Witch's Jewel

by Kater Cheek

  Fenwick was hilariously flustered.

  I turned to the doorman with an impish smile. “I’ll take him home so he won’t pester you anymore. We’re hoping he’ll outgrow this phase once he graduates high school, but you know how kids are.” I put my arm on his and led him away. “How about we skip the bar and find somewhere else?”

  Fenwick craned his head over his neck but didn’t let go of my arm. “You don’t want to go back to hear the band?”

  “It was too loud.” I swung my jean jacket on. It was finally cool enough to need a jacket at night.

  “Too loud? For you?”

  “Well, it was crowded too.” I pushed the button for the walk signal, but there was no traffic so we crossed anyway. I looked around trying to figure out which way to go. I had parked up the hill, to be farther away from campus congestion, but now I couldn’t remember where my van was.

  “What about Rob?”

  “He won’t notice.”

  “He was making out with Julie, wasn’t he?” He tried to look at my face, but I turned away. “And all their frat buddies were there?”

  Fenwick had met some of them, having started school the same time as Rob, but most of those he started with had already graduated. “Kit, no one’s going to look down on you because you’re not a college student.”

  I shrugged. It was an old argument. In another city, being a college-age non-student wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but here, my age, it made me stick out.

  “You’re just as smart as they are,” he said.

  “It’s not just that. It’s the college life I missed. It just seemed like a lot of fun. Like living on campus. I always wanted to live in one of those mansions up there.” I nodded at the huge, hulking Victorian structures that symbolized the University district the way the Old Stone Bridge and half-timbered houses symbolized the Old Town. The University had purchased them twenty years before for student housing.

  “I lived there a semester. It wasn’t that great.”

  “Really? But you have a view of the river and the whole city. That must have been fabulous.” And where had I parked? How hard was it to find a white van?

  “Not really. Imagine ten to fifteen college students, all with space heaters, microwaves, and computers, sharing a house with wiring from more than eighty years ago. I had one roommate who blew half the fuses out every time he ran his microwave and space heater at the same time. Since the fuses were in the basement, and the basement was rented out to someone else, we had a lot of cold nights with no lights.”

  Finally, the white azalea with a broken branch. My van was across the street. “Yeah, but all those details, and the gables, and the eyebrow windows. They’re so pretty.”

  “I guess so.” He followed me to my van. He waited by the passenger door while I got in, then reached across to unlock it. Once I started the engine, he continued. “We had to put blankets over the windows in the winter to keep the heat in, and everything was in various stages of broken. It took months to get the University to fix anything.

  “Even getting the maintenance request forms was a hassle. Usually we’d just try to fix stuff ourselves. You can guess how that went.”

  “Thanks for shattering my illusions.” I drove down the north side of the hill into the warehouse district. You could tell when you left the University district because things got shabby in a hurry.

  “It was cool sometimes. Living with that many people can be fun, and man, we had some wild parties.”

  “I never thought of you as a party… animal.” I turned to look at him as I said this, but at the word ‘animal,’ the image of a bear flickered over his face again. Freaked out all over again. I pasted on a smile to cover my discomfort, but of course it didn’t work. Fenwick could always read my expressions as if words were written on my face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” But I would have to tell him. Tonight would work, if I were drunk enough. “Hey, Fenwick, how about you come to my place? I’ve got a bottle of Bailey’s and some coffee James gave me for my birthday.”

  “Sure.” He blinked and then grinned.

  “You seem surprised.”

  “You’ve never invited me to your place before.”

  “It’s not exactly laid out for garden parties.”

  He’d understand what I meant soon enough. My apartment building was a residential island in a sea of factories and warehouses. It was in the kind of neighborhood where you were more likely to hear guard dogs than pets, where you almost hoped someone would graffiti the wall around the parking lot, because then you’d have some color. I turned down a narrow alley that snaked between a weed-filled empty lot and the back of a plain concrete building. We didn't have designated parking, but there was a gravel spot near a chain-link fence that was unofficially mine.

  “No, I’m not lost. I really live here,” I told him, sure that’s what he was thinking.

  Fenwick frowned. “You need to get a nicer apartment. The warehouse district isn’t safe, especially for a woman living alone.”

  “This is all I can afford. If I moved to a better place, I wouldn’t have enough money for dojo fees.” I parked the van and double-checked the locks in the back, which tended to rattle open over potholes.

  “Get a roommate then.” Fenwick got out and extended his arm to escort me up the graffiti-and-puke-covered steps. He wrinkled his nose at the stench of urine in the hallway. “You need to move.”

  “You sound like my brother.”

  Fenwick glowered.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll move when I can.” I fished out my key and started to put it in the apartment door.

  “Wait.” Fenwick put his hand on my arm to stop me, scanning the area vacantly, as though trying to hear better. “Something’s not right.”

  We paused for a second to listen.

  “You’re being paranoid.” I said, but just then the door swung away freely, despite the fact that I hadn’t unlocked it.

  “Holy…”

  The room had been searched, and not gently. This wasn’t the careful snooping of a little sister looking for her big sister’s diary. The place had been tossed. Someone with no respect for property had tried to find something in a hurry.

