No Way (Claws Clause 1.75)

The pain dulled. Shea breathed in again, with only the tiniest of twinges radiating along the right side of her body. Even that tiny twinge was too much. With as much power as she conjured up to fix herself, she should be pain-free.

She threw more healing energy at her right shoulder. Breathed again.

Wheezed when another stab cut through her chest.

Okay. Enough of that. If she kept trying, if she kept digging deep into her well of healing, she could actually make things ten times worse. She did that once, pushing too hard when Hudson got terribly hurt when they were teens, and ended up in a hospital for a week when she used half her life force to save his.

Shea liked to think that she knew her limits by now. So even though she still had no idea what was going on, she had to stop questioning it. Way she saw it, it was either her bed in the rooms she kept over her shop, or a hospital if she kept on pushing against this strange sensation.

Shuddering out another breath, she walked carefully toward the front door, leaning against it as she turned the open sign to closed.

Goddess willing, she’d be recovered tomorrow and her sudden spell would be nothing but

an odd memory.

6

It didn’t get any better. Not really.

The pain wasn’t so bad the next morning, or maybe she just got used to the continued hurt. The wheezes? They came and went, never fully disappearing. Shea wasn’t an asthmatic, and she wondered if she was coming down with a cold; that would explain the annoying body aches. Embarrassing for a healer, especially since she loaded up on echinacea and oil of oregano to no avail.

A couple of days after the spell first hit, it was taking everything she had to drag herself downstairs to open her shop on time.

The pressure in her chest? So long as she took it easy—and avoided stress—she could deal with that. It was what it was. Fine. But the twinge in her hip? The way her back stung like she’d been dragged over the carpet or something? How not even a full blast of healing energy or her supplements did anything to help?

In the end, she figured it would go away on its own. It wasn’t getting any worse, and she couldn’t afford to keep her shop closed for more than the one afternoon. So, every morning, no matter how much it took out of her, Shea got dressed, pulled on her glamour, and went down to man the counter.

On the third day, Shea was leaning against the counter, rubbing her thumb along the smoothed side of a length of blue kyanite. It was her favorite healer’s stone and, at that point, she was willing to try anything—well, anything except ask for help.

Business was slow. It was the end of June, and considering the big to-do from last week when a rogue witch got angry and threw a shifter out of a window, traffic had been diverted while the crews cleaned up the mess and worked to repair the crater left when his body slammed into the pavement.

Shea was just wondering if it would be worth it to close a little early, maybe take the rest of the afternoon off, and hope to the Goddess that she felt better in the morning when, suddenly, the front door swung as if pushed in by a gust of ferocious wind.

The tinkling bell caught her attention immediately, then the tingle of powerful magic filtering in its wake directly after. The strength in the breeze obliterated her necessary shields. Like the wind that threw the door open, the rush of staggering power blew past her shields without any resistance at all.

Her shields were her only line of defense. With a heart like hers, she’d try to solve every problem, heal every hurt. She kept her shields up around the clock, blocking the sources of pain that seemed to reach for her whenever they fell. She gasped when they shattered, steeling herself for the onslaught that could easily overwhelm her.

Only it didn’t.

Well, the urge to heal didn’t. The whipping wind? That nearly knocked her on her ass. Only a lifetime of living with a super powerful witch—her beloved Nana—kept her vertical.

Shea’s inky black curls flew around her face, slapping her cheeks, stinging her eyes, a stray strand or two getting caught between her lips. By the time she raised her hands to her head, flattening the wild tresses and taming them, she blinked her eyes open to see the tall, statuesque redhead in heels striding through the doorway of Shea’s shop as if she owned it.

Which was a matter of course. If a local witch had her name on it, part of it did belong to Luciana la Sorcière—whether Shea chose to be a member of the coven or not.

“Madame Luciana.” Shea bowed her head, half in greeting, half in respect. She slipped her blue kyanite into her pocket before she looked up to meet Luciana’s haughty gaze. “This is such a… such a surprise. What can I do for you?”

The head witch rarely left Coventry. When she did, she certainly wore a glamour. Very few Paras—and even fewer humans—knew her favored appearance. Luciana preferred to lord over the biggest coven in America from her penthouse office in the heart of Coventry. She had a whole staff of lesser witches to do her bidding.

So what was she doing at Moonshadow Apothecary?

“Brown eyes,” Luciana said by way of an answer. “It’s a choice.”

It was. Shea couldn’t manage much, between her shields and her backward magic, but a simple glamour to hide her purple eyes from her customers? Easy peasy.

And it wasn’t like she did so because she was ashamed of being a witch. Far from it. She was grateful for the small amount of power she did possess, and she was proud that—while her brother was completely powerless—one of them could continue on passing down the Moonshadow name.

“It makes sense to hide my eyes. I’m not selling witchcraft here, just wellness. You know. Herbs. Poultices. Crystals. It keeps my customers from coming in with high expectations if they think I’m human.”