by A. L. Tyler
“I think it’s cruel, but I’ll do it,” he said. “This vote is between you three, and it looks like you’re losing, Lyssa.”
“Us four,” I corrected, narrowing my eyes at Lyssa. “What did Vince say about it when he heard us talking?”
Swaying a little with her arms still crossed like she was debating whether or not to lie, she finally spoke. “He thinks he wants the cage. In a few days, that won’t be the case.”
~~~~~~~~~
Charlie disappeared to the Other Side for a little while to research. Even knowing as much as he did about werewolves, he had never been asked to build a humane cage for one. It was of the utmost importance that he get it right on the first try, or it all would be in vain.
While Charlie was gone, Vince finished his shower, and I was happy to see that Charlie had remembered to get him some clean clothes before he left. The rest of us had forgotten.
Lyssa offered to draw sticks with me, but I waved off the notion and volunteered instead. I wanted to be the one to tell Vince.
I looked at his arm when he came out, and while the flesh was still torn and ragged in places, it had stopped bleeding and parts of it already looked like they were melting together to mend.
“Hey,” he said nervously, rolling down his sleeve.
“Hey,” I said back. Lyssa and Gates had retreated to the kitchen to give us as much privacy as possible, but I wished they would have talked or something. Just standing in the other room, I knew they were listening in, and Vince probably did, too.
“So, I guess Lyssa told you?”
Vince sat down on the couch, and I followed.
“Yeah,” he said. “Lyssa told me.”
I nodded, looking down at my hands and thinking that they looked odd just sitting at my sides. I wondered if they always looked like that, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I turned my attention back to Vince.
“You’re taking it very well.”
He laughed darkly. “My roommate just grew fur and mauled me. It kind of makes you rethink the things you thought you knew.”
I caught a glimpse of Lyssa from the other room before she paced away again. “So, I know this isn’t… I mean, I don’t know how to say this, really, but…”
“Are they going to kill me?” he asked bluntly.
“No,” I said, finally finding the courage to look him in the eye.
“The cage?” He gave a resolute nod, and took a deep breath. “And no cure.”
“I’m not giving up,” I said. “It’s only for a few days. The week before the full moon, and then after… you’ll be normal again. Normal-ish, I mean.”
I did the math in my head, and realized that he might just make the first day of class, but that was if he was lucky. Afterward, it was going to be hard to keep a job or a class schedule missing an entire week every month.
Vince’s priorities must have expanded beyond academics, because he didn’t seem to care. “What’s the cage going to be like?”
I pursed my lips and shrugged. “I told Charlie to make it as nice as he could, but he said you probably won’t care once…” I took a deep breath, hardly able to believe the words coming out of my mouth. “Once you’re a werewolf. But you should have everything you need, and you’ll be safe from Walter and Stark.”
He nodded, and when a small smile crept to his lips, I knew his sense of humor hadn’t abandoned him. I was grateful for that.
“Was it this traumatic for you?” he asked. “When you became a witch? Lyssa said you were kind of new, and kind of bad at it anyways.”
“Oh, she did not!” But I didn’t hear Lyssa denying it from the other room.
Vince cracked a wider smile and even laughed a little. “Am I supposed to trust you to get me out of this?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” He raised his eyebrows. “We always did have each other’s backs. Are you going to let me out of the cage to go on that date?”
“Date?” I said, blindsided. “You’ve got a date?”
Even with all of the craziness going on, it was hard not to feel a little disappointed. I’d had a mild crush on him since the ninth grade.
He cocked his head. “Yeah… the one Jennifer Wilmot kept pushing on your behalf. Three days straight in gym class. Very classy, Annie.”
Horror washed over me, and my cheeks burned hot as I looked down. “Oh! That wasn’t really—”
“I know,” he said good-naturedly. “Geez, calm down… I know. I was the shortest kid in our class until the ninth grade, and I know a bully when I see one. She tried to get me to buy her a latte one time and I told her to buy her own, and then she started asking if I had a girlfriend. She teased me by saying that I must have a crush on you, and then she asked if I wanted to date you… you get the picture. She started in on it in French and I shut her down in front of her friends. I told her I would love to go on a date with you, because you had a lot more class than she did.”
I stared at him in shock. Just as I felt my smile slip, I saw his do the same.
“Annie?”
There are moments in life when you can either laugh or cry, and this was one of them. I had long since given up on finding out why Jennifer had dumped lattes into the open windows of my car on that hot day. That had been the event that started everything, and I had never understood why she chose to pick on me.
It had been Vince. Jennifer had a crush on Vince, and she thought that I was somehow standing in her way.
“Annie?”
I cringed, but tried to laugh it off. “It’s… nothing. It’s a long story, and it was pretty dumb, anyway. Thanks. For thinking I’m classy, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I wanted to talk to you about it afterward and tell you to watch out for her, but then Gates went missing, and you were never around anymore. I thought we might sit down and plan our fall classes together. Healthy competition works for us, so I figured…” He took a deep breath, and seemed to realize what I already had about his future. “Worked for us, I mean.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but the sound of a loud, gong-like bell made me jump. With a start and adrenaline pulsing through my veins, I turned around to see Charlie standing behind me.
