Chapter Ten
TEN
Work No. 227: The lights going on and off.
Eleonore wrinkled her nose at the Witchipedia article she’d accessed on her new PADD. Or digital tablet, she corrected herself, since that was apparently this era’s term for the device. The image accompanying the text showed an empty, dark room. Then the image changed, the lights in the room coming on. Eleonore twitched, startled.
Right, a GIF. She’d learned about those earlier, though she still wasn’t sure how to pronounce the acronym. She’d learned about a lot of things that day. Accessing the internet was rather like opening her mouth beneath a waterfall and attempting to sip.
She was addicted.
Having researched odd experimental theatrical performances, she was now investigating the strangest works of art of the modern era. Martin Creed’s 2000 installation had to be near the top of the list—it was just an empty room with electric lights set on a timer. “How is this worth one hundred ten thousand pounds?” she asked herself incredulously.
It was good fodder for her brainstorming session, though. Perhaps her performance at Ben’s Plant Emporium could involve her standing stone-faced at a light switch, turning it on and off.
She scribbled the idea down in a notebook Ben had given her. He’d supplied her with paper and pens from his desk, along with the tablet, which was helpful for plotting her revenge against him.
Was he being helpful in terms of acclimating her to the modern world? Yes. But when he’d just ordered her to perform a one-woman show at his café, that helpfulness was negated.
Eleonore had several other spite- and internet-generated ideas written down already: “setting fire to stage,” “sitting in silence with paper bag over head,” “incoherent screaming.” Maybe she should actually bite someone onstage.
It wasn’t that Eleonore hated the idea of someday getting to perform in a play. When she’d been young, the main path open to her had been fighting for their clan, and then she’d been stuck in a career rut for six centuries. If she could break free of the curse, she didn’t know what she would do, but it certainly wouldn’t involve as much violence. Acting might be just the thing.
The issue was being forced to do it after she’d refused. The werewolf must know she was mystically bound to obey his every command. The eBay listing hadn’t gone into detail about that, but it had to be obvious, right? That was how enchantments of this sort worked. Even if he didn’t know, though, he’d still ordered her to come up with a show with only two weeks to prepare.
Ben had returned from work approximately an hour ago, but Eleonore hadn’t felt like facing him. She was still stewing, and anger aside, she was confused about how to feel about him. He’d fed her and provided her with modern technology, which was helpful and possibly even kind. He’d also put new sheets on the guest bed and had mentioned taking her clothes shopping so she didn’t have to stay in her current outfit. (The witch had failed to ship Eleonore’s small wardrobe with the crystal.) He owned a large bathtub she had full access to, and his shampoo smelled delicious.
It was so far from what she was used to, Eleonore had no idea how to act or what to think.
A clatter came from the kitchen. Her stomach rumbled, and she eyed the bedroom door. It was close to dinnertime, and though she’d made herself a sandwich for lunch, she was getting hungry again.
The rhythmic sound of vegetables being chopped tempted her. Curious what Ben was making and wanting to learn about any additional kitchen gadgets (the internet had taught her about air fryers and waffle irons), she slid a fluffy robe over her clothes and headed for the kitchen.
The robe was dark blue and designed for someone much larger. It trailed behind her like a monarch’s cloak, whispering against the floorboards, and the sleeves dangled over her hands. She lifted the lapel to her nose and sniffed, then let out a secret sigh. The fabric smelled like Ben’s shampoo and a whiff of the cologne she’d sprayed in the air out of curiosity earlier, but her vampire senses were sharp, and she knew that wasn’t the sole reason it smelled good. His skin and the blood beneath were naturally delectable, calling to her predatory impulses.
She found Ben sautéing onions and garlic while a pot of water heated on the stove. His glasses were fogged. “Hello,” he said, looking up from the skillet. His tone was warm, though she could sense his cautiousness. “How are you liking the tablet?”
With food and continuing access to the internet at stake, she decided to be conciliatory, at least on the surface. “I like it,” she said cautiously. If she seemed too excited, would he take it away? She hadn’t had many things of her own over the centuries—a weapons collection, a few outfits, and some Star Trek bobbleheads the witch had insisted on summoning after their TNG marathon, all of which presumably still resided at the cabin in the woods.
