by A. L. Tyler
She stared at me. I thought we were having a moment, but then she had to open her mouth.
“No. You’d be in a shelter interviewing with some batshit crazy cat lady who smells like a litter box and buys skirts with patterns that hide fur. I’m a dog person.”
She jumped down and away, and I tried to proceed like she hadn’t been an ass. Charlie ignored us both as he leaned over me, and I watched in fascination as he selected a single finger and held it steady as he pressed the blade. I felt the pressure, but then… nothing. Blood started to flow out and into a cup he had produced out of nowhere.
And more blood. And more.
It bled worse than a paper cut, filling the chalice to the volume of a shot glass, and just when I started to feel like I was going to be sick or pass out, Charlie waved a hand over my stabbed finger and the blood stopped like he had turned off a faucet.
I held up my clean and perfectly intact hand in wonder, still feeling dizzy from the experience, and tried hard to ignore whatever Charlie was doing with my blood as he raised the cup. Unfortunately, Gates was compelled to watch.
“Oh, my God…”
I looked at him just in time to see him take a swig and then wipe his lips on a handkerchief, leaving a deep red stain that looked oddly like a lipstick blot. Both the cup and the handkerchief disappeared in a shower of lavender sparks, and he turned back to us and stood up.
“Are you a vampire?” Gates asked, sounding worried. “You just drank her blood. Why the hell would you—”
“I am not a vampire,” Charlie said simply, using a foot to encourage Gates out of his way. “And I resent the accusation. Thorn, it’s time to go.”
“What just happened here?” I croaked.
“I anchored myself to the physical world with a willing gift of life-force,” he said matter-of-factly. “And likely a damned effective one, if it’s your sister that tries to banish me again. I’ve got human blood running through me now, and that’s a lot harder to just sweep away to the Other Side.”
“She didn’t seem to have a problem sweeping me away before.”
“Exactly,” Charlie said. “She likes you, and I’m counting on her having altered whatever spell she used to stop that from happening again. Hence, human blood is a perfect anchor.”
At a loss for words, I looked at Gates. She blinked.
“I really don’t want to do that again,” I said.
Charlie held out a hand to help me to my feet. “I’ll drink it in private from now on. Time to go.”
~~~~~~~~~
At the greenhouse, Lyssa was trying not to argue with a customer about the correct place to grow a certain hibiscus in one’s yard. A lot more people thought that they could grow hibiscus in Colorado than really could, and for most of them, it was an issue of having too much freezing shade in the winter or too much scorching sun in the summer. The perfect yard, and the perfect location, were hard to come by.
Charlie was using a hand to nudge me toward her, and I finally slapped his arm away and turned to go to the back room.
“Thorn, we’re here for hair, not…” he peeked into a bucket and frowned in disgust. “Hand trowels and dirt.”
“She’s with a customer,” I said in exasperation, going to a pallet of new fertilizer that had arrived and needed tagging before it could go out onto the shelves. I picked up the price label gun and set to work.
I heard Charlie walking away, sighing. “Fine, then, I’ll do it.”
It took me a moment to register his words. When I did, the door to the front room was swinging shut and I was running after him at a frenzied pace.
When I came through, I was glad to see that they were still on opposite sides of the room, but Lyssa’s posture had gone rigidly upright as she stared at him with barely contained malice. The customer was still prattling on about how finding some magic combination of fertilizer and mulch would make any hibiscus grow anywhere, which even I knew was flat wrong, especially since he was eyeing a tropical variety. Lyssa didn’t even break to offer him a nicety as she stalked toward us, and then past us, and into the office. The customer stopped talking in dismay, and glanced my way momentarily. I turned my back and followed Lyssa like I was headed to the principal’s office for accidentally bringing something illicit to school.
When we walked in, Lyssa had already pulled out a jar of burning sage, and she had put on some sort of crystal talisman necklace. The clarity of the stone in the middle made me think it must have been a diamond, but it was much too large.
