Hounded

gleefully as a joke. I’d wait for Oberon to choke a couple down, then I’d tell him they were meatless and it was all Xypop’s fault.
    I forgot about the three-coffee witch for ten whole minutes. Just before we left town to the east and the road curved north and turned to Highway 89, I saw her in the passenger seat of a maroon Honda Civic that was waiting for an opportunity to pull out of a gas station. That opportunity came right behind me, and I quickly checked out her companions in the rearview mirror to see if I’d been right about the maiden-mother-crone thing.
    I hadn’t. » Damn it, now I’m paranoid, « I said aloud.
    › You’re always paranoid, ‹ Oberon observed. › Plus you talk to your dog and you believe in magic. By modern standards you should be locked away and sucking down Thorazine in a tall icy glass with an umbrella in it. ‹
    » What? Where’d you hear about Thorazine? «
    › They were going to give some to Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 because she was paranoid like you. ‹
    » I need to get you some new movies to watch while I’m at work, « I said, keeping one eye on the witch—or witches—in my mirror. The other two were just as young as the first one, just as attractive, and their auras were the same angry red as well, except I couldn’t discern in the mirror whether they had the thin sliver of white interference about their heads. It raised many questions in my mind, but Oberon derailed me temporarily from considering them.
    › Can I watch something with ninjas in it? I don’t want to watch any more romantic comedies or those teen angst flicks you like. ‹
    » I don’t like them, « I said. » I watch them for research so that I can figure out how these people think and talk. It takes a lot of work to make people think I grew up here, you know. I should make you watch Jane Austen dramas for a week, and then you’ll be begging me to bring back Juno. «
    › I don’t know who Jane Austen is, but I’m sure she’s sensible enough to worry about more important things than baby fingernails and Tic Tacs. ‹
    » You want sensible? Fine. Sense and Sensibility it is. We’ll see how you like it. «
    I returned my attention to the rearview mirror. Three young women raised unsettling possibilities when I couldn’t see their auras well. It was possible—even likely—that the other two were simply sorority sisters of Coffee Witch (as I’d come to think of her), and not witches themselves. But since they had almost identical auras to Coffee Witch, and they were also wearing velour tracksuits, it suggested to me a unity of purpose for which covens are known. The driver was blond and had a pink suit on and dark sunglasses—I’d call her Pinky. She had really thin lips and she was flapping them in an irritated manner, arguing about something with one or both of her passengers. In the backseat, on the passenger side, sat another brunette in a royal blue tracksuit with a deep tan. I named her Coppertone, and she was leaning forward to better hear what Pinky had to say, a frown on her face.
    I really hoped I wasn’t looking at a coven of young witches. With auras like that and the illusion of invincibility that all young people have, they were liable to try something immensely stupid. In maiden-mother-crone covens, the mother figure tends to balance out the other two. The maiden says hell, let’s do some unspeakable shit because I’m strong and I’ll survive the consequences if things go wrong, and the crone says why not, let’s do some unspeakable shit because I’m going to die soon anyway, but the mother usually says let’s all chill out and think about this, hedge our bets and play it safe.
    Whatever their argument was, they subsided after a while, and drove in silence behind me all the way onto the plateau. It actually made me nervous: Were they following me for some reason, or was this merely a coincidence? Had they spotted my aura after all, and now they wanted to find out exactly why the guy who looked twenty-one had an energy signature of extreme maturity and magical power?
    The few people in Tempe who know what I really am have secrets of their own to keep, so I didn’t think they’d tell anyone (much less these youngsters) that I’m older than the New Testament. But you never know: It seems like everyone wants the secret of eternal youth, and they’re willing to do most anything to lay hold of it. Maybe somebody suggested to these ladies that I had the answer.