by A. J. Aalto
“Perhaps my MJ would like to try nutrimatrix for herself and get a taste for perks that accompany the life of a Felstein DaySitter. In fact, I insist.”
Tara had a half-eaten bar in her pocket with the end of the wrapper folded over. She opened it to reveal something that looked like a maroon granola bar and snapped me off an end. “What are the, uh, ingredients?” I asked warily.
“It’s super-nutritious. The dietary requirements of humans up at Svikheimslending are wildly different than others. Near the Arctic circle, we need a lot of calories to maintain our weight, and we need to make a greater amount of blood to support our companions, so, lots of iron and Vitamin D and stuff like that.”
I put the piece tentatively to the tip of my tongue and tasted copper and turnips and butter and something that was distinctly asphalt-like. At her encouraging nod, I slipped it between my teeth and chewed. This wasn’t food. It was like masticating a slippery vitamin that had been soaking in pig’s blood and dirt. I couldn’t even decide if it was hard or soft. It crumbled like granola… at first. Then it melted. Then it turned the consistency of gelatin. The more I chewed, the stronger the copper taste got.
“Half a bar has about…” Tara squinted one eye as she tried to remember the number off the top of her head. “I think about three thousand calories? I eat about three of these before lunch. Not that I feed full time anymore, since Agethon passed away, but I’m a primi, so—“
“Uh huh. Primi, right.” Whatever that is. I smacked my tongue on the roof of my mouth and it nearly stuck there. “Say, this needs something. Salt. Pepper. Hot sauce. There’s a kitchen here, right?” Tara nodded as I backed away and pointed down the hall. I said, “Fascinating, do continue. I’ll be right back!”
I needed to get the taste out of my mouth as fast as possible. When Harry found me, I was trying to force my mouth around a soup spoon full of sugar. “I enjoyed your impromptu show of physical fitness.”
“Fitness? I’m only concerned about fitn’is sugar in my mouth.”
“Tasty?” he enquired.
“I could never get used to that.” I spluttered and spat into the sink.
“But of course you would,” Harry corrected. “You are a DaySitter of House Dreppenstedt. Should your companion be relocated to Svikheimslending, you would be expected to remain here at Felstein with him and to enjoy all the joys and benefits of his life at court.”
“I do so enjoy when you talk about yourself in the third person, Harry.”
“One does one’s best.”
“Thank the Lord and Lady we won’t be relocated here in my lifetime. I’d die without pizza and my espresso maker.” I wiped my tongue on a nearby dish cloth, balled it up and threw it in the sink. “How old is Tara?”
“She’s not quite as old as she’s going to end up, but very nearly so.”
“Why do you have to talk like that? Just answer the bloody question.”
“Indeed, I can readily appreciate your confusion,” he admitted, “only, it keeps a mind sharp to draw the blade across the stone.”
“She lost her revenant,” I said. “Is that who Agethon was?”
Harry made a soft little mmhmm noise, watching me clean my tongue off with a wet dishrag.
“But she’s not ratshit crazy like Danika Sherlock was. How come?”
“Our Young Aggie was at Felstein when the accident occurred. Quite unfortunate. He did not make old bones; he was barely a decade older than myself. We at House Dreppenstedt take care of our own, and Tara was kept on as a primifluous feeder for the crowned prince.”
An appetizer. She who bleeds first. “And that keeps her Weebles from wobbling?”
“As you say, my charming chatterbox.”
“Saw her checking out Kill-Notch. She better not steal him from me. I’ll never find another guy like Batten.”
“Good heavens, but when it comes to your brawny meat-puppet, you do squawk like a covey of grouse. I assure you, Tara does not intend to steal anything. She has a comfortable home, here.”
“Some people have a wacky definition of comfortable. This place is as much a home as a park bench is; cold, hard, and dangerous,” I said. “I’ll take our cozy cabin any day.”
Harry gave a chiding cluck of his tongue but smiled, and hooked me closer with one arm. “As would I, my angel. Let’s get you settled for a nap.”