She didn’t even look at Charlie, and didn’t hold my gaze for more than a few seconds before looking at the ground. “Annie, I told you, we’ll find a way to help Gates. Send him back where he belongs.”
“I didn’t summon him,” I said quietly. I hadn’t exactly told Lyssa that I had become Charlie’s bridge. Somehow it felt embarrassing, and like a personal failing, even though I had only done it with the best intentions. “He just kind of comes and goes now, if you get what I mean…”
Lyssa stared at me. I finally looked back at her, and gave a little nod, and her lips parted just enough that I knew I had disappointed her.
“Oh, Annie…”
Charlie cleared his throat. “And I’m sorry to say, but you won’t find a cure for what’s wrong with Gates. That one is mine and mine alone to give and take.”
“Don’t be ridiculous…” Lyssa sneered. But as she looked into his calm expression, her expression changed to a little frown, and I knew she was afraid.
Charlie was more interested than he should have been in the way her demeanor had changed. He took a step forward and put his hands on the desk to lean in towards her. “Alyssum Hawthorn… I came here for hair, but now the two of us need to talk.”
Lyssa cleared her throat as she stood up from the desk, reaching a hand to clutch at her necklace. “No. You may not have it. The hair or the talking. We’re done.”
She strode to the door, and Charlie grabbed her arm. Lyssa ripped free from his grasp, muttering something under her breath. When I realized it was a banishment, I held my breath, waiting to see if the starry veil of the Other Side shaded over us, but it didn’t.
Lyssa looked from Charlie back to me with a blank stare. “Annie, did you…?”
“Yes,” Charlie grunted. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but I need that hair.”
Lyssa’s accusing eyes fell on me. “And I guess we know whose side you’re on.”
“I’m just trying to help Gates—”
Her derisive laugh did nothing to help my mood.
“Annie, there is no helping Gates now, and he’s only going to make things worse!”
She stormed out of the office, and Charlie followed.
“I’m not the enemy, Lyssa, and I’ve only done the things I absolutely had to. I take no joy in—”
“Joy?” She turned on him. At least a half-dozen people were inside the greenhouse, and most of them turned to discretely watch the scene unfold. “You threatened my daughter, you animal! I don’t care about your happiness, or your intentions, or where you go or what you do, as long as it takes you away from this family for good!”
She turned and marched out, and Charlie and I followed her all the way to her car.
“Lyssa, please, just—”
“No, Annie.”
“But, it’s for Gates, and he says—”
“No, Annie!”
Charlie reached out and grabbed the car door handle before she could, and waited until she looked up at him.
His voice was as cold as ice. “If you thought the last curse was bad, then you obviously haven’t been at this very long, Alyssum. I can do much, much worse. And I have things to impart to the world that even the best powers won’t be able to reverse, so if I were you, I would consider carefully before refusing again, if you want Rosie to grow up whole.”
Lyssa was staring at him with angry tears in her eyes, and I’d had too much.
“That’s not what we came here to do!” I
reached out and tried to pry his hand off of the car door handle, but he refused to let go until he wanted to. “Leave Rosemary and Josh out of it. This isn’t about them…”
“I need her hair!” he snapped at me.
I was unimpressed. I had to physically wedge myself between him and the car to get him to let her leave, and she did, crying as she went.
“I am begging you, Charlie, leave them out of it!” I said, holding my hands together in front of me. “There’s a right way to convince her to do this, and scaring the hell out of her isn’t the way! She’s going to take her kid and run if you do it like that, and then we’re going to be in the same position we are with Kendra.”
He took a few deep breaths, and with a snap of his fingers, the dark of the Other Side overtook us.
Chapter 4
We stood in a familiar room. It was the room where Charlie had brought me several times to complete my homework, but he had done some redecorating in our several weeks’ estrangement.
