Ainsley took her witchcraft back to the city.

She hadn't expected to have changed that much. She'd gone down expecting to learn a set of skills, but by and large expected to come back as herself. And she still was, but a different self.

The first thing she did when she got back to the apartment she'd been subletting was to restock the kitchen. She hadn't done much cooking before she went down to train and she wouldn't do much now, but it wouldn't be reheated takeout and frozen boxed dinners anymore. She bought two crockpots, a large and a small, for meals to keep and meals to make for one or two nights. She took a couple of hours, worked out a list of staples for things she could cook quick, cook tired. Or cook halfway and leave the last couple steps for when she needed a hot meal but was too tired to do the full pots and pans.

The next thing was a plant. A succulent; she wasn't good at the green thing and she never would be. But she could brighten the space up and bring life into it when she wasn't there.

Prisms, well-placed on the windowsill. Open curtains when she was working, open curtains at night with the street lights coming in. Candles, never more than one or two at a time, placed at strategic points where the scents would waft throughout the apartment. At the same time, she kept with her reminders that when the carrot didn't work she had to be capable of pulling out the stick. A shard from the bowl Ofelia had broken, set at the corner of her desk where it looked like a knickknack. A bundle of cinnamon Lorna had given her to start her cookery collection, sitting in the shard for the reminder to use everything at hand. A booklet of photos from the rest of the family, which she'd called a coven until she'd been instructed better.

Her apartment was so clean it was almost sterile. A woman came in every third day except on Sundays. Ainsley didn't recognize herself from who she had been before the witchcraft.

Some of her goals had been realized. She had a good job with a design firm and worked in a building with glass and stainless steel decor. Posters and advertisements showcased their success, splashed over every vertical six by six surface that would stand still. She could afford the housekeeper, the one-bedroom apartment, and she could afford not to cook for herself even though she made the time to. She could afford a car, though it struck her as less a luxury in this town and more an annoyance. She could afford to take a taxi, but discovered people didn't bother her on the subway as much as they used to. And she liked watching people. She stopped in the subway by her house and talked to the saxophonist, who she thought of as her saxophonist, every evening he was out there. Ainsley before the witchcraft would have been confused or even appalled. Witch Ainsley wanted the contact, to listen to the beautiful music and to keep in touch with people. All kinds of people.

Both Ainsleys would have eaten dinner at the food trucks after work, although she liked to think Witch Ainsley was more adventurous in her choices and paid more attention to the people who crewed them.

"Thanks." Always mind your manners, Lorna had reminded her. Be nice to start, be brutal if you have to. Food truck owners didn't require brutality, only a minimum of politeness and understanding when they made mistakes. Which were inevitable when there was a dinner rush line six people deep.

She'd gotten enough food to keep for lunch tomorrow, expecting to be up late tonight preparing for meetings and setting up the food and drinks and the meeting rooms for maximum accord witchcraft. Also dealing with the negotiations for the international rights and ten other things she tried to juggle mentally as she walked. Her parents might have a point about her working too hard.

It wasn't the witchcraft either, although when she'd first traveled down to stay and apprentice with Ofelia and Lorna she had thought being a good witch would take up all of her time. It was the ad agency job. Her official title was Client Liaison, but they'd come up with that because they were embarrassed to call her the company witch, and what she ended up doing had far more to do with witchcraft than her design degree. Meeting with clients, holding their hands and explaining to them why having the logo appear bigger on the billboard wasn't a good idea, presenting them with the proofs and going over the brochures they'd written up and the commercials they'd filmed and taking down the feedback. All the while using her newly developed powers to make them agreeable and foster communication.

It still felt like cheating, except that every other company did it and she would be in high demand from any other agency in the business of selling things to people if she decided to jump ship. And she was careful to try and avoid anything like a compulsion, unless it involved keeping people from yelling at the artists. She was more than willing to browbeat people into that, by words or by witchcraft. Though since witchcraft was often accomplished by the carefully chosen use of words that could be a bit of a redundancy.

And she'd gone around and around this mental ground so often she'd worn a path in her mind. Annoyed at herself, she shook her head and looked up, only to realize she'd passed by her subway entrance and had to double back.

"Oh hell." And now there was someone shadowing her. She passed by her subway stop again, turned a corner as if she'd forgotten something at the food court stand and was taking a shortcut back there. The man following her didn't turn away or continue down the main road. "Dammit."

Statistics, she supposed, were not on her side. This was one of the most dangerous cities for sexual assault, she was a woman alone, also one of the statistically largest categories for being assaulted. She stood a better chance of being taken sympathetically given her blonde hair and pretty hazel eyes, but that was after the horrible thing happened. If it happened. She glanced at the man in the reflection of a shop window as they came out of the alley. He was skinny, didn't move as though he worked out, wore a t-shirt and loose jacket and jeans. He didn't seem to have a gun on him, which didn't mean he didn't but if he did it would be a small one. He might have a pocket knife but he didn't have the over-the-top bit of extra to him that suggested he carried anything more dangerous than a folding pocket knife, let alone knew how to effectively attack with one. She'd be all right if it came to a confrontation, unless she got careless or too scared to think.

