In defiance of Callie's conscience, the talk about what had happened in the bedroom never materialized. Several times it looked like either she or Jersey might broach the issue, but one or both lost their nerve and digressed into something else. At the very least the other woman didn't seem to resent her for it, and so Callie tried to take solace in the belief that if it had been entirely unwelcome then she would've been ejected from the flat ⸻ though of course she couldn't prevent the voice inside her from reminding her that fleeing an abusive partner was an extraordinarily difficult proposition, and the only thing that kept her from giving in to that logic was her surety that she and Jersey absolutely were not ‘partners’ in any sense.
On another difficult front for the embattled blonde, the “Seattle Slayings” and ensuing manhunt for the murderer of two Portland residents and an off-duty officer had been in the news for over a month, but two weeks after it finally lost traction in the daily broadcasts Callie assumed that as long as she didn’t travel back to Washington, then her trouble with the law was definitively over. While that may have ultimately proved true in that specific case, Caliie and Jersey’s legal problems were instead only just beginning.
In the state of California it is illegal for anyone to possess child pornography, even if it happened to be sexy videos of themselves. Furthermore, such offenses have no mediating protections for minors like in some other states, leaving the defendant to be tried in an adult court and their sentence entirely up to the discretion of the presiding judge.
At last the full extent of Jersey’s wish had been made clear to Callie when they were both arrested in the flat, then immediately separated into two vehicles bound for different holding cells. Callie didn’t hear about Jersey’s charges of soliciting prostitution and intent to distribute pornographic content of a minor until later, but she herself was accused of possessing and displaying a fake ID for the purposes of defrauding an institution.
“Fraud is definitely an issue,” her public defender had been saying, “but as long as you didn’t do anything truly stupid like try to purchase alcohol or marijuana, I might be able to argue it down to a misdemeanor and have the court settle for a fine.” The clearly-overworked woman slipped off her glasses to rub at her eyes, perhaps battling a feeling of exhaustion. “It’s certainly one of the stranger reasons I’ve seen to defraud the government, however. I’ll grant you that you look a little too mature for your age and you seem to be doing well in your classes, but if you wanted to start earning college credit that badly you could’ve applied through your highschool or other head-start program.”
“I appreciate your efforts,” Callie began, genuinely thankful for such hard-working people in a criminally-undercompensated occupation, “but I was hoping you could tell me about my friend’s case.”
“I’m not on her case,” she reminded the tall girl for what had to be the fifth time. “I can’t comment on other legal proceedings for various reasons.”
“Then what about your unofficial opinion?” Callie tried. “The one that I won’t be repeating to anyone else.”
The attorney fixed her with a flat look, but perhaps her sympathy for teens caught in the legal system urged her to provide an honest outlook. “I genuinely don’t know. It’ll depend on which judge gets her case and what the prosecution wants to push for. If it had been the two of you girls sexting each other or something like that the court might’ve chosen to be lenient, but selling her videos is another story. In the worst-case scenario, they might try to make a politically-motivated example out of her.”
Frustratingly, Jersey’s criminal trajectory was entirely out of Callie’s hands. In her own case, she could truthfully (if not believably) argue that she didn’t know she had a fake ID, but trying to explain that she was sure Jersey was of age when she was streaming wouldn’t change anything, and she had no idea where the prostitution charges had come from either. Perhaps her bonafide bimbo look might convince a judge that she wasn’t smart enough to understand what she was doing, but from what Genie had told her it wouldn’t be a simple thing to try to undo. The more hands her criminal proceedings passed through, the more people the Veil would have to supply with alternative facts, and it would doubtlessly not side with them when it came to expending the effort required.
Still, that didn’t mean Genie was ignorant of their problems, nor was she unwilling to provide what help she could.
Callie’s bail proceedings passed fairly smoothly, and she was treated to an introduction with a very posh-sounding, thicc-looking British lawyer who had evidently posted the relatively-inconsequential amount of money ⸻ well, inconsequential for an attorney anyway. For the now-seventeen Callie Brambell, a thousand dollars was an exceedingly difficult sum of money to obtain in such a short time.
“My god, you’re bloody enormous, aren’t you?” the British lady gawped up at her, extending a hand.
“Thanks,” Callie returned confidently, accepting the offered handshake. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” she agreed with a smile. “Dornollë told me you were built, but I was expecting a girls rugby player or something, not Athena herself.”
“More Medeinė, really,” Genie suggested.