It was still night outside the window, because it was always night in Charlie’s expression of the Other Side, but the moon outside was dimmer and more obscured by a drizzling rain that I wasn’t used to. Stained glass windows had appeared, and all along one wall of my study room, there were floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with old tomes. The wood-hewn table and bench had been replaced with a more elaborate and ornate desk and chair, and the squeak in the door was gone as Charlie threw it open and began to descend the stairs.
As I watched him go, I wasn’t sure what to do. Every time I had come here, he had left me in this one room. He always closed the door as he went.
But this time, the door was open.
I hesitated as I peeked out, but there was nothing to see but the descending spiral staircase. Charlie’s elongated and distorted shadow trailed up the wall after him from some light source below. Using the wall to balance myself on the narrow steps, I followed him.
Around and around, each round of the stairs was illuminated by a wall sconce that cast a pale purple glow.
Five times around below, I emerged into a a long hallway, stonework just like the rest of what I had seen, and Charlie was already disappearing down it.
“Charlie!” I called. “Wait!”
I saw him heave a sigh and look over his shoulder. Reluctantly, he paused to wait for me. Halfway down the hall, the windows opened up, letting the damp dreary weather in around us. Normally I liked overcast days, but it was too cold in the Other Side today to be wet.
“I am not dressed for this,” I said in complaint as I came up to him.
“You’ll survive,” he said humorlessly.
“Is this what happens when you’re in a bad mood?” I said, crossing my arms as a slow, creeping breeze blew more freezing mist right through every minute crack in the woven top I was wearing. “You’re a little bit of a drama queen, did you know that?”
He turned and started walking again. I chased after him again, but I couldn’t goad him to talk. We walked into a luxe sitting room, and past it into a dark dining room, then down some stairs into a kitchen. Out onto the street, we ventured down a bit, and then into the same storage space that I had seen the time that Lyssa had banished us.
Charlie snapped his fingers and lit the candles around the room, using a hand to close a thin wall cabinet. I caught a glimpse of several vials of dark liquid just before it snapped shut, and then he went to the large wardrobe that contained a million different samples of hair. Opening the doors, he stood before the well-organized and disgusting mess, and sighed.
“Do you still have those hairs I gave you?” he asked after a moment of quiet reflection. “The ones we need to summon her?”
“Yes,” I responded. I was happy to be out of the drizzle, but the smell that emanated from the hair wardrobe was enough to gag me, and I went to a window and undid the complex locking mechanism to force it open a few inches. I had the hair, still wrapped in a tissue, tucked into the bottom of my sock drawer. I hadn’t thought about it much, but I knew those hairs were important to Charlie, and I didn’t want to have to tell him that I had lost them.
He had a way of turning people into cats when they angered him.
Still facing away from me, he took a hand and dragged it across his face. Then he ran his hand along the contents of his collection, like he was stroking the hair of a pet, and I looked away, once again trying not to be sick. My hair was in there somewhere, casually mingling with a million other samples of various cleanliness.
When I looked back, Charlie had selected a long lock of deep brown hair. He held it gingerly in his hands, and then looked back up at me.
“If we can’t get Lyssa’s hair, then we’re going to have to use Kendra’s.”
“You said we needed that hair to summon her,” I said, scoffing. “If we use it for this—”
“I know what I’m losing!” he said forcefully. “We’ll have to find a different way to summon her. I need that hair now.”
I held up a hand and shook my head. “No… no. You’re not going to leave me alone until I use that hair to summon Kendra. We’re not using it for anything else.”
He set the hair back into the wardrobe and took a threatening step toward me. “Thorn…”
“I’ll find a way to convince her!” I said quickly. “Somehow, I’ll find a way.”
~~~~~~~~~
The following Friday night found me standing in front of my bathroom mirror wearing a trendy dress and makeup. I swept my hair up into a casual bun and stared at my reflection.
