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English
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Trick or Treat Exchange 2024
Stats:
Published:
2024-10-27
Words:
394
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
6
Kudos:
16
Bookmarks:
2
Hits:
100

Book Trained

Summary:

Dani's ghost tours are known far and wide for their accuracy. Her deal with the Sanderson Sisters have made them unique, and her prosper.

Then Winifred shows up to ruin the deal.

Notes:

Work Text:

The ghost tours are all Dani’s idea. They’re a dime a dozen in Salem – you can’t toss a rock without hitting someone in a black dress promising to lead the normies to the spookiest haunts in the city – but she has a special connection to the other side that makes her pretty popular.

She starts off from the Sanderson Sister’s Museum and walks her customers from one end of town to the other, following their rampage, ending in the cemetery. Since she actually has experience with the sisters, her customers pay closer attention, sometimes left incredulous by what she offered up. Not all of them actually believe her. That is, until she uses Winnifred’s book to conjure up the sisters and exorcise them back to the spirit world, all for the benefit of her customers. She practices the craft herself sometimes, though lightly, always careful never to fall to the temptations that magic presents.

Sarah and Mary are the ones who show up most often when she tries to conjure them. Mary likes getting individual attention that has nothing to do with being Winifred’s lackey, and Sarah just plain likes attention of any sort being centered on her. Winifred keeps her dangerous, resentful distance, and Dani can’t blame her. She is not foolish enough to allow her powers to be bound in trade for fortune and attention.

The routine has gotten so well-rehearsed that Sarah and Mary yawn sometimes when they deliver their canned dialogue. That’s probably why – on a Halloween night, the moon high over their heads in the alarmingly full cemetery - they don’t arrive when she conjures them. Instead, Winifred comes alone.

Her sneer and buckteeth have been unchanged by time. “Hello, little girl. I see you still love to play with things that don’t belong to you,” she says.

The audience murmurs in confusion at the look of alarm on Dani’s face. This isn’t in the script, but then again life has a way of going off-track on her. Dani’s hand tightens around Winnifred’s precious book. Her chin tilts upward. She’s not the child she was the first time she encountered this witch. She was Dani Fuckin’ Dennison – witch extraordinaire, and definitely no candle-lighting virgin. Less learned than Winifred in the ways of wicca, but just as tough.

“Come and get it, creep,” she says, ready for whatever might happen next.