Chapter 15
Kai felt much better after the food. They stayed at the little corner table much longer than necessary, but Fian’s company was soothing, oddly comforting, even though they didn’t know each other well.
He doesn’t seem to mind that I’m being such a downer. Or that…he doesn’t seem to mind what happened to me.
Every time Kai thought about what that was, his mind seemed to go in circles around a place Kai couldn’t quite see.
The last three years he’d spent as Nick’s boyfriend—“under the barnacle man’s enchantment” as Fian put it—were like a cactus, long thorns keeping Kai from touching it.
Yet at the same time, not thinking about it wasn’t an option either.
Helping Fian buy a phone made a great distraction though, and Kai was absolutely ready to get distracted when they walked into the electronics store.
“Do you know what you want?” he asked Fian, who’d been distracted by an air fryer he was examining with unabashed curiosity.
“A phone to call people with. It seems I will need it to organize things.”
Kai chuckled. “Calling people. How old-fashioned.”
Fian stepped away from the air fryer. “Is it really?”
“Nah. But making calls is pretty much a given with anything you get. Size, screen, camera, connectivity, that’s mostly what people are interested in. Oh, and how much you want to spend on it.”
Fian nodded like a fish contemplating walking on dry land. Then he brightened. Kai thought he saw him go a light blue around the nose.
“Oh, but I have an idea that is the best. Do you know what kind of phone you’re going to get? You didn’t like that flip phone.”
Kai sighed. Right. I do need a phone if only to call for help. “I guess—”
“You get that. Get the nicest one. And then I pay for it because you’ll let me use it whenever I’m in the human realm.
That way, I don’t have to worry about it getting wet when I’m going back and forth, you have a phone you like, and I can file it as a business expense.
We do that too in the Morpheusrealm. Taxes. So annoying.”
Kai didn’t love the idea, but he was tired, and Fian was excited.
Just like when he’d waved at Kai, just like when he’d carried all those clothes, it was this excited brightness of Fian’s that shone through the fogginess in Kai’s mind.
It was like a sour taste cutting through too much sweetness, and Kai found himself reacting to it.
He’s an anchor and a life raft. Maybe he’s good for me. Fuck, is he really a demon? Am I really in the process of befriending a demon?
“You’re pushy,” Kai said, looking over to the phones.
“Just a little bit.” Fian stepped closer. “I want to see you enjoy something because that makes me happy.”
“You have to tell me if I go overboard though. I’m a coder. I like fancy tech.”
“Then you’re just like me. I’m a carver, and I like fancy carving tools. Allow me to enable you.”
Kai smiled and looked up at Fian’s ocean eyes. Some of the darkness that clung to him lost its hold.
“Just don’t blame me later.”
Fian leaned in close. “Never.”
The same driver who had taken them to the mall picked them back up. The big yellow pickup truck turned quite a few heads in the lot as Fian and Kai got in.
As soon as Fian closed the door behind himself, he turned to Kai.
“Kai, meet Zazine! She’s a friend of mine. I apologize for not telling you earlier. She’s a demon too.”
The driver whistled when Kai slowly turned to face her. “You have tentacles as well?”
“Me? No, oh no. I’m from a seahorse family. He told you, huh? Tentacled you, huh?”
There’s more of them. That’s not really a surprise. It also is.
“Tentacled me? I guess he…did? That sounds very naughty though.”
“Zazine is like that. You get used to it.” Fian was leaning over to Kai and fastening his seat belt once more. “I told her about you. I had to because we needed a ride out of town.”
“Right. Thanks for that.”
Zazine shrugged and fiddled with her radio. “Oh, it’s fine. I have a bunch of brothers, so I know how needy they are. I’m used to being on call, you could say.”
Kai looked from Zazine to Fian. “Are there many demons here? Like, living here?”
“Hmm, I don’t think so.” Fian put on his own seat belt. “I mean, I guess some spend more time in the human realm, but the Morpheusrealm is a more comfortable place to live.”
“Yeah, you don’t have to hide, and your skin doesn’t dry out as fast.”
“Oh yes. That’s a really good point.”
Kai fiddled with his new phone, sleek and comforting in his hands.
He’d still remembered all his passwords, and to his shock, he’d not checked his emails and other messages once in those three years.
It was daunting and not something he’d be able to tackle in an afternoon, especially not an afternoon that was slowly turning to evening.
“Does that mean it’s normal for you to tell me what you are? Or are you going to…wipe my memory?”
Fian reached for Kai’s hand. “Never. We’d never.”
Zazine glanced from the road over to them. They were almost out of the brightness of civilization again, leaving the comfort of it behind the closer to Salt Harbor they got.
“Fian said you two were dating.”
“I mean—” Fian turned blue, literally. His eyes went wide, and his color stabilized. “I mean?”
“We did hook up in a dream,” Kai said. “I’m just in the process of getting out of some shit, that’s all. My life has been…”
“Magic shouldn’t be done by humans against humans,” Zazine said.
“Or by humans at all. Some try to use it to capture demons, can you imagine? Oh, if a human ever tried to capture one of my baby brothers, I don’t know what I’d do.
Fian’s decent though. I’d be fine with one of my brothers dating him. ”
“Oh, Zazine, that’s so sweet.” Fian sounded moved. It was adorable.
Zazine’s brow drew tight. “Part of the reason I’m saying this out loud is that you seem to only have eyes for the human, so don’t ever repeat it.”
“Okay.” Fian nodded. Kai managed to snap a photo of him, drawing Fian’s attention. “What was that for?”
“Here, look. You turned sort of purple.”
“That…happens sometimes.”
