills."

Ash took the bottle back, screwed the lid back on. "You try living like a Human without any magic, besides the occasional homicide, then get back to me."

Winnie, sitting in the aisle seat of the plane that they were riding in, jostled when a particularly large man pushed past her in the direction of the bathroom. After she readjusted herself, she hissed at him, "There's no excuse for it! You have no right to be giving Netta addictions." She turned away from him, shaking her head. In a disappointed voice, she said, "Me and the girl miss her plenty, you don't see us using sleeping pills to get over it."

Ash bit the inside of his cheek and turned to look out of the window. He wished that she could only experience, for a moment, what existence in his beloved's body was like for him.

When Ash had awoken amidst the rubble of the house, he felt a soreness and a grogginess that he had never experienced before that moment. When he turned, he was startled to discover that his only companion was a corpse that had been so mutilated that he could only recognize it as belonging to Hera because of the bloodied and ripped white cloth that partially adorned it.

It felt like he had a hangover, and the analogy fit doubly so, due to how he was unable to recall what had happened before he had awoken.

He barely turned around when he heard her voice, soft in the back of his mind.

You've awoken.

Ash stopped, closed his eyes to concentrate on the faint sound of his Witch's voice. He answered her, I don't remember much... He felt a swell of fresh desire, as he recalled something, some dream, that he felt with fading certainty. He felt a smile playing on his lips to recall it. You gave me a sex dream. There's something poetic in that, I suppose.

He had expected humor, indignancy - anything - in answer to his lewd answer to her. Instead, Netta softly said, When you sleep I may be with you, and I believe being with you like we once did is how you would most prefer our time be spent together.

Ash, strangely lethargic and growing horny from what he could recall of her time spent in his dreams, nevertheless stopped as he realized something in what Netta had said. He was taken aback so much that he asked it aloud. "You can be with me... when I dream?"

And then he heard it when he spoke. He heard, not his own voice when he spoke, but hers.

Remembering what it had been like to awake for the first time in Netta's body made Ash slam his eyes shut. He usually attempted to repress that memory, seeing little use in being miserable when he could not do a thing about it.

Besides sleep.

Neither of them had spoken in what must have been over ten minutes, when Winnie said, "Those pills - will you be good for tonight?"

In Ash's tiring mind, he found it hard, at first, to figure at what the woman was getting at at first. Cross, Ash snapped, "Didn't see me down the whole bottle, did you?"

Winnie sighed. "Well, no."

Ash maneuvered, wriggling further down into the seat. "Then once you let me get some fucking sleep, I should be good to go."

Sometimes Ash wondered how Netta would have felt about him acting like this in her body. How she would have felt to see the disgust or the disappointment on either of the other Witches' faces when they saw the way he behaved.

But then he remembered Winnie's insistence, that they all missed Netta equally. Then he wondered how much he had indeed changed, to not act on the impotent rage that boiled in him, for her egotistical belief that she could ever miss Netta as much as he did.

By the time the plane touched down, Ash was indeed up, slapping water on his pale face in the bathroom. Netta's beautiful green eyes - ones that he had once proudly wore on his own face - gazed, bleary, back at him. He often spent his waking time feeling like Nemo, longing to return to Dreamland.

The problem was that what little energy he had while awake went towards the constant reminders that he was in no way any longer intimidating. Or masculine.

Netta, the ways I fucked your body that first month, fucking you while fucking myself. That was true, of course. Ash had invested that first month alone, in agonizing, crippling sorrow, wearing nothing on Netta's body, then giving into an almost ritualistic, single-minded self-exploration of her body. He had brought a full-length mirror into his bedroom, watched the way her body arched and moved from every conceivable angle.

A once-dream, turned into bleak reality, became a gray torture, with masturbation serving as a sole waking pleasure. Yes, even though he controlled the most beautiful woman to ever live as she did everything he commanded her body to, it eventually became so that for the longest time all he would do - could do - was end his masturbation sessions by crying on the end of his bed. The sound of Netta's voice coming from him as he wept made him feel as though he were drowning.

Thankfully, he found sleeping pills and cigarettes before he could do something to the body he had become imprisoned in.

And always, he was greeted by silence. That was, when he was not asleep or had given Netta an offering.

Outside of the bathroom, he found Winnie, getting ready for them to exit the plane. She turned, as she was checking her purse for something, only to do a double-take as she saw the haggard, sunken look on Ash's face. He had cried for a few minutes in the bathroom.

