A Little Familiar

by R. Cooper

  Piotr shut the kitchen door behind him, which muted the urgent howling of the wind but didn’t silence it, since the glass in the windows was thin and almost as old as the house itself. The wind hadn’t been so fierce when he’d gotten home from work. He felt the message it had for him although he didn’t understand it, and paused with his armful of late apples to stare out the window over the sink.

  The dark sky was rolling with clouds. Ominous, to those who thought of rain as bad weather instead of necessary and life-giving.

  All the same, Piotr put the apples in the sink to be washed, and then went into the adjoining dining room. He pulled a sweater off the back of a chair and slipped it on before returning to the kitchen. He’d put his leftovers in the oven before heading outside to check on the garden, and the kitchen had warmed up but was still cool enough to make him shiver. The only sounds in the house were his footsteps and the ticking of the clock in Aunt Elysia’s parlor. Pallas, the raven, was perched on the refrigerator, but didn’t make a single noise as she watched Piotr wash his apples and leave them to dry.

  Piotr listened to wind whistling through the six apple trees in the garden. He waited for whatever it had to tell him before he realized that the message was the sound itself. The silence was so profound he could hear the faint rattle of the shed door, and the shed was yards from the house.

  He tightened his mouth and glanced up at Pallas, who looked back, unblinking. Pallas was not his, although Piotr fed her. She’d belonged to Piotr’s grandmother, a tough old bird herself, but since his grandmother’s death in January, Pallas had no master. It didn’t stop her from acting like Piotr’s familiar, of a sort. Pallas didn’t help him in any way, but she was fond of watching him with judgement in her black eyes. It was her way of guiding him without directly interfering as might have done if she had been his.

  Piotr didn’t have a familiar, and wouldn’t have chosen an elderly bird for one in any case, certainly not one who’d been devoted to his grandmother for most of its preternaturally long life. But there was a reason witches with any significant power to speak of had them around.

  Nature was about balance, and a potent witch required something, or someone, who could help them grow their power while keeping them grounded. His grandmother had said it was about connection. Besides a coven, a witch needed a link to another living creature to stop them from going mad as Merlin. But Piotr had often suspected the bond was more than that. His grandmother had possessed a fiery temper and a short fuse with idiots, and Pallas had been able to calm tense situations with a well-timed comment, or a beady stare, in a way that had nothing to do with magic.

  There was an older witch a few hours away in Wellington, who had a golden retriever for a familiar. The retriever served more as a therapy dog than a sarcastic best friend like Pallas. That witch, socially awkward and tense at large gatherings, needed the friendly, openly adoring presence of the dog, as well as its watchful eye. It allowed him to focus on his magic, to let it grow without tempting him toward abusing it. Not that every witch would lose their mind or begin to practice selfish, twisted magic without a familiar around, but something about unattached witches stabilized in the presence of their familiar.

  Piotr wasn’t certain what that was, but he knew people, and witches were very much human. Humans could get so heartsick they could die from it. Loneliness could turn a person inward, leave them without a bridge to the outside world. That could have considerable consequences for someone who could summon a storm, or cause flowers to bloom, or hex with the power of life and death.

  This had most likely led to the need for familiars in the first place. Covens wanted powerful witches to help lead them, but no one desired to live with one. As a consequence, the more powerful the witch, the lonelier their lives often were. Familiars would have begun as mere companions, and then witches would have noticed the effect magic had on them, or, maybe the effect the presence of another had on their own magic. Whichever it was, Piotr could judge a witch’s strength from their choice of companion.

  His grandmother had been formidable. Naturally, the smartest of birds had found her.

  Piotr considered Pallas, who managed to express her view of the situation with a mere cock of her head.

  She thought he was making a mistake by living alone. Despite that, she’d felt the same about his last two attempts at relationships. She’d glared at Kyle for demanding Piotr learn how to act like a normal boyfriend, and outright cackled in glee when Xander—who she had absolutely detested—had admitted Piotr was too weird, too into his “hippie shit” to be suitable for someone who worked at a bank. No one who looked like a big, fearsome bear should be so interested in gardening, or canning, or “whatever it was” Piotr and his “farmer’s market friends” did.

