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Agatha was nauseated. Her mother’s home had become a place to gather for the coven and women in need of safe shelter. It aggravated Agatha to no end. It was exhausting to be forced into the role of hostess, especially when all of her coven members hated her beyond comprehension and she would murder them if someone just asked nicely.
Apart from that, her least favorite coven member, Madeline, had recently found her soul match in a tinkerer from a town just outside Salem and managed to convince that poor woman to join their coven. Their union was taking place in just under two weeks, so Evanora summoned them to her home to start preparations.
So, there they were, huddled in the corner of the living room, rubbing their noses together in between languid kisses. It was disgusting. She was a hostage within her own home.
“Excuse me,” Agatha called out to them, her finger raised toward the ceiling, “I can feel my lunch creeping back up. Would you mind standing six feet apart?”
Madeline turned toward Agatha, brown eyes blazing with annoyance, and sneered. “Sweet Hecate, are you always so miserable?”
“Not always. Just when you’re in proximity.” Agatha lowered her book so it laid flat on the table in front of her. She was ready for some sparring with the red head, which was typical for them.
Madeline scoffed and rolled her eyes. “No wonder you still can’t find your soul match even at your age.”
Agatha’s chest practically constricted at that, but she managed to not show it outwardly. Instead, she smirked condescendingly and stood from the chair stationed at her mother’s kitchen table. “And perhaps you haven’t found yours until now because you’re a who-”
“Agatha!” Evanora appeared in the doorway behind her. Agatha’s smirk dropped almost immediately.
Madeline had the upper hand now and she knew it. Not only had she indoctrinated another young woman into their coven, but she practiced light magic and was a midwife for them. She was everything Evanora wanted and nothing Agatha could be. Agatha practiced dark magic and had been scolded many a time for attempting to learn spells above her station. She was a spirit witch and that held no value within their group. She was dead weight, unwanted and unliked, and her mother made that very clear.
“Evanora, thank you for inviting us over and helping with the ceremony.” Madeline stepped forward to bow momentarily before Evanora.
Her mother smiled, genuine and kind, and Agatha’s eyes slipped shut without permission. She couldn’t watch. She grabbed her book from the table and left for her bedroom. She could still hear them planning the ceremony through the thin wooden door. She gripped her book tighter and tighter until her knuckles turned white. Agatha reached for her chest with her other hand and rubbed at the cloth covering her soul mark. Underneath, the scar was raised and darker than the rest of the skin. People could get them anywhere on their body, but she had to get it directly on her chest, right above her heart, easily visible to everyone if she didn’t wear her blouses buttoned to her collarbones. Agatha’s lips twisted into a frown.
“No wonder you still can’t find your soul match even at your age.”
She was already categorized as a spinster within the settlement. She had been searching for her soul bond for over 10 years, but no one had the same mark as her. Her scar was a cursive, uppercase A where the crossing of the letter swooped off to the side as if written by an uncontrolled hand. There were two more lines scratched across the top of the letter and on the bottom right. It almost resembled the runes she read about in her books.
Her nails dug into her clothing until her skin burned. She wished she could rip that damn soul mark right off of her skin. She knew of people that never got soul marks. She’d heard of people that had multiple. She happened to be the person that had a mark and just hadn’t met her other half. At times, she wondered if she scared them away with her reputation and ire. In the end, it didn’t matter because she was stuck with her mother. She had nowhere else to go. Not until she found her damn soulmate.
Agatha scoffed at the thought. She was tired of waiting. Perhaps it was time to forego the hope that this would happen organically. If fate wouldn’t bring her to her soulmate, magic would. With that thought in mind, Agatha threw on her cloak and sprinted to a small hovel of a home near the river by her mother’s home. Lilia Calderu wasn’t part of her coven and never would be. She had made that clear to Evanora on several occasions, but her divination skills would be perfect for what Agatha was looking to do.
Agatha didn’t even knock. She barreled through the front door and heard a startled gasp from her left. Lilia stood, mouth agape, as she stirred a pot on her table.
“You left your door unlocked again.” Agatha chuckled for a moment. “You should be careful with that. You never know what miscreant might show up.”
“Yeah,” Lilia quirked a brow and stared at Agatha knowingly, “All kinds of assholes around here.”
Agatha smirked at the banter and watched as Lilia tossed some rosemary into the pot in front of her. “I’m here for a favor.”
“Unsurprisingly.” Lilia quipped. Agatha had bugged her too many times to count, asking for all kinds of elixirs or palm readings. She wouldn’t admit it, but she enjoyed the old hag’s company and found her skills in divination to be fascinating.
“I need you to tell me where my soulmate is.”
Agatha stared at the rundown cottage in front of her with a hint of disgust. She prayed to Hecate that her soulmate was just visiting this hellhole and didn’t live here in squalor. Lilia was unclear about the location where she’d find her soulmate. She said it was hard to pinpoint where the soulmate was and how it felt disorienting to track her, as if she was moving from place to place suddenly. She sensed her at the tavern in the settlement, then said she had moved to a home miles away, then said she was at this hellhole.
