Witch

Tessa was fifteen when she killed her first human.

The phrasing always struck her as odd - technically, Tessa was as human as the barber that she murdered, but her coven insisted upon the language. "Now you've been doing really well with cats and dogs, pet, but you've got to step up to the next level. Anyone can stamp on a hamster; killing a human, now that's where the skill lies."

And so, under the tutelage of her grandmother's mother, Tessa had booked an appointment with the barber, the last one of the day. She had even let him practice his craft just as she was about to practice hers.

Then, once he was done cutting the young lady's hair, she picked up his scissors and cut out his heart.

The new haircut felt symbolic, in a way - she'd decided to go quite short, which she'd never done before, and honestly the coven frowned upon. "Witches don't have short hair," her aunt's wife had once told her in private. "It doesn't sit well with the cackle."

But looking at herself in the barber's mirror, his heart still pumping in her hand and lightly sprinkling her face with his blood, she decided that she liked the new her. It was almost pixie-ish; it had that sense of mischief, and it definitely made her look older.

She had slipped the still-beating heart* into her purse, stopped to admire her new look one final time, and left a note on the window on the way out - written in blood, of course. It wasn't until she was three blocks away that she stopped in horror - Tessa realised she'd forgotten to pay for the haircut, but by that point it was too late to go back.

*One of the earliest tricks she had mastered when slitting the throats of her neighbor's neverending supply of seeing-eye dogs was preventing the heart from realising it had left the body and had no blood left to pump.

Her mother disapproved of her activities in general. One of the rare few in Tessa's family with no magic in her veins, Tessa's mother had never really seen the appeal of the lifestyle. After three years of washing blood out of her daughter's clothes her patience had started to wear thin, and Tessa's actions in the barber's were the last straw.

"You forgot?? You forgot to pay? Tessa, I understand that this is important to you, but when you said you were going to murder the barber I didn't think that you were going to steal from him as well! Have you considered his poor widow? And what about his children? You know young Gerald in the grade below him - yes, the shared last name isn't just a coincidence, that's the barber's son! It's not bad enough that he's lost his father, but thanks to you the expense of a funeral is going to be just that much harder to meet."

Tessa tried to stand defiant, like she'd seen other young witches do when the target of a tirade, but she was still new to the scene, and couldn't stop her lip from trembling and a pair of tears leaving her eye and rolling down to the end of her nose.

"I...I..."

Tessa's mother stopped. If Tessa had been watching, she would have seen a flash of concern on her mother's face, a chink in the armor of anger that she could potentially have exploited. But Tessa was too busy inspecting her shoe and wishing she still had a long and matted fringe that she could hide her face behind.

"I forgot! There was so much to remember...the ritual, the spells, the note..."

The glimpse of compassion passed and Tessa's mother started her rant anew.

"No! No, that is IT young lady. I let you host the annual meet again last year, I let you borrow my spices for your little spells, but I did not raise a thief. You can go to one more meeting, but that is it - after that, I want you to tell your friends that you are grounded. You are not allowed to be a witch anymore."

Tessa stared up at her mother in horror.

"But...but...mum!"

"No buts young lady, that is final. I don't want to see another toad in this house. This weekend when your father gets home, he is going to take all of that hocus pocus to the dump. No more witching."

Tessa's lip started once more, and the tears began to well up in greater numbers. Lost for words, she ran up to her room and slammed the door, leaving her purse beside her.

From behind her, she could hear a scream, and the squelch of a human heart hitting the floor.

"And I told you that I didn't want to see any more of these in the house!"