“On account of the wolves?” Callie tried, her amused grin revealing her sharp teeth.
“Though one that’s caught herself a cow instead of a hare,” the djinn chuckled.
“Kelly,” the lawyer continued, giving her name.
“Callie,” she returned.
“Cute,” Kelly laughed, charming the taller girl with her bright smile and affable disposition. “I hope you don’t mind us sweeping this along, but I’d like to go collect your sister before the two of you spend too much time apart.”
“Sister?” she echoed, failing to understand. “I don’t have any siblings.”
“Legally you do,” Kelly informed her, motioning for the other two women ⸻ well, woman and seventeen-year-old girl ⸻ to follow her out. “Now, I can’t really claim credit for the cleverness of the idea, since it was all Candi’s plot ⸻ she’s the one that made your phone app, by the way ⸻ but thankfully it’s one of the few times we can lean on the Veil to help us rather than hinder, largely on account of the fact that it seems to be wrapped particularly thick around you.”
“You’ll have to slow down, please,” Callie pleaded, grappling with a large chunk of new information all at once. “Can you repeat all of that with just a little more explanation? And what are we doing about Jersey?”
“That’s who we’re going to fetch,” Kelly said in a reassuring tone. “Your wish has created a number of complications, many of which are very open-ended, and the Veil hates when something pulls at a loose thread. If we can offer it sufficient explanation ahead of time, it’s more likely to accept our interpretation of otherwise-impossible events so that it can tie up those loose ends. With me so far?”
“I’m following,” she nodded.
“The two of you are, for the moment, houseless minors,” she explained, leading the taller girl along. “That’s a very conspicuous legal status.”
“Houseless?” Callie interrupted. “What about Xena? Where’s she?”
“I’ve had her with me,” Genie informed her, soothing the momentary worry. “She’s been behaving quite well, all things considered. She’s a very sweet girl.”
“And she’s another loose end,” Kelly continued. “Many of the details surrounding you and Jersey are in a state of superposition right now, so we’re taking advantage of that. If, for instance, I state that I am your legal guardian and provide appropriate documentation to that effect, the Veil will ‘correct’ any weird inconsistencies to follow along the convenient narrative.”
“So you’ve … adopted Jersey and I?” the tall girl questioned, fitting some of the pieces together.
“Precisely,” the curvy, model-pretty lawyer nodded. “While I am a sorceress myself, solving problems without magic tends to be slightly easier when the Veil is involved. By doing it this way, I’ll have more leeway to massage what happens in Jersey’s sentencing; if I hadn’t gotten involved she’d be a ward of the state, and we might’ve lost her to the system entirely.”
“I can hear that snap on your tongue,” Kelly accused, though it was more of a gentle admonition. “You may be thinking that your legal trouble is Genie’s fault, but I assure you that’s not the case. If she could’ve prevented whatever is after you from meddling in your biographical details, she would’ve done so; unfortunately they’ve decided to be subtle about it, which tied her hands.”
“... Sorry,” she grumbled, offering a half-apologetic glance at the djinn.
“No offense taken,” Genie replied easily. “I’m just as furious as you. I’m starting to think it’s more than just the one bad actor, which means they’re likely causing problems for a great number of other locals.”
“But that’s a topic for later,” Kelly said, getting back on track. “For now, it’s important that you know that for all intents and purposes I’ve been your mum for the last few years, retroactively speaking, a role I gladly accepted in my position as actuary for your and Jersey’s deceased parents, all five of us adults having been very good friends. Our story is that you were trying to skip right to college but were accidentally provided incorrect documentation, an error that all of us missed on account of me being a very busy, jetsetting lawyer, and you being a minor that didn’t know any better.”
“And is any of that true?” Callie asked. “Other than as part of our story for the Veil.”
“Well I am a very busy lawyer,” she mused, “but I haven’t been traveling to the States by plane so much as by spell, which is something I’ll have to forgo while I’m playing the part of your dutiful parental figure.”
“Is it okay to involve you, though?” the taller girl worried, recalling everything she’d been told about the Veil. “Since you’re not party to any of the wishes.”
“It’ll be fine,” she assured her, waiving away her trepidation with a smartly-manicured hand. “Genie and I are already intimately involved with each other, so my services are more or less gratis.”
“Thank god,” Callie replied, trying to cover her anxiety over Jersey’s situation with a little humour. “I don’t think I could afford you without the family discount.”