  The Bailey’s was gone, and except for my tackle box with the screws and wires, most of my tree-making material had been trampled. I picked up the remains of the oak I had been working on. The trunk was broken just above the base, with sphagnum moss still clinging to it.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t touch anything just yet. The cops will want to fingerprint.”

  “I’m not calling the cops.” A juvie record for shoplifting and possession had given me a distaste for authorities, and it would be just my luck if they found half a joint somewhere that I had forgotten about.

  “Don’t you want to know who did this?” Fenwick asked.

  “Not like I can do anything about it. I’m gonna just collect my stuff and go. Who knows if they’ll come back or not?” I took a plastic garbage bag and started stuffing clothes in it.

  “At least let’s talk to the building manager, see if he saw anything.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “It will be okay.”

  If there was one thing I had learned, it was that sometimes life handed you stuff you couldn’t fix. Sometimes you just had to pick up what was left and not complain about what was gone. Fenwick came from too nice a family to realize this, but it would make him feel better to think he was helping me, so I reluctantly agreed.

  When we had packed up everything salvageable and put it in my van, Fenwick and I knocked on the manager’s door downstairs. There was no answer at first, but Fenwick can knock rather persuasively. At the third series of poundings, we heard muffled cursing, and then the unlatching of several locks. The door opened to reveal four inches of face and most of a hand, but a brass chain kept it from opening further.

  “What the hell you want?”

  The manager, who signed the ren
t receipts “Larry,” and managed to make every service request vanish for months on end, was a greasy and surly man who had, at some point in his life, been dumb enough to get tattoos on his hands. My theory was that he once hoped to be a criminal hot shot, but had given up his Mafia dreams around middle age and settled for merely disreputable. He greeted me, as he usually did, with a halfhearted leer and a twitch of his lip as if he had tobacco to spit.

  “Her apartment got broken into. We want to know if you saw anything.”

  “Didn’t see nothin’.” The spit came then, barely missing my foot. He hadn’t been chewing tobacco, so this was just for show.

  “Did you hear anything?” Fenwick asked, casually pressing on the door so that the brass chain stretched to its limit. “You must have heard something.”

  Larry shook his head.

  “Then we’ll call the police and see what they can find,” Fenwick said.

  “Wait. Don’t call the cops, okay? We don’t need no cops.” Larry looked over his shoulder briefly, like he had underage porn, a few grams of cocaine, a pot plant, or something else he didn’t want the cops to see.

  “Then tell us what you know.” Fenwick leaned against the door a little too hard, and the chain popped under his weight. The door flung open to reveal a dingy apartment that mirrored mine in layout but surpassed it in filth.

  “Hey, hey, easy now!” Larry held up his hands, sounding panicked. He must not have realized that Fenwick broke the chain by accident. Or maybe he did.

  Fenwick took a half step into the room, nostrils flaring slightly. He grabbed Larry with both hands and flung him against the wall hard enough to dent the sheetrock. Larry’s wince of pain was punctuated by a squeak of fear. I squeaked a little too, never having seen Fenwick get this angry before. Jesus, what set him off?

  “The guys who trashed her place were here tonight. You know them. They talked to you.” Fenwick growled at him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

  Fenwick smashed him into the wall again. “You wanted a piece of this. You knew who they were and they gave you money to be quiet about it.”

  “No, no, okay, so yeah, I knew the guys. Look, it wasn’t like I had a choice or nothin’.” He rasped, like he’d gotten the breath knocked out of him.

  “Names.” Fenwick snarled.

  “Eddie and Jojo. Look, I’m sorry about your girlfriend’s stuff, but you don’t want to get involved with them. They don’t give a shit fer nothin’.”

  “What do they have against me?” I asked, surprised to be playing the good cop.

  Larry turned back to me, eyes pleading to call off my goon. “Shit, I don’t know. Someone hired them. You pissed somebody off. You’re lucky you weren’t here.”

  Fenwick growled again, a bestial rumbling, threatening, and much deeper than his speaking voice. Larry squirmed.

  “Tell you what,” I offered my former slumlord. “You refund this months’ rent, and give me my damage deposit back, and in return we’ll keep quiet about this. I’m not gonna tell the cops you were an accessory to God knows what, and you’re not gonna tell Eddie and Jojo that I ever came back.”

  He frowned in protest, but my terms were reasonable, and Fenwick was still growling. After the time it takes to mentally add two and two he nodded and jerked his thumb towards the back of the apartment. “Okay, fine, but it’s in … I gotta get it.”

  Larry, true to his word, had the money in a cigar box hidden under his bed. Fenwick followed and watched him while Larry counted out exactly what was owed me. After counting it a second time, Fenwick and I backed out the door toward my van. We tried not to run, for form’s sake more than anything. I don’t know how Fenwick felt, but my insides had turned to goo.

  I cleared my throat as the engine started. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you mind if I…”

  “Yes, you’re staying at my place tonight.”

  “Right. Thanks.” I grabbed his hand for comfort, and he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he held it all the way to his apartment.

  ***

  Fenwick had a small, tidy apartment, as far north as you could go and still pretend you weren’t in the suburb of Northridge. Like mine, it was a one bedroom with a kitchenette, but unlike mine it actually had furniture, most of it hand-me-downs.

