“I got it, mortal,” said Nick. “What should I do instead?”
Harvey offered cautiously: “I have an idea.”
He led the way to Tommy’s bedroom. He hadn’t ventured there since he went in with the gun in his hands. He almost chickened out now, but Nick was right behind him, and he didn’t want to be useless again.
Before it was Tommy’s bedroom, his dad had fixed up this room to be his mom’s library. Tommy had never let his dad take the shelves down.
Harvey’s mother had loved books. She’d gone to college for a year, doing social studies and women’s studies—some women’s nonsense, his dad always called it—before she had to drop out for the usual reason. She’d died when Harvey was too young to remember much about her, but he had a distant recollection of lying on patchwork blankets with her at bedtime. The memory was fuzzy and soft and warm, of being wrapped up in one blanket so it became a patchwork world and he was a quilt burrito, her voice reading to him the only sound he could hear. She’d read everything, books about love and poetry and celebrities from the golden age of Hollywood, and dictionaries and encyclopedias. She’d picked out the diamond panes of their living room windows, sunshine yellow and burnt orange, amethyst and teal. If she’d lived, Harvey might have grown up in a house with somebody who was like him.
Sabrina and Roz read a lot too. Harvey enjoyed sitting in the library with them. He sketched and listened to music and flipped through comics, or novels they recommended, while Sabrina made intense notes on the reading or Roz got lost in her book. Tommy was never much of a reader, but his steady girl in high school had been. Harvey suspected Tommy was drawn to her because of that. Because of their mother. Tommy told Harvey their mom used to say: Stories teach us to live better.
Harvey crushed down thoughts of Tommy. He had a task to perform, and he didn’t want to mess it up. He opened the doors hiding the shelves from view and combed through his mother’s dusty volumes to find the books on psychology and relationships. There were a lot of books all called The Hite Report: on female sexuality, male sexuality, and growing up under patriarchy. Whoever Hite was, they’d reported a lot of things.
“Oh, books.”
Nick sounded pleased.
Harvey glanced at him. “Um, I was thinking you could read these.” He hesitated. “You can stay here and read them. I can’t let you take them away. They were my mom’s.”
“That’s fine,” said Nick. “If Father Blackwood saw me with mortal books, he’d burn them.”
“Who’s Father Blackwood?”
“He’s the head of our coven, and the principal of the Academy of Unseen Arts.”
“He burns books?”
Their own principal had banned some books in the school library. Maybe it wasn’t so different. Harvey didn’t get why people in charge of teaching you wouldn’t want you to learn.
“He does a lot of things,” said Nick, a trifle grimly, then cheered up. “Give me the books.”
Nick continued to seem happy, rather than smug or amused, which was new. They carried the stacks of books into the kitchen, and Nick laid out the books in a careful pattern, then requested notepaper, highlighters, and several pens. Harvey had to go empty out his schoolbag.
“Do you—like books?” Harvey asked when Nick was set up with his studies.
“Yes,” said Nick absently. “When I started going to school, I wasn’t used to being around people. The books in the library at the Academy made sense of a lot of things. And they were interesting.”
Clearly, Nick was fond of studying, like Sabrina. Harvey’d never been much good at studying. Maybe he should go to his room and sketch and leave Nick to it.
“Stay where you are,” said Nick, without looking up from his book. “In case I have questions.”
“Um, okay. I don’t want any sex questions,” Harvey warned.
Nick was beginning to look amused again.
“Think I might know more than you on that particular topic, mortal. I’m aware you were primarily romantically committed to Sabrina, and of course she had to stay pure for Satan until she was sixteen.”
“She what!” exclaimed Harvey.
Nick shrugged. He acted as if everything he said was totally reasonable. It was one of the most upsetting things about Nick.
“Whoa,” said Harvey. “When we went out, her aunt Zelda used to yell at her from the window to keep the unholy temple of her body locked to unbelievers. I did wonder about that. I mean, I didn’t think she was a witch. I just thought her aunt Zelda was very weird.”
