There's a certain bonelessness that sleeping children get - it wears off when they turn five or six, when they start carrying around tension and waking easier, but that's how Raleigh feels now. That if she fell sleep in this moment, she could be picked up and moved and she'd sleep like the goddamned dead, excuse the term.

When he says his mother was powerful, but even she couldn't do it, Raleigh assumes it can't be done. Just... other witches or not, she never really thought about it as a possibility anyway. "It's okay, Joel. I've been like this a long time. It's not like it's going to kill me, right?" She smiles a little, and sighs as she relaxes even more. "It's okay. You're not like... one of those horrible women who just look at me and make like a tsk noise and tell me it's such a shame because I'm pretty." She wrinkles her nose, and then she pauses.

"When I was fourteen, I fell through an the rotting door to an abandoned basement. Fell fifteen feet, got a grade II compound fracture of the tibia." She paused. "No one knew where I was, and they didn't find me for two days." It's the short version, but it's what's important.