But now, Agatha knew who she was looking for. A tall brunette woman with shoulder length, straight hair and dark eyes that made Lilia shiver. That was concerning, but most people said Agatha herself was unsettling to be around.
Suddenly, a silhouette walked past the lit window and her breath caught in her lungs. She rubbed at the scar on her chest. With a deep inhale, she pressed forward. The lawn was overgrown and Agatha had to dredge through mud and weeds to reach the rickety front door. It was slightly ajar and she was able to push her way in.
The last thing she expected to see was a dead man sprawled across the floor, hand clutching his heart and his unseeing eyes wide open. Agatha gasped under her breath and froze, waiting to hear if there was anyone else inside the home. The silhouette she had seen was a woman’s form, sleek and curvy, but this was a pear-shaped older man. Did her soulmate kill this man? For some reason, it wasn’t detering her.
“Hello?” Agatha yelled into the dimly lit home. She heard something fall to the wooden floor to her right and turned toward it. In the corner of the room was a pristine skeleton positioned in the armchair there. Agatha gripped her own chin, confused by the turn of events. She was sure others would be disturbed by the sights before her, but Agatha had been the cause of many scenes like this and wasn’t afraid in the least. If anyone attempted to attack her, she could handle them. She was sure of it.
“I saw you in the window.” Agatha announced to the person she assumed was hiding. The home remained quiet and still, and Agatha’s eyes slipped shut in disappointment. With a grunt, Agatha turned and ran out of the home, muttering under her breath that Lilia would simply have to try again.
The next session with Lilia led her to a seedy tavern in the middle of the settlement. It was dangerous to venture into town with all of the hatred toward witches running rampant. She heard of a few witches being strung up, burned, and drowned. Her mother moved their home further into the woods for that very reason. They were forbidden from practicing magic or discussing dark arts while in town.
Agatha watched as drunk men stumbled in and out of the tavern, slurring their way through conversations about mundane events going on in town. She gripped the fabric of her cloak and brought it around her body even tighter. She wasn’t worried about fending off these idiots. She was more so worried about having to use her magic to fend them off then incurring the puritan wrath.
The tavern was set to close in about an hour and she suspected the patrons would be starting to get escorted out soon. Before she could contemplate how to navigate this situation, the door to the tavern suddenly burst open and a flood of drunk men and scantily clad women were rushing out of the building, screaming with terror. After a few moments, a tall man stumbled out behind the crowd with a bloodied knife and blood splatter on his face and shirt. He was yelling angrily about how someone deserved what they got and no one understood. He ran behind the group of terrified patrons, but Agatha took that as her cue to enter the tavern and look for clues. She wondered if her soulmate was one of the people that ran from the establishment.
She wouldn’t think the person paired to be with her, cosmically, would be afraid of death.
Inside the tavern were a few stragglers trying to resuscitate a bruised and bloodied man on the floor. She immediately disregarded the men in the room and looked at the women to see if they matched the description she was looking for. The woman kneeling over the bleeding man was stout, short and most definitely blonde. The woman running past Agatha screaming for the doctor in town was tall but a redhead. She continued to scan the room and spotted a shadow in the doorway leading to the kitchen behind the bar. She noticed a flash of medium length brunette hair and how the shadow was nearly as tall as the doorway.
Agatha’s breath caught in her throat as she ran past the gnarly scene, ignoring how the blonde tending to the man said that she couldn’t feel a pulse anymore, and burst into the kitchen. Agatha stopped cold when she didn’t see anyone in the room.
“I know you’re in here,” Agatha growled. The kitchen remained silent with no one stepping forward. This angered her even more. “Don’t be a coward. It’s unattractive.”
The room remained still. Agatha deflated. Her anger morphed into a twisted combination of disappointment, sadness, and hopelessness. She didn’t need a love that burned passionately or felt timeless. She needed a way out of her mother’s clutches, someone to be her partner, to see life in the same way. A kindred spirit. She had never found anyone that understood her, and it seemed like she never would.
She needed to do the healthiest thing for her: let it go. She thought about the Darkhold she had acquired from a dark witch right outside Salem. She had been teaching Agatha dark magic and was becoming more and more ill. She gave Agatha the book but she had been too anxious to try opening it yet. The book seeped with malicious energy and something haunting. But she suddenly realized that she had nothing to lose. She would go back to her mother’s cottage and crack open the book.
No one would ever save her from her circumstances. No, she needed to do it herself.
Agatha stared at her mother’s drained corpse with a smug smile. The crone really thought they could stop her. It was cute, really. She stepped forward and tugged the broach off of her mother’s cloak before calmly pinning it to her own shirt. She nearly used her magic to propel off the ground, but a slow clap and whistle stopped her dead in her tracks.
