Authors: Tim Pratt
“Idiot,” I said. Maybe a little affectionately.
“My second thought was the one about how I might die.”
I kissed him. I hadn’t done that, hadn’t really kissed him, since the night of our date, which seemed a lot longer ago than it actually was. Life had gotten complicated in bad ways since then. Maybe it was time to let life get a little complicated in a good way, just for the sake of maintaining balance.
“So,” he said after a suitable interval. “In your professional opinion, how’s this temporary cohabitation, undertaken solely to avoid my likely death, going so far?”
“
A
-plus-plus,” I said. “Would save life again.”
We still slept in our separate bedrooms, though I didn’t expect to keep that up much longer. I wanted the right moment—wanted it to be special, after all we’d been through—but if the moment didn’t appear soon, I’d engineer it.
Since we weren’t in the same room, I don’t know if Trey heard the fluting-trumpeting-screaming howl that woke me around three o’clock in the morning. Hannah hadn’t seemed worried about the noise. Maybe it wasn’t something to fear. Maybe it was…I don’t know. A security system? Trust my dead father to forego burglar alarms for something more exotic. Whatever made the noise seemed to like scaring the jays away, so we had that in common. Maybe the source of the noise was trying to tell me something, but wasn't willing or able to do so in words. Too bad I didn't speak the language of weird musical howling.
I went downstairs, broom in my hand—I’d lost the sword, but I wasn’t about to investigate weird noises without some magical implement at the ready. I didn’t turn any lights on, so my eyes stayed adjusted to the dark. I stepped out onto the porch and looked into the night, the shadowed trees, the bright stars, the moon. No dragon, no monster, no—
But something moving down the driveway, away from the house. I squinted, wishing for magic telescopic vision, but I couldn’t make out much. A dark car, running without headlights or taillights, sneaking away, maybe scared by the mysterious noises from the woods. I wanted to believe it was just someone who’d gotten lost on the back roads, but nobody would go down that long driveway with no lights on if they were up to innocent business.
Somebody had driven here on purpose, to look at the house—or to try and get a look at me. The Firstborn didn’t seem to bother much with cars, and Hannah wasn’t the driving type. So who was it? And what did they want?
The way my luck was going lately, I didn’t have much doubt I was going to find out.
After seeing that mysterious car drive off into the darkness, I stayed up late for a couple of nights, sitting on the porch with my magical broom, but the visitor didn’t come back—at least not that I noticed. Then I had an inspiration, and asked the house to keep an eye out and let me know if it returned. (The house, as per usual, didn’t give any indication of hearing or understanding, but I chose to have faith. The house was like a mute and capricious—but loyal—butler.) Eventually I convinced myself the car was nothing to worry about, and tried to relax in my pretty-much-impregnable castle, get some painting done, and enjoy Trey’s company.
I actually had a great couple of weeks, before I used the spoon, and before I met my half brother, and before everything went to shit.
One of my guilty pleasure pastimes: a few times a day I’d go out with the broom and use it to smack the Firstborn’s fake blue jays out of the trees. Being knocked off a branch with a magical broom was needlessly cruel for the genuine birds in the mix, but I took comfort in Trey’s insistence that they were just winged vermin. After about ten days of vigilance, the jays started avoiding the house entirely—the real ones were smart enough to stay away, and the Firstborn stopped sending her nasty flying spy-birds. It’s possible she switched to fake squirrels made of bathtub-drain hair and fingernail clippings or some other form of woodland spy, but I’d made my point, at least:
You can’t mess with me without consequences. Fuck off to wherever you came from, and take your little birdies, too.
After a couple of days in what we came to call Bekah’s Magical Safe House, Trey decided he should return to his real life, the threat of the Firstborn notwithstanding. His parents were annoyed he’d missed Sunday dinner, and he didn’t want them muttering about him shacking up with a client, even one he didn’t represent directly anymore. We agreed on a code phrase we could exchange to prove our identities to one another—that was fun, I recommend everyone do it just for giggles—and swore that neither of us would drop in on the other unannounced. It wasn’t much of a precaution, but we hoped it would be enough to keep us safe from the Firstborn’s insidious costume changes. My half sister Hannah’s insistence that the Firstborn wasn’t as powerful as she pretended to be was reassuring, too…and so was Trey telling me he’d inherited a shotgun from his great-grandfather and he intended to keep it handy in case he got any unwanted visitors at home.
Not that he kept entirely to himself, though. He still visited me a lot—not every day, but every couple of days. He’d drop by for an hour or two, to help me out and keep me company. Ostensibly he was there to assist my search for magical objects, but in truth we just liked being with one another. Sometimes you meet someone, and it’s like you’ve known them your whole life—they get your jokes, they see the world the way you do, and you fall into a natural rhythm. We’d been through a lot together, and what had begun as a flirtatious attraction was becoming a deeper friendship. I was happy to have it…and interested to see what else it might become.