“That’s what mums are for, right?” Kelly laughed.
Though charged as an adult, the fifteen-going-on-sixteen Jessie “Jersey” March was similarly being detained in the same center, and it wasn’t long before they were able to extricate her. Newly freed, the first thing the nervous girl did was throw herself at Callie, her chest squishing around her bestie’s waist as she clung to her in a tight hug. While the taller girl was thrilled to have Jersey back, the smush of her oversized pillows made it hard for her to stay collected; with the incredible sensitivity the other girl’s boobs seemed to have, it didn’t surprise her when Jersey fixed her with a knowing smirk as Callie steadily lost her sense of calm.
“I’m seventeen,” she muttered, turning her gaze away from her bestie as she blushed and stiffened. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“No?” Jersey giggled mischievously, twisting slightly from side to side to squeeze Callie even further into her decolletage. “What about those other times then, hm?”
“It was one time,” Callie corrected.
“It was much more than that,” she teased, delighting in flustering the other girl. “If you need a reminder, we could find somewhere quiet and I’ll help jog your memory.”
The thirsty way that Jersey eyed her wasn’t not doing it for Callie, but of all the places to risk getting caught fooling around when they shouldn’t, a juvenile detention center seemed like the worst possible option. Thankfully her new ‘mum’ rescued her with some comments about saving the ‘sisterly affection’ for later, and though Kelly shot a few worried glances back and forth between Genie and Jersey, she seemed quite familiar with how to maneuver an inappropriately-randy girl back onto the expected course.
When Callie asked Kelly about it later, the pretty lawyer informed her that her own little sister could get similarly ‘bimbo-brained,’ as she called it, and so she’d become an expert at handling ‘her condition’ whenever they were out somewhere that she couldn’t immediately ‘take care of it’. Of course the taller girl could read between the lines, and when she carefully posed a clarifying question to Kelly, she was shocked to be given such a frank answer.
“I’m more than a little fond of my Candi,” she smiled sweetly, unafraid of how Callie might take her assertion. “Genie and I both, in fact, and we like treating her in very many of the same ways.”
“I … see,” Callie mumbled, not entirely sure how she was supposed to take such a blunt admission. “So does that make Candi our other ‘mum’ …?”
“I expect that would be more likely to be Dornollë,” Kelly mused, “on account of the fact that she’s sired the lion’s share of our little darlings, but since we can’t really jot ‘Genie’ down on any official forms I don’t think it’ll ever come up. You’ll have to settle for your single working mother.”
Taking all of that together, Callie figured Kelly and Candi had to be the family Genie always dipped out to visit, and the revelation made her feel an awful sense of guilt over having deprived the (apparently sizable) household of two of their parents. Vowing to do a better job as Jersey’s familiar so that the other women could be released of their obligations, she resolved to stick as close to her new ‘little sister’ as she could, and perhaps see if she couldn’t sniff-out whatever it was that threatened her.
She would get her first chance only a few days later, but of course she didn’t realise it at the time. For the moment however, she had to settle for re-calibrating her life for the third time in as many months.
Kelly had rented out a nice, two-story home within an ‘acceptable’ school district, as she called it. While Callie’s opinion was that they’d taken a normal house, split it down the middle and then stacked it on top of itself for some insane reason, its vertical construction nevertheless sported ceilings high enough for her not to bang her head on every hanging fixture in the place. By consequence Jersey looked even shorter in comparison, as though she’d been built in an opposite configuration to the house where all of her height had gone into her width instead. The extreme juxtaposition affected both of them in the same way, and whenever her ‘little sister’ caught Callie eying her lack of size appreciatively, Jersey would bite her lip and give her a knowing smirk.
Callie, for her part, did her best not to make it obvious that her penchant for longer showers was due to her need to handle the inevitable consequence of those looks.
While it was no trouble to enroll Callie in the local highschool and get her set-up in Advanced Placement classes, Jersey suffered some rather unfortunate setbacks. As Callie understood it, the shorter girl had been distracted by something during the interview process and between her occasionally-incoherent answers, her bimbotic looks, and her increasingly-obvious pregnancy it became apparent to the school representative that Jersey would require a number of remedial classes and other academic support. That angered Callie greatly since she knew exactly how smart and capable the other girl had been in her former occupation as a project lead, but her opinion differed from everyone else that laid eyes on Jersey who only saw a vapid bimbo that had gotten herself knocked-up at fifteen, and so her estimation of her bestie was chalked-up to and dismissed as an overprotective older sister overselling her sibling’s abilities.