“No,” said Nick. “It’s standard.”
“Does everyone do that?” Harvey demanded. “Did you stay pure for Satan?”
A strange expression crossed Nick’s face. Harvey realized, with a burst of delight at this unexpected justice from the universe, that Nick Scratch was scandalized.
“Of course I did! What kind of boy do you take me for?”
Harvey couldn’t answer because he was laughing too hard. Even when Nick huffed and glared, he couldn’t stop.
“Yes, well, anyway—stop laughing, farm boy—that means I’m aware that you can’t have much experience,” said Nick. “What has it been? Like fifty people in your entire life?”
Nick glanced at Harvey inquiringly. Though it had seemed impossible to stop laughing a moment ago, Harvey wasn’t laughing now.
“Was that too few people?” asked Nick. “Was that insulting? Obviously, I know mortals don’t have to save themselves for Satan.”
“I don’t want to talk about this!” Harvey said loudly.
“Actually, the Dark Lord doesn’t specify men must stay pure, but I figured it was only fair.”
“Satan shouldn’t tell women what to do,” Harvey snapped, then worried he might be disrespecting Nick’s culture.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he took out the math homework they’d been assigned over the vacation. Usually Harvey left his math homework until the day before it was due, like a normal person. Susie did the same, no matter how often Sabrina and Roz told them it was better to accomplish their work on their first free evening.
Sabrina probably really appreciated that Nick was smart. She’d told Harvey he wasn’t stupid, but she’d been lying to him for years and he hadn’t caught on.
Harvey tried to concentrate on his math homework. It was difficult, but Harvey wasn’t sure if that was because math was hard, because Harvey hadn’t been sleeping well lately, or because there was a warlock at Harvey’s elbow making extensive notes about mortal courtship.
Also, he was starving.
Harvey looked up from the equations he was trying to balance with no luck. “Nick?”
Nick didn’t look up from his book. “Hmm?”
“Want something to eat?”
Nick did look up then. “What?”
His face didn’t show much, and the single word came out devoid of expression. Harvey wasn’t sure how he was receiving the impression Nick found this tricky to answer.
“Something to eat?” Harvey asked, slightly freaked out. It was a simple question.
Nick seemed to come to a conclusion. “I could eat.”
He was still holding his pen, but he had his chin propped on his fist now, studying Harvey with the same focus that he’d trained on the books, as though he was trying to puzzle something out.
Harvey tried to ignore the bizarre-warlock-in-the-kitchen stuff happening to him. He heated up the lasagna and set the table around the papers.
When Harvey turned back to the table, Nick was filling out the equations in Harvey’s math book.
“What are you doing?” Harvey asked.
“Playing the game,” Nick answered.
“What?”
“Isn’t it a children’s game?” Nick inquired. “With numbers? It’s so simple.”
Harvey glared and pulled the homework away. Nick cackled like a real witch.
When dinner was ready, Nick took a purple vial from somewhere inside his dark clothes and tipped
a tiny violet trickle onto his plate.
“Dude,” Harvey said. “Why?”
“The potion will tell me if this is poisoned,” Nick explained.
“What is wrong with witches? I’m not poisoning you.”
“It’s a precaution,” said Nick. “Alerts you to poison, truth potions, potions that make you miscarry children—not a huge concern, I admit—anything your enemies might put in your food.”
Harvey rolled his eyes and began to eat. “Gosh, I wonder why you might have enemies.”
“Every witch has a few,” murmured Nick, and forked up some lasagna. His eyes flickered shut, then open again, and he drew the plate toward him and began to eat rapidly, as if he thought someone might try to take it away from him.
The lasagna wasn’t even good. It was mostly stuff from jars. That was all Harvey and Tommy had ever really been able to work out how to do, and often it was TV dinners or chicken nuggets, especially when Tommy came home tired from working in the mines. Any special effort for family dinners usually went to waste. When Dad came in drunk, you felt like a fool for trying.