I rummaged through the supply crates and swiped a wrapped brownie. “Nuh uh. I couldn’t sleep in this creepy old place. It’s like a dungeon. There are weird noises, squeaks and squawks.”
“Mice,” he said with a tsk, frowning at the brownie in my hand. “And possibly an owl or two. Some of the DaySitters keep pets. Now, I would like you to fit into your court dress without any worry of tearing,” Harry said, pinching the brownie from my fingers.
My dress? Her dress. I thought I blocked the jealous flare better this time. “I’m ten seconds away from punching you in your four hundred-year-old schnoz, dead man. Gimme that brownie.”
“I will lavish you with as many treats your little heart may desire,” Harry promised, “on our voyage home to our little cabin in the woods.”
“Where the hell is the coffee?” I snarled.
Harry removed a bowl of undressed salad from the cold cellar and noted, “Provisions have been laid in for visitors who might not be accustomed to their diet, but that does not mean one can completely ignore one’s healthy eating habits.” Before he left to change, he handed me a bottle of water and I nearly lost my shit.
When Tara tracked me down, I might have been in the kitchen sobbing into a handful of romaine lettuce. I used a leaf to wipe my eyes.
“There you are. You ran off. Agent Batten says you do that.”
“Don’t believe everything he says about me.”
“Agent Batten says you're a crazy bitch.”
“That’s just a pet name. Like yours. What was it again? Ballsucker? Fuckturd?”-
“You guys are so much fun.” She said it like it was all one word — somuchfun!—as she wrapped both of her hands around my arm. I did my very best not to shake her off. Golden was right: I didn’t have girlfriends because I didn’t enjoy being around other women. Maybe having five sisters had made me wary and skeptical. This was a smallness that I should probably address if I wanted to have any sort of life outside of being a hermit. So, Tara was poisonously friendly, so what? I couldn’t dance around the toxic splashes to enjoy a little niceness?
She gushed, “I wish you could stay.”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “This place gives me the bonecreeps. My lady-nuts are shriveled up like prunes in a snow bank.”
Tara laughed too hard at that, and I caught her glancing around, probably looking for my sexy Second. I heard Batten in my head: Maybe she’s just a nice person. Or maybe, I thought, she’s a straight-up lunatic. Who ever heard of liking me? I’m not fun. I’m certainly not “somuchfun!”
“There’s a back door,” Tara said abruptly without any segue. “Another exit from Skulesdottir to the coast.”
“Harry told me to never use the back door.”
“Of course he would. He loves you.” She checked her exaggeration; DaySitter to DaySitter, there was no need to embellish. She corrected, “His concern for your well-being is immeasurable. The rear exit of Skulesdottir is dangerous, and not something they’d recommend you use, but I just… I feel like you might need to know.”
House Dreppenstedt did not create clairvoyants, so her feeling wasn’t based on any sort of precognition. Had she overheard some plot to confront me? “Just me?”
She didn’t answer that. “You take the hallway behind the throne. Go past the king’s collection room. Don’t let anyone see you leave that way.”
“Why not?”
“The path from the rear exit to the coastline is usually safe, but the coast itself is rocky and treacherous for Captain Rask.”
I suspected the coast was treacherous because of Captain Rask, but held my tongue.
She con
tinued, “He won’t retrieve you at the old pier there. If you needed to use that escape as a last resort, you’ll have to come south around the coast to the regular pier before Rask will meet you. And do not fall in the water.”
“Well, I should think not,” I said. “It’s freezing.”
“It’s more than that. There are things living in the deep. Things that hunt based on movement, splashing, vibrations of something struggling in water. The larvae stick close to the surface, and they’re always hungry.” She battled a quivering chin for only a second before confiding, “That’s how I lost my Agethon. He slipped. Who would have thought an immortal could be so clumsy?”
Slipped? Why was he out there, in the forbidden areas, in the first place? I frowned. “I’m sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine how hard that’s been for you.”
“Losing that Bond so suddenly and violently,” she said, “cannot be described. I am fortunate that House Dreppenstedt functions more like family, not like some of the older houses. Without a companion, they might have shunned me, driven me out, back to the world.”
