by A L Hart
Now she clipped her head in disagreement, started to say something, then seemed to rethink it. “Perhaps. But if so, then none of this makes sense.” She took hold of her tea and sauntered back to the bed, but I knew better than to believe she would be sleeping anytime soon, as opposed to snooping. At my look, she said, “I suppose, in a way, it makes some sense . . . The two worlds always did have a twisted sense of humor.”
Curiosity warred with my perturbed state. Eyes still narrowed, distrusting, I probed, “I don’t understand what you mean when you start talking like that. What do you mean two worlds—or is that some religious jargon?”
She cast me a bemused glare, but the expression sobered into confusion. “It’s just . . . you share features. You even share his gift.”
It was my turn to be puzzled. “I share features with who?”
“Whom,” she corrected.
I waited.
Her lips curled into a smile that turned something inside of me, though the smile was a sad one no matter what beauty it awoken in her subtle features. “He who created us,” she answered. “You resemble the Maker, and apparently more. Out there on that pitiful excuse for a playground, those men and how they suddenly vanished? You did that, but I cannot believe you’re him because rather than demand your diary, the Maker would have simply taken it.”
“Journal,” I said absently. It wouldn’t be the first time it’d been called that, and I would have gotten it had she not been so eerily quick, like a snake, if not faster.
That aside, the only “maker” I’d heard of resided above, moving His pieces elaborately, taking lives indiscriminately, unfairly. And I was far from a god. I was reminded of that everyday that I breathed in air without the ones I’d taken for granted, without the ones I could never express my love to again.
I said simply, “I’m not Him, no. And I for sure don’t share His gift.”
“You’re wrong. You share his gift and his face, and I don’t understand it at all. But perhaps she does.” There was something a little less contempt in her eyes when she looked down to her sister. “Then again, she always was closer to you—him. Could sense his presence anywhere.”
With the way her voice became void of all hostility, I felt I was invading some personal moment, even if the conversation revolved around me. “What did your sister need my help with, anyway?” I asked. The question I should have asked the moment they’d staggered into my shop.
Jera swallowed, and for a moment I thought I saw a spark of pain flash in the gray pools of her eyes. But the look hardened into familiar territory. “She probably sensed you were not the cruel man that he was—the one whom I mistakened you for. And she probably knew that you could help her.” Her gaze locked with mine. “Heal her.”
“Tough luck, because I serve coffee, not medicine,” I returned. “But the offer still stands: I can take you both to the hospital and I’m sure they’ll give you something for whatever drugs—”
“We aren’t under the influence, you fool!” she declared. “We’re succubi. And even we can fall victim to illnesses.”
Succubi? Like the demons of sex? Or something similar. I hadn’t exactly brushed up on my mythology since I was a teenager with nothing better to do than devour whatever material was at my disposal.
I settled into my desk chair and watched her carefully, trying to get a read on what she herself believed to be truth and fiction. “In your own words, just so we’re on the same page, what is a succubi to you?”
“Firstly, succubi is plural, while succubus is singular,” she clarified, then took a sip of her tea. She gagged. “What is this, horse excrements?”
“Or the best tea I have in stock.”
“Those poor consumers.”
“It’s one of my top sellers. You didn’t answer my question.”
She place the mug on the nightstand, smacked her lips to ward off the taste, and relaxed back against the headboard, returning my gaze with a more thorough one of her own. “A succubus is simply a breed of demon.”
I crossed one leg over the other and really looked at her now, trying to determine just what level of crazy she truly was. “And now, just to be clear, when you say demon, this is all in association with Satan’s spawns and the like, right?”
She blew a disbelieving breath at me. “Please. Satan himself would cower before me.”
I couldn’t help it. Amusement was beginning to run into my incredulity. “And why is that?”
She smiled coyly. “I burn hotter.”
Whatever that was supposed to mean. “Satan would have been able to smite those men who were after you,” I pointed out. But I was reminded of the way she’d moved at the start of the confrontation. I’d likened it to that of a serpent, and what was Lucifer if not a snake?
“They caught me when I wasn’t at my finest—which is indisputably mind-blowing,” she said, looking nonplussed about it. “I assure you, it won’t happen again.”
“No need to assure me,” I said, brows raised as I found my own lips curling. This was all bordering on priceless comedy. Really. “When the morning comes, the two of you and your delusions won’t be my problem anymore.”
Shock dominated within her gaze, her mouth dropping before she said, “And just where do you expect us to go?”
Now my mouth dropped. “I-I don’t know, but you’re not staying here. This is a business, not a shelter. Not to mention,” I narrowed my eyes. “You were clearly against the idea of being here before.”
“Well, perhaps I’ve had a change of heart upon realizing you weren’t the psychotic terror I thought you to be.”
I was too exhausted to speculate over her “change of heart,” but there was no need to. They couldn’t stay here. “I’m sure you have family or someone you can stay with until you get back on your feet.”
Silence answered. And a scathing glare.
I glared back.
“I suppose I could always kill you,” she concluded.