“Learn anything interesting?” Ben asked.
Eleonore had learned a lot of very interesting facts over the course of the day. “I don’t know where to begin,” she said. “The Cold War, the International Space Station, Roger Federer, the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, the Interplanar Song Contest, emojis…” It had been like being trampled by a herd of centaurs, information pummeling her with such detail and immediacy she’d hardly been able to process one fact before compulsively clicking a link to discover another.
Ben paused in his sautéing. “The Molasses…what?”
He didn’t know? This would be the first time Eleonore had knowledge about recent history he didn’t, and she was excited to explain. “Twelve thousand tons of molasses broke out of a storage tank and flooded the city of Boston,” she said enthusiastically. “Twenty-one people died!”
Ben blinked. “Wow. That’s…a lot of molasses.”
“Many more people were injured,” she said. “What a fascinating problem for a city to have, don’t you think? Supposedly the neighborhood smelled sweet for decades afterward.”
Ben looked like he was biting the inside of his cheek. “You like morbid facts, don’t you?”
“I like all facts,” Eleonore said. Then she considered. “But yes.”
Life could be very dark. She’d known that before she’d been chained to the crystal, when the vampire clans had engaged in frequent territorial warfare. When confronted with a foe or an unpleasant situation, Eleonore preferred to face it directly. Knowledge was, if not power, at least armor. And sometimes the darkest facts were the most interesting.
Ben stirred the onions again, then set the wooden spoon aside. “I have something for you,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. The fabric was stamped with the words KISS THE CHEF , and Eleonore’s thoughts briefly fixated on the idea. Curse her residual succubus hunger. If she could just spy on a decent orgy…As it was, she’d need to find a source of carnal energy within the next week or so, lest she become tired and listless.
Catching the direction of her gaze, Ben winced. “The apron is from my parents. They’re eternally optimistic.”
He turned to fuss with a vase of flowers on the counter before Eleonore could ask what his parents were optimistic about. The flowers were nice—roses with a sunset look to them, pink bleeding into orange. They smelled good, too. Maybe she could ask him to place them on the table before the television so the aroma would waft through the house.
He turned and held the vase out to her.
Eleonore looked at it, then back at him. “Do you want me to do something with that?” Maybe he would issue another order, she thought, spitefulness rising again.
Ben shifted from foot to foot. “They’re for you.”
“For me to…put somewhere?” she asked, puzzled.
“No. I mean yes, I suppose. If you want.” Ben bit his lip, then thrust the flowers out more forcefully. “It’s a gift.”
A gift. Other than the Star Trek bobbleheads, which didn’t count even if she had been secretly fond of Commander Data, she hadn’t received a gift in a long time. “Oh,” she said, hesitantly accepting the vase. The glass was ridged and cool under her fingers. “Why?”
Ben was scrunching his toes against the floor. Nervous. “Because I shouldn’t have told you to do the show. I mean, I would still like it if you did, but I went about it the wrong way.” He grimaced and looked down, rubbing the back of his neck. “I said that wrong, too. The point is, it’s not fair of me to put you in an uncomfortable position. You’re probably freaked out right now, and I’m really sorry, and I want to make you more comfortable in this time while we figure out how to free you.”
A strange unfurling sensation happened in Eleonore’s chest, like a snowdrop opening its petals at the end of winter. “You’re—sorry?”
He nodded. “Sometimes I get stuck in my own head and don’t think about what other people are going through. You must be scared—”
“I’m not scared,” Eleonore interrupted. That would be confessing a weakness.
Except…she was scared. A bit. A very minor bit.
“Even if you aren’t scared,” Ben said, “this time and place is new to you. I should take better care of you.” He gestured awkwardly at the stove. “So…pasta. And flowers. And I’ll listen better going forward.”
This was unprecedented. It would have been unimaginable if she hadn’t just heard the words fall from his lips. Eleonore clutched the vase to her chest, staring at him.
A burning smell wafted to her nose.
“Shit. I mean, shoot,” Ben said, grabbing the pan off the stove. “I forgot about the onions.”
Eleonore was too flabbergasted to speak. She stared as Ben scooped burnt items out of the pan.
He was sorry?
He wanted to take care of her?