“I know. I read up on octopi. After last night.” Kai saved the photo. He wanted a memory of this day, and even in pale purple, Fian was still a beautiful man.
“You did?”
Zazine clicked her tongue. “Don’t be that smug. It’s not a good look.”
Fian pouted silently. They were almost back in Salt Harbor now, and dread weighed heavy on Kai. He reached for Fian’s hand.
“I think smug looks good on you, especially if smug comes in purple.”
Kai felt suckers on Fian’s fingers, and the smiling demon on his right was changing color. It allowed Kai to focus on something other than the dread.
Zazine dropped them on Main Street, just a short walk from the Jammery. She poked her head out the window. “I have to shuttle a team of designers around for a bit, but I can come pick you up after I’m done.”
Kai looked at his phone. “That’ll work, but my Uber account is also still functional.”
“You just let me know either way, fishcakes. Man, but the magic in this town is suffocating. You two’re good though?”
Fian took a step closer to Kai. “I’ll keep him safe. You don’t have to worry about us.”
Kai could follow the conversation well enough to know that under normal circumstances, he should have gotten butterflies. Fian was a nice guy, and really, they’d been on a date, no matter how fucked up the day had been. No matter how fucked up he was.
Kai’s emotions wouldn’t line up with having been on a date though. All he had was the anxiety, a shapeless nightmare creature creeping in when he closed his eyes.
“Kai?”
Kai flinched. Zazine’s yellow pickup was already speeding away, and it was only Fian and him now, the seagulls noisy in the distance.
“Present and accounted for. Should we head inside? Packing shouldn’t take too long.”
Fian gave him a lopsided smile. “Not if I help you.”
“You said you get dry skin though. Is that going to be a problem? Do you have to go down to the beach and freshen up?” At which point Kai remembered that they never had gotten around to buying that swimsuit. Maybe I do want it. Maybe I want to go where he lives.
“It’s sweet of you to worry, but I’ll be fine. I’m not as susceptible to it as others are. Kraken demons can deal with dry land better than most.”
They started walking toward the Jammery. Kai patted his back pocket, suddenly panicking because the keys had been in his old pants, those ugly ones. But the familiar weight was there.
“Whoa. Did you remember to grab my keys back in the changing room?”
Fian looked confused. “Of course I did. Why? Did you lose them back at the mall?”
“No. I just thought—never mind. Thanks for remembering. I can’t wait to just go and grab my stuff and—”
“Kai! Hey, Kai!”
Kai turned. One of the townsfolk was jogging toward them, James from the café on Main, the one any tourists that lost their way and ended up here always went to first.
“Hi, James.”
They stopped next to a car, blue, an older model. Kai glanced past the approaching James to all the other cars parked along Main. He couldn’t remember there ever being a lot of traffic there, and all the cars had plates from different places. Something about that felt off.
It’s like they have been put there to make it look like there are more people in Salt Harbor than there actually are.
Come to think of it, I’ve never met that many people.
Nick’s friends, sure. They all run a business or have spouses who do it for them.
Kai narrowed his eyes. It was at a party, right?
When I saw Nick cheating. Who was the guy he was cheating with? Some out of towner?
Kai tried to recall the other man’s face but failed. James came to a stop in front of them, and Fian took Kai’s hand unprompted.
“Hey, Kai. I thought Nick was coming to the Jammery to talk to you.” James huffed. He was a beer-bellied man around Nick’s age.
“Well, I didn’t want to talk to him. That was that.”
James grinned. “Huh. That’s not how he’s telling it. Why don’t you fellas come over to the café? I’ll make you something sweet, on the house, and you can tell me your side.”
“There are no sides in this,” Kai said. He heard his own voice, barely more than a whisper, and he knew that few enough people would agree with him. He didn’t know what else to say.
“What’s that, Kai?”
Fian cleared his throat. “He said that there are no sides to this, which should be very obvious. And we don’t need anything sweet, thank you. We were leaving.”
“Leaving?” James said before cackling, his nicotine breath heavy on the air between them.
He’s so close. Too close, too fucking close.
“I want to go,” Kai said to Fian.
James had no trouble hearing that. “Go? I told him, cheap pieces of ass are always a problem. You’re not going anywhere.”
With more speed than Kai would have thought possible after that jog, James lunged forward and grabbed his arm.
As if a switch had been flipped, Kai felt cold and dull, the solid ground he’d only just stood on miles and miles away. He’d gotten very drunk once in college, and this was almost like that, only worse.
Fear was with him in this cold dull world.
“Nick wants you back,” Kai heard James saying.
“The barnacle man will not have him!”
Fian’s voice shattered the cold cocoon, and Kai could feel himself again. He could also feel the many tentacles and their suckers that held on to him, comforting in their tightness.
“Fuck me. Nick was right. You are a fucking demon. You’ll make us fucking strong.”
The greed in James’s eyes shocked Kai, but maybe it shouldn’t have. “This whole entire town is a sham. All you do is use people.”
James broke into a maniacal laugh, mouth opening wide as if he wanted to devour them.
“Kai, I think we should leave.” Fian had his tentacles out, but what drew Kai’s attention was the red hue of them and the way they looked spiky, almost angry. Almost scared.
“Okay.”
“You’re not going anywhere with what’s mine.”
The two of them spun—Kai tried to, but it wasn’t easy with all the tentacles covering him—to see Nick striding toward them. Green sparks were dancing around his fingers.
Oh, shit. Is that really what magic looks like?
There was no time to ask. Fian moved, running into the street where there was never any traffic and pulling Kai along.
The evil witches were following them.