Harvey had his eyes on his own plate for literally a second, then glanced up and saw Nick had finished his entire portion and was sticking his fork in the lasagna dish.
“Hey, put it on your plate! Were you raised by wolves?”
Nick blinked. “How did you know?”
Truly, Nick thought he was a comedian. Harvey sighed and pushed the lasagna dish toward him.
“You can have the whole thing. If you put it on your plate. Do they not feed you at Invisible Academy?”
“The Academy of Unseen Arts,” corrected Nick. “They feed us. It’s slightly better than eating live rabbits.”
Harvey was leaving that one alone. Frankly, he didn’t want to know.
“While we’re eating,” said Nick, which was a polite word for “watching a man decimate a lasagna within minutes,” “these books talk a lot about consent. I know what the word means, obviously, but does it have a different connotation among mortals? Why does it get brought up so often? Is it very important?”
Harvey’s vision went hazy with horror. He wished Roz were here. She was wonderful generally, and especially at explaining things. Then he was even more horrified by the thought of Roz being in contact with magic.
It was a hideous thing to ask somebody, but he tried. “It’s very important. Are you sure … the women you’ve been intimate with, uh, wanted to do it?”
Nick’s expression turned quizzical. “I mean, people usually leap on me and rip off my—”
“Great, nonverbal consent!” Harvey said. “Let’s stop talking about this. Right now. Immediately.”
Because nothing about Harvey’s life made sense, Nick continued to eat lasagna and muse aloud on this issue. Nick could eat at the speed of light, but with perfect table manners. Harvey suspected witchcraft.
“Is consent like … when you sell your soul?”
“No!”
Nick looked faintly appalled. “Farm boy, it’s wrong to just take souls. People have to agree before the devil can have their souls. I thought it was a good analogy.”
It didn’t sound right, but Harvey didn’t feel he had grounds to make an argument.
“I don’t know enough about how selling your soul works to say,” Harvey said eventually. “Do you guys really worship Satan?”
“Yes, we do,” said Nick in a placid voice, as if telling Harvey about the weather. “We sign our names in the Book of the Beast, so Satan has a claim on our souls. Why, what do mortals do with their souls?”
“Uh. Mortals keep our souls.”
“Why?” asked Nick. “What are you using them for?”
“Well,” said Harvey. “We just keep them.”
“That seems wasteful. You could be trading them for immortal youth and beauty, and magic powers.”
When put that way, it sounded almost reasonable. Nick talked about signing his soul away in the same manner kids at school who went to church a few times a year talked about Easter service.
Roz was very clear about everyone being tolerant of different religions. Harvey wasn’t sure if this applied to Satan.
Roz believed. Her dad was the minister, so maybe she had to, but Harvey didn’t feel entirely comfortable with Roz’s dad or at his church.
Tommy believed. He’d always worn their mother’s cross around his neck. The funeral director in Riverdale had given Harvey Tommy’s cross, and Harvey didn’t know what to do with it. He carried it around in the pocket of his jeans, always aware of the weight. Wearing the cross seemed wrong, but so did putting it away somewhere to gather dust.
Harvey didn’t know what to think about a world where monsters were allowed to terrify little kids in the mines, or people like Tommy were murdered by witches. It was hard to have faith in anything these days, but he knew when something felt wrong.
“I think …” he said at last. “I’d rather keep my soul and figure out what I want to do with it.”
Nick shrugged, as if to say: Suit yourself. The lasagna was by now totally demolished. “Sabrina didn’t want to sign the Book either. But she did.”
Harvey tensed. “Did someone make her?”
“Sabrina signed the Book on the night the Greendale Thirteen came,” said Nick. Harvey was starting to understand that when Nick’s already-low voice went lower, it meant he was troubled. “So she’d have the power to save the town. And you.”
She’d appeared in his bedroom that night and told him it was dangerous to be together ever again. That was the night her hair turned white as starlight. When he’d taken her in his arms and kissed her, he tasted ozone, and midnight, and bitter sweetness. He’d known something had happened, but not what.