Another five minutes' walk and they were on the other side of the small park from the food trucks. The shops were closed at this hour, and the foot traffic was sparse with nothing for people to do but pass by between places. Between was good. She worked well in the between places.

"You can stop following me now," she told him. Without turning, projecting her voice loud enough that she could be clearly heard behind her. "You've picked a poor victim tonight. Might as well go home, try again another day."

"The hell are you talking about? I'm just out for a walk, like everyone else." He put on wounded pride very badly. He was also, to judge by his voice, about two feet behind her now. He'd walked up behind her to take advantage of her stopping to talk to him, to get up in her space. Which was, not that he could know it, exactly where she wanted him. She opened her purse and rummaged, letting the wraps drop. He'd step on them to show dominance and she'd have to get new ones. Waste of money.

"Lady, you don't need to call for help." A foot and a half. "I swear, I'm just out for a walk. Honest." She heard a rustle of plastic that meant he was standing on the bag. Good enough.

Ainsley turned with her pepper spray in one hand and her knife in the other, not a pocket knife but a combat knife four inches long, she'd checked the state regs. "And yet I don't believe you," she said in her boardroom voice as she sprayed him in the eyes. Her aim was better now that he'd come in close, and because she wasn't afraid.

He screamed and dropped to his knees, scrabbling at his eyes. She sighed and looked at her wraps, wondering if there was enough yogurt separate in there to make a difference and then decided it wasn't worth scraping it out. "Oh, be quiet. You should have anticipated this risk when you chose to get up in a woman's space at night when she was by herself." Ah, but she did have a container of sauce that, as far as she knew, was mainly yogurt. "Here. This may help."

"The hell is this stuff?" He tried to knock her hands away but since he couldn't see through the pepper spray and the pain she avoided him easily.

"Tzatziki. Leave it on, it'll cut the burning." She knelt beside him. "That was a risky thing you did, attacking a witch."

"A wh-- A wh, wh, wh--" He might be stuttering from the pain of pepper in his eyes, or from the fear of realizing what he'd done. "You're a wh--"

"A witch, yes. I don't suppose men like you think about that when you follow and attack a woman alone at night, that you might be attacking a witch. A sorceress. Someone more powerful than you." A woman with a good sense of self-defense and the confidence to use six months' worth of training could have taken this guy down. He was overconfident and underpowered.

And now he scooted back away from her and opened his eyes to see that she'd drawn her knife. Every witch should have a knife, Lorna and Ofelia had both said. Useful for cutting herbs, drawing circles, intimidating assholes who wanted to take advantage of her skills. She'd said she didn't think drawing a knife in the conference room was a good idea. Now she'd have to call them and tell them they had been on to something, assuming they didn't already know from being attuned to their baby sister.

His eyes focused on the blade as she waggled it back and forth. "Witching used to be a bloody business back in the day. Headless chicken and goats. Reading fortunes in entrails. Did you know it's only in the last couple hundred years that we stopped doing that?" Because entrails went out of fashion, Ofelia said, not because it was less effective. And after she'd talked to her boss and some of her co-workers about some of the more physical things she'd done to train as a witch she understood what her eldest sister meant. "They still teach it, though. How to read the patterns in the entrails of a once-living being. Blood magic is the most powerful." Which was also true, but performed with sterile needle pricks under most circumstances. Not with a well-maintained military knife dangled between loose fingertips at a quivering stomach.

"Y-you. You. You..."

"Oh calm down. If I were going to gut you I'd've done it several minutes ago. But I tell you this so you know who you have chosen to piss off this night." Gutting him was tempting, but it'd be out of pique and spite and she would feel awful about it later. Aside from the obvious consequences, as a person she wasn't the casually murdering type. But she would make him squirm. And piss himself, by the smell. "Your fate will be bloody, if you don't stop harassing people who might be bigger and meaner than you. Take a class. Read a book. Find a video lecture series online. Leave women alone, bothering them won't make your life any easier or more fulfilling. And one of them might decide to shoot you instead of pepper spray you."

He whimpered when she put her knife back in her purse, as if she might have a gun in there. She stood up and kicked the wraps over towards him. "If they're edible you might as well eat them. I'm going to go home, take some aspirin, and forget about you before I go to sleep. But seriously, take a class or find a different hobby." Ainsley squinted at him. "There's a few continuing ed lectures at the science museum. They're free, and you get to walk around the basement and they show you the extra stuff that's not in the exhibits. You might try it sometime."

Whether or not he would, she didn't know. But he had the right kind of nerdy t-shirt on and the outline of rocks in his pockets. Shoes with scuff marks you could get from walking around in parks and over boulders. These days, all the advertisements were for expensive programs that cost a lot of money even before you got to buying the equipment. If she could point out how he might engage his interests for less money, it could help. It was a chance that cost her nothing and could mean everything to another woman.

She went home exhausted and annoyed, too annoyed to call a delivery place on the phone and too drained to stare at endless screens of menus so when the knock on the door came thirty minutes later she knew exactly who to blame. "Thank you," she sighed, tipping the poor confused and nervous kid. "It's nothing, it's been a long day."

"Well, I hope it gets better, ma'am," he nodded, relaxing as he decided her wrath wasn't in his direction. "Thanks."

The note on the dinner was from Ofelia. It said 'the soup told me you needed to eat.'