Still trembling and globbed with Grace’s warm saliva, Allen breathed a heavy sigh of relief to feel his sister’s giant fingers closing protectively around his half-inch body. In another moment, he sensed something that felt like cool suntan lotion spreading electrically over his skin. Blinking, he realized it was a defensive barrier, taut against his body, to prevent him from harm as Roxy regrew him to eight inches in a flash of light and sat him down on the desktop.
“Sorry about the stains, nerd,” Roxy sighed, eying the pooled vomit on her brother’s bedroom floor that resulted from her surprise assault spell on Grace. She looked with disdain back to their uninvited guest. “It’ll come right out with some of that spray like they use for when your dog makes a mess. Or a spell, I guess.”
At last recovering from her sickness, a revolted and visibly infuriated Grace stumbled back to her feet, wiping a hand across her lips and patting her disturbed bangs back into their previously pristine locations. With rosy cheeks puffed, her stormy blue eyes narrowed in on Roxy, who was already glaring with a particularly venomous bent.
“Hey, you’re back just in time to play, too,” Grace giggled with false sugar. She was obviously seething from every pore. “I saw you guys did that earlier. It just looked like so much fun. I mean, come on, could you really expect me to not try it myself?”
“What did you do? Just waited around for me to leave once you knew our parents were gone so you could come in and pick on someone who can’t do anything to stop you?” Roxy scowled, standing between her still-reduced sibling and the recuperating intruder. “You really are a little vulture, aren’t you? All that fancy shit you can do, and still nothing constructive to use it for.”
Allen could hardly recall occasions like this where his sister didn’t insert a joke between every other word. He rarely witnessed her in this kind of cold calm.
“Now, now, there’s no need to be such a bitch, Roxanne,” Grace taunted with a grin, knowing the witch was only called her full name by her mother and loathed its every utterance.
“It takes a bitch to know a bitch, Gracie,” her opponent snapped. “And trust me. Everybody knows you’re a bitch.”
“Uh, Roxy?” Allen peeped anxiously, not quite on board with antagonizing someone as powerful as Grace. He was comforted by the shield his sister had formed around his body, but all the same, he didn’t like feeling this vulnerable. “Please…”
“You heard him,” Grace snickered, taking a well-appreciated step back from the pair. “Maybe you should give your little brother a growth spurt, hmm? He could really use the confidence boost.”
“First I’d like it if you left and didn’t set a single fucking foot back in our house again,” Roxy said icily, taking no prisoners.
“Yeah?” Grace grumbled. She shifted her weight to one leg, tapping her sandaled foot against the carpet and pivoting on the axis of her squat big toe. “Or what?”
“Or I guess I’ll have to ask you the nicer way.”
“Nicer? Nicer than what?”
“Nicer than what I’m already asking you,” Roxy answered through a gratingly gritted smile. “Nicer for me, obviously. Not for you.”
“Roxy?” Allen pleaded. He certainly wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially after his sister had saved him from an almost definitely nightmare-inducing ride down into Grace’s digestive tract. But by now, the tension was too thick for even a cursed blade to cut through it. “Please…”
“Uh-oh, I think baby brother’s gonna cry, Roxy,” Grace teased, pantomiming a wringing of tears on her cheeks. “Maybe you should do something before I just feel too bad for him and have to help him myself.”
“You lay another finger on my brother…” Roxy spat, her tone cold enough to quell a dying star. “…and you’re gonna have a nice big spider where your head used to be.”
Allen froze, too daunted to summon any further words. It seemed his sister was intent on this happening, whatever it was, and though he was just as frightened as before, he realized it was more than just personal pride driving her now.
Grace’s eyes flared, as even with all her bravado and power she couldn’t go unaffected by words such as those. At last, she plastered on another smile, and stepped closer to Roxy, who drew her hand behind her back with fingertips glowing purple in preparation for a retaliation.
“Not sure I’d be so into that,” Grace sighed with some boredom, as though discussing the state of the weather. “I mean, I don’t have anything to wear that would look good with a bunch of hairy legs hanging off my head. What would people say?”
“Probably roughly the same things they say now,” Roxy retorted instantly. “You know, if anyone even noticed the difference, obviously.”
Another stinging pause followed as the younger but more powerful witch looked the college student up and down, sizing her up with a wrinkled upper lip.
“All right, all right, I guess you and I got off on the wrong foot too, Roxanne,” Grace said. “Maybe we should ask your little brother for suggestions, since he didn’t seem to like our trust swallows very much.”
Without warning, Grace’s hand thrust forth, not toward Roxy but Allen, who recoiled at the very sight of her fingers coming for him again and flopped onto his back. Double-taking, Roxy turned her head for just an instant, the rare sight of real concern raw in her face as she saw her brother had been strangely untouched by whatever the other witch had done.
That was when Grace’s other hand slapped itself into Roxy’s stomach instead, crackling with thunderous energy that caused the lights overhead to dim momentarily. In a flash, she had the twenty-year-old in a bind of luminescent plasma that seemed to course down her entire arm and through Roxy’s body, and swinging around with all her might as though tossing a discus, she flung the older witch across the room and into the wall with a spray of sparks and light trailing behind. The force of the throw whipped papers into the air as Roxy careened directly through the wall and landed with a thud on the other side, shrouded in a cloud of rising dust.
“ROXY!” Allen cried, lunging forward to the end of the desk and throwing himself off of it, knowing the watery shield around his body would protect him. He landed awkwardly on his feet with no pain despite the drop and scrambled forward, but suddenly felt a pair of fingers closing around his back and lifting him up.
He dangled awkwardly, batting his limbs as Grace’s fingers wrestled, preventing him from following after his sister through the hole their attacker had blown in the house.
“Not so fast, little boy. This is kind of a girl-talk thing we’re having here,” Grace scolded, then proceeded to plop Allen onto his bed with an uncaring flick of her wrist. “Or maybe just more of a witch-talk. Stay put while the big people sort stuff out, okay?”
Realizing the fruitlessness of trying to act while Grace was watching him, Allen looked through the plaster-crumbling opening in his bedroom wall and was filled with relief to see a dust-coated and more thoroughly pissed-off Roxy standing back up, none too pleased for the opening blow of the encounter being the dirtiest kind of sucker punch.
“I’ve seen you throw people around when they had a ten-second head start on you and a barrier already put up,” Roxy commented pleasantly. “Little scared I’ll give you a run for your money without the cheap shots, huh, Gracie?”
“No, don’t be silly, Roxanne,” Grace giggled. “I was just making things even after all your bullshit you were puking all over me earlier.”
“Better than actually puking, you have to admit,” Roxy snorted with a sly half-smile that earned another grimace from Grace. She raised a hand that was already radiating from palm to fingertips with emerald light. “You know, my mom’s gonna have a cow about that wall. I hope you know some good reconstruction spells.”
“Obviously I do,” the younger witch laughed as green sparks began to spill from her palms in equal readiness. The room darkened as the unlikely battlefield warmed from the wrathful energy pulsing through both powerful bodies. “And it’s a good thing, too, cuz your face is gonna need it big-time after this.”