Disclaimer: Don't own it, would like to, know it's not going to happen.

Author's note: Four years later...

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Chapter 1

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The bed used to be Savannah's, but she sold it to me for twenty bucks back in the fall. It was both lumpy and hard and when I rolled onto my side a spring would invariably poke through and attack my hip. One morning I had woken up with a scratch running the full length of my thigh. But twenty bucks was twenty bucks, and despite all its flaws, I was eager to get back to it. Desperate, in fact.

I hadn't slept at all the night before. After stumbling in late Friday night, I hadn't been able to fall asleep. It was a process that usually took me a while, but last night had been much worse than usual. There wasn't much to do at that time of morning, especially since the walls in my humble college housing were paper thin. I had considered going for a run, but that would have just made me a walking advertisement for a mugging or worse. I had tried reading my Latin texts—I liked Latin, really, but I wasn't that much of a nerd that I liked it at four in the morning. Even that hadn't helped.

But I managed to amuse myself until five somehow without losing my mind, which was a relative statement if I ever heard one. At five I said screw it and went for a run anyway. Then I went to the pool, the gym...anything I could think of to try and force my body to collapse from exhaustion. It was the first Saturday before Spring Break. UCLA was a ghost town and since I had nowhere else to be, I had plenty of time to recuperate.

Even working out like Gene Simmons on speed did little to knock me out. I was too used to punishing workouts. I had been a gymnast at the university for the past three years...up until four months ago, when I had fallen off the bars and landed wrong and completely tore my ankle to hell. Bye-bye scholarship, hello blood money and overwhelming depression.

I could have fought harder, pushed myself further and tried to get back on the team. But I stayed away because gymnastics was beginning to bore me—and because you get disqualified if they find heroin in your system. Better to avoid getting tested altogether. So even though my ankle was doing all right (thank you magical healing), I didn't plan on going back any time soon.

If having your life going to hell was an Olympic Sport, I would have been Jesse Owens. Gold medals in anything you could think of. Dead parents? Check. No future? Check. Humiliating past? Check. Lousy attitude? Check and double check. At least I wasn't delusional. There was nothing worse than a failure who didn't realize it.

"Gillian. Gillian! Hey MacArthur, slow down."

I turned around, plastering a smile on my face. Debbie was a sweet girl and I did like her. But we were both fresh from the gym and she had never been injured in her life. I took a little more pleasure than I should have in realizing I was still ten pounds lighter than she was—I wanted to tell her it proved anorexia didn't work, but didn't think her starved heart could survive the shock.

Trying to snap myself out of bitch mode, I beamed. "How are you? You look great. You know, except for the copious amounts of sweat and grime. You're hair looks so cute."

"You think? I thought going darker might make my face look stumpy."

"It makes you look older."

Debbie beamed as I paid her the ultimate compliment. When the team used to go out, inevitably all of us got carded. I still sometimes got the kids menu at restaurants. Though ever since I had stopped training, my breasts had started to come back.

"Thanks. I hope my mom likes it. She loved my hair before."

I hated when people talked about their parents. It was an unnecessary thing to add to the conversation. What did your genetic donors have to do with anything? But I kept my smile firmly in place. I should have been a beauty queen. "You're going home today?"

"Yeah, my train leaves at three. I can't wait to get back." Her and the rest of the university. It was times like this when I wished I had a home. Debbie saw my face fall and it finally got through her thick skull that I didn't quite share everyone else's Spring Break enthusiasm. "I thought you were going with Hilary and Victor on some sort of cruise?"

"Victor had to go home. His dad's sick." I hated how even the words made me tremble. My dad would have made me come home for the holidays. It was the only time we ever saw each other and now that he was gone it hurt that much worse because the holidays were the only times I had to remember he wasn't here anymore. "Without Victor...we just couldn't."

I also couldn't afford it if Victor couldn't chip in. Not that Victor and I...he had been crushing on Hilary forever. But Victor wasn't stingy with his money. And since I had none to speak of that wasn't going to my tuition, it made hanging out with him that much sweeter.

"That sucks," was Debbie's brilliant summation of the situation. I agreed, I wished her the best for her trip home and got out of there as fast as I could. I was in such a mood—lack of sleep made me insufferable. Not that Debbie had noticed. I liked having friends to much to do anything other than keep it to myself.

