by Jaime Munn
Boytjie and F.C. pretended not to notice, but when the werewolf started straightening out the lounge and righting overturned chairs, I knew things were starting to get a little awkward for him. I switched to the mushrooms with a few sniffs and a last lingering trail of a tear down my cheek.
“How did you get bit, Boytjie?” I asked as I stirred my vegetables in the pot, pouring in a liberal amount of olive oil and turning up the heat. The microwave pinged as the werewolf pulled the last overturned chair upright and punched the cushions back firmly in place. “Do you mind me asking?”
“No, Miss,” he said. I wondered if he was gonna call me Miss Witch again, which I really wanted to discourage. What if he called out to me in public?
“It’s Nilla,” I said.
“No, Miss Nilla.”
I rolled my eyes. He grinned at me all toothy and feral and with a glint in his eyes. If I hadn’t known him enough already to see it for a very human smile with boyish mischief twinkling in his eyes, I would have gulped at the thought of the big, big werewolf feeling like taking a bite out of me.
“I don’t tell stories much. I’m not good at it,” he told me. Then sat down beside F.C. and gave the cat a scratch behind the ears.
I got the chicken out of the microwave and set about cutting the deboned pieces into rough squares. I missed chopping onions already. Sometimes I think that’s what’s wrong with society and people in general. We hide our emotions like they were uncouth and not for public display. Other times I think it’s beauty pageant contestants asking for world peace that really screws things up.
“Before I got bit, before I worked for Cleo, I worked for a bad man. I didn’t care. He gave me everything I needed. I just had to make a few people see things his way to get it. I was good at it.” He looked up at me. “I don’t like it, not like some, but I’m good at it.”
I nodded meeting his gaze for a second before I went back to my chicken cubing. I tried to decide whether I believed Boytjie. Sometimes people don’t want to accept that they are who they are. That can also be a good thing. Whether at heart Boytjie was all about the violence or if it was the only thing he thought he was good for didn’t really matter so much I decided.
It mattered that he didn’t accept it as right. It mattered that he wanted me to believe that underneath it all, he wasn’t a guy who enjoyed making people hurt. It mattered that he wasn’t proud of it.
At least he worked for Cleo now. I couldn’t see her putting the hurt on anyone who didn’t deserve it or allowing her muscle to indulge in their destructive sides.
Boytjie continued his story again. I focused on it before my mind took to contemplating the scariest werewolf of them all.
“It was like that then. Funning and hurting.” Boytjie frowned, as he tried to think of how to say what happened next.
He really wasn’t good at telling a story, I thought. “What was funning?” I asked, prompting him when I thought that he’d become lost on where to go next.
“Funning was drinking, doing stupid things,” Boytjie grinned like those were still his favourite pastimes. “I didn’t know funning then like now.”
I quirked a brow at that wondering if my mind was in the gutter or if Boytjie really had just made a reference to sex. When he looked away, I decided that if his skin wasn’t already so dark I’d have seen him blushing. Boytjie had been talking about sex, like a bashful teenager. I guessed that he meant that his sexual preference had been very repressed back in those days of funning and hurting.
“And how did you get bit?” I prompted the direction of the story again. Boytjie looked up, forgetting his embarrassment.
“I was funning when I met the skin man,” he said. “That’s what people called him.”
“Why would they call him that?”
“He was thin. He was like those people who don’t eat only he was hard-thin,” Boytjie said. “I didn’t call him the skin man after I knew that. I called him the bone man.”
I avoided lifting my brow and looking too hard at Boytjie. It sounded like a first time story of a different kind. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the intimate details. I got enough of that from Livia. Although, I thought, Boytjie would probably have a very different perspective. I couldn’t picture the bone man and Boytjie fitting together, even if it sounded like they were both all muscle if in different proportions.