  Since that had not been the time to finally explain a family history of witchcraft, Piotr had once again left it unsaid. That was one of the problems with dating ordinary humans; eventually it became necessary to either tell them the truth or break up with them. Relationships with them could be done, of course, with the right sort of person, the kind already inclined to gaze longingly at full moons, the ones who searched for fairies when they saw a circle of mushrooms, or ran toward breaking waves instead of away from them. Not, apparently, the kind who looked up at all 6’3” inches of Piotr and saw his thick, drawn eyebrows, his sooty black hair and beard, and assumed he spent his Saturdays doing something more interesting than weeding his herb and vegetable gardens.

  “Hippie shit,” Pallas croaked at him. She’d taken to repeating that phrase when she was most amused with him. It was not the first time the ways of the craft had been mistaken for some kind of hippie, organic foods movement by outsiders. Piotr should have been grateful for the recent trends toward home gardens and sustainability. They certainly made hiding in plain sight far easier than it must have been in past centuries.

  But he turned his back on the stubborn corvid and filled the kettle for a warming cup of tea. He checked on what was left of his vegetable pot pie in the oven, then scrubbed the dirt from under his nails. Outside of the kitchen, the big house would be cold, so he crossed to the thermostat to at least turn on the heat upstairs, and then went back when the kettle began to whistle.

  The hour was fairly late, after seven, but he pulled a caffeinated tea blend from his overstuffed open pantry and got out the antique teapot with the faulty strainer. Pallas gurgled at him for a moment, repentant about hurting his feelings but unwilling to come down from her perch.

  He could remember his grandmother gently scratching the raven’s back and how Pallas had preened for it. There was nothing like the bond between a witch and their familiar. In the days of the witch hunts, fearful humans had assumed the close partnerships had something to do with the devil, or involved some kind of bestiality, which said more about those humans than the witches on trial. Familiars were more than beasts. They were animals with a magic of their own, who were drawn to the human witch who needed them.

  Piotr forgave Pallas because the bird was still grieving, and set one of the apples on top of the fridge for her to peck at without actually eating. Outside, the wind picked up, making the windows shiver and the bells hanging along the porch ring noisily as if they had an announcement.

  Piotr poured his tea into his favorite cup, the one round and trimmed with pink and big enough to not be dwarfed by his hands, and went into the dining room. His notebook was open by his usual chair, his pen beside it. He had his choice of rooms for his workspace but had always felt more comfortable around the center of the home—the kitchen and dining room. He scratched a few items off his to-do list, jotted down a few others, and pretended the ticking of the grandfather clock in the parlor wasn’t louder than it should have been.

&n
bsp; He was already planning for the winter months. Even in the modern world of heaters, frozen food, and bulk shopping, winter was a lean time, a time when budgets were tighter, days were colder, and costs went up. He made what he could for himself and for his coven from his garden, but by January, even his supplies would be dwindling. He’d have to visit the market in Trinity Creek in order to keep his pantry, and his gifts, ready.

  Baskets of canned fruit and vegetables were not the gifts of a normal boyfriend. People expected fancy or impractical things from the ones they loved, chocolates or hugs or visits at work, things like that. Piotr had done his best. Fresh baked bread had earned him a perplexed look. Preserves had gotten him a puzzled, “Thanks,” and then Kyle had forgotten to take them home with him.

  Piotr hadn’t tried again. The coven understood, and that was enough for him. The meaningful stares of a shiny black bird meant nothing. The clock ticked because that was what clocks did.

  Piotr itemized the contents of his pantry and took stock of what else he would need in November to use the preserved cherries he’d made, as well as the spiced pears. He considered his plans for next week, and realized he’d need to make more vegetable stock and freeze it.