Callie had been registered as a senior and Jersey was very nearly placed as a freshman on account of her perceived need to be held-back a year, but an intense argument between the taller girl and the registrar eventually convinced them to let the younger girl ‘skip’ 9th grade and move right into 10th, with the express understanding that the precocious Callie would personally tutor her sister if she started falling behind her classmates. While that fight with school officials would eventually provide the solid foundation for rumours that Callie perhaps fancied Jersey more than was appropriate for adopted siblings, she herself was happy to bite that bullet to ensure that the other girl was perceived as having gotten a ‘good education,’ and thus be eligible to attend one of the better colleges and eventually reclaim her former, well-paying career.
Before they could really get into a rhythm at school, they of course first had to deal with the fallout of Jersey’s time as a cam girl and escort, both of which were the subject of gossip regarding her sexual proclivities and presumed availability. At first Callie worked hard to try to silence those rumours as well, but eventually Jersey asked her politely to let the matter drop, claiming that it would hurt the older girl’s reputation before she had a chance to make any friends; that would’ve been fine with Callie, of course, but she didn’t want to make her bestie uncomfortable and so ultimately gave in ⸻ though there was a tacit understanding among the student body that such gossip spoken around Callie would result in immediate reprisal, and while some respected the warning others chose to use it as their method of getting under her skin.
Mostly the latter was relegated to the likes of kids like Megan Baxter, whose father was Assistant to the Deputy Chief of Special Operations in the city’s municipal police department. Megan knew her father was a very important man, and she leaned on that connection whenever she believed she wasn’t being treated fairly, whether by staff or students. Jersey had made quite the splash during her debut as a stunningly-attractive girl, if somewhat clueless and slightly-pregnant, and Megan made sure to play-up the latter aspects after she sensed a threat to her title as prettiest girl in the school. Once she learned that Callie was her overprotective adopted sister and one of the handful of trans students, she wasted no time in using one sister’s presumed negatives as slurs to hurl at the other.
If that verbal abuse had been relegated only to whispers hidden behind hands during classes, Callie would’ve left it alone. Unfortunately, Megan seemed to be growing into a feminine version of Commander Baxter, the latter of whom did not care for Callie and made his opinion known through roundabout force.
Callie recognized Baxter first and more-completely when they’d locked eyes with each other during her trip to the courthouse to deal with her sentencing. An almost expected consequence of her rotten luck, the broad-set, aging official had been part of the swell of ‘patriots’ that had rolled into Seattle that night and clashed with her. Apparently her changing form had obscured her partly within the Veil, and while the man understood immediately that he both hated and feared Callie it was evident he didn’t know exactly how or why, otherwise she expected she would’ve ended-up being extradited to her former home city post-haste as the primary suspect in the ‘Seattle Slayings’. As it was he simply glowered at her, then turned to make derisive and ‘informed’ comments about her character to the prosecutor handling her case.
Without his casual interference, Callie likely could’ve gotten the charges dismissed or at least downgraded to a misdemeanor and a fine, but the serious words from a respected man of the law ensured she was prosecuted with a felony charge instead. While Kelly wasn’t licensed to practice law in the States, she did assemble a competent team of defenders who did everything they could to keep the court from throwing the book at Callie and Jersey, and ultimately they were able to secure an agreement to expunge Callie’s conviction and seal Jersey’s as long as the two were able to satisfactorily complete a community-service and juvenile rehabilitation programme.
Designated ‘Project 127,’ it was a somewhat-controversial partnership with regional counseling services that intended to eliminate juvenile recidivism through ‘community involvement,’ which all sounded well and good on paper. Unfortunately for the girls, the ‘counseling services’ drew from a wide well of religious partnerships, many of which did not strictly have the child’s best interest at heart. While Callie was only assigned to the community labour portion of Project 127, Jersey had been ear-marked for the ‘Academic Support’ and ‘Life Skills Training’ segments of the programme as well.
Ostensibly created to mould wayward children into respectable and productive citizens, the coursework achieved that goal through enforcement of gender roles and stereotypes that aligned with ‘Christian values’. Of course it didn’t say ‘conversion therapy camp’ on the tin, but Callie was intimately familiar with the concept and could immediately recognize the signs present in what Jersey had been asked to do.