He’d given her flowers?
Eleonore brought the vase to her nose, breathing in as the petals brushed her nostrils. It smelled like happiness.
Was Ben actually being genuine?
She stayed unmoving as he dumped a box of dried pasta into the boiling water and added a can of tomatoes to the skillet.
Ben looked at her. “Want me to put those flowers somewhere?”
Eleonore shook her head and backed away, holding the vase closer. Vampires were territorial, and these were hers now.
“Okay,” Ben said, eyes flicking between her face, the flowers, and the skillet. “You can do whatever you want with them.”
There wasn’t much to do with flowers. She could dry them out and paste them in a scrapbook if she were the sentimental type, which she was not. She could put them in the living room to make the house smell nice, as she’d originally thought, but no. This was Eleonore’s gift, and right now, she didn’t want to be parted from it.
“Thank you,” she said cautiously.
He smiled in response, a grin that lit up his face and made his eyes crinkle agreeably. “You’re welcome.”
Eleonore kept the vase with her throughout dinner preparations. When Ben brought the bowls of pasta to the coffee table in front of his couch, she set the vase next to the food, close enough that she could snatch it up if needed.
Ben provided a plastic tub of shredded Parmesan cheese, which she dumped liberally on the pasta. Her first bite tasted like heaven.
Maybe Ben was forgiven.
Then he said, “Pass the cheese.”
The mystical pull in Eleonore’s chest sparked to life, along with familiar resentment at being given an order. Her rage had worn a deep path in her brain over the centuries, one she slipped back into without thought. Fury and instinct collided, and with a screech, she threw a handful of cheese at him.
Ben flinched as Parmesan bounced off his forehead. Some of it stuck to his hair and beard like snow. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Ben set his fork down and cleared his throat. “May I ask why you threw the cheese at me?”
Eleonore’s brain caught up with her body, and she felt mortified at the loss of control. “Sorry,” she said. “It was instinct.”
“Instinct,” he repeated. “Throwing cheese is a vampire instinct?”
He was being very reasonable for someone who was the victim of her seesawing moods. Eleonore’s cheeks felt hot. She shook her head, looking down at her lap. Her first flowers and a nice meal, and she’d ruined it. “You ordered it, so I had to obey. I don’t like orders.” And she was apparently the equivalent of a feral street dog, snapping at anyone who came too close.
“It wasn’t exactly an order,” Ben said, brushing cheese out of his hair. “People say ‘pass the salt’ all the time.” When she peeked up at him, she saw his forehead furrow. “Wait, what do you mean you had to obey?”
So he truly hadn’t known the details of owning the crystal. Eleonore felt a bizarre urge to laugh and cry at the same time. She scrubbed her hands over her face. “It’s part of the spell,” she said. “The curse. If the person who owns the crystal issues me a direct command, I’m mystically compelled to obey.”
Realization washed over his face, quickly followed by horror. “You can’t say no, no matter what I tell you to do?”
“So long as it’s worded like an order and not a request, no. I can’t refuse.” He could tell her to strangle someone or jump in front of a car or run for two days straight without stopping, and she’d have to do it, no matter the cost to her health or sanity. “Why do you think I killed so many people for the Witch in the Woods? Because I wanted to?”
Ben covered his mouth with one hand. His eyes widened behind his glasses. “My God…Eleonore, I had no idea. That’s barbaric.”
“How could you not have at least guessed?” she asked. “That’s how spells like this tend to work.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never even heard of a spell like this, and I guess I didn’t think about the details that much. It’s only been a day, and there’s so much going on…” His breath hitched. “So when I said you had to perform at the café, that counted as a mystical order?” At Eleonore’s nod, his eyes grew watery. “That’s why you were so angry. I mean, you were right to be angry at me, but it’s not just because I asked you to do something you didn’t want to. It’s because you’re being forced to do it by the magic.”
Eleonore nodded again.
Ben’s breathing was growing agitated. “I violated your consent,” he said. “With that order and with…Lycaon, have I commanded you to do anything else?”
“Not much,” Eleonore said. “Just the performance. And leaving the restaurant. And passing the cheese. And telling me to stop drinking your blood.”