There was only one person who I could stand to see me when I couldn't stop being a bitch. I tried calling Savannah, so she could tell me off properly or at least let me vent aloud, but she didn't pick up. She was probably still asleep, like I longed to be. Last night she had been planning to get Paige a birthday present. Knowing Savannah Levine, that didn't mean she had gone shopping. She had probably gotten into some sort of fight but had miraculously come up with the perfect rare grimoire for Paige.

If she wasn't going to pick up, I was going to leave a message.

"Get out of bed and get to work or she'll know something is up," I began. She would know it was me. "Remember, you're only allowed to call me for life threatening injuries. If I don't pick up today it's because I'm taking a nap, but leave a message. I want to get together this weekend—I've got this new spell that I think you'd be totally awesome at. Exploding eyeballs, right up your alley. Call me back."

I liked Savannah, most of the time anyway, but she wasn't the person I really wanted to call when I felt the beginnings of a bad day. The person I really wanted to call was on the other side of the country and buried under six feet of earth. Dana would have made everything better—Savannah just ordered me to pretend it was. Don't get me wrong, I needed that. But it would be nice to have things feel right every so often.

When I finally got home, I almost froze to death; my housemates must have turned off the heat in order to save money on this month's utilities bill. University housing (and the budget restraints of a university student) sucked. It was like prison, without the guaranteed meals and more mould. As I walked through the door, I tried to ignore any and all wildlife that shared the house with me.

With Spring Break beginning next week, almost all of my housemate had already cleared out. Tia was the only one downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a tall glass of orange juice and folding the newspaper into squares. Good. Tia would leave me to myself. She meant well, but she wasn't the brightest, taking an extra year to settle on classical history. Her preference for Coolers over Corinthians meant she might need yet another year after that.

"Hey." She pushed the newspaper away from her with a smile. "I didn't hear you get up this morning. You must have been really early."

"I couldn't sleep. I'm glad I didn't wake you. Everyone else cleared out?"

"Vicky left this morning with Maddie and Sandra, so we're the only ones left. You should have seen the van—I don't know how they fit all that stuff in. You want something to eat?"

"Sure."

"I bought donuts, if you want." Tia watched carefully as I went to help myself. "You doing something tonight?"

I ripped a tiny piece of the donut off and rolled it around in between my fingers. "Why? You have something in mind?"

"A friend of Kevin's has this uncle or something who owns this club and he invited us—if I bring a friend. You interested? It's supposed to be exclusive and we wouldn't have to pay cover."

"Sounds good."

"Excellent." Her eyes narrowed. "Gillian, you're supposed to swallow you know."

Tia glared until I shoveled the donut in, chewed and swallowed. Only then did she turn away. No, it wasn't that she had a strange carbohydrate fetish. My whole house was convinced I had some kind of eating disorder and the purchasing of high fat food was their way of helping. It could have been because I looked like I would lose a fight against a Smurf. Or because that's what I had told them.

I didn't like lying to them—they were nice girls, for the most part. But sometimes only a lie works. People expected there to be something wrong with me. I don't know why, but it's been that way most of my life. There are some people I can't afford to disappoint, so I go to over-priced therapy every Sunday just to keep things steady. I didn't want to have to explain this to my housemates. Luckily, the sad story of my struggle against vegetables won me a little privacy.

I told them I had been treated for anorexia so they would feel pleased when they saw me eat. Not that I did it very often. Not that I was sick, just food was usually last on my list of priorities. You couldn't eat and keep yourself distracted. Anorexia bought me time in the bathroom without anyone huddled at the door, listening for sounds of retching.

The truth was I lacked the self-control that anorexia required. Bulimia would have been my disease of choice, if I cared enough about myself to try and look good. Hurling acid and spit back at the world as tears squeezed from my eyes and mucus poured from nose, mixing in an unholy blend of hate was almost what I already did. The ugliness inside now on display for the whole world to gawk at. I knew a little bit about that. Denying myself something I craved? That I knew I couldn't do.

The food finally swallowed I said, "When do you want to go?"

"Twelve? Is that all right?"

"It's a date," I promised and quickly left the room. I didn't mean to be rude, but I was exhausted. My housemates were sweet girls, much nicer than I deserved. That was most of the problem. They possessed qualities I didn't: Money. Family. Hope. Restraint. All that and something worse.

They were human.

I wasn't like some of the others. Having grown up with almost no awareness of my supernatural abilities (thanks, Mom!) I tended to be less discriminating that those supernaturals who had been brought up knowing they were just a little bit better than the rest. The girls I lived with didn't even know you could be anything other than human and therein lay the problem. My realm of experience was completely detached from theirs. They didn't know the kind of power I had, but more importantly, they could never know. I couldn't tell them and so I could never give them reason to trust me. However much I might want to cross the abyss, it simply wasn't possible. So I kept my distance.

