Anna was familiar with strange-looking creatures, having seen them on a semi-regular basis throughout her whole life. She was a blood-witch, and being brought up by her mother and aunt, knew not to engage with them. One of the creatures had killed her father when Anna had been small; shattering her family’s world and earning in Anna an intense hatred of all creatures such as the ones which currently were running through central park.

Power rushed to the tips of Anna’s fingertips, desperate to be released in the presence of the other, unwanted, supernatural creatures. Stifling the urge, Anna deliberately turned her back on the chase, her shoulders taunt with tension, all previous joy in the beautiful day, lost. She hated seeing the creatures, and had hoped that moving to New York would have prevented, at least the big, scary looking ones, from hanging about. However, to her annoyance, despite there not being an abundance of the big ones, the more humanoid creatures were even more common than where she had grown up. Since her father’s death, she had been taught to ignore them completely unless threatened, as they typically could not tell that she was a witch without her acknowledging it. If she pretended that she wasn’t seeing anything out of the ordinary, they wouldn’t bother her. There were, of course, exceptions, some of the creatures being able to sense her magic, but Anna was a very strong witch, and they typically didn’t bother her for long.

Turning her attention to her, still, unfinished painting, Anna stared at it, her eyes boring into the canvas as if she could force the two males behind her to disappear with thought alone. Unbeknownst to her, in her concentration a small flower sprouted and bloomed at her feet amid the lush grass, its delicate white petals brushing against her bare ankle in a soothing fashion, as if the plant were trying to comfort her, trying to offer her solace in its touch. If an expert were to look closely, the plant would have been a mystery, the climate of New York supposedly making growth impossible. However, no one was paying attention, and the little flower was so small that even if they had been, it would have been easily mistaken for a daisy instead of the exotic, healing, herb that it was.