by Tim Pratt
“Your father—he assured me everything would be explained—”
I talked over him. “But it wasn’t explained! Why the hell didn’t you help me? What is this? Is it some family revenge thing, a feud, Hatfield and McCoy shit, the Graces versus the Howards? Getting revenge on me for what my father did to your grandfather?”
He winced. “I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but there are things you don’t know—”
That ice in my gut spread to my brain, at last. “That’s the point. I needed to know things, and you didn’t tell me. I trusted you. You were the only one I trusted.” If Trey had kept this from me, his knowledge of my father’s sorcery, of my half siblings, what other secrets did he have? The Firstborn wasn’t the only person who wore masks around here. “You need to leave, Trey. I can’t be around you right now.”
“Bekah.” He stepped toward me, reaching out, and I recoiled. So many lies had come out of that mouth. That mouth, that had kissed me all over the night before. The one I’d kissed, feeling so safe and secure and protected.
“Don’t touch me. Just go.”
“Please—” he said.
The cookie jars on the counter began to rise up and bob toward him, and a drawer rattled open, a cloud of knives forming in the air. The house, defending me again. I didn’t want him to get hurt…but if the house could scare him away, that would be fine. Looking at him made me feel sick and broken inside.
Trey looked at the bobbing cookie jars, looked at me, and then ran for the door. The knives floated out after him like a swarm of patient wasps.
I slumped against the counter, hollowed and drained. I’d opened myself to him, and he’d held back so many things I’d needed to know. Couldn’t I trust anyone here?
I went to the living room and watched at the window as pottery smashed against Trey’s car as he drove away. I watched until he was gone, until even the cloud of dust he’d left behind was settled, and then I went into the kitchen, got a bottle of bourbon, and took it into the shower with me.
#
I stayed pretty drunk all day. I think the house kept me from falling down the stairs at one point—I’m almost certain the steps shifted under my feet, tilting me back when I’d been leaning forward—but it’s possible that was just general alcoholic lack of equilibrium talking.
Trey kept calling, but I wasn’t ready to talk to him. I turned off my phone and didn’t look at my laptop, sure there were lurking emails. I’d calmed down a little from my initial shocked betrayal, and even in my boozy haze I wondered if he had a side of the story worth hearing. Maybe in a day or two I’d sit down with him, somewhere public, with the bell of truth in my hand—he’d lost the right to trust without verification—and let him explain himself. But for now, I just wanted to disappear into a puddle of brown liquor.
I was tired of being the plaything of forces I couldn’t comprehend, and my one ally in that struggle had turned out to be more (or less) than he seemed. In that muddle of emotions, it turns out, there was a fair bit of anger.
So when someone knocked on the door, I was hoping for an excuse to cause some damage to the world. I hoped it was the Firstborn darkening my door again. I grabbed the wristwatch and strapped it on, ready to show her the error of turning up at my door today of all days. I took the broom from its place by the front door, too, so I could sweep up whatever was left.
The knocking was the house’s early-warning system, though, and I stood on the porch watching Ken Tenzil’s car approach for the second time. Well. Not the Firstborn, but another uninvited guest. One I had less reason to punch, true. But maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe he’d give me one.
Tenzil parked and got out of the car, raising his hand in a wave. “Miss Lull. I thought I’d stop by one more time before—”
“I know about you. You’re a rip-off artist. Steal from widows and orphans, right?” I might have been slurring. I was certainly taking out my frustrations on him.
He cocked his head. “Ah. You googled me. I always offer a fair price, Miss Lull. It’s not my fault if people have an unrealistic idea about the value of—”
I wasn’t in the mood for his shit, and—let me remind you—I was very drunk, so I swept the broom in his direction. I didn’t mean to swing hard, I just wanted to knock him back, freak him out, make him run away…but I misjudged, and hit him with a pretty strong wave instead. But he didn’t fly backward—he hunched down as the wind of the broom rippled around him, and even though his car behind him rocked on its shocks, he didn’t so much as lean back. When the wave subsided, he straightened up, and gave me a smile that was horrifying and, for the first time, genuine.
