covencraft 04 - dry spells (20 page)

“You sound very well-versed on this topic,” he said, trying to keep his tone light.

“I am. But I wish I weren’t.”

When they arrived at the cottage, Bruce bound down the steps.

“Buddy, you look anxious,” Lily said, crouching down to pet him.

Bruce submitted to her ministrations for a moment, his snout moving up and down her crouched form, and then pressing forward suddenly, his tongue coming out quickly to touch her knee. He then wag-wobbled over to Paris, sniffing up one pant leg and down the other. Bruce let out a loud snort and headed to the car, deftly hopping up onto his hind legs and pressing his taloned forelegs against the car doors, leaving some rather sizable gouges in the paint. Bruce gave the inside of the car a once-over and then pushed himself off, a horrid scraping sound coming from where his claws raked the doors. He went around the car in a circle, snout raised, nostrils flaring before he came back to Paris and Lily, his tongue zipping out and back in.

“Pfffffft.”

“I’m afraid she’s still not with us, chap,” Paris said. Bruce blinked at him twice in succession, and then gave a mighty sigh, turning around and waddling back toward the house. He disappeared around the side, where there was a window charmed to let him go in and out.

A loud sniff made Paris turn quickly to Lily.

She wiped a hand across her nose, her irises looking more sharply green against the sudden redness in her eyes. “It’s sad, you know? He misses her.”

“She’s been a large part of his life for the last while. A near constant.” As he spoke the words, he realized he could be speaking of himself as much as Bruce.

“Yeah,” Lily agreed. She placed her hands on her hips and stared at the cottage. “I need a drink.”

With a determined tip of her head, she stomped up the steps to the front door. After lingering a moment, Paris followed.

CHAPTER TEN

Jade pulled her phone out from where it was nestled in her coat pocket. Besides the glaring notification that she’d lost network connectivity (no shit), the date and time were all fucked up. She shook it a bit, as though it would help. The numbers seemed to be randomly changing - the date kept flickering back and forth between the 31
^st
of February and the negative 8
^th
of October. She hadn’t even know cell phones could show negative dates or other non-existent dates. The time was a strange mixture of numbers, symbols and characters. She stared at the screen as they walked, trying to figure out if there was a pattern to it. As if it might impart some information.

“You can clearly see it doesn’t work here.”

“No, I get that. I just…” She looked around, squinting at the vastness of the Dearth. “How do you tell time here?”

Seth sighed. “We don’t. Not really. It passes. Quickly or slowly it doesn’t really matter.”

“How can it not matter?”

“There’s no mortality. So what does it matter how long something takes?”

Jade frowned, feeling her eyebrows come together as she looked back down at her phone, swiping it on and flipping through some apps. No connectivity, Wi-Fi lost, out of service range. She pocketed it again. They were almost at the settlement, although she was hesitant to call it that now that they were closer. It was more like a shanty-town. Jade was pretty sure she’d seen towns like it in a million spaghetti westerns - men without pasts or futures wandering in and hitching their horse to a post while locals narrowed their eyes at them and then spat in the dirt. She wished she had some kind of gun belt. Not that she knew how to shoot a gun, other than what she’d read in books or seen on TV. But it would have been nice to have somewhere to put her hands other than inside her coat pockets. All she had in there was a cell phone that didn’t work, her ear buds, a ChapStick and a couple of tissues. One of which had been used. She dug into the bottom of her pockets and felt a couple of random coins. Maybe about two bucks and thirty cents.

“What kind of money do you use here?” Jade asked.

Seth’s lips curled slightly. “Barter and trade, dear Possum. Barter and trade.”

She swallowed thickly, not liking the sound of that.

“How long have we been here, do you think?” Jade asked the question before she could stop herself, not sure if she wanted the answer.

Seth sighed again. “I told you, time is different in the Dearth. But,” he continued before she could protest. “By your mortal clock, if I had to guess I would say…” He motioned his hands around slightly. “Three days.”

Her stomach swooped low and hard at his words. “Three days? That long?”

“Give or take a day.” He shrugged, seemingly unconcerned.