“The bone man made me see things I hadn’t seen before,” Boytjie said. I clamped my mouth shut on the snarky response that wanted to well up out of me. “The boss would never have taken him on if it weren’t for me.” His tone darkened, he looked down at the floor. “I didn’t see the bone man right. I didn’t see how he liked the hurting, but after I took him to the boss I think the boss saw.”
Boytjie kept his head down. After a moment hen raised a big hand to his face and I thought he wiped away a tear. I was glad to see he wasn’t a Hollywood action hero. I let him keep his silence until he felt able to speak again.
“The bone man was bad. He liked the hurting. He liked it too much. I couldn’t make him stop.” Boytjie shook his head sadly.
I wondered if this was what had made him see himself in a different light. If it was what had made him decide that there was a part of himself that was dark and dangerous and needed chaining. The bone man had influenced Boytjie’s life from the moment they’d met and maybe it had been a good thing.
“He was out of control,” I said gently.
Boytjie nodded.
“The last man I ever tried to make see things the boss’ way really got under the bone man’s skin. He was going to kill him.” He looked up at me with haunted eyes. I had inadvertently dragged up one of the werewolf’s worst memories.
“So you had to step in.”
“I stopped him and I got bit.”
“The bone man bit you?” I asked surprised. I’d totally missed that punch line.
Boytjie nodded again.
“I didn’t know. Some of the pack say he was all wolf on the inside all the time, but they didn’t know him.”
I considered the tense and studied Boytjie.
“I killed him. I didn’t mean to. I had to stop him.”
I threw the chopped pieces of chicken into the pot and wondered what I could say to that. It was a traumatic experience for Boytjie. It was a surprise that he’d felt comfortable enough to share it with me. We hardly knew each other and yet there he was sharing his darkest moment with me.
“You had to stop him,” I told Boytjie.
He looked up at me with a grateful set to his features that totally ruined the moment. Dammit, either I was really bad at reading people, or the muscle bound werewolf boy-man had just shoved me into a maternal role. I wasn’t old enough to be his mummy dearest.
I tossed the last of the chicken into the pot a little forcefully and gave the contents a vigorous stir. I busied myself with grabbing a packet of powdered chicken soup from the cupboard, cream and milk from the fridge, and mixing the ingredients into a jug. I stirred all of it into the pot when the chicken pieces had cooked through. Then added a packet of breadcrumbs before putting the pot into the oven.
Boytjie watched me silently through it all. I wondered what his childhood had been like. Had he grown up on the streets? Had he ever known his real mother? I guessed that joining the pack had been another big moment for him, gaining a family and a home just like that. Why hadn’t he imprinted on Cleo as his mother figure?
The answer seemed obvious given the woman in question. Cleo had probably threatened to beat that thought right out of his head before he even finished thinking it. I couldn’t match that argument, so I resigned myself to temporarily playing substitute mom for the werewolf.
“Ten minutes to supper,” I told Boyjtie and couldn’t resist adding, “go wash your hands before we eat.”
He grudgingly got to his feet and stomped off to the bathroom grumbling. F.C. looked up at me like he had something to say about that. I figured it was something that would be followed by a su
perior smirk.
“Boys!” I said in disgust and grabbed cutlery and plates to set the table. The smell of the chicken pot pie filled the room quickly. I wondered how I was going to feed Sofia. My sleeping beauty spell hadn’t tapped into the fairytale magic that had allowed the princess and her court to dream through the long night without even the smallest nibble of a snack. Would the incubus be tempted by pot pie and a nice box of white wine?
I opened up a can of tuna for F.C. before I took the crustless pot pie from the oven and set it on the stove to cool a bit. I headed through to the bedroom to check on Sofia. She lay still and unmoving. Under all the linen wrappings I couldn’t even see her chest rise and fall. She had to be hellishly hot in that cocoon, I thought.
I called Boytjie through and together we unwrapped her. Her skin was feverishly hot to the touch. I chased Boytjie out before I pulled off her jeans and shirt. I left her in her underwear, throwing a light sheet over her body.