Agatha turned to see a tall brunette step over the bodies of Madeline and her soulmate. She smiled at Agatha with a knowing stare as clapped a final time. She jerked her head toward the bodies. “Nice job.”
Agatha paused, frozen in place. Was this who she thought it was? Impossible, surely.
“Who the hell are you?” Agatha asked, suspiciously and treading carefully.
“So, what’d they do?” The woman asked, her tongue poking out to press against the corner of her mouth as a smirk shaped her lips.
For some reason, Agatha eased slightly. This woman looked familiar to her somehow, but she was sure she had never seen her before. She noticed a small gap between her front teeth and how her dress was a vibrant green that wasn’t common in Salem. “They were attempting to limit my power.”
“Ah, so a good reason then,” The woman agreed easily with that smile still firmly in place. Agatha took a few steps closer without thinking. The woman casually added, “The name’s Rio.”
“Agatha.”
“I know.” Rio replied knowingly and stepped closer. They were at arm’s length now. “You’ve been looking for me, but I didn’t think you were ready until now.”
Agatha’s hand lifted to rub at her chest. “Prove it.”
Rio nodded, like she expected this, and raised her arm to show Agatha her wrist. The skin was smooth and bare, and Agatha almost scoffed, but Rio’s skin faded until Agatha could see her ulna and radius bones. She shivered at the sight, slightly shocked, but gasped when she saw her soul mark etched into Rio’s ulna bone. Agatha inhaled sharply. “Who are you?”
“Rio.” The other woman joked, smiling slightly at Agatha. When Agatha remained confused and unsure, Rio’s smile dropped. She cleared her throat quietly. The silence between them grew until Rio could muster the courage to say what she had been hiding all along. She locked eyes with Agatha before revealing, “I am Death.”
Agatha rolled her eyes and Rio quirked an eyebrow. “Be serious.”
Rio didn’t say a word. She allowed Agatha to process what she heard. Rio always dreaded this moment. She had to watch Agatha for years, waiting to see when she would be ready to tell her soulmate that she is a cosmic entity that most people feared. Rio had worried that Agatha would turn away from her, reject their connection, and leave Rio alone. She had waited centuries for Agatha.
Agatha thought back to the times she had looked for her soulmate. She thought of that home with the dead body and the skeleton, of the tavern with the murdered man and that damn shadow, and she felt her knees weaken. “Every time I looked for you, someone died.”
“Well, you didn’t cause the deaths–”
“You were there the whole time!” Agatha swatted Rio’s shoulder, making her wince. “You knew I was desperate to find you and you hid!”
“Well, technically, I didn’t hide at the cottage.” Rio countered. She allowed Agatha to see her true form for a moment.
Agatha gasped at the skeleton before her. She was the damn skeleton in the arm chair. “You are a coward!”
“I was nervous.” Rio sneered. “I have been waiting for my soulmate to be born for hundreds of thousands of years, and I wasn’t about to scare you off. This would be kind of a big issue for most people.”
“I’m not most people.” Agatha chided her.
“Yeah, I got that."
Agatha rubbed at her eyes, completely unsure of how to proceed. Her soulmate was Death. How does one have a relationship with a cosmic entity anyway? Do they move in together? Will Rio be away all the time? People are constantly dying, so the logical conclusion would be yes. However, that would grant her some freedom.
“Alright,” Agatha exhales wearily. “Now what?”
Rio blinked at her owlishly. “I don’t really know. I’ve never done this before.”
“I would hope not.” Agatha grumbled.
She took a moment to really look at Rio. She was beautiful with her sleek hair, tanned complexion, large doe eyes, and thin body. Agatha felt a twinge of attraction flow through her. She could work with this. As long as Rio stayed fleshy anyway. Skeleton’s weren’t really her thing.
Before she could think about it more, Rio stepped closer, until their hips touched, and pressed her forehead to Agatha’s. They were strangers and it should’ve made Agatha recoil but it didn’t. She felt comfortable and it all felt slightly familiar in an inexplicable way.
Almost as if she heard Agatha’s thoughts, Rio gently offers, “I’ve been watching for awhile. I knew you had been looking for me, but I was a coward. Too afraid of losing the one person I was fated to be with. Not all cosmic entities get this opportunity. I didn’t want to fuck it up. I’m sorry.”
Agatha had never received an apology from anyone before. She thought back to all of the angry words her mother spewed at her and how she had to simply move on or suffer more wrath. She thought of her coven mates, who bullied her relentlessly for her curiosity and the lack of attention she received from her mother. Dozens of memories flashed before her of moments where she was cast aside or treated unfairly, and how she never got what she’s getting now. And from Death of all beings.
Rio paused, waiting for Agatha to say something–anything really–to break the silence. She waited for Agatha to reject her, but that never came. Instead, Agatha closed the distance, kissing her hard. She melted into Rio’s arms as they circled her waist. The kiss felt like coming home. Rio moaned against Agatha’s lips. They wanted more.
Perhaps this would be worth the wait after all.