Chapter 9
After Mikano had left, 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.”
The man had a hand on either side of the doorframe, essentially blocking the exit with his body. Fian looked in through the window and saw Kai there, his face pale, a jar of jam in his hand. He was shaking, caught between running or fighting.
“Just give me a kiss, cutie,” the man said. “We really should kiss. It’ll make it all better, like it was before. Just like the last time this happened.”
Fian tried to collect himself. Magic was rolling off that human, stronger even than his barnacle aura. I can’t just break into tentacles and throttle this man, not with Kai here and watching. Swamps and brackish waters be damned, this is a mess. But I have to protect Kai.
Fian did the only thing he could think of. He emulated Mikano, the perfect Human Liaisons agent with the kind of teeth and stomach that could handle everything.
“Excuse me, sir, but you seem distinctly not invited,” Fian said, trying to sound as superior as his big brother.
The human barnacle turned. Fian had been wrong.
His hair wasn’t brown but blond, the kind of shifty color the sand on the beach got after an ugly storm.
His eyes were the brown of mud, not good plant nourishing mud, but rather sludge that dropped off the trucks that took away manure to festering, smelly pits so common in the human realm.
With a grating, annoyed-sounding voice, he asked, “What do you want?”
Oh, he’s just a bloated corpse drifting on the waves. I can take him, no problem.
Fian smiled, showing teeth the same way Mikano always did. “I want jam.”
The shifty human crossed his arms. “Get it elsewhere. We’re talking here.”
“No, we’re not. Just leave, Nick,” Kai yelled. He still sounded scared, but more than anything, his voice was thin as if he were a human the waves had washed off a ship and out to sea, struggling to keep himself from drowning.
Fian narrowed his eyes once more, shifting deeper into his demon sight. There’s enchantments creeping toward Kai. What for? To keep him compliant? Oh, but this is foul. No wonder he was so tired, even in his dreams.
The enchantment was slithering right toward Kai’s heart, slow and steady, a poisonous spell that knew its way to hurting all too well.
Without thinking about it hard or long, Fian reached for the human’s collar and dragged him back from the door he was still blocking. His mud eyes widened in shock.
“Kai told you to leave. You should.”
The barnacle’s eyes widened, and he froze. It looked as if he was thinking, calculating. It made Fian’s skin run cold, and not shifting right then and there to squish the human took everything he had.
Fian released the man’s collar, and he stepped back, a disgusting smile on his face that made him look superior, like he had won, like the last clam was his to savor.
“I’ll be back for you, cutie pie. We have a good thing going here, and I won’t let you ruin it, Kai.”
He left with that, angry but entitled, moving as if he owned the place and could do whatever he wanted.
Fian watched him, turning to Kai only when he felt it was safe to take his eyes off the retreating barnacle.
“Are you okay, Kai? I heard glass breaking. Are you hurt at all?”
The question was a silly one to ask. The spell, that malevolent vine of evil, was still winding itself up Kai’s legs. My landbride is human and has no way at all to guard himself against such witchery. I should never have left him alone this long.
Fian stepped forward, intent on dissolving the spell with magic of his own, but Kai was scared still. He took a step backward, and that distance, it felt like a stab right at Fian’s heart.
It’s not his fault. He’s scared. And he has every right to be scared after all that.
Kai looked at Fian, eyes wide and haunted. It occurred to Fian that Kai’s reluctance to accept the truth of last night’s dream might make him only more afraid.
I can’t rush him, I can’t. It’s the same with a piece of driftwood I can’t rush to give up how it wants to be carved. Yes, having a landbride means a demon needs to be patient. Humans need more time than the tides for the easiest things after all.
At the same time, Fian ached to change shape until he was in his cecaelian form again with all his tentacles out so he could wrap Kai in their safety. But before any of that, he needed to dissolve that spell.
Kai closed his mouth and balled his hands to fists, knuckles standing out white against the jar of jam he was still holding on to. Clearly, he was struggling for composure.
“I’m all right. I’m sorry you had to see that, but it was nothing. I was on my way out, but you said you wanted jam?”
“Oh? Right. Jam. Can I come inside?” Fian pointed at one of the shelves without looking, making it seem as if he wanted what jam was displayed there.
“Sure. I mean, I guess, I’m open.” Kai sounded anything but excited about that. He gestured at the floor to Fian’s left. A broken jar of red jam had been shattered close to the threshold, the source of the earlier noise no doubt. “Let me just clean that up.”
“You didn’t aim for the head. Too bad.” Fian stepped over the shards. “Actually, I can clean that up for you, Kai. You look shaken, and the glass is sharp. You could cut yourself. How about you sit down and oversee me cleaning this? I promise, I’m great at taking direction.”
Fian saw a hopeful flutter in Kai’s eyes, the seed of a larger emotion. However, because of that strangling spell that was still going, it never grew, fizzled out to nothing.
“I…that’s really nice of you. Thank you.” He turned, pointed to the counter. “I’ll…I’ll take a seat over there.”
Fian saw a folding chair there, nodded. “Excellent.”
“Okay.”
Kai made his way over. He still held on tightly to the jar of jam, though Fian wasn’t sure Kai was even aware. Fian hated that this wasn’t a dream. In a dream, there would be no magic to overcome, and getting closer to Kai to hold and comfort him would have been easier.
But that’s the thing, when a demon wants a human, the demon has to get used to working his charms in the human realm. Kai has to want me more than he wants any boring human. He has to pick being with me over ignoring all demon-kind, at least that’s what everyone says.
Fian was ready and willing to make Kai want him like that. “Where are your cleaning things?”
Kai had unfolded the chair and sat down on it heavily. He looked up, appearing disoriented for a heartbeat. The spell was still climbing, climbing.
“T-there. Behind that door in the back.”
Fian nodded and closed the front door behind him.
“All right. I’ll take care of this.”