by Mila Young
"Perhaps your mother was running from something," Rog suggested, handing me the first of the two glasses to be filled.
"It wouldn't surprise me. I asked her, but she refused to talk about it. Hell, she refused to even talk about what she was doing before I was born. It might have been something nefarious, or it could just be that she was in the middle of her rebellious phase. Following rock bands on tour, getting them to sign her tits. Honestly, nothing would really surprise me at this point."
He smirked. "You don't really care for your mother, do you?"
"I like to think she tried her best, but in the end, I..." I paused, taking a sip from the rich beer and pausing to inspect the glistening golden hue. "Honestly, I don't think I feel much about her one way or the other. I just never respected her as a person. She was the 'do as I say, not as I do' sort of role model. Once I was old enough to start making decisions for myself, I realized that I was making better decisions than she ever did."
"It does not seem the sort of thing to fall out with family over," Rog noted.
"What do you know?" I asked, trying not to sound aggressive with the question. I did want to know more about whatever family he might have had.
"Admittedly only what I learned from studying the lives of others. Still, a handful of centuries has taught me quite a bit about what families should and should not do. And the family I had long ago were not role models for anyone."
I sighed, shaking my head. "I... we got into an argument over my going to college. She thought that I should be continuing with her gypsy lifestyle. She wanted to send me off to someone that would teach me to develop my magical talents, and called me a couple of words that do not bear repeating when I said no. She also had a bad habit of punishing me by locking me under the stairs when I grew up. After all of that, I left and cut her out of my life."
He nodded. "That I can understand. You do realize that she felt as though you were betraying her legacy, yes?"
I stiffened. "Her legacy is hers to do whatever the hell she wants with. I spent every single one of my formative years following her up and down the East Coast of the United States for reasons that she never elected to share with me."
"It would appear as though what you two have is a breakdown in communication," Rog commented.
"Screw that. I asked her. I tried talking to her, and she clammed up. She expected me to follow her into her own lifestyle without a question, without ever trying to do anything of my own volition, and she got pissed off when I tried. And who locks up their kid when they don’t behave?"
Rog sighed, leaning back against the wall and taking a sip from his beer.
I took a deep breath, twirling the glass of beer in my hands, enjoying the cold against my throbbing hands." Have you ever heard the saying that blood is thicker than water?"
"Of course."
"Its real meaning is that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. Meaning that the family that you make for yourself is more important than the one that you were born with. And as it turned out, the family that I found for myself was far the superior choice."
Rog smiled, tilting his head. "I understand. Even so... I would be a little more careful about casually tossing your family aside like that."
"It sounds like you're going to be a pain about this."
"Am I not already being a pain about it?"
"A little, but you're starting to get to the point where I'm regretting ever having this conversation with you." I sipped the beer again. The demon was at least right about one thing: It was damn refreshing. "So let's change the subject. How the hell is it that a blood demon finds himself playing Dr. Phil to a long line of Romanian vintners?"
"Dr. Phil?"
I sighed that time. "All my references are shooting right past your head. Family psychologist, then."
"Ah, yes. What do you know about blood oaths?"
"You mean besides the kind that you tricked me into?"
"That was a blood contract. There is a difference."
"Oh," I grunted. "Well, nothing. I don't know anything about blood oaths."
"Well, I made one ages ago with the first Cloris to walk these parts, back when... well, there were a lot more people walking these roads back then. Not a lot of houses or farms around here then either."
I narrowed my eyes. "Wait, Cloris as in..."
"Yes, as in your aunt. She was married, you know. Took her husband's name and everything, which I suppose is how she knew about me through her husband, who was a descendant of the original family, although he was a few generations removed. She never did speak on it, but I assumed that was why she came here, although the actual reasoning was lost in translation. She was very intent on not allowing me to learn anything about her. I did not know that she had family of her own until she dictated her will and testament to me."
It was a little too much to take in, but it did sound a lot like Aunt Moira.
"I just don't understand why she would have left her whole life behind just to come here to study... well, you. Sure, there are those interested in the study of demons, but she was... well, I never remember her being like that. Then again, I... don't actually remember her even having a husband."
"If what I was able to learn is true, he died many, many years ago, long before she ever showed up here. She only did when it became clear that she was the only one carrying the Cloris name, even if only by marriage. From her, the place passed on to you."
"Sure, in name," I retorted. "But you're the one that was here first. The one that was here to keep everything running. Kept here by a blood oath that I'm guessing now binds me to this place with you, right?"
"Correct."
"Well, I think it's about fucking time that you tell me what this whole blood oath thing is about so I can go ahead and start finding a way to break it."
He smirked and took a mouthful of his beer, then swallowed it loudly. "You know that doesn't really give me any incentive to help you, yes? I do want to keep you here."
