Chapter Seventeen • Mixed Signals • Damien #2
“Yeah! She’s sort of indoor-outdoor,” she says, fighting a laugh.
“This is not funny,” I say sternly.
She sputters before outright guffawing. Laughing so hard she starts to genuinely snort.
“I’m so sorry,” she says through tears. “You just—your face—and Gloam looks like a little creature from hell.”
I catch a view of myself in the full-length mirror leant against the far wall. My hair is a nest of chaos. My shirt is askew. And my face is totally put out as this small terror wriggles in my arms. The cat looks like its straight out of one of those TikToks about black cats with orange cat energy.
She’s right. It’s hilarious.
I collect the cat closer to me. I apply enough pressure to stop the violent, demonic flailing, but not so much that it hurts. I press it close to my chest until it eventually calms down. Its pupils are still blown to hell—it probably saw my foot keeping time and went into hunter mode.
It looks at me like it’s just recognized that I’m a human being with feelings. Its ears flicker and its little pink tongue flashes before it swallows nothing.
“Oh my god, she lovess youuuu,” Lillith coos as she scritches the top of her head with a single, pointed nail. “Where have you been, silly little bean?”
There are zero thoughts in its little eyes. It’s completely devoid of neurological activity beyond the instincts it was born with. It starts to purr.
I loosen my grasp, and the cat immediately climbs up my shirt before perching on my shoulder. “You said her name is Gloam?”
Lillith nears and scritches underneath the cat’s chin. “Yep. She’s named after gloaming, that time of day that isn’t quite sundown.”
She dips into the kitchen, and when I follow, I see pasta spilled all over the floor. She steps over it to put a plug in the kitchen sink and start filling up the basin with water.
“Damn,” I say, kneeling to start cleaning up the mess.
She looks back at me and cringes. “I know. I was about to move it to a serving dish so we could eat at the table when the chaos erupted. I thought something horrible happened so I dropped the pasta and ran over. It was tortellini with pesto alfredo sauce.”
I look around the kitchen and spot the remnants of her dinner prep. Including the flour and rolling pin. “Was this... homemade pasta?”
“Unfortunately yes,” she says, squeezing a few drops of dish soap into the running water. “Anyway. How does Chinese delivery sound? Because I won’t be doing that again—at least not tonight. I’m sorry.”
My stomach drops. “Don’t be. I’m sorry I ruined it.” I can’t believe she went through so much effort to make dinner for me. I would have been happy with boxed mac and cheese or Hamburger Helper or something.
“You didn’t. Well, not exactly. Gloam is a little agent of chaos,” she says. It’s remarkable how unbothered she is by this. I’ve known girls who have cried over less. Hell, I would have cried over less.
“How’d you come by having her? I’m amazed I haven’t seen her yet,” I say.
She gives me a hesitant little smile. “She’s a little more special than your average cat,” she hedges.
“How so?” I ask.
“More witchy shit, I’m afraid. Not sure if you’re going to be cool with it.”
“Did you... have a bad experience sharing that stuff with someone?” I ask. “I don’t mean to pry, it’s just—I mean, I thought we’d established that you literally could never be too weird for me. I love how strange you are.”
She smiles sadly, still focused on the cat. “Yeah...” she says. “I mean, more than one. But there is one that particularly sticks out in my mind.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to,” I say. “But I promise that your witchy shit is one of my favorite things about you. Granted, that list is fucking long, but safe to say you’re not going to freak me out.”
“Do you... mind if I talk about it?” she asks. “I mean—if you don’t want a bunch of trauma dumped on you, I understand, but—”
“Trauma dump away, sweetheart,” I say.
Her lower lip slips between her teeth, and she still won’t look at me as she begins.
“I’ve always lived here—my whole family has, my whole life.
My mother is maybe the only exception to that rule.
And you know—when you come from a long line of mystical women in a small town, you kind of get a reputation for these things.
I know this is SoCal, but we have a pretty right-leaning populace here—lots of churches and stuff.
Not that that’s a problem or anything; I believe in all of the gods out there, the Abrahamic ones included.
But—anyway, I’m going off on a tangent.”
She inhales deeply, like a patient preparing mentally for something painful. I’ve seen that exact breath on dozens of people in the back of an ambulance right before I slip an IV catheter into a vein.
“Nan wanted to homeschool me, but when I was growing up I desperately wanted friends. I desperately wanted to be normal. So, I begged her to let me go to public school. She relented. I think she felt bad. I spent years trying to make friends, but the reputation of my family preceded me. Some parents wouldn’t let me hang out with their kids in or out of school.
Kids are mean, you know? They all kind of ostracized me.
But I thought if I could just show them that I could be a good friend, that I could be fun and funny and interesting, then I could prove to them that I was normal enough to be brought into the fold. ”