“Thorn,” he said, looking grave. “I’m going to need more blood.”
Chapter 2
“Charlie!” I said, clutching the stitch in my chest. “Quieter bell!”
We had unanimously decided it was best if Charlie announced his presence with the ringing of a bell every time he left and came back, but this was the first time he had elected to follow the bell rule while human instead of feline. It was to prevent him from finding out about a curse that could only kill him if he learned about it. And instead of the soft tinkle of a little charm on a collar, he had chosen to announce himself with all the acoustics of a bell tower.
He had a knife in one hand, and his other was held out to receive my wrist. Vince was immediately on his feet.
“Settle down, Fido,” he said. “We do this all the time.”
“We’ve done that once,” I corrected him. “Why do you need more?”
“Because I’m out, and I don’t want to have to deal with banishment at the wrong moment, and it’s the easiest way to prevent such things.”
I held out my hand with a sigh, and Charlie steadied it in his grasp, laying the sharpened blade to my flesh as Lyssa approached.
“No! None of that here!” she said, agitated. She grabbed my hand away from Charlie. “Annie, I would really rather you didn’t practice this kind of… of… bastard magic.”
Charlie and I rolled our eyes at the same time. Lyssa let my hand go, and I gave it back to Charlie.
“I already summoned a demon,” I said. “That ship has sailed, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say he’s our best chance to get out of this alive.”
As the blade cut my arm and blood flowed down into a cup, Vince gasped and I looked over at him.
“It doesn’t hurt,” I said. “He�
��s a demon. He makes it so it doesn’t hurt.”
“That doesn’t seem healthy,” he finally said.
“It’s not.” Lyssa crossed her arms.
I took a deep breath and sighed at her before setting my gaze on Vince. I withdrew my completely unharmed arm as Charlie finished.
“It protects him from banishment,” I said. I didn’t want to share the exact details on how it worked, because the thought of Charlie drinking my blood still made me want to gag. It might have put Vince right over the edge. “Having a piece of me sort of anchors him here.”
Charlie took the blood to the kitchen, and Gates came running out as fast as her four legs could carry her. She remembered the sight of Charlie with his mouth full of blood, too.
When he was done, Charlie came back and cleared his throat. I looked at him expectantly, and he raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
Nothing happened.
My eyes shifted nervously to Vince, and then I smiled. “Okay, so…?”
“All done,” Charlie sat down on the couch, and reached for the remote.
I waited for him to speak again, but he didn’t.
“With what?” I finally asked.
“The cage,” he said, leaning back. “I put the door in your bedroom. Under your new rug.”
Vince shifted nervously, and then all of us except Charlie moved to the bedroom. Vince flipped up a corner of the Oriental rug that had appeared, revealing a heavy wooden trapdoor. Beneath the trapdoor, there was a flight of hewn stone stairs, and at the bottom, there was a heavy silver door. It had a large wheel mechanism to close and lock it, like a submarine hatch. Charlie had built in a door viewer with a small, hinged cover, heavily armored by crosshatch bars only wide enough to stick one or two fingers through.
The inside of the cell would have made me laugh if Vince hadn’t been present.
The walls and floor matched the style of my apartment, but the lights above were protected by more silver crosshatch grates. There was an over-sized nest-style dog bed in one corner. Situated next to it were two stainless steel bowls for food and water.
“That’s cute,” Vince said with a frown. “Real cute. Your boyfriend has a sense of humor.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. Charlie, get down here!”
If Gates had been human, I knew that she would have been smiling. She trotted over to the pet bed in the corner and jumped inside it.
“Oh, I don’t know, Annie…” she said, doing a quick turn before sitting down. “Looks good to me. Can I have my own room?”
“We’ll talk,” Charlie said from behind me.
I turned to face him with a frown. He gave me a condescending smirk.
“Lighten up, Thorn. It was a joke.”
He snapped his fingers, and the room was fully furnished. Vince’s jaw dropped open, and he did a quick turn as he took it all in.
It was done up like a studio apartment, complete with a small kitchen. There was a sleeping area tucked away behind a curtain next to a living room that had a television and a blue couch. One corner had been walled off for a full bathroom, and two windows along the far wall from the door overlooked a park with a fountain. It even mimicked the real time of day outside, and a dark expanse of stars shone across the illuminated pond beneath the splashing jets of water.
“You won’t be able to enjoy the illusion when you’re your other self,” Charlie said, walking over to the windows with us. “And I expect you’ll destroy everything else in here, but you’re in the company of a demon. I’ll clean it up when you’re done.”
“Annie, this is nicer than your place.”
I turned to see Lyssa looking over the stainless steel appliances. Gates was jumping down from the couch to get a closer look at the wall-mounted television.
“It’s all real,” Charlie said. “I had to redo some city plumbing to make room, but this is a real basement below your apartment, Thorn. Thank god you’re on the first floor, or someone would have been evicted. The walls, floor, and ceiling are just a facade over a silver-lined thick steel casing. The door is the same. It is part of the apartment, technically, so it should be protected from Stark like the rest. As long as you willingly come in every month before the animal takes over, I don’t think we’ll have a problem.”