"I'm here to remind you that I don't give a shit what you want. Oh, and that I can make this whole... ahem, situation, a lot less comfortable for the both of us if you're not cooperative."
"You know I can make this situation a lot more uncomfortable for you as well, yes?"
I snorted. "You mean besides the fact that I'm bound to a town out of a fucking Tolkien wet dream, tricked into being bound by blood to a demon who is trying to convince me to stay married with him for some reason that he refuses to share with me, which is just my mother all over again? Or did you have anything else to add to this literal shit storm that my life has become?"
"The aristocrats."
"Oh, so that reference you get."
"It is what you might call a classic."
"I never understood that joke anyways. I mean, aside from the whole shock value combined with a random ending. People act like it's such a fucking masterpiece, but in the end, it's just... no wit, nothing really creative about it. It just stops short of something that is truly a classic. The worst part is that I think that nobody else ever gets it, and they just play along because other people that are also pretending to play along are telling it like it's actually funny too."
Rog smirked, placing his empty glass on a table. "You appear to have a great many strong feelings about the joke."
"Don't psychoanalyze me again, please."
"If you want it explained, the power of the joke is carried through the middle and depends heavily on the teller's ability to read his audience and improvise to the point of a shocker, building up to the punchline. It ends up being a wink from the teller to the listener, showing that all he really wanted to do was talk about the most disgusting, repulsive shit he could think about."
"But the joke isn't made in the middle. All the middle is supposed to do is build up to the punchline."
"Well then maybe you should be a little more open-minded about your humor."
I took a deep breath, placing my glass down next to his.
"I still don't get it, so let's move on. What were you working on before you came out to check on me? And did you feed the goat? It headbutted me, not liking that I ate its cheese."
He chuckled, his gaze sweeping over to the cheese wheel with a wedge cut out of it.
"I was working on the boiler, for the most part. And the area around the boiler. Getting warm water around the house will be quite important come the winter, so it's best to keep everything in repair. I would have done it before, but... most of my time was spent caring for your aunt during her twilight years."
He started moving down into the cellar again, and I found myself following him into the depths of the house.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that she was dying, and I was there to care for her."
"She had a... coronary, yes. A heart attack. Doesn't that kill you pretty quickly? How fucking long did you have to care for her again? And don’t you have demon powers to get things fixed around the house fast?"
"That was the official word, yes. But I think you'll find that not everything in this place is as it seems."
"You mean along the lines of a caretaker for a vineyard ending up as a fucking demon?" I asked.
"Something like that. Like with your sense of humor, you'll have to keep an open mind about everything that you see in this area of the world. To the eyes of many, this is just a quaint little tourist trap in the middle of Eastern Europe."
"There is a lot of interesting history in this area of the world."
"It's like you keep forgetting that you're talking to someone who was actually around for most of that interesting history."
He was right. It was a little difficult to look at a man with a perfect jawline, broad shoulders and the appearance of someone no older than his mid-thirties and remember that he was a demon that was easily millennia old. Which did beg the question of what exactly someone like me could bring to the table that had him so determined to keep me around. Just to keep him company as he had earlier implied didn’t quite make sense then did it?
"You never did answer my question," I noted as he started working on the boiler again. Probably not something that I wanted him to get wrong, but in the end, how would an exploding boiler hurt him anyways?
"No, I did not."
"I'm guessing that was sort of intentional?"
"Nothing sort of about it. My blood oath is a very personal matter, the kind that is not lightly shared."
I cocked an eyebrow. "Oh yeah? Not the sort of thing that you share with the witch that you tricked into marrying you? You know that if you told me about it, I might even be able to break it."
He turned his eye on me, and for the first time, I thought he looked annoyed. "Ah, yes. A centuries-old blood oath, held by the words of some of the most powerful mages of the Golden Age will be done away with by the would-be witch that turned her back on her practice because she wanted to be a secular woman."
"Well, if you're going to be a bitch about it, maybe you'll just be stuck to this little spot of grass for the rest of eternity. No sweat off my back. That's totally your problem."
He hissed, looking angry now. "Yes, it is my problem."
"Except no, it isn't, because you roped me into it for some reason, so I figure you owe me some kind of explanation. Again, we can keep being relatively pleasant like we are here, or I can turn the bitch on. Believe me, you don't want me pissed off at you. Just because I haven't practiced in a while, doesn't mean that I can't still dish it out. I'll tear your world a-fucking-sunder."
"You do remember the part where I'm a demon, right?" He arched a brow, staring at me with an arrogant grin.
I pulled a few strands of my red hair out of my face. "Did you hear me stutter? I've seen your real face, and I'm not scared of you. So you can either keep being an annoying shit, or we can get to talking about our problems. Up to you."
