A solid meal and a cup of coffee later, Luc was itching to get outside and start working. Maybe if she could rig something up quickly, she’d be able to get over to the commission and pick up something simple at least. Just a little job to make a little bit more money.

  I wonder how much I made from the showdown with Marie yesterday, Luc thought, resisting the urge to pull out her phone and see if she’d gotten paid. It didn’t matter how many times she checked, she wouldn’t get paid until Monday.

  “Where’s your phone?” Maisey asked as Luc pushed back from the table. “I’d like to set up your social media page. Start getting this footage out there.”

  Luc paused, hand twitching toward her back pocket. “Why can’t you just use yours?”

  “Because it’s not my image we’re worried about,” Maisey said.

  “Can’t you just handle it?” Luc asked. “I don’t have time to-to take pictures and post videos.”

  She knew she was supposed to be building up her image to compete with Marie, so she wasn’t just an accessory for Magical Girl Limit, but where was she supposed to find the time for it? Wasn’t Maisey dealing with it part of their deal? Maisey would set up everything online that Luc didn’t have time for, and Luc would help Tobias protect his family’s farm.

  “Don’t you want to have some say?”

  Luc shrugged silently. She really didn’t care that much, and she didn’t want to look at any more footage of herself in her stupid uniform with her scrappy tools.

  Compared to Marie, she looked like a child playing dress up. Nobody would root for her over Marie. Nobody would notice her, except to point out how ridiculous she looked. She’d never gain respect, looking like this.

  “Okay,” Maisey said. “I’ll deal with it. What do you—”

  “Just figure it out, please,” Luc said, cutting her off. “Tobias, can we get started?”

  The boy froze with a fork almost to his mouth, another bite of roasted apples waiting for him. He had to have eaten half the pie, or crisp, or whatever Maisey had called it.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, and took the last bite. “Where do you want to get started?”

  That was the question. Luc didn’t even know how big the farm was and had no idea where to start, and if it would even be possible to shield such a large area entirely from magic. Magic was a force of nature. It would be like trying to stop rain from falling in a specific place. Possible, with enough effort, but not sustainable for long.

  “Just… walk me around the farm,” Luc said, settling her hands onto her utility belt. “I need to see what I have to deal with.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Mason, Maisey, do you want to come?”

  Mason lifted his head over the couch far enough for them to see him shake his head. At the dining table, Maisey gave her own a slight shake.

  “I’ll join you when I’m done,” she said. “Just, wait, hold on.”

  Her eyes lit up as she grabbed a small scrap of paper, quickly folding it into a familiar crane. With a touch, it came to life, hovering off the ground and flying over to Tobias.

  He held out a hand for it, letting it settle onto his palm. “That’s never not cool,” he said, and lifted the paper crane up to his ear. It settled behind it, wings tucked into its sides, seemingly comfortable there.

  Luc gave a nod and walked out of the house. Tobias ran out after her, catching her before she’d made it off the porch.

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing,” Luc said. “I just want to get going. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “It’s a Saturday, Luc,” Tobias said, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Where do you have to be?”

  “Work! Some of us, unfortunately, have to work! And it’s not like I’m getting paid for this.”

  She bit her tongue before she could let anything else out, forcing a breath into her lungs. She couldn’t go around saying things like this, or people would get worried. As far as anyone knew, she was doing fine. Her mother was doing fine. They were all doing fine.

  “I can pay you for this.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “I can.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “You won’t,” Luc said, spinning on him. “We have a deal. You don’t need to pay me. I just can’t waste all day talking and-and eating pie!”

  “Spending time with friends isn’t a waste,” Tobias said, his tone surprisingly gentle. “And if you’d just said something sooner, we’d be out there already. The only person you need to be angry at is yourself for not communicating.”

  Luc opened her mouth, then snapped it shut, tongue burning with scathing comments she couldn’t let fly. Not when he was right, the truth burning across her cheeks as she flushed.

  “It’s okay,” Tobias said, laying a hand on her shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I forgive you.”

  She shoved his hand away. “Can you not?”

  “Not what? Be nice?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s weird.”

  “That’s sad and disturbing,” Tobias said. “I’m sorry for you.”

  “Stop it!”

  He chuckled and darted away before she could swat him. “Okay, okay! Chill. Let’s go get the farm vehicle.”

  Tobias led the way over to the barn, opening up the sliding front door to reveal a beat up four wheeler with a trunk on the back.

