by A. L. Tyler
“CHARLIE!”
His voice boomed nearly as loud as the thunder and the devastating crack of stone split by lightning. Every noise made my heart skip a beat, over and over and over, until I was sure it would never beat steady again. I found a little nook in a wall, just deep enough for me to fit inside if I curled into a fetal position, and I did so.
“YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME FOREVER!”
Another ripple of lightening, and a clap of monstrous thunder from directly overhead, and the rain started pouring down. The pitter-patter of the drops hitting the pavement dulled the sound of Stark’s anger, and I was grateful.
The rain was Charlie’s doing. It had been raining in his Other Side more often than not lately, and now I knew why. He had been angry at Kendra for what she had done, but now the anger had burned out. Now, he was only alone.
Another loud clap and the world shook, and shook, and shook…
It was an earthquake.
My nook was crumbling from above. I didn’t have time to react, and I felt the stones shift around me into a trap I couldn’t break free from. They pummeled me in the head, and I heard my bones breaking.
I tried to stay awake. I tried to keep my grip, and focus on the new information that Charlie had been in love with Kendra when she had banished him, but it was the peaceful image of the crimson sumac in his garden that lured me away. I could see it, just there in my mind’s eye, and slowly I followed it through the darkness that swallowed me.
Chapter 9
I don’t remember much of my beginning. I floated in a place of nothingness. It was a reality without form, like a sandbox leveled flat, and waiting for me to shape it to something worthy of being seen.
I started with the trees.
I made tall, elegant ones, and short ones with character. I made wide ones, and narrow ones, and twisted ones, and ones that bore fruit.
Then I did the bushes, and as many flowers as I could remember from the place I had been before…
Where was that place? I wasn’t sure that I knew.
I needed a ground to stand upon, and physical form to do the standing. So I made the ground, and then I made me.
My hair was dark blond, and I was just a little taller than average for a girl my age.
Age. Why would I care about age, as a noun or a verb? I was never going to do it. I was never going to be it.
And yet it mattered, because I knew it would matter to the one who would take me to the place where I would feed.
Eighteen. That was my age.
I made myself a little house in the middle of my garden, and I filled it with dried herbs and pickled goods, handmade furniture and handwritten books, a walking stick for hikes and a little satchel to carry my finds.
I looked for the black cat… but then I realized I was the black cat.
What?
Where was the kindly woman? The one who fed me?
~~~~~~~~~
When I opened my eyes, it took me a minute to process the stillness of the world.
Everything was just so… fixed. It lacked fluidity, and I wanted to shape it to something more to my liking.
I licked my lips and stared at the light above me, intent on making myself a sky of stars to stare at instead, and I blinked.
Nothing happened.
“You’re back, Thorn.”
I looked over at the man sitting next to me. I knew him, but it felt like ages ago…
“Charlie,” I smiled. He was like me, a shaper of things. One of the finest tinkerers the universe had ever seen.
He was pushing something into my hands, and I took it. It was a pendant charm, and it glowed red like blood as he set it in my hand.
I stared into it. It welcomed me.
I sat bolt upright. “Stark—!”
The figure of a woman swam into view, and I was suddenly aware of a cat seated at my feet. They had been no more than a minor feature of my world before; like insects underfoot.
“Now, Annie…” Lyssa was pushing me back onto the bed. With her reddish hair unwashed and only half pulled back, she looked more haggard than I had ever seen her. “That was more than a month ago, just lie down, and listen—”
“A month?” I said. I didn’t feel like I needed to lie down. I felt like I needed to rework the heavens so that lightning didn’t exist. “A month?”
A force pushed me back onto the bed, and Charlie raised a finger to his lips to silence me.
“I found you just in time, Thorn,” he said. “Or perhaps, just barely not in time. We’ll see how you do. You kissed the Other Side, but you left a piece of yourself here when you went, so I don’t think it took.”
I furrowed my brow in confusion, but Charlie put a hand on mine. I was clutching the sumac pendant he had given me.
“Stark dropped it when I tackled him,” he said calmly. “He grabbed you instead. Do you remember?”
I tried to think back. It all got… malleable. Like the details didn’t really matter.
“I remember a little cottage,” I said wistfully. “And old books, and jars of stuff and dried plants. And I was looking for an old woman who smelled like—”
Charlie only smiled, raising his eyebrows for a moment and nodding. “Yes, I know. The early memories of the Other Side can be strange.”
I closed my eyes, shaking my head. This wasn’t a memory from the Other Side. This was something else. “No… No. That’s not what I mean—”
Gates had walked up to give me a hug by way of a feline head-butt, but she stopped just as her ears folded back for impact. Lyssa stared at me with concern, unmoving.
My eyes moved back and forth between them, and then to Charlie. “We’re in fast forward again?”
“No,” he said with a weak smile. “This time I slowed them down.”
“Ah.” I tried not to jostle Gates as I moved to sit up a little more. “Why do I remember looking for a woman who smells like lavender? And why do I think I was a cat when it happened?”
Charlie took a deep breath, and then he shook his head. “Because I didn’t get to you in time, Thorn. I’m sorry.”