“Is that supposed to motivate me to change my mind?” This woman was actually a nutcase. A real, in the flesh lunatic. I shook my head. “You and your sister are leaving first thing in the morning.”
“Wait! I was kidding!”
“About killing me,” I said drily.
She scowled. “It’s a habit.”
“The act or the threat?” Both required a long, hard session with a psychiatrist and a straightjacket, as far as I was concerned.
Silence answered.
There was no chance of me sleeping tonight. No chance of them staying here.
Jera rose from the bed then and the moment she took a step in my direction, I was out of my seat and speculating on the force required to knock a one hundred and twenty pound woman out with a desk lamp.
She closed in; I wrapped my hand around the vintage neck of the lamp.
She stopped in front of me, looking up at me with those storm of grays, and this close, I noted the full shape of her lips, their natural pink tint, and vaguely—as could only be expected—just how ample her chest was despite the loose fall of my t-shirt. She smelled like rain and minerals from her grapple in the park.
I said nothing. Too busy waiting for her to make the first lethal move that could make this a clear case of self-defense when the authorities showed up.
She didn’t move. “Look at them,” she said.
Like that, hostility slid from my grasp in exchange for heat rising to my neck, ears, and eventually my cheeks. She really was crazy. I averted my eyes to the side, hesitant at first, but slowly I dragged them to the two swells of her chest and felt as my heart began to pound, thoughts racing. Was she going to try to buy her residency?
“Not my breasts, you sick old man.”
My lids fluttered, gaze snapping back to the floor, cheeks burning more furiously. “W-what?”
“The horns. Look at my horns.”
I did, maybe even with more intensity than necessary as I tried to scrub clean my thoughts. Lips pursing, I acknowledged the gloss
y material attached to her head and I had to give their designer props. The horns were like well polished black oak, a deep shade just above that of coal. They curled back, disappearing into the fall of her fringes, then outward, thicker at the base and thinning towards the tip.
“What about them?” I said. Then, “And I’m not an old man. I’m only twenty-six.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, and I was quick to look anywhere but in that direction. “What about them? They’re real is what.”
I blew a breath of disbelief at her, and copied her line, “Please. How long did it take you to glue those on?”
She scoffed at my derision. “Are you accusing me of surgically modifying myself for what is clearly natural beauty? Are you accusing me of acting human?”
“You call those things beauty?”
She pinned me with daggers, lip curling over her teeth into a snarl. “They’re real.”
Bored, I regarded her drily. “Then you’re telling me,” I began. “If I were to do this . . .” I reached for a horn and she recoiled.
“Y-you can’t touch them, you degenerate!” Her cheeks were flamed, her fists balled into the seams of her t-shirt.
I dropped my hand and smirked. “Because they’re fake.” I never understood those who wanted to walk around with such bizarre body modifications, so in love with lore that they opted to become it. I also never cared enough to question, object or harass about it. You could drape yourself in a sheep costume, wolf costume and claim yourself one of the wild, and you wouldn’t turn my head.
However, Jera using these horns to justify the absurd story she was feeding me was another matter entirely. She must have thought I was multiple shades of ignorant to believe she was some demonic descendant being hunted by—I don’t know, demon collectors?—and had no place else to call home but my coffee shop.
“You know,” I said. “You could try telling the truth. I might be more inclined to help.”
She grumbled something, shifted uncomfortably, then cast me a dark look from beneath the black curls furling into her gaze. “Fine,” she said.
“Fine?”
“Fine!” She closed the distance between us, her body so close to mine a heat licked inside of me and this time I couldn’t pretend to not see it for what it was: hunger. “You may touch them,” she permitted, oblivious to how blood began to rush through me just a little bit faster.
I swallowed, backed up, only for the desk to press into me.
She watched me expectantly, that rose tint still coloring her cheeks as though she were offering for me to touch something much more sacred than some costume accessories.
But curiosity got the best of me again. Batting down the uncharacteristic attraction, I lifted my hand slowly, and with gentle force, I ran my finger over the rim of the black horn.
She gasped. A quiet, heedy sound that made me retract my hand instantly, only to find her staring at the floor, her lashes curtaining all emotions. When she didn’t stop me, I resumed. The material was colder than I’d expected, reminding me of marble. There were four depression rings, I discovered, and when I pressed into its groove, Jera’s breathing became labored.
I paused again. Resumed. There was a quality to the horns I couldn’t deny. Fingers memorizing the tip, the soft pouring of her curls over the back of my hand, I marveled. And then I stopped. Focused. Had the temperature around us always been this warm? The heat sank through my shirt as if I were seated right in front of the heating vents and I was sure I smelled something . . . floral.
“Satisfied?” she whispered breathlessly, drawing my attention back
The tone caught me off guard, and when I looked down, I caught her running her tongue over her lips, her gaze boring into me. Her pupils were dilated, and the heaving of her chest . . . its rise and fall, made me want to lean in for just the barest of contact.
Shaking off the thought, I abruptly gave the horn one hard tug and was stunned when her head jerked rather than the material snapping off.
“Ow!” She smacked my hand away, cradling the horn. “I said touch them, not try to rip them out of my skull, you big brute!”
