I Said I'm Sorry, Mama...

No one expects to be carjacked. I certainly didn’t. Which is why I was slouched in the driver’s seat with my left hand deep in a box of Cheez-Its while I waited for the light to turn green. Kanye boomed from my speakers—his numerous controversies be damned—, rattling the closed windows and causing me to trip off the power. A smile hung on my face.

My workday was over, and it was time for some good old-fashioned rest and relaxation.

That was the plan, anyway. Rest, relaxation, and the crafty bank balance arithmetic I did every evening to ensure that I hadn’t missed any crucial bills. I had to account for the rent, minus the electric, and minus the amount that I’d set aside for my mother…which was the singular number in the entire equation that I never touched, never rounded down, and never "borrowed against" no matter how thin the rest got. I'd been doing that math since I was nineteen years old, and it was still a necessary evil five years later while sitting in a fourteen-year-old car with cheese dust on my fingers.

A tall, slim woman raced up from behind my car. I caught a glimpse of her right as she yanked on my door handle, whipping it open. “Out of the car!”

What the hell?? I’d always pictured carjackers as buff males with the finest of facial scars and demeanours seconds away from pistol-whipping your teeth out. But…this? This woman looked as though she’d stepped off a catwalk and promptly mistaken my Corolla for her own.

“This is mine now!” Her Russian accent rattled in my ears.

Nope. There was no mistaken vehicular identity here. I was actually being carjacked by a beautiful blonde Russian woman. If only I’d just locked the doors! My mother had always lectured me about neglecting to lock my car door, something that I’d always found trivial because who the fuck was going to carjack a fourteen year old Corolla?

Sorry, Mother.

“Aaah!” I shrank into myself, the sudden movement causing my box of Cheez-Its to tumble out of the car and onto the concrete below.

What a waste of a snack.

“Jesus Christ,” came another voice from somewhere outside of the car. The back right door opened, and a different woman slid inside. This one was brunette, accentless, and she, too, was missing the physique that I’d come to expect from a carjacker. She stretched out in my backseat and slammed the door. “Hurry up, and get us out of here!”

Before I could object, the Russian woman shoved me to the side, causing me to pitch headfirst into the passenger-side floorboard. My body tangled in my seatbelt and promptly contorted my lanky frame into something reminiscent of a macabre aerial arts performance. The Russian struggled to release me from the seatbelt’s unforgiving latch, but it held tight.

“Just leave him like that!” yelled the woman in the backseat.

“No, I’ve almost got it,” said the Russian.

My head smacked into the floorboard as the seatbelt finally released. “Shit!”

The Russian slid into the driver’s seat and quickly shifted my car into Drive as my body crumbled atop itself. Before I could do or say anything else, her foot slammed the gas pedal and launched the car forward. She eyed me carefully for a second at a time, alternating between focusing on the road and focusing on me. Eventually, she glanced up into the rear-view mirror and locked eyes with her companion. “Are we sure that he’s one of us?”

“Yeah, but who cares?” the companion said from the backseat. “I’m sure that he’ll come in handy regardless.” She paused and chuckled before adding, “It’s a win-win for us!”

I was still struggling to right myself in the seat when the Russian violently shook my leg. “Hey!”

She didn’t flinch. Instead, her hand wrapped itself firmly around my ankle and my calf, her cold fingers slithering in their search. I kicked out in the other direction to free myself, and my foot cracked against the passenger’s seat window, causing me to shriek in pain.

“Are you armed?” the Russian asked, ignoring my predicament.

“Armed?” I repeated with a squeak. “Yes, I have arms!”

“Where?”

“What do you mean ‘Where’?!”

“Guns, you idiot! Do you have them?!”

“N-no!”

The car veered to the left, taking me further and further away from my apartment. “Lily-Rose. Check him.”

I heard movement in the backseat, and Lily-Rose’s torso draped itself over my seat just as I managed to right myself. Lily-Rose. Such a pretty name for such a psychotic mess. “Hold still!” Her hands danced around my abdomen and waist while she checked for weapons in places where they clearly wouldn’t be found. I stayed still—my body paralyzed in fear—as her cold lips brushed against my neck.

Cold?

“Wh-where are you taking me?” I asked, doing my best to make my voice sound cool and collected as we sped down a small side-street.

I failed miserably.

The Russian glanced over at me as she pulled into the alleyway ahead, avoiding yet another busy intersection. “We’re taking you to work.” A sly smile stretched across her lips. “What’s your name?”

I gulped. “My real name, or a-am I supposed to make up a street name? Like, I don’t have guns or weapons or any sort of codename, but since you guys…ladies…seem—”

“Your legal first and last name.” The Russian’s tone matched the annoyed expression on her face. “Don’t make anything up.”

I nodded my head, fearful of trying any more of her patience before I figured out what to do next. “I’m Sem. Sem Van Dijk.”

“Ahhh, a Dutch boy!” Lily-Rose cooed. She continued to shift around in the seat behind me, alternating between gripping my headrest, brushing her arms against my hair, and ducking down to disappear from the sight of the rearview mirror.

“Yep. You’re right.” I glanced at the mirror as Lily-Rose reappeared like the ethereal mist that she was. “So, you’re Lily-Rose?”

“Pleasure to be doing business with ya, cupcake.” Lily-Rose wrapped her fingers around my neck and choked me just enough to toy. “And that’s Anya behind the wheel. Cheers to friendship!” Her hands were so cold, especially for such a warm, Summer day. She giggled as I coughed and sputtered, and so, I did the only thing a man in my position could do.

I reached for the pentagram under my collar, closed my fingers around it, and whispered the words my oma had pressed into me across a hundred kitchen-table afternoons, back when magic was just the reason why our tea never went cold and the burglars two doors down always skipped our house. "Nevelvrouwen… Hoed mij…"

The pendant warmed in my fist, while grey mist welled around us. It trailed off of my skin, up from the seats, and out from the floor mats, its trail cold and damp and filling the car in a single breath. Frost ferned across the inside of the windshield, and the shove of it, a hundred grandmothers deciding all at once that they did not care for a cold hand on their boy's throat, cracked out of the pendant and knocked Lily-Rose's fingers clean off of my neck.

She snatched her hand back to her chest and stared at it like it had been slapped by someone she couldn't see.

And then my nose started to bleed.

"Awww," said Lily-Rose, delighted as her hazel eyes greedily stared at the blood. "He's a little hag!"

"I'm a witch," I said, which was maybe not the flex that I needed it to be, given that I’d been upside down in my own car forty seconds ago. I wiped the blood onto the back of my hand before whipping around to glare her straight in the face, ready to fire off another spell no matter what it cost. "Let me go, or I'll—"

“What happened to the rest of your accent?” Lily-Rose asked, completely unbothered by my spells and my threats. “I can hear traces of it, but it’s mostly gone.”

“That is none of your—”

“Answer the question,” Anya demanded.

“…N-naturalization?” I watched as Lily-Rose reached down and dragged one cold, slender fingertip against the blood on my hand.

“Naturalization, huh?” She pressed the finger against her lips and tasted my crimson. “Fascinating. But back to the spell. What did ya do?”

Anya took yet another sharp turn, and I whipped to the right and smacked against the side of the car. I scrambled to locate my seat belt. “A protection spell,” I admitted, “‘cause clearly I need it.”

“A ‘protection spell’…” Anya said dryly while Lily-Rose snickered in the back. “Listen, you’ve got no need for protection now. You’re fine—”

“No, I’m not!”

“—The question is, when we’re actively in danger, will your little spells actually be able to do something?”