It took me a minute to grasp the meaning of his words. And when I did, my heart sank in panic. “I’m a demon?”
“No.” He shook his head again, looking forlorn. “Thorn, you never made it all the way there. I already had the ingredients for the spell gathered. The cottage and the woman aren’t your memories. They’re mine, from my first mistress. I was a witch’s familiar at the start.”
“But—” I could hardly believe what he was saying. “But you needed them. You needed them for you. You were going to help Gates, and Lyssa’s hair—”
“Yes…” Charlie frowned, looking down. “Lyssa’s hair didn’t work, so I had to use Kendra’s. It was a trick getting you to give it to me while you were delirious, but you eventually handed it over…” His eyes fell a little. “It’s gone now.”
“But—”
“I’ll gather them again,” he said dismissively. “And I am sorry, but I find myself drained again after this experience. Gates will have to wait.”
“But you should have helped her—”
“Thorn.” He gave a crooked smile. “I just brought you back from the dead. Quite literally. And that was your decision—your logic—because I know you chose to save the dying girl over the ailing friend. You will always save the dying girl. Show some gratitude.”
I blinked. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said dismissively. “Don’t tell your sister, or any other witch. It will label you tainted for the rest of your days, and they don’t need to know. Even not knowing, the stress damn near killed Lyssa.”
“But…” I stammered, looking over at my sister, frozen in time as we debated her better qualities. “She would understand. I was a demon, but now I’m me again. It’s me, after all. She’s my sister.”
“And you know how she feels about demons,” Charlie said. His eyes turned sad as he recounted the things she had said early in
their acquaintance. “Demons are too powerful for their own good, and they need to be enslaved. Being touched by that power carries a heavy stigma in certain circles, and I didn’t expect you to know. I think she would care about this, and not telling her is doing you both a favor.”
I nodded, taking another deep breath. “Thank you.”
He nodded with me, and Gates resumed her affectionate bumping, mumbling something about how she didn’t know what she would have done without me, because Charlie didn’t scoop the box nearly often enough. I carelessly trailed a hand down her back, and then stopped, looking back up at Charlie.
“You were in love with her,” I said suddenly, remembering what Stark had told me. “I’m so sorry.”
Lyssa looked shocked for a moment. Charlie did, too, but then he shattered into a shower of glittering sparks and was gone.
“Who?” Gates asked, looking up at me. “The old woman?”
~~~~~~~~~
I stayed in bed for another day to appease Lyssa, and Gates stayed nearby the whole time. She was quieter than usual, and it unnerved me. Somehow I thought she was slowly becoming more cat-like, and I feared she was losing what little of her humanity she had retained. Lyssa assured me it wasn’t the case, because the curse that had been laid on her affected her form only, and not her mind. Gates was just shaken by my near-demon experience, and it had changed her.
Somehow, that made it worse.
She was much more solemn than I had ever remembered her, quietly reading Kendra’s old spell books and eating her meals in silence and away from us when she could. It wasn’t like my loud-mouthed friend to be so withdrawn.
When I finally got up to take a shower, I had an ugly shock when I stripped down and saw the scar down my side. I winced at the memory of being dragged to the Other Side like a rag doll as I trailed my fingers over the twisted flesh between my ribs and down to my hip. It was jagged and melted, and four heavy dimples in the pink scar showed where a massive claw, like a bird of prey’s talon, had gripped me too tightly before tearing me from the physical world.
I didn’t need a doctor to tell me that the wound would never heal right. The skin had already reformed, and it was misshapen. Stark had made sure I would never forget our meeting, or his exact sentiments toward any witch that bore the name Hawthorn.
By the third day, when Lyssa hadn’t left the apartment, I asked if she was ever going to get home, because Josh and Rosemary surely missed her by now. With a stoic expression that was haunted by a few stray tears, she had calmly explained what had happened in the month that I had been away from my body.
Lyssa had become suspicious of my prolonged absence when I didn’t come back to work, but she hadn’t worried because she’d sent me on the errand to collect her supplies. All the same, she had stopped by my apartment before going home to check in with Gates and make sure she was fed. When I didn’t return the next day, Gates had called her for help. Lyssa wasn’t able to summon me, and Charlie would have known if something more common had befallen me, but neither of us showed up.
As time went on, they feared the worst.
It had taken Charlie nearly a week to lose Stark in the Other Side and then find me. When he brought me back, I was frozen by his magic, and so near death that he feared I might not survive. He and Lyssa had done a series of spells to restore me, all the time lying to friends and family and saying that I had contracted mono or had gone on an unplanned vacation. Lyssa hadn’t wanted to worry our dad unless the worst happened…but it hadn’t.
Lyssa didn’t know, and for once didn’t care, how Charlie had done it. He had brought me back, and I held my tongue about what he had said to me. I had become a demon for a short while, but he had managed to put me back in a human body. I was human, and alive, and that was all that Lyssa needed to know.
Charlie had told them what he knew about my encounter with Stark, and Lyssa had immediately freaked out and put a protection spell on Rosemary and Josh. She sent them away to live with Josh’s parents until she could get the lay of the land with Stark, and hadn’t seen or heard from them since.