The Blue Sense stirred to report that she was lying, but empathy is rarely as helpful as you’d imagine; sure, Tara was telling me a falsehood, but about which bit? Was she lying about the house shunning her? Was she lying about not wanting to go back to the real world? Was she lying about the accident?
Tara said, “I’m sorry. Telling you about Carole Jeanne wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t kind. Will you forgive me?”
“Maaaaaaybe,” I said suspiciously. “Can I call you whoreface?”
“Sure.”
“Can I clobber you?”
“Um, no.” She eyed me warily. “But I promise to never be unkind again.”
“You won’t take offense if I consult my Clairempathy to judge your sincerity, will you?”
Tara hung her head for a second. “That was fair. I accept your terms.”
I summoned the Blue Sense, which responded without struggle here, an easy, springy, effortless summoning I had known nowhere else on the planet. With my Talent summoned, I wrapped Tara in psi like a lasso. She giggled in response and her shoulders twitched upward.
“Tickles,” she said.
Jealousy, it reported. Concern for safety, feeling threatened and displaced. I probed further, and Tara gave a little shudder. I had gone from tickling her to pressing in on her very flesh and I Felt it as though I had a wet sponge in one fist. I gave it an experimental squeeze, and her eyes flew wide. Her lips made a perfect O. There was something else, and I was close to it, but I couldn’t quite pin it down.
“What are you so worried about, Tara?”
“You’re number seven,” she blurted, like it was an insult.
Lucky number seven? I tried to remember anything I knew about revenants and numbers. Declan’s warning: the four is always a lie. How many canons were in Marie-Pierrette’s journal: I’d lost count. More than ten. What did seven mean? Notes in a musical scale? Days in the week? In numerology, seven was the seeker of truths. Asmodeus was known to speak the naked truth to mundane humans when asked a direct question. Was that a connection, or was my mortal mind simply puzzling things out the way one does?
Seeing my confusion, Tara got upset. “Your advocate did not tell you that you’re his seventh. How unfair.”
“What does it mean?” I said, not trusting her as far as I could spit a hippo but not wanting to miss what new trick she could be playing on me. “So what if I’m Harry’s seventh?”
“Seven is cataclysmic,” she said emphatically. “Seven always leads to ruin.”
“Oh, come on!” I cried, rolling my eyes and throwing my arms in the air, a miserable mirror image of Kermit the Frog’s happy waving. “I can’t always be the worst at stuff.”
She nodded like a doctor giving a terminal patient the bad news. “The old ones, they learned a looooong time ago to get rid of the seventh as soon as the Bond set in and it was official. The Seventh DaySitter always leads to calamity and ruin for any immortal, and so he must destroy her. The seventh is a disaster!”
Sounded about right. I dropped my arms. “How do they, uh, get rid of her?”
“Full body impalement in the Wild Valley.”
I blinked. Then I blinked again. Then I fetched the lettuce bowl, chewed a lot, swallowed, and blinked some more. Tara waited patiently.
“Like, when you roast a pig?” I asked finally. “That kind of impalement?”
She nodded rapidly, looking a bit green.
“Well, damn, that's kinky. I’m not here for that, right?” I double-checked. “If so, I’m taking my dollies and going home. I’ll leave through the back door, I don’t care. I’ll swim home.”
She shook her head. “They would have done it by now. I guess Lord Dreppenstedt has just… resolved to work through his burden. While you last.”
“He chose me,” I said through my teeth, “because he liked me.”
“They usually choose a seventh that will be completely unsuitable so they don’t feel bad about losing her so quickly,” she let me know, which I thought was helpful of her.
“I am not bad luck for Harry,” I said, struggling not to believe it despite overwhelming proof. If I looked back at our entire relationship, it was fairly obvious that I was, and continued to be, a catastrophe. “You can’t be saying I’m the first… uh, seventh…” I paused to work that out. “Yeah, first seventh to survive.”
“There have been a few sevenths that weren’t destroyed,” she admitted uncertainly, “but they have always caused the tragic and sometimes brutal downfall of their companion and the house is left to mourn both of them. It’s better to cut one’s losses and just—“ She drew her finger across her throat and made a schhhritch noise.