“Sorry, sister. When I want to be, I’m more or less an immovable object. Nice broom, though. Brooms are out of style, and it’s such a shame. The pink sweatpants aren’t doing much for you, either. If you’re going to be a witch, go all out, that’s what I say. “
“Who…you’re…” There was only one Grace boy-child I knew about, unless some of those three babies in the pictures were male. “The Belly. You were here, weren’t you, watching me? Couple weeks ago. I saw your car.”
He bowed. “I might have done a little reconnaissance. Due diligence. Had to sniff out the territory before I approached you directly, make sure there weren’t any nasty traps. There are some—our father believed in good defenses—but nothing I need to worry about.”
“The Belly. Belly Belly Belly.” I really wished I weren’t so drunk, but you go to war with the faculties you have, not the ones you wish for. “I saw pictures of you, when you were little. I thought you’d be fatter.”
He patted his stomach. “Oh, I used to be. I’ve got six pounds of enchanted tapeworm curled up in my gut now, keeping me trim and fit. I’m not especially vain, but hauling those pounds around got in the way of being swift and nimble.” As if to demonstrate, he launched himself at the porch with astonishing speed, until he was standing right in front of my face, startling my drunk ass into gasping and stumbling and crashing against the door. He leaned in and sniffed my face. “Mmm. Bourbon. Maker’s Mark? Save any for me?” He snapped his teeth together an inch from my nose.
The broom’s powers didn’t work on him, but it was still a blunt object, and I had plenty of booze-and-betrayal-fueled frustrations to burn off. So I kneed him in the groin—he felt that—and when he backed away I started hitting him in the face with the broom until he stumbled back down the steps.
He surprised me by laughing and falling back, holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “All right, all right! I had no idea you were so ferocious, but you’re family, so I shouldn’t be surprised—apart from the Drips, we’re a formidable bunch. I just wanted a chance to meet you, the girl who got everything.”
“Stay off my porch.” I slurred more than I wanted to. “You…you were spying, stalking, for weeks—”
“Oh, well, I’m going to live a long time, a couple of weeks of cautious observation isn’t so much for me. It’s not like I’ve just been watching you, anyway—I really do trade in antiques, and there are lots of odd shops and recently dead people around here to keep me occupied. Calm down, sister. I just want to chat.” He sat down cross-legged in the grass, looking at me expectantly, and I dropped down until I was sitting on my top step, more because I could no longer hold myself entirely upright than because I felt like having a heart-to-heart.
“I guess big sister’s given you some trouble, huh?” The Belly was all sympathy, and I didn’t believe it. But then again, I was in a cynical, suspicious, and distrustful state of mind.
“She tried. I drove her away.”
“I heard a rumble of a rumor about that. She’s got daddy issues, that one. I mean, old Archie was in my life growing up, too—one summer he took me to the beach for a long weekend, and he swooped in from time to time to show me how to use my powers, how to hone them, and took me on the occasional…oh, let’s say ‘business trip.’ I think he had some idea of using me for a weapon, but then he figured
out all his enemies were dead, so I was a loaded gun with nobody to shoot. By the end, the only person dear old Dad had left to fight was himself—and, what do you know, he conquered that guy, too. Archie was never a loser, I’ll say that for him.”
I thought of my father, demented and weeping, in my vision of the past, and didn’t offer any opinion.
“You can’t blame big sister for being cranky. She was being groomed as the heir apparent, until Dad realized she had even less empathy than he did, which is saying something. Archie didn’t think he was human, so humans mostly didn’t interest him, but it was just indifference on his part. Our big sis is cruel. The difference between Dad and his firstborn daughter is the same as the difference between someone who’ll see you dying in the street and just walk by without a second glance and someone who’ll point and laugh and maybe put a cigarette out on your eyeball, just to make sure you suffer a little more. Anyway, she would’ve despised you anyway, just on general principle. But because you inherited everything, she hates you extra. Why should the girl who knows nothing get dear old Archie’s treasures?”