I headed to the washroom, to get some of the grime off of me. It was empty, a rare occurrence in a house full of eight girls. The magic of Spring Break. I kicked the door shut behind me. I would have locked it but Gina's asshole boyfriend had broken it one day and she refused to pay to fix it. We could have tried to force her, but it wasn't like she had the money to begin with, so we made do with a closed door policy. With the door shut, the room resembled a small cardboard box, everything crowded together to fit into the insignificant space. The toilet seat had been pulled down and I sat on top of it, the cool plastic shocking the sensitive skin on the back of my thighs, running shorts have ridden up. I leaned my head forward and let it rest in my hands for just a second. My long blonde hair sheltered my from the world for a moment. One glorious moment.

Standing up was tedious, but not the chore it had once been, so I did it, even though it was unnecessary in the tiny space. The mirror still had fog over it from the last occupant who had probably used up the last of the hot water. That was usually what happened.

Gazing at the mirror I was struck by how long it had been since I had been pretty. The face that watched me in the mirror with dead eyes wasn't one I could look at for very long. The sweat didn't help matters either.

The water was lukewarm, better than I hoped for. I kept the shower short. It didn't take much for me to stumble to my tupperware-sized room and fall asleep.

...

I woke up and read for a few hours, before I started to get ready. In Greek. I was sort of loser in that respect. University was my gateway to the past—I was studying every remotely dead language (and a few living ones) that UCLA offered. It made me feel closer to the heritage my mother had denied me. I was also sort of good at it too and I tended to cling to the few things I could do well.

At nine I started to get ready and was ready ten to twelve, though I could still hear Tia fussing around in her room. I sat at the kitchen table—that technically only fit two people, though we had been known to cram as many as ten in—and began tearing the newspaper into tiny pieces. No one in the house actually read the thing, they just vandalized it in the way they felt was best.

The material of my slinky blue dress felt loose against my skin. Still underweight. How many donuts did I have to cram down my throat? Blonde hair tickle against my bare shoulder. I had left it down, which meant it was going to get sweaty and greasy by the end of the night, but Dana always said it looked good down. On my feet were Maddie's four each heels, the only way I could look someone in the eye. I was five feet on a good day and had always found heels invaluable. I looked good enough, tonight.

Tia came down in a white tube dress that she looked gorgeous in. She always looked gorgeous. We traded compliments as I checked my cell again. Savannah still hadn't called back. Bitch.

"Lead the way," I said.

"You okay? You seem...nervous. I swear, Kevin's friends are really nice."

"It's nothing," I shrugged. "So, are they picking us up?"

Tia still looked worried, but apparently the guys were on time, because I could hear the engine pulling into the driveway. I stood up quickly, before Tia could say anything. What Savannah did in her spare time was none of my business.

"Let's go," I said, grabbing her hand and leading her out of the house. Tia locked up behind us, as I bounced on the porch beside her, letting the excitement fill me. Savannah was a big girl. She didn't need to call me to gloat after every successful adventure. And just because the promise of a spell hadn't gotten her to call didn't mean anything. She could have been busy.

Kevin was driving. His friends were in the back, two of them and one of me, but I didn't mind. I climbed into the back, falling carelessly into the lap of the one with the beard. The black one was hotter, but beard-guy was closer. I apologized and settled in between them, but I let beard-guy feel me up as he helped push me off him.

"Guys," Tia announced, once she had stopped kissing Kevin hello. "This is Gillian MacArthur."

She introduced me to Ryan and Calvin, but I didn't pay attention to who was who. It didn't really matter; I was having fun tonight and I didn't care which one of them provided it. It was a friend of Ryan's cousin who owned the club. I never bothered to learn its name. Ryan and Calvin seemed nice, so I talked to them.

The time flew by so quickly I almost thought I had taken something and forgotten about it. We were passed the long line outside before I knew it. It wasn't as dark as I had expected, or liked, but there was a dance floor and a bar and music loud enough to drive all thoughts from your head. Better than drugs, the music pulled you right out of yourself. It was perfect.

"Dance with me," I asked, grabbing both Ryan and Calvin. They both came. I hadn't expected them too, but I didn't complain. The pounding beat drove the last of my thoughts out of my head and I was beginning to feel lighter, like I might float away if I didn't have someone (or some ones) around to anchor me.

