It worked well enough.After a few minutes, the pain was gone, though Kai felt a familiar exhaustion claw at the back of his eyes.
Still, he wasn’t going to give up and curl up in bed with only self-pity for company.“At a minimum, I’ll go out and buy myself some decent clothes.”
With that goal in mind, Kai headed downstairs to that all too familiar store filled with jams and teas he’d made and blended, labeled by hand and displayed prettily.
In and of itself, there was nothing wrong with the store, nothing at all.The jams were good, and messing with the recipes until he’d created something new was fun in a way.
“I’m just not meant to make jams for the rest of my life.”Kai picked up a jar of strawberry, one of the simplest flavors he carried, and a gleeful, giddy part of himself almost had him smash it.That part, it wanted to trash the store and everything in it, wanted to tear apart the shelves and—
A knock from the door interrupted Kai’s train of thought.I know that knock.I’d know it anywhere.FuckingNick.
9
AfterMikanohadleft,Fian hadn’t been able to sit still.He knew he needed to go and see Kai, talk to him, explain how the dream had really been real, how what they had done had been real.Once more dressed, he went right back to the ocean and made his way to shore, the human shore.
I need to tell him how much I enjoyed it and that I meant everything I said.
More importantly, Fian knew he needed to make sure Kai was all right.
That magic, that spell clinging to him, I need to free him of it.It’s not right for a landbride to be the one caught in a net.
As he stepped out of the ocean, using magic to dry himself off completely, Fian’s limbs ached with urgency.It was a struggle to keep his form to human, to keep his tentacles hidden and his color a stable hue.
Walking up from the ocean, Fian noticed that the air closer to the small town smelled of magic recently cast.He wrinkled his nose and hurried along the watchful gathering of garden gnomes in the gardens along the narrow path.
It cannot be.This can’t be meant for Kai again.It’s too much magic just to enchant one person.Still, maybe I should have kept him?But dreamers imprisoned in dreams can get hurt in the human realm, and I don’t want that at all.
As Fian rounded a corner to a slightly wider road, he noticed a cat hissing.He didn’t see what the beast was so annoyed by, but the feline dashed past him, not so much as sparing him a glance.
They are sensitive to magic too.That’s why they like demons so much after all.What in all the saltless nightmares is this place to make even cats run scared?
Despite the urgency to get to his landbride-to-be, Fian stopped at a crossroads ahead of him.Like all the houses in this quaint seaside town, the ones set by the crossroads featured garden gnomes and lush flowers overflowing their pots.They were very bright gardens indeed, and while Fian had little to no knowledge of human-world flora, the sheer number and brightness of everything he saw struck him as out of the ordinary.
He narrowed his eyes and focused on his demonic senses.Now that I look at it, there is magic here.Just the smallest trickle in the paint and the soil, but it adds up.
The town was a pretty place indeed, but perhaps unnaturally so, too perfect to be normal.It was laced with magic to make it more than it really was, just like a blowfish when threatened.
It’s more than that though.No one is threatening the town, so I guess it’s like the town is an anglerfish, and whatever coven rules it is trying to attract the likes of my perfect landbride.It might be about tourism.Don’t some of the dreamers always complain that small towns don’t get enough business and tourism?
Fian’s hands balled to tentacled blue fists, and he stepped right up to one of the picket fences, the northernmost property that made up the crossroads.I won’t let this go on.
With his demonic magic, he ripped through the spells prettifying the property.The gnomes, at least some of them, were anchor points for the spells, Fian saw that now.Like row upon row of slowly falling dominoes, the spells collapsed, unraveled.The garden wasn’t really tended to perfection as it had seemed, and the freshly painted walls of the house truly had chipped paint all over, the magic acting like a strong glamour to hide the truth.Only shrubs and wilted things grew in those magic-brightened flowerpots, and while Fian didn’t have human sensibilities, he still thought those ugly as a starfish butt.
Definitely some kind of weird small-town coven who want to pull tourists.It has to be.And if those tourists are as beautiful and sassy as Kai, they just keep them.Oh, the Human Liaisons Unit will come down on this coven like a tsunami if I tell them.But I have to take care of Kai first.He’s what matters most.
“Kai’s mine,” Fian said and turned toward the Jammery.
Kai’s little shop was off Main Street.The way he was hurrying, it took Fian less than five minutes to get to Main Street, another thirty seconds or so to get to the smaller street that led to Kai’s store.He could see the corners of the sign above the Jammery though the entrance and front windows were hidden by cars.His skin prickled before he even heard the voices.
“Get the fuck away from me!”Kai yelled.
Then there was the sound of glass breaking, and before he knew it, Fian was running.
“Kai!”Please be all right!Don’t cut yourself on the glass.Be safe!
A man stood in the door to the Jammery.Fian saw only the back of him, light brown hair and a checkered shirt.
“Don’t be like that,” the man said.“You’ll forget all about it.Just come here and let’s go back to how things were.It’ll be easier on everyone if you just do what I tell you to do.”