She thought of Lily and Bruce, home at the cottage, wondering about her. About Paris. She swallowed. “Do you think… I mean, do people know where I am?”

“If by people you mean your Englishman and your understudy, then yes, I suppose they do. Tell me, you can still sense your other half, can’t you?”

Jade paused, focusing in on the thought of Lily. Now that she concentrated, she realized she could sense her. She was in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water. If she closed her eyes, she could almost taste the liquid on her tongue.

“Enough of that,” Seth said sharply, pinching the skin on Jade’s elbow hard. Her eyes watered. “You’re leaking power again.”

Jade pulled her magic back in and took a deep breath. For a moment, she’d been in her small, cozy kitchen. Sipping a glass of water and looking at the sink, wondering if she should clean it. But now, she was back in the Dearth. She squinted and looked at the sad, slovenly structures they were coming up on. Whether she liked or not, she wasn’t at home. She was here.

Entering the town was rather anticlimactic. There was no sign, no notice of their arrival (that she saw), no change in the topography. They simply got closer and closer to the structures until they were upon them. They seemed to be made of wood - dark, washed out grey colors with knots and warped edges. Everything had a worn, timeless look about it. As though they had stood forever as they were, never new and shiny. Always old, creaky and weathered. Seth eyeballed the sign outside one of the buildings - a wooden thing that swung and swayed despite the lack of a breeze. Jade watched as a muscle in his jaw clenched. She couldn’t make out the lettering on the sign. The letters seemed to wiggle and move as she watched, only standing still when she looked away and could see them out of the corner of her eye. But even then, the characters weren’t any she knew. Some kind of runes, she guessed.

“Bad news?” she asked.

He pursed his lips together. His tail, still visible to her while they were in the Dearth, swished back and forth restlessly.

“Let’s go, Possum.”

It wasn’t an answer, but she didn’t feel like pressing him at that moment. She had this sense that he was like a tight piano string - waiting for the hammer to strike him and snap him in two.

Three sagging steps, each in the shape of a smile led up to the building and Seth by passed them all with a quick leap. Jade tentatively touched her foot to one and found it relatively sturdy. It groaned under her weight, a low, painful sound, like a living thing. But it held and she counted herself lucky. The door was an odd revolving one, broken into small pie slices, smaller than she’d seen before in her life. It was some kind of darkly colored glass. Dirty, dusty. Scratched up with deep, long grooves. Something with claws had made those grooves, she just knew it. It spun lazily as they approached, as though someone had recently entered or exited, the momentum still carrying the door through its rotations. She estimated there were sixteen thin slices. The thought of being trapped between them made her shoulder blades itch. It would be too much like being pressed between glass slides, like some kind of insect or specimen to be examined. Before she could say anything, Seth slipped into one of the crevices and the door started revolving faster. She knew she had to go after him, but watching the revolutions and figuring out when to jump in reminded her of trying to skip double-dutch jump rope as a child. She’d never been able to figure out the rhythm and jump in between the ropes. It was like there was a secret to which she hadn’t been privy.

Possum
.

She started. Seth’s voice hadn’t really come through the air and into her ear, like sound. It just… enveloped her. Like an uncomfortable cloak. It scared her and she jumped into the revolving door, a quick image of being sliced in half lengthwise exploding in her mind’s eye. It was cloying in the small space. And dark.

Her eyes darted trying to find the exit, but none came. Panic was a tight fist crushing her lungs and then, after it felt like she’d gone through at least two full revolutions, Seth’s tail snaked into the small enclave, wrapped itself around her waist and yanked her. She stumbled out of the door, her runners making no sound on the wooden floor. The only sound for a moment was the soft
whup-whup-whup
as the revolving door continued its lazy spin behind her. It was dark and she blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She looked up toward the light and jumped back when a strange shape hovered above her.

A fat, spiked fish-globe dangled from the ceiling, like a disco ball. It was sickly yellow with sharp red points jutting out all around it. Small fins waved almost daintily as it rotated. It was the most hideous light fixture she’d ever seen and only one of about twelve that hung around the establishment. All her eyes could make out were low hanging fat fish globes all giving off a dull red hue. Like being trapped in one of those submarine war movies.