“I didn’t think that would happen,” I said, still puzzling on just what kind of adhesive could have been used to tether such hard, smooth material to the flesh. It was far too large to follow the principle of dermals, its curvature disrupting the laws of physics.
Bottom lip puckered, anger sustained, she rubbed the base of the horns.
“An accident,” I said.
“You did it on purpose,” she accused.
Tears sprung in her eyes.
“Wait a minute now,” I said hurriedly, holding up my hands. “It really was an accident. I didn’t pull them that hard.”
She sniffed.
“You should have told me they were practically screwed into your head!”
“They’re a part of my head,” she insisted, and then the tears were falling, her hand rubbing the area that looked to be inflaming.
My nonbelief dissolved in favor of panic. The night was already a strange one. A woman with questionable horns in the middle of my bedroom crying because of something I’d done was not something I came pre-prepared to deal with.
“Look, it was an accident. How can I fix it? I have some tylenol and muscle cream. I can even brew you a drink of your choosing this time.”
The crying continued, and the guilt began to spread in my chest. “Come on, don’t cry. Tell me what to do to make it better. Anything.”
She ceased rubbing the horn momentarily to peek up at me from beneath her arm. “Anything?”
I nodded.
“Residency in your abode for one month.”
I crossed my arms. “Anything but stay here.”
At that, the waterworks continued, her hands rubbing once more. “It was horrible, officer,” she said between wet sobs. “First he incapacitated my darling sister here, then he dragged me to his man cave and proceeded to assert his wicked ways onto me.”
Un. Believable. “Blackmail?!”
She peeked again. “We don’t have anywhere else to go,” was her defense.
“This is a coffeeshop, not a refuge!”
“It’s safer than out there!”
“That is not what you told your sister. In fact, you said the exact opposite.”
“Well, I change my mind. I didn’t know you were such a gracious, strong, and capable young man.”
I was speechless. She was a chameleon, willing to adorn whichever shade favored the situation. From blackmail and insults, to sweet compliments that were obviously lies. And me, I wasn’t going to stand for it. I wasn’t going to allow her to walk into my shop and manipulate things to her satisfaction, as if she owned the place. She was so clearly unstable in the head, high maintenance, and far too volatile. There was no way someone like her was staying for an entire month, and contrary to her belief, there was nothing that was going to change my mind.
She looked at me hard, measuring. “We’ll work for free.”
I cleared my throat. “One month. You can start tomorrow.”
Ch. 4
I woke to the most pleasant sensation.
Gentle fingers threading through my hair, moving in therapeutic circles over my scalp, threatening to sink me back into slumber if not for the rays beaming down on my face. I groaned and turned onto my side, burying my face into the softness beneath me. The motions continued. Round and round, lolling me off to dreams.
And then, through the distant warp of dreaming and waking, the loveliest humming fell over me like a blanket in the cold, sending warm shivers throughout me.
I drifted.
When I woke the second time, I bolted upright, my internal clock telling me it was past 6 am. The shop opened at 9 on Saturdays.
Wiping the sleep from the corner of my mouth, I looked around me. I was downstairs in one of the lounge’s booths.
Yesterday came flooding back. The twins, the storm, the men in black. Or maybe, just maybe, that’d
all been a dream, a product of my overworked mind.
“Good morning.”
I leapt away from the voice, back plastering against the window near the booth. In front of me was the sister Ophelia, watching me with an easy smile softening her features and distinguishing her perfectly from the terror that was Jera. Even the morning rays shined in her favor, a yellow sheen of sunlight feathered onto the gentle curvature of her, brightening her into something celestial. Her gray gaze was interrupted by the curly bangs, but from what I could see of the matte slates, kindness poured from them by the kilowatt.
Not a dream.
My gaze dropped to her legs. I’d been laying on them (and drooling). Which meant she’d been stroking my hair and humming me into the most peaceful rest I’d had in . . . ever, really.
“What time is it?” I asked groggily, a black fog of lethargy settled over my nerves, numbing any panic or opinion I should have had on waking up to a stranger’s touch. Or maybe it simply paled in comparison to all I’d experienced last night.
“7:05,” she answered lightly.
“What?!”
I jumped to my feet and banged my head on the low-hung light fixture. “Ow.”
“Sorry,” Ophelia whispered, looking down at her now fidgeting fingers.
Rubbing the throb, I eased from the booth, giving the fixture the evil eye. “You didn’t make me hit the light. Poor design on the architect’s part.”
Yesterday’s agreement was the next thing I remembered.
We had fifty-five minutes before the prep team arrived, and usually I had all systems a go by this time. I was off this morning. And a bad morning typically elicited a bad day.
I frowned and looked back to Ophelia.
She startled under my gaze, her eyes averting back and forth in some anxious bid to escape scrutiny.
“Jeez, relax, I’m not going to do anything to you,” I promised.
I may have had an extensive, strange yet reassuring conversation with Jera, but her sister had been out for all of it. There was no telling what was going through her head after last night.
Black lightning flashes behind my eyes, the memory of her scream echoing with pangs of emotions in my chest.