They hadn’t seen or heard from Stark, either. They didn’t know how he had found me, or how he had left the Other Side. It didn’t seem conceivable that he could have done it without being summoned, because Kendra had made him as a new demon. No one knew his name, and even if they did, any half-decent sorcerer would have bound him, so the fashion of his summoning remained a mystery.
So the three of us sat, like rats trapped in a hole, inside the protections that Lyssa and Charlie had laid around my apartment. Lyssa was working on creating charms to protect us so that we could leave, but the work had to be completed on the full moon in two weeks.
She was going to be done just in time for me to make it to classes. I was beginning to question if college was really a viable option for my future, but Lyssa insisted.
“You’re going,” she said, wielding a wooden spoon at me as she mixed up yet another meal of pasta and canned sauce. “I did not estrange myself from my family and commit to gaining ten pounds in a month via spaghetti for you to drop out of school and run off to the warlock circus.”
Pasta was one of the few foods she had thought to bring with her for our lock-in, because it was easy enough to make and nonperishable. We had all been hoping that Charlie would come back sooner than later, and maybe bring some cheeseburgers with him, but he didn’t. It had been a week, and my emotions had run the gamut from severe depression to a fiery anger.
I knew I must have embarrassed him when I brought up his relationship with Kendra, but running off had just been immature. I had worried when he hadn’t come back, but then I had realized that I was his bridge. Even when we were apart, there was a part of us that was still connected, and somehow I didn’t feel like he had met a gruesome end at Stark’s sparky fingertips. He was sulking somewhere, and we were stuck and hungry, and he wasn’t coming back because I had embarrassed him.
I had taken to the quiet moments when Lyssa was cooking in the kitchen and Gates was staring aimlessly out the window, going to my bedroom and talking quietly to myself, or maybe to him, if he was listening. I apologized, and I cried, and I asked him to come back. I said I understood why he had instantly been defensive when we had met, and I said I understood if he never wanted to see any of us again. Then I took it all back and I railed against him for abandoning us. I gritted my teeth and cursed him for being a coward now and in every moment he hadn’t just told me the truth. I accused him, and berated him, and begged him.
And when I had nothing left to say, I went to the window with Gates and stared out. Neither of us said anything, and at first, I had wondered what she was looking at. But then I saw them.
There were kids—new adults—just out of their parents’ homes for the first time. The rich ones drove fancy new cars that I was sure would be dinged and damaged in the dumbest of new driver ways in the next few weeks. The rest drove used cars, or bikes, and the old used furniture arrived in droves to decorate their dorms on campus down the street.
And they all looked so excited.
This was a moment that both of us had talked about without end back in January. We had talked about getting an apartment together, and staying up all night with energy drinks while watching old science fiction horror movie reruns, and filming mock episodes of Kitchen Master International, where our ingredient of the week would always be noodles, because we were poor college students who couldn’t afford a real, nutritious meal.
And here we were, sharing an apartment and staying up all night terrified. We had only noodles to eat. It was exactly what we had wanted, but the dream had shattered.
We weren’t starry-eyed kids anymore.
As I laid myself down to sleep that night, Gates quietly jumped onto my bed and curled up under my arm. She was starting to feel bony; the pasta was taking a faster toll on her carnivore’s body, and she was sick of the indigestion that came with eating it, so she skipped meals as often as not.
&nbs
p; I thought about how Charlie had come back to me the first time, just as I had fallen asleep, and I wondered if he would do it again. He did have a flair for the dramatic.
Gates stayed by my side while Lyssa slept alone on the couch. I went to sleep that night without seeing him, and dreamed that I was walking alone in his castle in the Other Side, shouting his name as I went down the corridors looking for him.
Then I awoke to the smell of bacon.
Chapter 10
I flew out of the bed, and Gates hissed and almost didn’t land on her feet. I threw the door open and stepped out. She was right on my heels, and we both stopped when we saw him sitting at the table in men’s pajamas and eating a plate of eggs and toast. Lyssa was sitting across from him, looking hung over and aged ten years, clutching a warm cup of coffee.
When she saw me, she took a deep breath and sighed, frowning at the front door.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been around,” he said, looking unhappy. “I was told that I was unwelcome, and not to contact you anymore.”
“You were told,” Lyssa said with a glare, “That we didn’t need help from a liar. If you’re going to do this, then out with it. Tell her what you did. What you’re still doing.”
Confused, I looked from Lyssa to Charlie.
“I have no idea what she’s talking about,” he said, taking another bite of eggs.
Lyssa cocked her head, disgusted. “You’re a good man, Charlie. This is low. Too low for you, even after what Kendra did.”
I looked back to Lyssa. Of all the words she had used to describe demons, and Charlie specifically, “good” wasn’t one of them.
“What’s he done that’s so good?” I asked her.
“He saved your life,” she said without hesitation. “He had a hand in dad and Janet getting together. He banished one of the worst tyrants history has ever known, and Kendra always said he was good. I believed her, but I’m done covering for you. Tell her the truth, Charlie, because you know you can’t hold onto this forever. You’ll break her heart when you disappear. You’ll break both of their hearts.”