  “Oh, do you want your other shoe? I found it yesterday.” He lifted the beat up tennis shoe out of the bed, holding it up with a grin.

  “Sure,” Luc said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “I’ll take it with me when I leave.”

  “Great,” Tobias said. “Now get out of my seat. You have no idea where you’re going, and I do.”

  Luc stared at him for a moment before releasing her grip on the steering wheel with a groan. “Fine!” She lifted herself out of the seat and dropped into the passenger seat, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Tobias laughed as he took the driver’s seat, turning the vehicle on and driving them out of the barn. Rather than driving deeper into the property, he took off toward the house, circling around onto the road. They only stayed on the gravel road for a few moments before turning off into a pathway worn into the dirt, a few pieces of grass still struggling to grow on it.

  The well worn pathway seemed to traverse the entire farm, and the further they went, the deeper the pit in Luc’s stomach grew. There were apple orchards, animal pastures, pumpkin patches and corn fields. So much to protect, more acreage than she could even wrap her mind around. And Tobias was talking about how it wasn’t even that big of a farm.

  Laughter, empty, panicked laughter, bubbled out of her chest as she started shaking her head.

  Tobias slowed the vehicle to a crawl, creeping along inch by inch as he turned in his seat to stare at her. She didn’t look at him, fidgeting with one of the zippers on her utility belt as she stared out at the apple orchard she’d just helped save days ago. Staring through it, she could make out the tree that the werebat had destroyed, still lying there in pieces, leaves slowly going brown and brittle.

  When Tobias asked for her help, she’d had an idea. Something simple, not fully formed yet, but she’d had an idea.

  She had no idea how to make it work over such a large area.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” Luc said, unable to look at him. “Nothing. Except I don’t know that I can help, and maybe the commission was right for not trusting me with anything important because I didn’t even do a good job stopping that werebat the other day—”

  “Wait, werebat?”

  Luc blinked, momentarily thrown off track, before side eyeing the boy. “The huge beast that you helped me with?”

  “Oh, that thing. Why’re you calling it a bat? It didn’t have wings.”

  “It had a bat face, though,” Luc said. “But that’s not the point!”

  “I don’t really know what the point was supposed to be,” Tobias said. “You dealt with the werebat, or whatever you want to call it. I can’t think of a way you could have done better. You know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Could have fooled me,” Tobias said with a shrug.

  “I-I just make it up as I go along!” Luc sputtered.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what most people do,” Tobias said. “Why don’t you just tell me what you think you can’t do?”

  Luc sat in tense silence for a moment before forcing herself to speak. This was Tobias’s home, she couldn’t lie to him. It affected him far more than it did her.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to hold up my end of the favor,” Luc said. “Magic shields can be tricky, I don’t understand them that well, and I don’t have any idea how I’m supposed to shield your entire farm. I’m sorry. We can go and I can tell Maisey to drop the whole image thing and I’ll get out of your hair—”

  He flicked her in the side of the head. She stopped mid-ramble, mouth open as she stared at him, unable to form words.

  “So you can’t shield the whole farm. What can you do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that,” he snapped. “If you can’t do it, it’s fine. I was just hoping there was something we could do to help protect the farm since we keep getting infested.”

  As if on cue, something in the trees screeched and leapt out at them.

  Luc jumped up, swinging an arm over her head at the flying imp. She caught the creature across its side with her forearm, sending it flying. Before Tobias had a chance to do anything, she leapt out of the vehicle after it.

  It had landed in the middle of the pathway, getting its arms and legs underneath it as it tried to pick itself up. The imp, with goat-like horns curling out of its head, chittered as magic began to build between the two points of their horns.

  She kicked it, sending it flying out of the path and down the hill to the side. With a little huff, she marched back to the vehicle and dropped back down into her seat.

  “That was unexpected,” Tobias said, giving his head a shake. “I mean, I understand that I’m irresistible, but…”

  Luc stared at him blankly and he sighed. “Yeah, okay, that joke is funnier with Maisey around. What do we do now? Do we kill it?”

  “I don’t have anything on me to kill it right now,” Luc said. “If we go back to my car, I can build something.”

  “Not necessary,” said a voice from above. The wings flashed overhead, a white feather floating down to land on Luc’s lap as the magical girl soared out of the sky and landed in the grass below. The imp lunged at her as she punched, hitting the thing with such inhuman force that it exploded into magical dust and bones.

  Marie turned to them with a satisfied smile, unphased by the insane blow she’d just dealt. “I thought your whole thing was being prepared, Gadget?”