No Way (Claws Clause 1.75)

Yeah.

No way.

Part II

Shea

5

It began with a wheeze.

Shea Moonshadow was standing in the middle of her shop when, suddenly, she couldn’t catch her breath. One second she was taking inventory of her essential oils. The next? It felt like the air had been knocked from her lungs.

The clipboard clattered to the tiles. Her hand went straight to her chest, her brown eyes wide and afraid as she choked on a gasp. She bent over, clutching the crystal hanging from the chain around her throat. She wheezed and shuddered, desperate for her next breath.

It didn’t last long. But five seconds could feel like an eternity when she couldn’t explain the stabbing pain that arced down the fleshy backs of her upper arms before she fell to her knees, hands flat on the floor, her shoulders screaming like someone had taken a bat to them.

As soon as she was down, though, the phantom aches dulled, disappearing as quickly as they had come. If it wasn’t for the fact that she’d been brought to her knees by something she couldn’t explain, she might’ve thought she imagined it.

She didn’t.

She couldn’t.

It was so sudden, so all-consuming, and so… so real that the first thing Shea did when she finally got unsteadily back to her feet was reach up and check that her arm wasn’t bleeding.

Well, no. That was her second reaction. First? She dropped a fraction of her impressive shields to put out a feeler, checking to see if someone had used magic against her. She might be a witch who chose not to practice the craft—for way too many reasons—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t sense a vindictive spell when she was on the receiving end of it.

Was it a curse?

A hex?

A jinx?

Shea frowned, rubbing her chest with the heel of her hand, then breathed in as deep as she could.

Nothing.

The tell-tale scent of baby powder would be easy to miss with all of the candles, incense, and oils in her apothecary, but she didn’t need her nose. The still air was enough of a clue that, whatever caused her little, well, spell, it wasn’t witchcraft.

Weird.

Luckily for her, that was a good thing. With the way her magic had the tendency to backfire when she attempted even the smallest of spells, if someone had cursed her, there wasn’t much she could do to fight back on her own without a bunch of diamonds, her grandmother’s grimoires, and a whole mess of luck.

Healing, though? Healing she could do. And while a lot of her customers were convinced that she had a charmed touch when it came to helping them with their health and wellness, healing was the only one of the Moonshadow family’s gifts that she could actually tap into.

But it wasn’t magic—at least, not the way other charms and spells, wards and incantations were. It was more of a talent and a skill, and one that Shea prized greatly.

A small, tentative breath. Another. She still wheezed, though the sharp pain had lost some more of its edge. She took another breath, deeper this time, and closed her eyes, trying to get a sense of where her strange injuries began and where they were the worst.

It… it seemed to be everywhere. Her arms, her chest, her back, her shoulders, even her hip. Though it wasn’t as strong as it was when the feeling first hit her, there was no denying that she hurt. It kind of felt like she’d been in a car crash or something, but that was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

Growing up a witch with a Nana like hers, Shea knew better than to think that anything was impossible. However, when she finally got back to her feet, leaving her clipboard on the tiles as she grounded herself against her countertop, she was seriously beginning to second guess that.

The black star diopside threaded throughout the marble helped Shea grow calm, balancing her as she dug deep to heal her body. She’d done this a thousand times before, knew how much energy she needed to heal a papercut or, one clumsy afternoon, a broken arm.

Only, this time, it didn’t work. At least, not entirely.