“Well we don’t have any knitting things here, so that’s out. Dark clothes, and he got my book which also looks pretty dark, hmm… But he likes the holidays, you said?” Oren hummed before stopping them short of any destination with a tiny hand on Kassel’s bare chest. “It’s a long shot, but I might have something appropriate. I’ll be right back with it. You get ready to go back up.”
“You just dragged me all the way over here.”
Oren twirled away without a backward glance or another word, a bright spot of Technicolor soon swallowed up by the darkness.
Kassel stared after him in consternation.
Apparently, he was going topside again.
He sighed and trudged back to his room to change clothes and fix his hair a little bit. He had to dodge a roving band of fan-demons that had heart-shaped pickets with his face on by ducking into a shadowy alcove, but eventually he made it. He did a quick rubdown of his horns, careful of the sensitive tips—no time for anything more substantial.
Not even twenty minutes later, Oren waltzed back in, a small black box in his hands and a wide smile on his face.
“Here.” He handed Kassel the box. “We don’t have any pretty wrapping paper, but I think he’ll like it.”
Kassel took the box and paused for a second, causing Oren to shoo at him with his hands.
“Well go on then,” he said impatiently. “We don’t have forever.”
“We actually do.”
Oren scowled. “Beau doesn’t. You know Hell and Heaven time doesn’t run perpendicular to Earth. One second wasted here could be a month or a year there. A century here could be a blink there. It’s all wibbly wobbly, as the great Doctor would say.”
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
Kassel was so confused.
“What are you still doing here?” Oren demanded.
Kassel sighed.
Heading topside of your own free will was very different from being summoned. For one, you had to be sent up by someone with the authority to do so. Usually that was Luc, Zorun, Big G, or one of his archangels. And now, apparently, Oren had the power.
Because of course he did.
Kassel closed all of his eyes and focused on visualizing his destination. Beau’s living room. Every detail he could remember from it. The tree. The blankets. The small, sagging couch.
Then he recalled Beau. Wrapped in his blanket and looking up at him with his large blue eyes. Despite the annoyance of being summoned, Kassel found he didn’t harbor any negativity toward the human. And while he usually liked human tears, he realized he didn’t like them on Beau. For whatever reason, they seemed out of place on him, and it would be best if they were gone so Kassel didn’t have to think about them.
It was as if that specific thought gave him the final pull.
The world around him went hazy and tilted, and before he knew it, he was being whisked away from his room and into the now-familiar living room.
Kassel waited for his vision to clear before turning himself around, watching his horns around the light fixture to avoid smashing it. The room was empty and dark. The tree was still there, but the lights on it were off. He focused one eye out thesmall window and found the other houses were still decorated and twinkling.
Beau’s was the only one with lights off.
That seemed odd, considering how it had been when he arrived.
He scanned the darkness easily, lights not actually mattering—honestly, the artificial kind irritated him more than anything.
The human was nowhere to be found.
Kassel spread out his eyes to cover every corner of the house, peeking through walls and underneath furniture that was entirely too breakable. His steps were almost silent in the quiet of the night.
The house was small. In comparison to where Kassel lived, the world itself was small, but Beau’s house seemed minuscule even by human home standards. There was only the living room Kassel was standing in, the kitchen right next to it, and a tiny hallway just off it that Kassel wasn’t positive he could even squeeze down.