He cleared his throat, still working on the boiler. He didn’t respond right away, and the more I watched him working, the more I wondered if he did these menial tasks to simply give himself purpose. He’d been stuck here for so long, it was like he’d morphed into a human in his behavior. "It might take me a while to... well, it is quite... difficult to share my particular situation."
"You mean that you never actually shared any of this with Aunt Moira?"
"No. She never did ask. I don't think she cared. I think that is what I liked the most about her."
"Sure," I huffed.
He rolled his eyes. "But... well, if you want to know, things were a lot more complex back then. So many mages wandering the lands, working to summon creatures like me for their own purposes and killing us when we were of no more use. As it turned out, there was a marriage that was never quite resolved that allowed me to survive their purge attempts."
"Is it just me, or did that not explain anything?"
"It's the beginning of the explanation. We'll continue it... later. For now, I think we both have work to do."
That sounded more like an excuse to me.
Chapter 9
I wasn't surprised, but the disappointment was still a sting that hung over the rest of my day. As it turned out, there wasn't much around the world about demon marriages, and from the looks of the books in Moira's room, it was clear that she had been looking into something similar. Not really the sort of thing that I ever thought that I would be looking into.
How the world changed in a few minutes. And I knew how to do my research. Most of my time as a journalist had been spent researching and fact-checking, making sure that nothing we sent to print was ever the sort of thing that we would have to retract or get sued for libel over. And truth be told, I enjoyed it. Research was the sort of skill that everyone needed to pick up on in practically every single line of work.
The fact that I was good at it was only half of the story, though. There needed to be something to research, and there were almost no mentions of demons even being interested in taking on marriages with anyone, much less humans. That they were able to take on what resembled human form was a relatively recent discovery on its own.
At this point, so little time had gone into actually studying demons aside from summoning them and sending them back to where they came from that we still had no idea where they were being summoned from.
A worrying thought. For me especially, considering that I was trying to find my way through my accidental marriage to one of them.
I felt like I had been studying for days, but truth be told, it was probably a few hours as I looked out the window of Moira's room and saw that the sun was still travelling up in the sky of a new day.
"Seriously, did people back then have anything else to do but write up murder and porn fantasies about demons?" I whispered.
"In fairness, they didn't have the Internet back then," Rog said from the door. "And the church was somewhat controlling over what fantasies people could indulge in, leaving only the realm of fiction for people to peer into their deepest and darkest fantasies."
I scowled at him, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of looking surprised that he had been standing there this whole time. And I certainly wasn't going to start talking to him about deep, dark fantasies.
"You're no goddamn help," I growled, collecting a couple of the books. "And you have way too much work to be doing for you to just stand around trying to distract me with my research. Remember that the vineyard needs to be tilled before we start fertilizing it.”
I moved past him, trying not to let his scent distract me as I slipped the books into my backpack and started heading out. Maybe once I'd scanned through the books, I would be able to cross-reference them with the database that my university held, look into all possible connections to demonic marriages.
"See?" I asked as I stepped outside. "Not even out of the house and you're already cleaning the cobwebs out of your brain, getting some good ideas."
Despite the fact that I’d set out with no clear destination in mind, there was no real surprise when I found myself hea
ding back into the village. As far as I knew, it was the only place inside the realm of where I could wander without being dragged back by my invisible leash.
Bram was already there, with Dracul lying out in the warm sun while the man was setting his produce out for sale.
"Nilsa!" he called when he saw me. "I am starting to think that you are no longer a tourist here!"
"I've found someplace to spend my time, and I think I'll be staying for a short while," I answered, taking a seat in the shade next to his stall. "This village is the only place where I can go that has a semblance of civilization that lets me get out of the house."
"Lucky me," he answered, placing a couple of sandwiches on the stall next to me. "I thought you would be coming by, and I made something to eat while we had our daily tea. Can I interest you in cheese sandwiches? I made the bread myself."
I raised an eyebrow. "That sounds lovely. Isn't it a little early for tea, though?"
He shook his head. "Never too early for tea. You never did tell me what you are doing in our little slice of the world."
"Nothing really important," I answered as he poured tea into the styrofoam mugs and handed me one. "I'm stuck doing some research in the area, and I've hit something of a wall."
"A... real wall?"
"Metaphorical. Staying in the house isn't doing me any good. Too many distractions there."
"And the distractions here?"
I tilted my head to the side. "Considerably less distracting, somehow. You'd think it would be the other way around, right?"
He shrugged. "There have been many that found inspiration in this countryside. You would not be the first."
That was an interesting thought, although I had the bad feeling that Rog had been there to distract the others that had needed a little inspiration in the area.
One of the other stall owners was approaching us, holding her hand up in the sun and jogging lightly across the street to where Bram and I were enjoying the warm tea.