“They keep telling me that I need to ‘shape up’ and become a ‘good mum’,” Jersey had been saying to Kelly and Callie after her first week in the programme. “Everyone thinks I’m an absolute numpty, which honestly helps a lot in its own way. They all say I’m too daft to cause problems beyond accidentally leaving the stove on or knocking a bag of flour over with my tits or something like that, so most of what they have me learn is homemaker skills. It’s getting to the point where some of the ladies that run the courses think I don’t even know what sex is, or at least not beyond a way to make boys happy, so they swamp me with a load of ‘Godly and loyal wife’ bollocks at least twice an hour.”
Jersey’s steadily-growing condition prevented her from doing anything other than the lightest labour during the service portions, and Callie was expected to double-up on work to make up for it. It wasn’t a problem in and of itself since her strong frame was hardly taxed by even the most-demanding chores, but the ease with which she completed her assignments grated on the men overseeing the operations. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping . com.
The worst of the bunch always seemed to have their eyes glued to Jersey and girls like her, and the way they talked about their budding physical features set Callie on edge. It reminded her of the summers she used to spend at her uncle’s farm where she’d helped evaluate and purchase cattle at auction; their inappropriately-lewd dialogue suggested they were picking out girls for some other purpose, but their intense dislike of ‘the tranny’ meant that they assigned her work that would keep her away from them and Jersey for the bulk of the outings.
Even still, she had a strange way of passively comprehending events that occurred around her adopted sister. Once, a particularly bold supervisor attempted to maneuver Jersey to a secluded area away from the stretch of highway they were working at, and he got about as far as slipping off the straps of the young girl’s overalls before Callie arrived to put him in the hospital; though it reset her progress in the programme as a consequence and piled anger-management sessions on top of it, the brave testimony of the other girls weighed in favourably in Jersey’s defense when the man tried to accuse her of seducing him. Everyone else in the programme thought Jersey was a daft cow, obviously, but as far as the other delinquents were concerned she was a sweet daft cow who had been willing to put a hoof in to help others, and so they were happy to return the gesture.
After they’d come home from that particular harrowing adventure, Genie had asked several questions about the men, including why Jersey had been willing to follow her assailant so far away from the group. When the shorter girl struggled to come up with an intelligible answer, the djinn exchanged a worried look with Kelly.
“You think they put a geas on her?” Kelly asked, clearly familiar with the concept. “Like what Paul tried way back when.”
“Similar, but not the same,” Genie mused, slowly stalking around Jersey as she looked her over. “This is newer magic, I think. Some Roman wizardry mixed with an odd looping structure … or maybe a pyramid? The links are very weak but they’re spread out in dozens of directions, which likely has to do with that cult they’re all involved in.”
“You mean Christianity?” Callie asked, hiding a smirk she thought to be inappropriate for how serious the discussion was, even though it amused her greatly that Genie was apparently old-enough to have such an objective view of the comparatively-young religion.
“Yes,” Genie nodded distractedly, missing the other girl’s mocking tone entirely. “I don’t know what it is that this sect calls itself, but I can recognize a sacrifice when I see one.”
“Sacrifice?” Jersey echoed fearfully.
“Not a fatal sacrifice,” the djinn explained, “though I don’t know if that makes it better or not; personally, I think it might be much worse. It reminds me of when I was … ⸻ well, not that such ancient history matters here. Suffice it to say, I can guess at what the function of the magic is supposed to achieve.”
“And?” Callie prompted, terribly concerned for the woman who mattered most in her life.
“It’s a bit of cheap sorcery designed to reap even cheaper miracles,” Genie continued, working through her analysis aloud as she unraveled the magic at play. “I think I was right when I said it’s a pyramid in nature. It appears as though they’ve spread these marks widely, presumably among girls like Jersey, in the hopes that they ‘be fruitful and multiply’ and thus provide a trickle-up amount of power back to the source of the geas.”
“To what end?” Kelly inquired, worrying at her bottom lip as she considered the rather ominous words.
“Wish-granting, I suppose,” the dark-haired woman shrugged, having reached the end of her concrete understanding. “It’s not quite the same spell to create more djinn, but perhaps it’s more useful because of it. As long as the sorcerer can spread the cost out among a large-enough group, they’ll be able to grant minor wishes without any negative consequences ⸻ well, to them, of course. To the poor girls they’re entrapping, I expect it’ll eventually equate out to fertility problems and the like, and perhaps ….”