  He would have a lot of work to do, and no time to focus on the stillness of his house. But thinking of that broke his concentration, and he put down his pen to reach for his tea before he forgot it.

  The citrus and lemongrass aroma of the tea was as warming as the tea itself. The steam warmed his cheeks, and the cup his fingertips, and both lulled him into closing his eyes. He took a sip, and then another, listening to the rattles and moans of the wind outside as it tore through his neighbors’ gardens. The big house creaked once or twice but withstood the storm as it had withstood countless others. His home was strong, the family magic had made it so, although there was only Piotr to maintain it now, at least until his brother someday had children.

  Piotr would delight in teaching them magic, though he expected no children of his own. He didn’t know which fact stood more in his way, that he was gay, that he was a witch, or that he was powerful enough that other witches were content to leave him alone. Whichever it was, he didn’t have any childish visions of happily ever after in his future. He knew better.

  He took another drink of tea as if that would make decades of loneliness in an empty house more bearable, and then opened his eyes.

  The dregs of his tea in the bottom of his cup set his heart pounding. He swallowed, acutely aware of the wind now, the mad, merry whistling of it, the ringing of the bells on the porch, the open book in front of him, the candles in the candelabra at the center of the table as the wicks caught fire and glowed.

  He swirled the cup three times before tilting it to pour the last of the tea into the saucer. The twigs and bits of tea leaves left behind were not so bold as to spell out a name, but Piotr would never have needed something so obvious.

  He raised his head before the first knock at the door echoed through the house.

  Even the rush of blood in his ears could not drown out the sound of the fireplace in Aunt Elysia’s parlor roaring to life. The electric lights were on, but candles lit in the hallway once Piotr made himself move. He should have paused to check his appearance in the mirror by the door, left his hair wild but pulled the stray apple leaves from it, wiped any spilled tea from the front of his gray cable knit sweater. He should have, but he didn’t, because his hand was already on the handle, and the hot tea made his pale cheeks bloom red, and because he didn’t want to know the eager image he presented as he opened the door for Bartleby.

  Bartleby Dorchester lifted his head from his observation of the countless neighborhood cats—and one dog—occupying Piotr’s porch, and then blinked as if Piotr had surprised him, although Piotr couldn’t see how. Everything about him was the same as it always was.

  In contrast, Bartleby was ever-changing. That wasn’t quite true, Piotr corrected himself, Bartleby himself was the same, but something about him always suggested movement and transformation. Perhaps it was the stenciled climbing vine tattoo that started on the top of his left foot and made its way leisurely up his body, blossoming into honeysuckle at his throat.

  Piotr had never seen the full tattoo except in glimpses at revels, when Bartleby stripped down to nothing, or next to nothing, depending on his mood. His summer tan had faded, which meant freckles were visible across his dusky brown skin, and his eyes were even more of a surprise when the light hit them and they became melted honey.

  He didn’t quite reach 5’8”, but 5’7” was a respectable height, at least until he was next to Piotr. Then Bartleby deepened his usual lazy slouch instead of trying to stand taller the way other men often did. Of course, Bartleby wasn’t like other people. He wasn’t gender fluid, at least, not how Piotr understood the term, but then again perhaps he was. Bartleby was… Bartleby. He wore what he chose to wear and acted how he chose to act. He’d never requested to be addressed by another pronoun or name, he simply was, like a trickster deity of old, although one not interested in deception.

  His short, multi-textured brown hair was mussed from the wind, and he’d wound a long, vibrant scarf around his neck multiple times, hiding much of the honeysuckle. He held a paper cup in one hand. His other was in the pocket of his short red trench coat. When he pulled his hand free to comb his hair to the side, Piotr noted he had on fingerless gloves to match his scarf. His fingernails were burgundy. His lips were purple.

  Piotr sighed.

  Bartleby dragged his gaze up to Piotr’s face before gesturing at the collection of animals on his porch. The dog immediately trotted down the steps, presumably toward its home. Some of the cats followed, but first pretended they weren’t by stopping to sniff the rosemary bushes.

