"It's not as awful as I had expected," Wes said, and from somewhere in the depths of the shop there was a great crack, like someone had Disapparated without warning, and a resounding crash, like a great oak had been felled onto a small car, and Isla shrieked faintly with a pitiful kind of surprise.
The skin at the bridge of Rahel's hawk-like nose scrunched like an accordion as she peered into the darkness suspiciously. A spider swayed from one of her ears, twitching as though caught in a light breeze. Wes did not mention it.
"Not... awfully awful," Wes said, and this time there was no crack and crash and shriek to contradict him.
"I... suppose not?" Rahel drew the word out like she was uncertain of it, one hand loosening and tightening the strap of her backpack like she was measuring herself for a noose.
They stood together. There was silence.
Silence!
Wes had forgotten what that didn't sound like.
They waited.
Isla...?
"Do you reckon," Rahel said.
"We don't get that kind of luck," Wes reminded her, and right on cue Isla bounced from the darkness like a springbok on skittles, her corkscrew hair precariously swaying like a poorly-designed house in an earthquake.
She coughed with a violence that had Rahel taking a sudden step back. Sparks flared between her lips and her hand, crackling like crossed wires. Isla looked inordinately pleased with herself.
"Let me show you," she said, but even as she lunged for Wes' hand, something skittered outside and they all froze, Wes and Rahel and Isla, and they stared at their own pale faces in the dark window of the shop, out into the street beyond. Wes stared at the expressions on the faces of the two girls, too afraid to look at his own, knowing that his emotions would be a mirror of Isla's - fear and fear and fear. Rahel would try harder. Her eyes would tighten at the corners and her lips would draw back into a grimace and she would set her jaw like she could ward off danger by grinding her teeth at it.
Rahel closed her hand over the orb in her hand, smothering the halo of honeyed light, leaving them in the cold and in the dark but no longer blind; it was a crescent moon tonight, a mere sliver of argent in the sky, but cloudless, and the street outside was clearly deserted, defiantly so. Wes searched for the ripple of movement in the nothingness that would suggest their eyes were being deceived by magic, but found nothing.
"Make this quick," Rahel hissed, and opened her hand again so that the light flared once more, sudden as a heart attack.
Rahel had no edge that was not sharp. Her eyes narrowed abruptly; her jaw tightened, cracking like bone, at the slightest irritation. All raven and oil slick and dusty knives - that's what Isla had told her, the first time they met, and Rahel had just shrugged and ran a hand heavy with rings across her shaved scalp, like she knew what the girl was talking about.
Her hair had grown out since then. It was a liability now - it tangled. It snagged. But she wouldn't cut it. Sometimes Wes caught her looking at knives with a kind of anticipatory stare, like she was considering it at length, but she would always turn away again and meet his eye with a defiant kind of a set to her gaze that forbade questions.
Rahel didn't like questions.
She allowed herself one now. "What should I be looking for?"
Wes didn't have words, none that Rahel - with her callused hands and scarred fingers and step like a jackal - would or could understand. How could you explain magic to someone who had only ever seen it used as a weapon, someone who had never felt its presence like a second heart-beat beneath your skin, right at your jugular where your pulse kept time, in the fabric of your veins and the spark of your nerve endings?
"Look for a closed box," he said, and Rahel nodded and raised her hand so that the light she kept there like a stolen star scorched the gloom like a burning thing.
Those who had come before them, resistance and death eater and survivor all, had done a good job of clearing out anything of use, but Wes was nothing if not optimistic, and with Rahel a living shadow behind him he scoured the ground for any sign of a fallen or forgotten wand, turning over boxes with his foot, hefting the edges of destroyed shelves and bookcases to peer beneath them. Isla had disappeared into the recesses of the shop again; he could hear her footsteps as she walked - no, she bounced - from one side of the room to the other. No doubt she imagined this was helpful. He supposed she was keeping watch.
"I think I," Rahel said, and then shook her head. Her dark hair flew. "Never mind. Mistake."
Wes could understand those. He opened his mouth to call out to Isla, and then the windchimes over the door sang out an alarm as three men in robes stepped over the threshold.
It seemed sometimes like the entire world should be held in Isla's eyes. She was just that kind of a girl - she saw everything, and she knew everything, or at least it seemed so. She had this way of leaning over whatever surface was nearest, be it kitchen counter or the hood of a car, usually leaving her feet hanging above the air, short as she was, and, watching unblinkingly, making the kind of comment that made perfect unsense.
The previous day she had informed Wes that if his future had a colour, it would be tan with mauve speckles, and that was no colour for a future whatsoever.
"You want to go for green," she had said helpfully, swinging her legs and watching him pensively from across the fence of whatever field they had been tramping through as he struggled with a water canister Rahel had closed too tightly. "Green or blue."
"I'll get on that," Wes had promised, and Isla had pursed her lips like she knew he was lying, but had dropped down from the fence nonetheless and gone off sprinting to tell Rahel that her future was closer to grey, and Isla wasn't sure what that meant only that it was a particularly unpleasant shade of grey they were talking about. "Not silver," she had stressed. "Smoke."
Rahel had almost looked a little pleased with that declaration. "Smoke," she agreed, and now she held out a hand as though to catch Isla before the death eaters could spot her and let out a low, humming whistle to catch the younger girl's attention.
"Ollivander's being unhelpful again," said the first man, and the other two laughed. Wes couldn't see Isla, and apparently neither could Rahel, because she didn't object as he caught her arm and the two of them moved towards the back of the shop.
He hoped Isla would have the sense to stay quiet.
Isla did not stay quiet.
She tried to run.
One of the death eaters shouted and raised a wand. Rahel yelled a warning to the smaller girl, and sprinted - across the shop like it was nothing, and into the nearest wizard, a rugby tackle that nearly laid the older, taller man flat on his back. She managed to avoid sprawling with him, and knocked his wand from his hand, sending it skittering across the floor and under the nearest bookshelf.
Wes almost didn't follow. The shadows by the bookshelf seemed far safer, he thought. Far safer.
But he followed. Of course he did. It was as inevitable as the sky.
He ran for the dropped wand and the nearest death eater roared a curse as a streak of light arced past his ear. Wes swore, and ran faster. Behind him, he could hear Isla calling out and Rahel fighting - the sound of knuckles on skin, and spitting blood, and a resounding crack like breaking bone.
Wes dived. His fingers found the wand, but nothing - there was no spark, no static there to be found, but he swung and pointed it anyway, pointed it squarely at Rahel, who sat alone in the centre of the floor with blood on her lip and her nose and a bitter expression.
Fragments of paper, gusted by the brief fight, floated down from the ceiling. Dust misted around them, insubstantial as smoke.
"They took her," Rahel said, and she let the light go out.