The look on Lyssa’s face almost made me laugh, because the entire setup was nearly too much. She looked like a child staring through the window of a toy store at things out of reach that she wanted so badly to touch.
Charlie hadn’t turned away from the window, but when he caught my eye he gave me a smile and a wink.
“You’re changing your tune on the evils of demons?” Gates asked Lyssa.
Still aghast, Lyssa shook her head. “I can want something and still say ‘no.’ It’s fueled by unsavory dealings.”
“It’s fueled by human stupidity and greed,” Charlie said, finally turning around. “And left to my own devices, I choose my clientele very carefully, thank you very much.”
“And you consider yourself qualified to play God and judge who deserves what?” Lyssa crossed her arms again. “Kendra wouldn’t tell me much, and it spurs curiosity. I found more than enough sources to tell me about the nature of demons.”
“You don’t know the nature of this demon,” he said with finality. He turned to Vince. “But this isn’t about Lyssa. It’s about you. Does it meet your needs?”
Vince was still stunned. He went to the entertainment cabinet beneath the television and slid open a panel to find a gaming system. There were three games stacked on top of it.
He turned back to Charlie, both pale and amazed. “How did you—?”
Charlie tapped his temple. “I hope you don’t mind. I had a look around your room back at your parents’ house. I obviously wasn’t going anywhere near your room at college, and your thoughts are already getting a little difficult to read.”
Glancing back at the games, Vince looked uncertain. “Oh. Okay.”
“I want a room,” Gates repeated in a low voice.
Charlie gave me a quick look as he started walking back toward the door.
“Sure, whatever,” I said.
Gesturing for Gates and Lyssa to follow him, he walked back out of the new expansion to my apartment with my friend and sister in tow.
Vince was still looking around the room like he was either ecstatic or terrified. I kept my distance, staying on the opposite side of the couch.
The sound of Gates’ voice, dictating what she wanted her room to look like, finally faded off into nothing as the door closed to just less than an inch.
He finally said something. “You’re a witch. Can you do stuff like this?”
I glanced around the room and cocked an eyebrow. Even if I had a small fortune and a team to do the heavy lifting, I wasn’t this good of an interior designer.
“So far, I can summon demons,” I said. “One demon. And he’s usually not this cooperative.”
He nodded, but the frown on his face told me he was still intimidated beyond words. I was uncannily reminded of the way I felt when Charlie froze me outside of Jennifer Wilmot’s window, forcing me to watch her fall to the ground as she went into anaphylactic shock.
“He’s not a bad guy,” I managed. “He’s not a good guy all the time, but I guess none of us are. I think he does the best he can.”
“He could be the king of the planet,” Vince said. “He could snap his fingers, and literally be the king of the entire planet…”
I had never thought about it before, but I supposed it was true. But with what little I remembered about my time being a demon, I knew it held no interest for him.
“He already has that,” I said, lowering my voice and trying to choose my words carefully. I didn’t understand why people hated ex-demons so much, but I knew it would be better if they never found out I was one. “They come from a place called the Other Side, and they shape their own worlds there. Humanity is just food to them.” I shook my head when his eyes went wide. “No, no—h
e makes deals. I don’t get exactly how it works, but the deals, the exchange of wants and needs and gratification, it fuels them. We’re like livestock to them, or less. He wouldn’t want to be the king of livestock. And they like us having complicated lives, because it gives them more opportunity to offer to fix it. I think that’s why they mostly leave things alone.”
Vince nodded. He turned his back on me to sit on the couch. I quietly crept around, then debated if I should sit next to him, or across from him on the lacquered wood coffee table, or just leave. When Vince moved over on the couch a little, I supposed it would be rude to refuse the gesture, so I sat down.
“Did you use him to cheat on your ACT score?”
I slowly looked over at him, and his grave expression made me laugh. “No. He wasn’t around when I took the ACT.”
“But you would have.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Vince smirked, pleased that he had ruffled my feathers. When he looked back at me, and our eyes locked for a second, I forgot where I was and what had happened to bring us there. His eyes were dark gray and gorgeous, and he was technically sharing an apartment with me.
“I think I’ll settle in and see if there’s anything else I need,” he said.
I twitched in a very unattractive way as I snapped back to reality. “Right. Good.”
I stood up and started walking to the door.
“Annie?”
I stopped, heart pounding, and turned back to him. I hoped I wasn’t blushing too badly.
“Thank you,” he said, standing up. “Tell Charlie thanks, too.”
I nodded, smiled, then turned around and left.
Climbing the stairs again, I realized how tired I was. It was way past when I usually went to bed. When a werewolf came knocking on your door, the schedule went out the window.
“Annie!” Gates burst through my bedroom door, once again human. Having completed his work for the evening, Charlie must have given up his turn being human. “Annie, you’ve got to come and see this!”
She pulled me from my bedroom and out to the kitchen, where a new tribal tapestry was hanging on the wall. Pulling it aside, she opened a door, and we stepped into a small hallway and into a new room.