The day things started to change was pretty much like any other day, starting out warm and bright and getting hot and it made my human sweat buckets from under his helmet, which was not fun for my human, so he was in a bit of a bad mood. This also was not unusual, the Fire Witch was usually in a bad mood when he sweated a lot and it was still early in the day. We were getting some things from the store, what my human called “consumable tools” that would get used up while he worked on things. That was another reason he was in a bad mood, because he hated tools that turned to dust while they worked and lately he was complaining that his consumable tools were getting consumed at an even faster pace than usual. When he came out of the store he was actually so mad that the sweat was turning to vapor on his head with curly whisps coming out of the vents in his helmet.
“The price of the cut-offs went up again,” he growled. “The price keeps going up and the quality keeps going down, just like with the BSOs. I’m not buying tools any more just tool-shaped objects.”
And he threw a small bag into one of my carriers while muttering under his breath.
As we rode home from the store someone driving all alone in a thing that looked like a cross between a truck and the Witch’s living room yelled at him to stop taking up the whole lane and get on the sidewalk. The he threw something at me and my Witch, and almost knocked me over. The Witch shouted something when he got hit, then pulled us over to the curb.
“That was just about enough of that.” and then he started chanting something I couldn’t hear clearly, and the thing the thrower had been driving started making lots of smoke of different colors, then half of it just disappeared in a big puff of smoke, and the part that didn’t disappear just fell over with a big clang and a lot of sparks. The Witch pushed me away from the curb and pedalled past the guy and shouted, “I think you lost something back there! Get on the sidewalk.”
“That was fun, but a bit mean, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Oh you bet it was fun,” said my human. “I just get so tired of people complaining about my taking the whole lane when they are driving by themselves in a vehicle that could transport their entire extended family, so I just changed his vehicle to one that was more suited to the number of people he carries in it. I just need to refine that spell a bit, the car was supposed to be still drivable but only half as wide, not just half of what it was.”
“Well, maybe if you didn’t mumble the spell it would work better,” I told him. “I couldn’t understand what you said, and I was right here. If you want the deities and elements to do what you want you have to be understood, or they will do what they want.”
“Well, I didn’t want the guy in the SUV to hear what I said, he might get suspicious,” said my human.
“So, speak clearly but in a low voice, so you don’t get heard. Your mouth guard will keep people from seeing you talk.”
And my human rode on home with me.
The very next day we were out for a “fun ride” just to get away from the house. My human calls these “thinking rides” because he uses this time to let problems he’s working on ferment in the back of his mind until a solution bubbles up to the top that can be used. We went way out in the country away from just about everything, on little roads that were practically driveways with county road signs on them. I don’t know how far we rode together, but for me it was fun, talking to the dogs and hearing them bark things I couldn’t understand, watching the squirrels run back and forth across the road ahead, but getting off the road when we got close so I didn’t have to worry about hitting one.
I felt fine, and the way the Fire Witch was riding me I think he was not doing too bad either. We were fast, but not too fast and he was barely breathing hard, just enough that I could tell he was working but not very hard. This was the way he rode when he was either thinking hard or just having too much fun to care, and sometimes both. I think that day was both.
Then we heard another long loud blast on a car horn, and this really fat woman leaned out the window and screamed at us about being in the middle of the road then leaned on the horn again. I heard my Witch chanting again. and just as he got to the end of the chant he pulled to the right and stopped suddenly. The pink cloud surrounded us as half the car disappeared again, but this time it was the part in the middle of the car and 2 parts of the car fell over in the road. He jumped off of me like he was on fire and I had to put down my kickstand to keep from falling over while he ran to the woman laying in the road, shouting “Are you all right? Did you see what hit us?”
I was thinking, “Nothing hit ‘us’,” but since I’m not supposed to talk when other people are around that the Witch calls “muggles” I didn’t say it out loud.
The Fire Witch kept shouting about “What was that?! Did you see that?” over and over, like he didn’t know what really happened, and I saw that he had somehow managed to cut his arm and there was blood running down over his hand while he held it against his arm. Then I understood, this was a way to make it look like it wasn’t his fault that people’s cars fell apart.
The Fire Witch was telling the woman that he saw something coming on the wrong side of the road right as she honked but that it was going too fast to tell what it was and he hoped she got a better look at it than he did, because he couldn’t tell what it was. The woman was screaming over and over but not saying anything I could understand, nothing that sounded like words was coming out.
Then my Witch said, “Can you call 911? I don’t have my cell phone with me.”
And the woman stopped screaming and just pointed to her purse laying torn apart in the middle of the road, and started screaming again, “My purse! It hit my purse that was sitting right beside me, now look at it!” and the screaming with no words started again.
My Witch went to the remains of the purse and found what looked like a cell phone case. “Is this your cell?” he asked the woman. She nodded and continued to scream like a hurt child. My Witch pushed some buttons on the phone and then spoke into it about a wreck, which I guess this was. What he told the person on the other end of the call was that something had hit them both but had just brushed him before cutting the car behind him in 2 and that the driver of the car didn’t appear to be hurt but didn’t look too good, and that we needed a tow truck and an ambulance but that he didn’t know the name of the road we were on.
I knew what had happened but it was still a little scary to be there with the woman screaming and my Witch bleeding and the 2 parts of the car sitting in the road with whisps of pink smoke coming off them. Pretty soon we heard sirens coming and the woman stopped screaming and just sat there with her mouth hanging open and moaning a little ever now and then. There was a fire truck and a police car there and an ambulance rolled up and 2 tow trucks. My Witch was telling people that he saw something coming fast on the wrong side of the road but because the car behind him was honking at him he didn’t get a good look at it as he went for the side of the road to get away from it. And aside from the 2 parts of the car and my Witch’s cut arm there wasn’t anything there that showed a wreck, of course. Since the wreck was caused by the Witch’s spell he was casting there wasn’t anything else there. But it looked like something had torn the car apart and then disappeared, leaving the woman untouched, and me, of course.
The policeman was saying, “The woman never saw it, too busy shouting at the guy on the bike, and the guy on the bike doesn’t know what he saw except that it was fast and on the wrong side of the road.” Then he picked my up and put me in the back of the police car.
to be continued
Witch on a Bicycle 