Trailing off, Genie stared meaningfully at the growing bump of Jersey’s tummy. While it was too horrific to say aloud, everyone immediately understood the implication. Overcome with fear and indignation, Jersey held her hands over her stomach, a gutted expression spreading across her face as she held back tears; a low growl formed in Callie’s throat without her conscious awareness of it, and she clenched her hands into angry, tight fists.
“Can we safely break the links?” Kelly asked, offering Jersey an understanding look. “I can see them, but I’m worried about touching them.”
“They should be fine to sever,” Genie theorized, “but if we do, they’ll know that we’re onto them.”
“So sever them,” Callie snapped, her temper flaring. “If anyone comes at Jersey after, I’ll handle it.”
“What do you mean, ‘handle it’?” Kelly retorted, a concerned accusation lingering on her tongue.
Callie met her gaze, fury blazing in her eyes. “I’d step in,” she offered coldly, declining to give specifics. “I won’t let them near her.”
“That’s all well and good to say,” Kelly responded seriously, chiding Callie as though she really were her mum, “but it’ll be much harder to get you out of murder charges than it was to deal with the fraud, and that’s assuming you don’t similarly end up in the morgue for your trouble.”
As the steady volume of her rumbling increased, Callie was about to bite back a reply about having already put a number of similar men in the grave before ⸻ even if she wasn’t very clear on how she’d done so ⸻ but she stopped as Jersey set her hand against the taller girl’s arm, the nascent sorceress calling off her attack dog.
“What if we only break a few of them?” the petite girl offered, seeking strategic compromise. “Just enough to make sure that nothing happens to the babies, but not enough to alarm them.”
“That might be doable,” Kelly hedged, “but you’ll be prey to all the other effects, including the heightened suggestibility and the like.”
“I can see the tactical advantage, mistress,” Genie concurred, “but I would warn you against allowing this to continue. As it is now, it’s mostly a matter of trading eventual danger for an immediate one, but you’ll be at risk either way.”
“Then I’ll depend on my guardian,” Jersey insisted, wrapping Callie’s arm in a tight hug as she clung to the taller girl. “She was able to protect me once before, and I doubt they’ll be able to come at me directly.” Despite the brave tone to her voice, the anxious trembling of her body communicated her fear. “Can’t the two of you use the ‘links’ to trace the magic back to its perpetrators?”
“... Yes, that’s possible,” the djinn hesitantly allowed, “but it’ll take time, and it won’t guarantee that we’ll be able to do anything even if we ultimately locate those responsible. I hate to remind you of this, mistress, but my wish magic is intended solely for your benefit; I am limited in my ability to affect others.”
“And I’m not exactly battle-hardened either,” Kelly admitted defeatedly. “The handful of times I’ve come up against another sorcerer, it was mostly about making sure we kept the Veil between them and us. Of course Genie and I will do everything we can for you, but dismantling a cult is a little beyond my abilities.”
It was a frustrating if realistic appraisal of the situation. As far as anyone else in the mundane world was aware, an entirely normal Christian operation was doing its utmost to help juvenile criminals back onto their feet; suggesting that they were secretly deploying destructive magic would be impossible to do, both because it would sound batshit crazy to anyone who heard it, but also because the Veil would fight them every step of the way in order to keep magic a secret. While the Veil protected people like Jersey and allowed them to receive the benefits of their wishes, it also shielded horrible people just the same.
What they needed was some external agent, one clued-in to the supernatural but capable of acting against the sorcerer(s) responsible in a natural context. As much as she wanted to believe a force like that could exist to punish such horrific villainy, she had no idea how they’d go about discovering it, much less contacting or contracting it. Likely that was the problem in any sorcerous duel, she supposed, and it made sense to her why historical ‘magicians’ liked to keep close to the nobility and royal courts; it was much easier to send a sheriff after a rival than it was to try to fight with magic.
And, unfortunately for Callie and Jersey, their opponents probably were the sheriffs, or at least in their good graces. Two teenage girls against a 501(c) and the State of California was just about the most lopsided matchup they could get.
Still, none of them wanted to leave it alone. If Jersey was suffering, then dozens more girls just like her would be equivalent prey to such an organization; it was impossible to know it existed and not want to try to destroy it.
Promising that they would look into it, Kelly and Genie asked the girls to avoid doing anything rash, and merely continue to check-in with them. While she agreed to the plan outwardly, Callie could feel a nervous energy building in her chest, a storm of rage that howled against the threat to her crush; she knew that if she saw a chance for revenge, she would take it.