“I think you mean—“ I mimicked a pike going down my throat and gurgle-choked with my eyes crossed. “You know, on account of the whole impalement business.”
She acquiesced with a sad head bob. “There are worse ends.”
I couldn’t believe that, and scrunched up my face to show her how I felt.
“There’s something you need to see.”
The back of your head? I figured that wasn’t good people skills, and said obligingly, “Oh?”
“Come. I’ll show you.”
It felt like a setup. I knew it was a setup. And yet, I couldn’t not tromp after her. Somewhere in Felstein, Batten was alone, surrounded by revenants; maybe Harry was Kill-Notch-sitting. That was a good thing if it helped him become comfortable. Tara and I went down several halls, her little ballerina flats soft and quiet on the stone floor. The path was twisting and turning. We jogged up a set of stairs, and another, and another, until I was good and lost. On a wave of psi, I felt her anxiety rise as we came to a long, curved window that reminded me of bowed aquarium glass at a dolphin tank. What I saw were not sea creatures, however.
There were meandering paths through the boxed sand areas, and above them were skylights that really didn’t help during the long polar night of winter, here in the Arctic. There was a gas lantern on a pillar nearby, casting flickering shadows around a woman sitting on a flat rock with her legs to one side, using a small hand rake to trace spirals in white sand.
Harry sat on a wrought iron bench with his hands loosely knotted in his lap, silent. I followed the line of his somber gaze to the woman, her short brown hair frosted with a hint of white and done up in springy, permed curls, wearing a navy, floral print dress, carefully tracing lines in the sand. It looked like she had drawn a collection of turtles. I couldn't make out her expression behind what looked to be bifocals, but her mouth was pursed in concentration; it didn't look like she was ignoring Harry, but she wasn't about to interrupt what she was doing for him, either, and he wasn't pressing the issue. It was weird, seeing him so reticent, but then I remembered that he was pretty much relegated to the kiddie table in this crowd.
Harry knew I was there, but he didn’t look up until he picked up my insecurity through the Bond, and then, he did so wit
h a look of sad resignation that cut me deeply. Was this Carole Jeanne? Why was she here? If he had her, why did Harry need me at all?
“Surviving beyond your companion’s needs is not always a good thing, either,” Tara told me. “A discussion for another time. Join me later in the den. We have company, now.”
Batten had found us. I smelled watered-down Brut cologne before I saw him. He must have thrown a bottle in his go-bag, because he sure didn’t have his kill kit with him.
“I should leave you alone.” Tara said.
“I wish you would.”
She shrugged it off. “When you think about it, you’ll see that I’m trying to help. Tonight, while our masters are dining, come to the den. Room 226. Just you.” She perked up when Batten got close, flashed him her biggest smile, and told him, “Have a good one.”
“He’s already got a good one, but the judge told him to stop whipping it out in public.” I gave Batten a sharp, openly possessive butt smack.
Batten spread his hands. When she had toddled away, he asked, “Must you?”
“Yes, I must. She’s all up in my beeswax and I need her to feel the sting,” I said, watching Tara walk down the hall was like watching a spider getting flushed down the toilet; I waited a beat to make sure she didn’t come back. Batten noted Harry and his company and chose not to comment or ask questions. I liked him a lot for that, especially since I didn’t know what to say.
“Could we have a talk?” Batten asked. “In private?”
I watched Harry return to silently staring. His lady friend also remained silent.
“I don’t see why not,” I answered, and followed him to the stairs. He knew which way to go, which was amazing, since I found this place a maze. Or maybe Tara had taken me the least-direct way on purpose, which, at this point, seemed the most likely thing for her to do.
Once in my room, Batten didn’t break stride as he moved to the bed; his was the smooth stalk of the jungle predator at comfort in the dappled shadows, even though I sensed he was hyperaware of his new surroundings. “Tell me what I don’t know.”
“About life? Love? Liberty? Lunch? Lingerie? Liposuction?”