I shook my head, scowling. “You all have magic. You and her and Hannah, too. You always did. I didn’t have anything.” Not entirely fair. I’d had loving adoptive parents and an education and support. But no magic, that’s for sure.
He shrugged. “You make a fair point. I didn’t say the Eldest had a good reason to hate you.”
“And you don’t? Hate me?”
The Belly waved that away. “I don’t want to put on Daddy’s wizard cloak or his magic cummerbund or One Ring, or whatever thing he used to hold his power-in-potentia. I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of raw magic, honestly. My talents lie in other directions. But there are things I want, and I was thinking we could make a deal. Do you want to find the vessel of power, so big sis won’t bother you anymore—or so you can swat her like a bug when she does?”
That sounded pretty good, so I nodded.
“I can sniff it out for you, little sis.” He tapped his nose. “That’s one of my powers—sensing magic. Hell, half the artifacts in that house are things Dad had me sniff out for him. Sure, he imbued a few things with his own power, but lots of the stuff was enchanted when he got it. Did you find the bell that tells the truth? The oil lamp that plunges everything within half a mile into impenetrable darkness when you light it? Both yard sale finds, believe it or not. Archie used to call me his little truffle-hunting pig.” He paused, a troubled expression crossing his face, then shook his head. “Our dad was kind of an asshole. Let me into the house, Bekah, and I’ll find the vessel easily—it’ll be the strongest scent around.”
“I don’t trust you, though.”
He shrugged. “So? Why should you? Doesn’t the house do what you want? If I misbehave, tell the house to throw me out.” I didn’t wonder until later how he knew the house obeyed me—either he’d been watching me more closely than I realized, or he had other sources of information. Turned out to be the latter.
I was emotionally battered and drunk, so this was not the ideal time to make big decisions. But to get the vessel of power…“You’re not offering to do me a favor. You said there were things you wanted.”
“It’s true. There are. My power…Let me demonstrate. Here, give me the broom.”
“What? I’m not giving you my broom.”
He sighed. “It’s basic telekinesis, sis. You think I couldn’t knock you around with my own abilities? Besides, the broom is yours, you haven’t given it to me as a gift or renounced your claim, so its powers won’t do a thing in my hands anyway.”
That was true. I’d forgotten that part, on account of all the bourbon. So I nodded.
He picked up the broom, then tipped his head back, and slid the handle into his mouth. My eyes went wide as first inches, and then feet, of the rough wooden broom handle vanished down his gullet. It was like watching a sword swallower at a carnival, except he didn’t stop, just kept pushing the handle down, and then shoving the straw of the broom into his mouth, too. He looked like a cat with the feathers of a bird sticking out of his mouth. A few convulsive swallows later, and the last of the broom vanished between his lips. He took a bow, then opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue like a patient at a mental institution proving they’d swallowed their meds.
“You ate. My broom.” My voice was a lot weaker and confused than I would have liked. “You ate it.”
“True, but seriously, don’t worry about it—once you take on our father’s power, you’ll be able to create all the enchanted cleaning supplies you could possibly want. Mops that drip acid, sponges that turn things invisible—think of the possibilities.” He belched mightily, not even bothering to cover his mouth. “Dad always called me a phage. I eat stuff.”
I blinked. “Matter-Eater Lad.”
He beamed. “You got my little joke. Except, I mostly eat magical things, by preference, and when I do…I take on their properties. Observe.”
He waved his hand at the oil barrel where we’d burned the Firstborn’s scraps of disguise, and the barrel went spinning and bouncing across the yard. “See? Now I have the broom’s power, and I didn’t even have to get permission to use it. Your consent is irrelevant when the magic is inside me, when I’ve digested it and absorbed it and made it my own.” He glanced around, gestured, and sent a heap of scrap boards flying across the lawn. “This is fun. I was totally lying before—I didn’t have any other telekinetic abilities.”