As for sexytimes, well, we kissed hello and kissed good-bye, and sometimes we found a clear bit of wall space to push one another up against for kisses in between, but we didn’t take it much further than that—the attacks by the Firstborn were still too recent for me to totally relax, and I think Trey sensed that, because he didn’t push. His patience made me like him even more.
We started sorting through the house, looking for the items we’d found in the mirror sanctum: the smoking jacket and the spoon and the cup. We actually found the cup, at least we were pretty sure, nestled in a cupboard among twenty other mismatched mugs—heavy pottery, a dark chocolate brown in color—but if it did anything magical we couldn’t figure it out. (Things we tried: drinking hot and cold beverages from it; pouring water out of it onto the ground; making tea in it and then gazing at the dregs of leaves in the bottom hoping for revelations; hitting Trey in the butt with it.)
“Maybe it’s like a combo deal with the spoon,” Trey said. “You get the mug
and
the spoon together and, uh…poof.”
“You mean one of these spoons?” I opened the spoon drawer, because in Archibald Grace’s kitchen, there was a drawer
just
for the scores of available spoons—soup spoons, dessert spoons, serrated grapefruit spoons, serving spoons, and, of course, long-handled coffee spoons (at least thirty of those alone). The coffee spoons weren’t identical, but neither of us had paid much attention to the exact details of the one we found in the sanctum, so I had no idea which one I was looking for—assuming it was any of them, and that the spoon in question wasn’t hidden somewhere else altogether. “What do we do if we find the right one? Bang it against the side of the cup? Fill the mug with the blood of orphans and give it a few stirs? I’m all for experimentation, but we wouldn’t even know if we got a result, necessarily. We found the book from the mirror sanctum, easy, and we’ve got no idea what it even says, let alone if it has any hocus-pocus qualities.”
“I guess it’s possible Mr. Grace was just having a cup of coffee in his sanctum,” Trey said. “Even wizards get cravings for caffeine, I suppose.”
Stumped on the cup, we also checked every available closet for the smoking jacket, to no avail. But there were those hidden rooms—a whole tower!—that we couldn’t access, a fact I got fairly obsessed with, for what little good it did me.
We found some interesting things, though, hidden in that warren of rooms between the living room and my studio:
A violin, kind of beat-up but still playable, and when you plucked the strings, all the lights in the house came on; pluck them again, and the lights all turned off.
A pair of painfully ugly horn-rimmed reading glasses with scratched-up lenses, but if you put them on and went outside in the daytime and looked up, the blue sky was transformed into blackness, revealing thousands of stars. The view was clearer than I’ve ever seen in my life, even on nights camping miles from any light pollution.
A chunky diver’s wristwatch that, when you wore it on your wrist, made the hand above it invincible and numb—I punched a hole in a plywood board and didn’t feel a thing, stuck the hand in boiling water, picked up hot coals, and bounced knife blades off my knuckles.
Trey liked the watch. We were sitting out on the porch, enjoying the early autumn cool while I smashed random old bricks into powder, just because I could. “You’re like Iron Fist,” he said.
I brushed brick dust off my hands and sat down in the wooden chair beside him, flexing my numb fingers. “Sorry? Is that a kung fu movie thing?”
“Comics. Danny Rand-K’ai. Luke Cage’s partner? No?”
“Sorry, I’m the wrong kind of nerd. You’re into comics? I thought you were a frat boy.”
He gestured at himself. “You see this, Bekah? This whole package here? It contains multitudes.”
“I knew you were full of something.”
“Iron Fist is a martial artist who can focus his
chi
into his hand, making it hard as iron. He uses this awesome power to punch bad guys into walls, knock down steel doors, stuff like that. I also could’ve gone with a Hellboy reference, though his badass hand is more like stone, and you’re vastly cuter than Hellboy.”
“He’s the giant red guy with the horns in those movies, right? That’s a pretty high bar for cuteness. I’m glad you think I cleared it. No points for the compliment, but half points for effort.” I flexed my iron fist. “The only problem with this particular superpower is I can’t feel
anything
in my right hand when I’m wearing the watch—not heat, not pressure, no sense of touch at all. It’s like wearing an oven mitt made of ice. So I won’t be wearing it all the time, as pleasant as it would be to punch the Firstborn in the face with my Hellboy fist.”
“It’s been almost two weeks since you drove her off,” he said. “Maybe you made your point, and she’s gone for good.”
“We live in hope. I am, almost, starting to relax. Why, last night I didn’t even wake up convinced someone was in the house trying to murder me.”
“That’s great progress. Since you’re feeling so relaxed…any interest in a second date?”
You know what? I was interested. Nobody had tried to kill me in two weeks, so I was ready to think about the future. Maybe not ready to get serious, but at least ready to seriously consider the possibility.
It was more fun to make him work for it, though. “You mean a second date with
you
?”
“I didn’t realize you had other suitors.”