“Deco-demon?” Jade said lowly, trying to be casual and nonchalant. She thought she did okay, until the fish exhaled, its body caving in on itself before puffing up again, impossibly fat and rotund. “Is that thing alive?” she inched closer to Seth, not taking her eyes off the gelatinous, shiny thing. It collapsed again and then bulged. A quiet
puh-puh
sound escaping it.

Breathing, Jade realized.

Seth leaned closer to her and she began to pull away until his tail wrapped around her waist again, this time painfully and he grabbed one of her wrists and twisted it, enough to make her freeze like a rabbit in the woods. She held her body pristinely still as his lips brushed her ear. “Try not to make a scene, Possum. You’re drawing attention.”

Jade looked around the interior, her muscles so stiff one of her eyelids started twitching. There was a long bar running the length of the room, which was far longer than it was wide. The other side of the room, across from the bar, held eight booths, five of which were occupied. The occupants seemed human upon first glance, but as she stared harder, she saw several pairs of eyes glint with unnatural light, ears perched on top of heads and tails swishing back and forth. Everyone was watching her and Seth. But mostly her. She fought the urge to reach up and fiddle with her salamander pendant, just to have something to do.

“Grab a seat. I’ll get us some drinks.”

Jade bristled at Seth’s tone, but recognized she was in no position to argue with him. Walking with slow, measured steps, she passed by the first four occupied booths, keeping her eyes focused on the back wall as she did. The patrons of the bar tracked her movements.
Like being a giraffe on a field of lions
, she thought. She swallowed and slid into the booth, her back toward the door. She pressed herself deep into the corner and then rested her hands carefully on the surface of the table. Upon examination, it was etched in various runes and markings. She traced her fingers over a set and they lit up under her skin, glowing brightly blue against the brown table top.

“None of that, Possum,” Seth called from the bar. Feeling like a child caught stealing cookies, but not knowing what she’d done, Jade tucked her hands into her lap. She kept her spine perfectly straight. She could hear slight chatter coming from around the bar, the denizens of the establishment going back to whatever they were doing before she and Seth arrived.

Moments later, Seth slid into the seat across the table from her, depositing two shot glasses filled with a dark, murky liquid on the table top.

“Don’t drink it all at once,” he warned.

“I thought I didn’t need to drink here,” Jade asked, reaching out and touching the shot glass, spinning it slightly.

“You don’t. That’s why you can’t drink it all at once, nor can you have another. Anything you drink or eat will remain unprocessed in your system until you’re back on the other side. You might be able to have this and perhaps something to eat, if you chose, but not much more.”

Visions of Persephone eating pomegranate seeds flitted through her head. “If I drink this, am I trapped here?”

Seth took a small sip of his drink, grimacing as he did. “This is not the Underworld, nor am I Hades. No, you won’t be trapped.”

“What is it?”

“Best not ask.”

She pushed it away slightly, pulling her hand back to her lap.

“You’re going to have to drink some of it. Mnemosyne won’t come talk to us unless you do.”

Jade looked over at where Seth inclined his head, back to the bar, where the bartender, an older woman with dark hair shot through with silver, was watching them carefully. She swallowed again and reached out for the shot glass. Licking her lips, she paused, holding it up. She took a delicate sniff and her eyes burned.

“This smells like paint thinner,” she said lowly, staring across the rim at Seth.

He nodded. “Tastes like it too. There’s not much that’s pleasant in the Dearth.”

Jade touched the glass to her lips and took the smallest sip she could.

“Keep your face under control,” Seth added, just as the vile liquid hit her tongue.

It did taste like paint thinner. Or what she imagined paint thinner would taste like. Oily, chemically, pungent, thick and bitter. She kept what control over her face she could, but the sheer awfulness of the drink still managed to force her features into a strange grimace she could feel - her cheeks strained, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes watering. Seconds later, the bartender, Mnemosyne, slid into the booth next to Seth and stared at Jade.