I had never been very concerned with fashion in high school, but I looked upon that aspect of my life as something that I wanted to leave behind. I wasn’t going the full nine yards into fashion, but now that I was out and on my own, I at least wanted to look nice. More like a finished piece instead of a work in progress, and that meant getting out of my paint stained art jeans. At least on occasion—I hadn’t been able to part with them completely, and I still wore them to the grocery store and the greenhouse some days. They were comfortable.
But as I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw the woman I wanted to be, and she was confident and sleek. She also had Charlie staring over one of her shoulders, like a demon in an old cartoon sent to whisper in her ear.
He was getting anxious, and it wasn’t a good look on any of us. When he was unhappy, he had a way of hanging around, all the time, and seeing to it that everyone else was unhappy, too. I had been carrying my aunt’s hairs, wrapped carefully in a tissue, on my person since he had brought me back to Earth. I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference or not if he decided that he wanted to take them, but I also wasn’t sure that I believed him when he said he needed a Thorn to give them to him.
It started with little taunts, like when he began mocking Gates with a laser pointer. Then he had cut off my hot water, mid shower, under some sort of deluded logic that it would motivate me to work harder to get Lyssa to give him her hair. When I had walked out one morning to discover that Charlie had installed a new door in my kitchen, and it was a direct passage to his personal chambers on the Other Side, I knew I had to try something.
So now, I was wearing makeup, and doing my hair, and making dinner.
The doorbell rang, and the stove alarm sounded at the same time. I hesitated, torn as to which one I should get first, and then I saw Charlie pulling the pork chops out of the oven. We had an understanding that he wasn’t going to be joining us for dinner, so he set the hot pan down on a trivet before going back through his door, and then the entire doorway collapsed into a shower of glittering light before disappearing.
I straightened my dress and my hair, and opened the front door. Lyssa was standing there, holding her toddler daughter Rosemary, Josh standing just behind her shoulder. He had a large bag hanging from one arm. The sound of glass clinking as he adjusted his weight told me that Lyssa had insisted on bringing along some precautionary supplies.
She didn’t look happy to be there. As she narrowed her eyes at me
, I began to question my plan. “Anise Hawthorn, how dare you…”
She pushed into my apartment and started to look around corners.
“He’s not here,” I said, hoping I sounded half as confident as I wished I was. “Look, I just wanted to talk this out, because—”
“There is nothing to discuss!” Lyssa said, passing off Rosie to Josh as he set the bag down on the floor. She squatted down to and pulled out several jars of dried plant matter and two new boxes of salt. “You called dad on me to say I was worried about him and Janet?! For god’s sake, Anise—do your own dirty work and leave them out of it!”
“You weren’t answering my calls and you weren’t showing at work. It was a last resort.” I sighed as she lit a bowl of sage and set it on the table, saying a strange incantation. “That stuff won’t work now, Lyssa. He has my blood and I’m pretty sure he’s been using it continuously. I’m his bridge. He’s not leaving until he finds Kendra, so if you want to help, give him some hair.”
“Wait—” She stood up very suddenly, nearly kicking over a jar of mustard seeds in the process. “You gave him blood?”
I shrugged and crossed my arms. I knew it was gross, and Charlie had openly admitted that it wasn’t witch magic, but an old and crude warlock’s spell. But I was done being ashamed of what I was trying to do.
I had to help Gates.
“You gave him blood?!” Lyssa said in a hyped whisper. “Annie, you have no idea what you are doing!”
“Knock knock!”
My dad walked through the door right then, and Janet was close behind him carrying a fruit salad. Neither of them knew about witches or demons, or anything else magical. Lyssa had told me in a rush once that our dad didn’t know, and couldn’t know, because Kendra had put a protective spell on all of us in the family that would stop demons from harming us if we didn’t know they existed. It had taken some doing, but Lyssa had managed to extend the protection to Janet. The two graying love birds were none the wiser to our strange moonlighting activities, and we were going to keep it that way.