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Ezra didn’t hear the knife hit, but the terrified shriek and the shouts from the other cultists brought a smirk to his face that he quickly tightened and wiped away. He could use his connections to draw information from the local hospital later to see if anyone arrived with a stab wound, then trace who brought them in to find out what kind of idiots decided to rob from him and his family. He poked his head out from the passage; the cultist was on the ground and another was reaching to pull out the knife. He sunk back into his hiding spot with a stern look on his face as he avoided the gaze of the couple of Vanburens that had followed him. A body could still give answers, but it also demanded questions.  The only thing keeping him from getting sick was knowing that the states stance on the castle doctrine would unquestionably side with him. 

First he felt his phone buzz, then he felt the whole house shake as the sound of heavy wind smacked against the house and the ground trembled. Ezra doubted it was just an anomaly, thinking instead that it was the doing of one of the cultists.  He looked back down the hall to see if one of them was channeling anything in retaliation. He saw the cultist who had been pulling the knife out of the other on the ground, likely unable to steady themselves after their realization that their first aid failure had thrown their friend from being on the brink of death to plummeting straight to hell. He also saw the impostor run over to another one as they summoned a torrent of water that was rushing straight his way.

[color=darkgray]“Go, go, go!”[/color] shouted Ezra as he turned and began prodding his siblings to retreat down the passageway. The alarm in his otherwise normally calm-under-pressure voice would’ve likely been enough to get the others to start bolting even if it was accompanied by the sound of a rushing wave. However, even if they hadn’t been bottlenecked there would be no outrunning the water. The wave slammed into Ezra’s back and lifted him off of his feet, threatening to knock him into Alex and sending the pair cascading through the passageway straight back to the dining room. 

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In the safety of the stall, hidden from the mob of annoyed coffee drinkers in need of their afternoon brew, Nisha replayed the conversation she just had in her head:

“I’m sorry [i]Ms. Vanburen[/i], he did not answer,” said Cherry, the proprietor of Café, Oh Yay and current victim of Nisha’s abrasiveness. 

Nisha had glared down the larger woman, her nails biting through the thin polyester of her light jacket to create tiny indents on her arm, her lip curled at one end. Cherry’s tone seemed overall friendly, but there was something in the way she said Nisha’s phony last name that Nisha didn’t like. Maybe she was just imagining it. With complete disregard to the line behind her, Nisha said, [color=lightgreen]“Then. Call. Him. Again.”[/color]

“[i]Your brother[/i] knows how to listen to a voicemail.”

[color=lightgreen]“My brother is going to be very angry when he hears about this,”[/color] hissed Nisha, already invoking the power of an utter rich stranger because she knew it would set the unhelpful woman straight. 

Only she didn’t budge. Cherry said, “[i]Ms. Vanburen[/i], I imagine that, like me, Ezra is busy. Now you can either wait quietly here or I can arrange for Officer Dewey to pick you up again and take you somewhere quiet.”

The two women stared at each other. Nisha only budged when she saw Cherry start to reach for the phone. [color=lightgreen]“Fine, but I want a refill.”[/color]

“Anything for a [i]Vanburen[/i],” said Cherry with a smile.

Now that Nisha had time to analyze the event, she began to suspect that the owner didn’t believe her claim about being a Vanburen. Her eyebrow twitched. How dare that lady assume she’s lying just because she is! Nisha had half a thought to go out there and teach the old bitch some manners. She could use the Long Arms of the Slaugh to toss the entire store and that woman even know what’s going on—Nel had told her that the normals couldn’t really detect the arms, on account of them being all stupid. Nisha grinned wolfishly, thinking of how funny it would be to smash a hot coffee pot across Cherry’s smug face. Nisha might not actually be a rich person whose money put them above the law yet, but she could get away with it nevertheless—no cop would buy the story that the girl materialized some ghost arms to assault her.

Nisha heard footfalls coming from outside of her stall, which was odd since there had been no noise of anyone else opening the bathroom door. She pressed her eye up against the gap in the door, holding her breath as she watched two women emerge from the mirror, one pulling the other through. They both had red hair, although one was darker and the other was brighter, and the taller woman’s arm hung in an odd way. Odder still was the skull slung under her arm. Nisha felt her eyes drawn to it. A slow chill ran down her spine as she analyzed the skull, but then there was nothing. The smaller of the two women began speaking, her Irish accent catching Nisha by surprise. 

Truth be told, it all was perhaps the third oddest thing she had ever seen happen in a bathroom that she could remember, and she could remember a lot of weird bathroom experiences. Still, the woman who had pulled the other girl through the mirror was the first person besides herself that Nisha had seen use magic. Wait, magic? No, that wasn’t Nel’s word for it, she had called it....something. Whatever. The two women would hear a flush followed moments later by the unlatching of a lock as Nisha emerged from the stall. She imagined they had thought that they were alone. The atmosphere felt heavy. Nisha gave them a once over and nodded at the sink.

[color=lightgreen]“You’re in the way,”[/color] she said before stepping between the women to wash her hands. What was the proper etiquette when meeting another magical weirdo? She could’ve used Nel’s advice, but the spirit was always so shy around others. Did she show off her ability like it was some kind of secret handshake? Did they fight? Nisha watched the two in the mirror as she washed her hands.Hopefully it was the former, but if it was the latter they looked pretty soft, one of them was already injured, and she had more fists and although not great with math she knew that meant she could throw more punches than them. 

[color=lightgreen]“So that’s a cool little trick you have there,”[/color] said Nisha, watching Arabelle in the mirror. Her voice fired off like a machine gun, not letting the others get a word in edgewise. [color=lightgreen]“I bet you can get into a whole lotta trouble with something like that. Outta it, too.”[/color] She leaned towards the mirror and placed a wet hand against it: totally normal mirror. A ghostly blue arm slithered out of Nisha’s side, yanked a paper towel from the dispenser, and deposited it in her hands before fading away as she turned around to face the two. [color=lightgreen]“Don’t worry, if there’s a string of burglaries around here I’m not gonna be the one to rat you out to the police.”

“Actually, that gets my brain thinking. Can you do that with any mirror? Like maybe even those security dome ones? Wait, would bank vaults even have one of those guys in”[/color]—she pointed at Aileen, whom she recognized from a tabloid story from when she had “researched” the Vanburens—[color=lightgreen]“Hey, I know you! We’re’ sisters!”[/color] A mischievous smile radiated from Nisha as she spread her arms out, anticipating a hug from someone who didn’t even know she existed, [color=lightgreen]“Well, half-sisters. Who cares, right?”

“I’m Nisha. Oh my gosh, I was getting worried that Ezra was standing me up too. Phew! He’s such a prankster, you know? Very funny guy. Love him already. I was kind of expecting a limo but I totally get doing something more lowkey like this, way cooler anyway, very slick. How’d you know I was in the bathroom though? Oh whatever. Ahhhh! I’m so excited to finally have a family!”[/color] she squealed, peppering in fragments of a convoluted tragic backstory that she was forgetting nearly as quickly as she was making it up. Everybody loved orphans, right? Nisha, no longer capable of waiting for the affection that she felt she was truly deserving of thanks to her performance, launched herself at Aileen to pull her into a big hug, ready to squeeze her “half-sister” as hard as she was about to squeeze the Vanburens for every goddamn red cent they had.