My head hurt, and I wasn’t even hungover yet. “So. What. What is it you want?”
He snapped his teeth at me again, and I flinched backward. “Only everything. An all-I-can-eat buffet at Chez Grace, with every artifact in the place on the menu. You’re the witch, minus the broom, and I’m going to gobble up your whole gingerbread house. Dad kept me on a strict diet, but now that he’s dead, I eat what I want. And I want lots.”
I shook my head, the facts not quite coalescing in my head. “You want me to trade you…all the magical junk in the house…in exchange for showing me where the vessel is?”
“Close.” He waved his hand again, this time at me.
It was like being hit by a wind full of brick walls. I flew backward across the porch and slammed into the door, hard enough to rattle my bones. I slid down the door, and Ken—the Belly—stalked back up the steps. “No, what I want to do is eat everything in the house, and maybe also the house itself. I’m tempted to just eat the vessel of power, too, but I’m worried the pure magic would be too much for me, like a drunk trying to guzzle down grain alcohol like it’s beer, and dying of alcohol poisoning. So I’m going to trade the vessel to the Firstborn for a favor to be named later. When she called me up and said she needed help, that you’d brought the house to life to fight her, I expected more. You were able to drive her off, so I thought you’d be more formidable—not stinking drunk in the midafternoon. I went to all that trouble: doing recon, hanging around this shitty mountain town for a fortnight, pretending I had an appointment, all that nonsense.” He snarled. “I hate having my time wasted.”
I was pretty much doomed, and the house must have known that, because it tried to save me. The door swung inward, and when I sprawled onto one of the countless rugs, the rug slid across the floor, dragging me inside to safety, the door slamming in the Belly’s face and locking itself.
“Little pig, little pig!” he shouted from the other side. “Let me in!”
I stood up, wobbling, trying to think. Run and hide? Call the cops?
The Belly took a bite out of the door. It was like that scene in The Shining, Jack Nicholson chopping through the door with an axe, but the Belly was using his teeth. They should have been immense fangs, a mouth full of daggers, but they just looked like ordinary teeth, despite the incredible damage they did. The inside of his mouth, though…it had changed. I didn’t see a tongue inside, or a throat. Nothing but impenetrable darkness. Like there was nothing inside him but empty space and black holes.
He bit a gash
in the door big enough to fit his hand through, reached in, and tried to twist the doorknob. The knob fought him—good house!—so he just kept gnawing at the door, swallowing splinters of wood, widening the gap.
I thought of the axe, still in the kitchen after my failed attempt to break open the door that led to Grace’s study, and considered grabbing it and burying it in the Belly’s face. But the axe was way the hell in the kitchen, and my fist was numb already because of the watch, and it would be so much more satisfying to punch the Belly with my own hand. Feeling in control of myself for the first time all morning, I marched purposefully toward the door just as the Belly ate a hole big enough to squeeze his body through. Either the front door couldn’t self-heal the way the one in the kitchen did, or the Belly had drained its magic by eating it, or something else—magic was still a mystery to me. Either way, he bent his stork-like frame and angled himself through the opening into my living room.
I should have told the house to throw him out. I shouldn’t have let the rage and the visceral desire to knock him down—to knock someone down, and here was a worthy candidate—get the better of me. I blame the bourbon, but of course, I’m the one to blame for drinking so much of it.
My punch was not elegant, but it was enthusiastic. I threw it when he was still partway through the door—one foot inside, one outside—too awkwardly positioned to defend himself. I realized even through the haze of bourbon and fury that there was a good chance I’d kill him, with the watch turning my hand to lead. At the last minute I tried to pull the punch, to minimize its power, but it didn’t matter.
The Belly smiled, and then his mouth dropped open, gaping impossibly wide, big enough to swallow a basketball, revealing all that nothingness inside. He moved his head just enough for my fist to smoothly pass between his teeth without touching them. The inside of his mouth was shockingly cold, so cold I could feel it despite what I’d assumed was a total absence of sensation in my enchanted hand.