Before she could ask the rhetorical question of what he had been doing in the bathroom, Ash pulled his sunglasses out and put them on. "Let's get this business trip over with."

Ophelia walked to the entrance of the shop, pausing to look at the strangely beautiful but macabre garland of what looked like sharp, black, thick vines next to the door. She pushed the door open, shaking her head to forget the sight of the odd decoration.

As the door closed lazily behind her, she turned, allowing her eyes to adjust, for a moment, to the darkness inside of the shop, she found that she was facing more than her fill of what the store's sign out front of the strip-mall shop had promised.

Bibles and assorted Christian memorabilia lined the shelves, further into the shop. On the two-faced metal shelving that made up the center of the shop that seemed, curiously, to be larger than it had initially seemed from the outside, were statues of crosses, vases.  All meant, it seemed, as things to be left on graves.

What faced the teenager, standing in front of the shelving, was something that at first made Ophelia jerk in shock, thinking that she was once more facing the white-robed Hera.

Gazing down at her with a blank, kindly expression on her face was a sun-bleached statue of the Mother Mary, her hands spread out before her. For a moment, Ophelia, still clearing the buzzing in her head from the heat outside of the shop, gazed blankly at the overtly Human statue. It was the sound of a woman's voice that finally snapped her attention away.

"Young miss?" Ophelia turned, saw the kindly-looking woman standing behind the counter. Nondescript, looking like an older librarian who barely spoke up, except to softly answer questions, she seemed to gaze at Ophelia as though trying to answer some question that bothered her. "Is there any way that I can help you find what you're looking for?"

Ophelia felt her pulse jump in her throat. She felt thankful for the glasses she wore, liked to imagine that when she turned her head, that the woman couldn't see the way her eyes potentially showed her fear. Still, she turned away, walking to the opposite side of the shelving display and pretending to look for a vase meant to put grave flowers in.

She said, "I'm trying to find something nice to put on my sister's memorial stone."

The woman was quiet for a moment, then she sighed, said, "A-alright. Please keep in mind that I'm going to close up shop in five minutes."

Ophelia pretended to be trying to choose between a blue-bottled vase and one that was cream colored. She waited, turning one this way, then putting it down to look more closely at the other one.

The woman asked, "Memorial stone, is that what you said?"

Ophelia nodded, still pretending to be distracted as she gazed once more at the blue glass vase. "Yes. That's what they call it - when they don't want to say for sure that someone's dead. Say, you guys don't accept credit here, do you? Some of these small shops don't even have anything that takes charge payments, which is funny - the vegetable stand I saw on a dirt road on the way here, they had a little card reader that attached to their phone -"

The woman interrupted, and Ophelia found that she had walked out from behind the counter, was standing in front of the Mother Mary as she peered at her. The woman said, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that your - your sister, that's what you said?"

Ophelia pretended to ponder the aesthetic difference between the two vases for a moment before she turned to look at the woman. Ophelia enjoyed wearing the fake glasses these days, at least during these kinds of interactions. They made her feel more removed from the situation, yes, but in truth, she felt a lot like a spy.

Like none of this was real. Or dangerous.

Ophelia played with a strained smile on her lips, recalled how her after-school acting group had had her practicing. Imagine how the person would feel. Pull on personal experience, blow your experience out until it feels palpable, comes through in how you interact, speak.

She pretended that she was talking about Anais. Or any of the others. "Yes. She went missing not too far from around here." Before she could draw attention to her lie due to obvious outward detail, she added, "I was adopted. Mom says I should have been the one to go - Lena was the Golden Child, you understand. Couldn't do anything wrong. But here I am, picking out the shit to put on her not-grave. I still loved her, you know."

The woman blinked, seemingly at a loss with what she said. Still, and maybe Ophelia was only imagining it, but there was some glint in the woman's wide eyes. One that she recalled from Sia's eyes, when she had crouched down until she was sat on her knees, close to where Ophelia had crawled away from her.

The woman put a hand to her mouth, the maybe-glint in her eyes gone. "Oh my lord. I am so sorry to hear about that." As though the woman were only playing some sort of an act of her own, she seemed to be struggling with recalling something, then she asked, "Wait, Lena? My word, I think I can remember that there was a Lena Freeburg that went missing a few months back."

Ophelia gazed at her for a moment, willed sorrow to rise in her. She did it so well, was so acquainted with it, that it took barely anything to bring a tear to her eye. She said, "Lena told me that she couldn't stay, that there was something that wanted her to come. She said that there was something that I couldn't understand. Would never understand."