  Bartleby released a satisfied puff of breath once they were gone, then faced Piotr again.

  “Piotr.” His voice was high but not loud. Piotr hadn’t seen him to speak to in months, which might have been why the happy greeting made him forget how to answer. He stared at the spring and summer of Bartleby, the glimmer of his eyes, how bundled up against the cold he was, and then stepped aside to let him in.

  Bartleby had another pleased huff for that, then immediately went into Aunt Elysia’s parlor to stand in front of the fire. “Thank you for the fire. Thoughtful of you.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Piotr admitted, and glanced around, but there wasn’t even a hint of Great-Great-Great Aunt Elysia tonight, if he didn’t count the heat she had provided for Bartleby

  “Ah.” Bartleby nodded in understanding. “Aunt Elysia always did like me. How are you, Elysia? Not tired of this old place yet?”

  Elysia’s spirit gave no answer, not for Bartleby to hear. Bartleby could never hear or see her, but it had never stopped him from speaking with her. He was oddly comfortable talking to a ghost, in a way other witches often weren’t. But Aunt Elysia was friendly, and he was right; she always had liked Bartleby.

  As if not getting a response didn’t bother him, Bartleby turned back to Piotr. “I see you’ve been setting up for your Hallow’s Eve.” He must have meant the plastic skulls on Piotr’s porch, and the candles in the windows. But instead of judging, his tone seemed almost wistful. “Is Halloween so much more fun than a proper Samhain?”

  Whatever business had sent Bartleby to his door didn’t stop Piotr from answering his questions while Bartleby soaked up the heat from his fireplace. Piotr had explained his point of view to the older members of the coven so many times he could recite it even when distracted by the firelight against Bartleby’s cheeks. “The ordinary human version of our revels is not that different, even if the meaning is lost. Samhain is the end of harvest and green pastures. It’s the beginning of winter and the death of the year. It’s the space between, where boundaries disappear and anything can happen.”

  Halloween was chaos and magic and mischief that some enjoyed and others feared. The ones who feared it tried to render it harmless with jokes and singing skeletons, but de
ep down they knew the truth. Halloween was a celebration of life through an awareness of death, and a reminder of the presence of spirits.

  Bartleby was watching him intently, and straightened at his last words, so Piotr made himself shrug as he went on. “It’s a holiday we share with them, and will continue to share, as long as children learn to love it as we do.”

  “Is that why you no longer come to our revels?” Bartleby frowned a little. “You prefer to be among them, handing out candy to cartoon characters and princesses?”

  “Candy bars are magic to children, and jack-o-lanterns light the dark to keep away the goblins.” Piotr was embarrassed at his own explanation. “Kids are easy to please,” he finished, after a small pause to search for better words and not finding any.

  “And I bet the little princesses are delightful,” Bartleby said on an exhale, before dropping into an elegant slouch. He studied Piotr, and when Piotr didn’t demand to know what he was doing there, he took a sip from his cup.

  “Is that a pumpkin latte with whipped cream?” Piotr asked quickly, rather than focus on the swipe of Bartleby’s tongue across his lip after he swallowed. The notations on the cup were easy to read, but he asked anyway.

  Bartleby stopped, then turned his head to airily address the room itself, or the ghost of Aunt Elysia. “Oh look, he is speaking to me about something not coven business. Is he feeling well? Months without a word from him, and then he asks about my coffee of all things.”

  He might not hear the tinkling laughter from the corner, but Piotr did. He was immediately irritated that he was not more irritated. Bartleby had made a ghost laugh. It was stupidly charming, and Piotr was incapable of answering in kind.

  “So you are here on coven business?” Piotr got to it at last. Now Bartleby would impart whatever information he’d been sent to share, and then leave.

  “Why else would I be here?” Bartleby blinked at him, in not quite false innocence. As usual, Piotr had no idea what to do when confronted with that look and settled for crossing his arms.