He braced his elbows on his knees, breathing so fast it was more like panting. “I’m so sorry. You don’t have to do the performance or anything else. Can I revoke the command? I revoke it. I’m so, so sorry. I’ve been such a villain.”
That was taking it a bit far, but Eleonore knew all about taking things too far. She had flung a handful of Parmesan at him in a fit of rage, after all. “Hey,” she said when his breathing began to sound not just rapid but unhealthy. “Take a deep breath. You didn’t know.”
He did not take a deep breath. When he raised his head to look at her, his cheeks were wet with tears. “This whole situation is so stressful. I never should have clicked on that eBay listing. I never should have told that stupid lie to Gigi or taken you to Brittany’s or ordered you to give me cheese or any of it. Lycaon, what are we going to do?”
Eleonore gingerly patted his back. “Can you try some deep breathing? This is growing alarming.”
He sucked in a breath, then another, but it didn’t seem to help. “Sorry,” he said. “I get anxiety attacks sometimes. You can leave me to wait it out—wait, that’s an order, shit, fuck, I don’t mean it, I’m so sorry.”
It wasn’t technically an order—“leave me” would have counted, but the addition of “can” turned it into a statement of possibility—and she was glad of it. Not just for her sake, since orders sent her rage to uncontrollable heights, but because she didn’t want him to suffer through this alone. She looked around, her own anxiety spiking as she tried to figure out what would soothe a werewolf having a panic attack. “Stay here,” she said, standing up.
She returned in seconds with a glass of water from the sink. He jolted when she set it in front of him. “I forgot how fast you move,” he wheezed, hand pressed over his heart.
Right. If she was trying to soothe him, she probably shouldn’t give him a jump scare. She moved with excruciating slowness to grab the blanket on the back of the couch and wrapped it around him like she was swaddling a baby. Then she sat next to him, staring in what she hoped was a nonmenacing manner. She patted his back again. “There, there,” she said, trying to remember how her parents had soothed her when she’d been upset as a child. Not that Ben was a child, but the things that were most comforting often had roots in those formative years. “There, there.”
Over the next few minutes, Ben’s breathing gradually grew slower. Eleonore lifted the glass to his mouth and helpfully tipped it, since he remained swaddled. He coughed—perhaps she had been overly enthusiastic in pouring water down his throat—then extricated an arm from the blanket to take control of the glass.
Once he was done drinking, he set the glass down and slumped back, closing his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “And I’m sorry. For the orders and for making you see me like this.”
She frowned. He sounded ashamed. “You don’t have to apologize for having anxiety.”
He winced. “That’s what my parents always said when I was growing up, but I can’t help it. What kind of werewolf has panic attacks?”
“I’m sure plenty of werewolves have panic attacks.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced, though.
They returned to eating pasta, an awkward silence falling between them. Eleonore took the time to think.
Ben wasn’t anything like she’d expected him to be when she’d first been summoned. He was anxious and thoughtful, and he’d given her flowers, then cried over violating her consent. He wasn’t a complete villain after all. Maybe not any kind of villain.
And he was under a great deal of stress between her arrival, his café opening, and his sister’s expectations. Having been the cause of a lot of that stress, Eleonore decided to be the solution as well. “I’ll still do the performance,” she said.
“No,” he said instantly. “I don’t want you to do it because you were ordered to.”
“You took the command back,” she pointed out. “That means if I do it, it’ll be of my own free will.”
He chewed his lip. “But—”
“But nothing,” she said. “The performance goes on.”
He looked at her with tentative hope in his eyes. “You would do that? I thought you hated the idea.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t like being surprised by it or ordered to do it, but if I get to choose? It could be interesting. Maybe even…fun.” Not a word she used often.
He finally smiled again, a small curve of his lips that made the inside of her chest feel warm and soft. “Thank you, Eleonore. I really appreciate it. You have free rein to do whatever you like, of course, and anything you need…”
“I’ll let you know.”
The silence this time was easier as they finished dinner. Eleonore’s mind churned over possibilities. She wouldn’t be flicking a light switch on and off or setting fire to anything anymore. No, she was going to put on a real, meaningful performance, the kind that would be talked about for years.
She looked at her roses and smiled. Ben wasn’t going to regret trusting her with this.