I sat down beside her and stroked her hair until I realised that the incubus was probably the one experiencing my tender touch, not Sofia. I gathered my energy and wove a small parting into the binding spell, allowing Sofia’s body the ability to move her lips again.
“Am I going to have to stick a tube down your throat to feed Sofia?” I asked.
“You’re dead set on making this difficult, aren’t you?” the incubus asked in Sofia’s voice. “Never mind, if you have to let her sleep forever, I’ll still have my revenge.”
I wanted to cry again, but I wouldn’t let the incubus have that satisfaction.
“So…tube or hand fed by a witch?”
The incubus laughed. It wasn’t the melodious music that erupted from Sofia. Even her lovely voice couldn’t make it a pleasant laugh.
“Oh very well, you can feed me to keep this body going. Whatever is for dinner, it does smell good.”
I banished the parting spell. The binding flowed back over the lips before the incubus could say another hurtful word.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Boytjie had already helped himself to a massive helping of pie. I guessed manners weren’t high on his agenda and that Cleo wasn’t a stickler for etiquette. He was wafting his mouth with a massive hand when he glanced up at me.
“It’s hot.”
I sighed.
“It would be. It’s just come out of the oven.”
I crossed to the fridge deciding that even if Boyjie was old enough for wine, I wasn’t old enough to deal with a belligerent and intoxicated werewolf with the heart and soul of an adolescent. I got him a tall glass of milk and he seemed very happy with that. F.C. I noted hadn’t touched his tuna. He was standing on the chair next to Boytjie, front paws on the table, staring intently at the mountain of food on the werewolf’s plate.
Was F.C. contemplating switching his diet, I wondered. I didn’t say anything least I jinx the moment. It would be better for my bank balance if my funky cat decided that eating what was served was the right way forward. If I had to make pot pies and chicken ala king three times a week to get him to leave the precious cans of tuna alone, I was ready to step up.
There was no reason F.C. couldn’t eat pretty much anything. Homunculi weren’t fussy eaters. One could generally feed them anything from mud pies to caviar, although I didn’t see them lasting very long on either of those cuisine choices.
Boytjie took another spoonful of pot pie and blew on it. I got my dish and took a less substantial helping from the pot. Then I sat down next to him. He was still blowing. In a boy it was precocious, in a man it probably counted as stamina. In Boytjie it was darn right annoying. He gave it one last blow as though sensing my exasperation. Then to my surprise offered the spoon to F.C. My familiar gave it a tentative sniff, then delicately took a chunk of the pot pie off the spoon.
I was definitely not feeding him that way, I thought with a shudder.
Boytjie watched in fascination as F.C. ate his piece of pie.
“He likes it. Funky cat.” He laughed.
I said nothing, but decided that in future I needed to set the table with F.C. in mind. As long as he didn’t get up on the table to eat dinner, I could deal with him joining me for meal times.
I finished my dinner quickly, then dished up another plate for Sofia. I poured out two glasses of cheap white wine from a box that had been sitting in the back of my fridge for months. It tasted okay, but I firmly intended only having a few sips at most.
I set everything on a tray and left Boytjie and F.C. alone with a hard look directed at my familiar indicating that I expected him to be the responsible one. He didn’t seem that taken with his assigned role.
In the bedroom Sofia hadn’t moved. I felt reasonably certain that my binding spell would last through the night without Boytjie or myself taking turns at standing watch over her body. I set the tray down and propped Sofia up with pillows so that she could comfortably eat her dinner. Then gathered a little magic for the parting spell and wove her a little freedom from the bindings.
Ready, I sat down beside her and began to feed her. It was a slow and unsatisfying process, but between bites of food and sips of white, I let the incubus talk hoping that something would trigger a clue about its true nature.
“Did you grow up wanting to sell lamps,” the incubus asked. I guessed it was trying to stir up trouble, since I’d taken away its ability to do anything else.