“You don’t seem thrilled about her doing it,” Harvey said. “You don’t think signing away your soul is messed up at all. So why aren’t you pleased?”
Silence followed. Apparently, Nick hadn’t thought to ask himself this question.
“I liked her the way she was,” Nick answered eventually. “I thought it was a pity to change her. And an even greater pity to make her do anything she didn’t want. She said she didn’t want to, so I didn’t want her to either.”
“So, uh,” said Harvey. “That’s actually a good working definition of consent.”
Nick brightened. “Is it?”
“Well done.”
Nick glowed. “Doing things the mortal way is a snap.”
That was when they both heard the creak of the front door opening. Harvey’s blood was trained to run chill at the sound, as if a certain footstep turned on the cold tap in his soul.
“That’s my dad. You have to leave.”
It was already too late.
“It’s all right, mortal,” Nick murmured. “Relax.”
Harvey didn’t know how he was supposed to relax when Nick kept saying things like “mortal.” His dad was bound to notice.
“Harv, I’m home!” his dad bellowed from the hall. “Had a hell of a day. Two mine shafts collapsed, of all the rotten luck, and that part-timer Jones broke his leg …”
His dad’s voice trailed away when he saw Nick at the kitchen table.
“Who’s this?” his dad barked. He poured himself a glass of water, his hands shaking slightly. He drank a lot of water these days, reaching for a drink even though it wasn’t alcohol.
“Uh … this is Nick,” said Harvey. “We’re working on a project together.”
If his dad looked at Nick’s notes, he would see Nick had written Wooing Mortals? in beautiful calligraphy at the top of one page, and he would have questions. His eyes were boring through Harvey instead, seeing right through Harvey’s feeble excuses. He always looked at Harvey with the same expression, that of a man who didn’t like what he saw.
Quick as an animal moving through the trees at night, Nick produced another vial. This one glistened green, and Nick tipped it into the water glass while Harvey’s dad was watching Harvey.
“Dad�
�” Harvey began, warning, but even as he spoke, his dad took a deep draft.
He lowered the glass. Harvey winced.
“Nick,” his dad said, and started to smile. It was a broad smile, a little foolish, and it fit badly on his dad’s face. “Well, you’re welcome, of course. Come by anytime.”
“I will,” Nick answered calmly.
“The captain of the football team,” said Harvey’s dad. “That’s pretty impressive.”
“Sure,” said Nick. “Whatever football is.”
Dad was obviously hearing different things from what Nick was actually saying. Harvey’s gaze traveled from Nick to the glass to his father. Dad clapped Nick on the back.
“Nice to see the boy finally hang around with someone normal.”
Nick bared his teeth. “Hilarious you would say that.”
“Maybe you could have a talk with him about not wasting his life,” Harvey’s dad continued. “Always drawing his freaky pictures and talking stupid nonsense with the weirdest girls in town. Don’t know where he gets it from.”
Harvey stared fixedly at the kitchen table.
“Not you,” said Nick. “Clearly.”
“He’ll never amount to much,” said Dad. “No spine. Can you imagine Harv playing football? Ha! He’d burst into tears at the first touchdown. But he could try basketball. Something worthwhile to occupy himself with, for a change. Have a word with him, eh?”
“Great talk. Shame you have to go to your room and not come out until morning.”
Nick gave the command very casually. In response Harvey’s dad yawned and stretched, as though he was a puppet and Nick could pull his strings.
“I’m worn out, boys. Gonna turn in.” His dad glanced over at him. “You’d know the feeling, Harv, if you ever did an honest day’s work in your life. Nice to meet you, Nick.”
The door of his dad’s bedroom slamming closed echoed through the house. Harvey kept staring at the knots in the kitchen table. One discolored knot of wood looked almost like a screaming face. He knew his own face had fallen into its usual sullen lines.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said at last. “Magic. On my dad.”
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