The woman had turned her gaze away from Ophelia, was looking at a selection of faux wood and stone crosses to her right. Her mouth laxed open.

Ophelia played her next move as seamlessly as she could manage, pulling her phone from out of her pocket and gazing at the time. "Oh, wow," she exclaimed, shaking her head as she slipped it back in her pocket. "Five minutes passes quick."

Ophelia made to move past the woman, only to have her pull her in as she tried to pass. Ophelia fought off the initial urge, to shove the woman's hand off of her.

The woman stared at her, and she asked, "Why are you here?"

Ophelia blinked, tried to look as naive and innocent as she could hope to manage. "Like I said, I wanted to put something on her memorial." Still, a dreadful chill - one that Ophelia never got used to feeling - ran up her spine.

The woman licked her lips, then asked, "Just to find something for her memorial?"

Ophelia carefully pulled away from the woman, allowed her unease to show through, when she said, "I thought you said that you had to close up."

The woman shook her head, an impatient look crossing her face. "What do you know about your sister's disappearance?"

Ophelia swallowed a hard knot that felt as though it had appeared in her throat. "She told me that she was going away somewhere, somewhere where she would feel normal. Some place she felt like there were women who were calling out for her."

The woman did not blink as she stared at her. Slowly, she reached out, pale, pale hands closing over her shoulders. She asked, "And did she tell you where she was going?"

Ophelia gazed into her eyes - before, she had taken the women's nondescript brown eyes as being reminiscent of soft brown animal's fur, but now they seemed to her to be near black, shiny - and said, "Well, no." The woman's gaze broke away from her, then Ophelia looked away, as though something was bothering her. She added, softly, "But I think she was called - here."

She did not look at the woman's face, but she could feel how the hands that the woman had on her shoulders tightened. The woman asked, "And why do you think that?"

Ophelia turned to look at the woman. "I had - these strange dreams. Dreams of this town, dreams where I was told by some woman to not tell anyone about what I saw. Dreams of small crosses." Ophelia turned, looked at the statue of the fading Virgin Mary. "I saw that statue."

The woman spoke, her gaze feeling as though it were burying itself into the tender meat of Ophelia's mind, probing it for truths. "Have you ever experienced anything that you cannot readily explain?"

Ophelia felt her eyes widening as she allowed herself to be pulled in. To feel the nightmare as though it were real. "Yes. One time, I spoke to an imaginary friend, one that felt as real as though he were as real as any boy. Only, he never walked on the ground. And when I tried to introduce him to a friend, I turned and he had gone."

As she had talked, the woman's face had distorted, a smile spreading on it that did not look as though it altogether fit. She said, "What if I were to take you somewhere - some place where all can be explained to you?"

Ophelia wanted to walk backward, to get away from the woman whose eyes seemed, with the bright sun outside of the shop turned away from her, to be pure black. Instead of that, she whispered, "What are you talking about?"

The woman's eyes darted around, the smile slipping off of her mouth, as though she had just realized that she had been grinning. She wiped at her face, said, "You are in possession of something valuable. Exceedingly so. I can show you someplace - no, something that can let you understand what it is."

Ophelia fought the urge once more to now pull the woman's hands from off of her. Instead, she said, "I don't know -"

The woman's fingers tightened until her grip was painful on Ophelia's shoulder. "Your sister is alive. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your sister is alive, alive and with a new family."

Ophelia felt sick, but she focused on her own real shock. She said, "She - Lena is alive?"

The woman smiled, a manic width of bone-white teeth, shining black eyes. "Yes. And she's been waiting for you. Come with me and you can be with her."

Ophelia let the woman drag her, pull her back out of the shop, then through the sidewalk in front of the shops, until they were walking towards a vacant field next door.

She had to fight the whole time to not wrench herself away, knowing where it was that the woman was taking her, but understanding that where she was going she would not find the missing Lena Freeberg. Ophelia knew that in the neighboring woods there was no place for a young woman, save for in one spot on the hushed forest floor, a place where any paths that had been furrowed amidst the trees and weeds had long been overgrown.

Underneath that place was a mass grave of sorts, one that acted as the unceremonious dumping ground of five corpses, all of them undoubtedly of young women.

All had come to the sound of a pied piper's voice that they had heard in their dreams, promising family and understanding. What they had found, instead, was nothing less than the sort of death that Hansel and Gretel had themselves narrowly escaped.