  The new pieces were a carved wooden table and a Chinese silk painting of two carp, strangely incongruous with the painted pine trunk and the ratty maple dresser. He had a bolted-on bookshelf filled with books and comics as dog-eared as my own, and on the shelf underneath about two yards of samurai movies and anime.

  Fenwick went to the kitchen, got some limes, and quartered them.

  I picked up a light blue bottle from the counter. “Gin and tonics sound good.”

  “You look like you need a drink, and I’m out of beer,” Fenwick said, carefully placing exactly four ice cubes and one quarter of lime in each glass. “I’m sorry about your stuff.”

  “Me too.” I shrugged, as if getting robbed happened so often it didn’t bother me. “That’s what I get for living in a seedy area. I’m just glad I delivered the palm tree already.”

  He measured out the gin and tonic water with shot glasses, and handed me one of the finished concoctions. Unlike every other gin and tonic I’d had, this one didn’t taste like a pine tree.

  We adjourned to the sofa, and he sat down next to me. “Why do you think those guys broke into your apartment?”

  “For the magic jewel I inherited.” The drink was stiff, but that’s just what I needed if I were going to get the courage to have this conversation.

  “Very funny, Kit. No, I’m serious, why do… you are serious?” He lifted my bangs. “For this thing you’ve been wearing? It’s magical?”

  “This one isn’t. This is one I bought at a shop in the Old Town.” I fished the envelope out of my jean jacket pocket and handed it to him. “This is the magical one.”

  Fenwick read the letter. When he was finished, he took out the bindi. “This is it?” He stuck it on his forehead experimentally. When it fell off, he put it back into the envelope. “What does it do?”

  “I see things.”

  “Like what? Dead people?”

  “Otherfolk. Like vampires.”

  He set the glass down and leaned forward with his hands on his legs. “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re not crazy. I believe in them too. Jolene is one.”

  I nodded and looked at my glass.

  “I’ve never met anyone else who knew they were real,” he said. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  I took a deep chug of the drink and set the glass on the blanket chest which served as a coffee table. “No, well, kind of. I need to ask you a question. Before I ask you though, you have to know that I’m your friend, and I’ll always be your friend, no matter how you answer. I want you to know that you can trust me, and my opinion of you won’t change no matter what you say.”

  He took my hands and rubbed his thumbs lightly in my palms. He didn’t look worried. He looked happy, and had a small expectant smile. “Ask me anything you like.”

  “Why do I see a bear when I look at you?”

  Fenwick dropped my hands and leaned back with shock on his face. “Holy shit. You know. How do you know? How did, how did you find out?”

  “The bindi. I told you it showed me things.”

  He stood and started pacing back and forth, rubbing his mouth with a hand. “Yeah, but … Kit, no one knows that about me.”

  “No one?”

  “Well, my parents, and my grandfather, but it’s not the kind of thing you can see. You can only tell by smell, and if you … but you didn’t come over here during those times. I was careful not to …” He ran his hand down his face and sighed. “I didn’t want you to find out this way.”

  “Find out what? I still don’t know exactly what you are.” I took another hefty chug. This was a drinking kind of conversation if ever there was one.

  He licked his
lips and took a breath. “You know what a werewolf is?”

  “Sure, I’ve seen movies.” I set the glass down. “Are you saying you’re a werewolf?”

  “I’m a were-bear.”

  I nodded. It made sense. I saw a bear, not a wolf. “So, you turn into a bear at the full moon?”

  “Once a month. Not always at the full moon.”

  “Do you turn into a whole bear, or just hairy and toothy like in the movies?”

  “I turn into a real bear.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes, but not un-bearably.” Fenwick grinned at his pun, but I didn’t smile, and his grin faltered. He sat down again and reached forward, with a hand not quite touching me. “Kit, please don’t be afraid of me.”

  “I knew you weren’t a normal human. I’ve known for a few weeks now.”

  “A few weeks?”

  “I’m okay with it.” I wasn’t, but for his sake I’d fake it.

  Fenwick lifted me up into a hug and let out a long shuddering sigh of relief. After an awkward half-second, I hugged him back. It felt kind of nice being in his arms. Safe. And man was he built. Rob was nicely built too, but Fenwick’s chest was like a solid wall.

  “What made you growl at Larry like that? How’d you know he knew about it?”

  “I smelled them. I smelled that the same guys had been in Larry’s apartment too.”

  “You could tell that much just by scent?”

  “I can tell a lot of things.” He took a deep breath and ran his fingers through my hair. “Your conditioner smells like almonds. You had ramen for lunch. You’ve been smoking again.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “I can tell that too. Is it because of me? Kit, I’m not a monster. You know I’d never hurt you.” He pulled me even closer, close enough that my face was nestled against his sweatshirt. It felt nice.

  “Fenwick, I trust you. You’re like a brother to me.”

  He relaxed his arms, letting me out of the hug so suddenly I thought maybe I had said something wrong. “We’re friends, Kit. Friends stand by each other.”

  “Yeah.” I lifted my glass. “To our friendship.”