I would worry about Savannah another night.

...

Sometime later Ryan turned to me and asked, "You wanna take a break?"

I was a sweaty mess, but I was having fun. Calvin had drifted off and while I would have preferred to have him there, it wasn't a big loss.

It was definitely Ryan's uncle who owned the place because we easily managed to find a place to sit despite the crowd. His hand was on my waist and I let it stay there because I was here to have fun. As the drinks came, I pretended to listen. The things I had to do before the screwing could commence. Fortunately, I was good at pretending to listen and after a few drinks it wouldn't have mattered if I was good or not. Ryan was too out of it to care.

Lightweight.

I glanced around the room, making sure my choice was a decent one. That's when I made eye contact with a man sitting in the corner.

He wasn't anything special. Actually, he was an older man, strands of white decorating his dark hair as he looked down at me. He was much too old to belong in a place like this. But that's not what attracted my attention. He was a sorcerer. Which meant the expression on his face was clearly condescension.

The stories of witches and sorcerers were ones I was well acquainted with, even before I was aware I had any powers as a witch. Mom always did like something to complain about. Witches were always women and sorcerers were always men. Once upon a time the witches had been more powerful, but stupider, and had shared their powers with their counterparts. Different spell types had evolved, but for the most part everyone was happy that we could now do magic all together. Good times for everybody.

Then it got ugly.

The Inquisition happened and the sorcerers turned on the witches, handing over their former teachers in return for safety and power. The witches never forgave the attempted extermination—the sorcerers never forgot that witches were powerless to stop it. Witches hadn't been able to fight back and to this day sorcerers thought they were pathetic.

Truth? We kind of were. Or had been. There were some changes happening, threatening the balance. Some of us were getting powerful, Savannah extremely so, without having to turn to the sorcerers as had happened before. A witch—Paige Winterbourne, my teacher—had found more powerful spells and she was slowly trying to share them with the rest of us. It was slow going and we weren't taken very seriously, but one day we would be able to do something to change the supernatural community's expectations of us. Not that this sorcerer would have any ideas about any of this. Sorcerers weren't known for understanding subtleties. Or brainpower of any kind.

Still, seeing him sitting across from me reminded me who I was. Gillian MacArthur, not so powerful witch, who screwed up on an almost weekly basis. But Savannah always called me back. Always. Especially after a night of almost getting killed—which was just a normal Friday for her.

I had to find her. Which meant I had to get out of there.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I can't do this. I haven't been very honest with you, Ryan. I'm really sorry but I have a boyfriend. And I just realized I cannot do this to him."

He appeared startled but my declaration didn't have its intended effect. "We're just hanging out."

Time to apply a little bit more pressure. "I know. But he gets really jealous sometimes. That's why we're sort of on a break. Last time he put an axe through some guy's car. But he can't help it. It's just because he loves me. I mean..."

I babbled on a little more, but I didn't need too. Ryan had gotten the message. I wasn't worth that sort of trouble.

"If you see Tia, tell her I've got to go," I begged him and he nodded. "It was nice meeting you."

I slipped inside the washroom and called a cab. All I had to do now was find Tia and then head over to Savannah's L.A. base to see if I could pick up any clues about where she was.

Hurrying out of the washroom as quickly as I could without attracting attention, I ignored the hazy sort of room with the heat and the music that I loved rather desperately. Having fun could wait.

I spotted Ryan through the crowd. He was in the same booth as before and if I didn't know better I would say he was still with me. The blonde girl who was currently with him may have had my hair, and my little orphan Annie physique, but her dress was a slightly different color. I had to work at not being pissed. I hated just being someone's type.

I cast one last look back at Ryan, in the hopes of catching glimpse of the sorcerer. He might have hated me, but he had reminded me that while I could play human better than anyone, that wasn't who I really was. As I was looking for the sorcerer, I spotted the other man. Not so much because I found him attractive, but because he seemed so obviously so. A mid-sized powerfully built man with the faintest touches of a beard and the most luxurious head of hair I had ever seen. The sort of hair that looks Photo-Shopped and airbrushed. Handsome in a Ken doll way. And he was heading for Ryan.

Maybe this blonde actually had a boyfriend. Poor boy.

It was only because he seemed so perfect looking that I kept my gaze on him. It was for that reason that I saw exactly why Ryan started screaming.

Ken bypassed the woman's outstretched hand and stuck his hand straight into her chest.