“No,” I answered seeing no reason not to be forthright about it. In the interests of drawing the succubus out I continued, “It kind of happened. I got tired of living one spell to the next. If you’ve got any scruples or ethics then selling spells is a pretty lean business even in the thick of a supernatural community. It was harder than just selling lamps.”
“So you weren’t always a small town girl?”
The incubus twisted small town like it was a dirty word.
“Not always, but happily now. You don’t think much of small town life?”
“It’s small and cloistered and everyone knows your business.”
Sofia’s face scrunched up into a scowl. It didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have already guessed. Incubi were city dwellers as much as any other supernatural being, where it wasn’t as hard to disappear into the hustle and bustle and anonymity of the crowds.
“It’s not that hard to live a secret life,” I countered. “I still sell spells, people still have skeletons in their closets, bad things still happen.”
I got the feeling that the incubus would have shrugged, but for the binding spell holding that part of Sofia’s body in its ungiving grip.
“Small things are easy to hide. It’s the big, big secrets that will always trip you up.”
I didn’t let the insinuation that my spell selling was an insignificant thing ruffle my feathers. It took me to the count of ten and feeding the incubus a heaped spoonful of pie to get my feelings under control though.
“Big or small secrets and lies have a way of making lives miserable.” It wasn’t the best come back, but it sufficed in a pinch. It also made me sound like I was old enough to be Boytjie’s mother. “They divide and they conquer, little by little.”
“You sound like you have experience,” the possessed Sofia responded. “It’s hard dealing with ordinary people. You can’t treat them like pets and you can’t treat them like equals.”
I grimaced at that. “We’re all extraordinary in our ways.”
“Now who is fooling who?”
Harsh laughter flowed from Sofia’s lips. I wondered if she would have a sore throat from the experience afterward.
“There are ordinary people and then there’s us. There’s a barrier between them and us that might as well make us an entirely different species. You’re young. You’ll learn.”
I decided that the incubus couldn’t have been Daudie’s child, not with sentiments like that. What did it mean then, looking in the wrong direction? I fed Sofia’s body another mouthful, then offered her another sip of wine.
“You can’t just
stay here forever you know,” I told the incubus. “Even in the city it won’t pass unnoticed.”
An incubus needed to feed its natural body in order to survive. It couldn’t derive its sustenance from whatever host it inhabited. It had to leave, didn’t it?
“I can stay long enough,” the incubus replied with a knowing smile. It did nothing for Sofia’s features.
“You should have tried harder,” I said, feeling vindictive. “If you’d tried harder your Daudie wouldn’t have been such a complete shit.”
“I know,” the incubus said softly. “I know. I did try, I did.”
The rest of the meal was eaten in contemplative silence and neither of us seemed to have the energy to break it.
I erased the parting spell , removed the pillows that held Sofia up, making her comfortable in the bed even though it was only the incubus who would enjoy it. I wondered what tonight’s sleeping arrangements were going to be like. I couldn’t let the question simply resolve itself. I pondered the options as I took the empty plate and wine glasses back to the kitchen.
Boytjie and F.C. were finished eating. I was a little surprised to see that he’d washed up the plates and utensils, setting them neatly on the drying rack. He’d even wiped down the dinner table. I could still see the moist trails of the damp cloth he’d used. He was on the balcony with F.C. staring up at the night sky. I washed up Sofia’s plate and the wine glasses before stepping out to join him.
It was a cool night. The moon looked almost full and huge above us. It was almost close enough to reach out and touch.
“Did it eat?” Boytjie asked, looking at me with a worried expression on his face that made me want to forgive him any past transgressions.
I nodded.
“Good. Sofy needs to eat.”
A cell phone rang. It was one of those annoying ones that some people seem to think are humorous, but really aren’t. It suited Boytjie perfectly. It sounded like someone with a bad cold repeating ‘ring’ over and over again, progressively at a more shrieky volume. Boytjie took the phone out of his pocket and handed it to me.