I snorted, the look on his face priceless—a mix of boy-who-lost-his-puppy and anyone-who-wants-to-date-you-will-have-to-go-through-me. It’s nice to be wanted. “You’ve been here every other day, Trey. If I had other suitors you would have tripped over them. You sure you haven’t gotten sick of me yet?”
“Presence makes my heart grow fonder. Plus, the days out here have been heavy on sorting piles of junk, stirring up dust, and the occasional magical experimentation—but woefully short on making out. I—”
I slid the wristwatch off my hand while he was talking—sensation rushing back into my fingers and palm—and then reached over and touched his cheek before kissing him. It was a good kiss. Long, lingering, slow, deep, and returned with obvious but not sloppy enthusiasm. He pulled back and said, “Bekah, you make me feel so—”
I interrupted him with another kiss, and when we paused he tried to talk again, saying, “You’re just so—”
I stopped him again, the same way, since it had worked so well the first time.
I knew at some point we’d have to talk about where we stood, what we meant to one another, figure out our expectations and assumptions and aspirations—but that meant
I’d
have to figure out what I wanted, and I hadn’t done that yet. I knew I wanted to kiss him right now, though, and see where that led us.
I could feel him drawing breath to speak again, so I paused just long enough to murmur, “Trey, it’s hard to make out when you keep trying to talk about your feelings. It makes your tongue all wiggly.”
He got the point, and focused on the task at hand—and the task his hands suddenly found for themselves. After a while I suggested we move inside to the couch, since there’s only so much you can do in the way of snuggling and groping when sitting side by side on a pair of hard wooden chairs. Once he was settled on the couch I climbed into his lap and put my arms around his neck and we spent a pleasant fifteen or twenty minutes engaged in a thorough exploration of how we each liked to be kissed.
Making out is underrated. Too often it’s just foreplay, something to get through before you rush into the the bits that involve more nakedness and gasping. But a good makeout session is a work of art on its own merits, and a great way to learn a new person’s rhythms and responses…and also to figure out how well you mesh.
Trey and I meshed pretty well.
“So about that second date,” he said, when we’d slowed down to occasional kisses.
“About that. Unless you’re totally sick of my house, would you mind having it here? I was thinking, you’ve cooked so often for me, it’s about time I made dinner for you.”
“You can cook?”
“I can do anything, Trey. You’ll learn that about me.”
“I look forward to the education. So…you’re still not comfortable leaving the house for the night, then?”
I shook my head. “Nah, that’s not it. For our next date I just thought we might benefit from proximity to my bedroom.”
He leaned his head against the back of the couch and regarded me. “You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, Ms. Lull. I don’t know what makes you think I’m the sort of guy who puts out on the second date.”
“My humblest apologies.” I made a show of getting off his lap. “I shouldn’t have presumed. Or else I thought all the days you’ve spent in my house counted as partial credit, a half date here, a quarter date there. By my count this’ll be more like our fifth date.”
He pulled me back against him. “Hmm. I could conceivably put out on our fifth date and keep my dignity intact. But I’ll wait and see how good dinner is before I commit.”
“Always wise to reserve final judgment.”
“So this dinner.” He wiggled a little and resituated me on his lap; don’t think I didn’t notice. “When were you thinking? Because I’m plenty hungry now.”
“Anticipation is the best spice, counselor. Besides, you have to give me time to go shopping. It would be gauche to cook you the same food you bought and put in my kitchen.”
“We wouldn’t want to be gauche. Tomorrow night I’ve got family dinner. Believe me, I’d rather be here, but in the ongoing war that is my family, I have to pick my battles.”
“So let’s make it Monday night. No time like the immediate future.” I slid off him, onto the other half of the couch. “Consider me sitting in your lap just then an appetizer, though. Because I will probably be too lazy to prepare a literal appetizer.”
“I like metaphors better than petit fours anyway.”
I stared at him for a moment. “I…that was terrible, Trey. That was not a good joke. Puns are the E. coli of humor, but that wasn’t even a pun. That was just a rhyme. Barely even a rhyme.”
“You expect me to use my
good
jokes tonight? This isn’t even a date. Monday works for me. I don’t need to be up early Tuesday, either.”
“What makes you think I’ll keep you up late? Who’s the presumptuous one now?”
He leaned over, gave me a kiss not quite deep enough to get us both going again, and stood up. “I’ve got some errands to run, so I’ll leave you to plan your menu. No more than eight courses, please, I’d hate to get overfull.”
“You like Italian food?”
“Sure. I guess if we both have garlic breath it cancels out.”
“Yeah, well, bring a toothbrush.”
“That’s the sexiest sentence I’ve ever heard in my life, Bekah.” He grinned and showed himself out, leaving me to sprawl on the couch, looking up at the ceiling. I took a few moments to just lie there and feel happy, a kind of effervescent sea welling up inside me, all my considerable worries and concerns floating up to a distant surface and bobbing away out of sight. My lips still tingled from all that kissing, I was warm from Trey’s body against mine, and even breathing in and out felt good.