CHAPTER NINE
Elysian
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him stroll into the kitchen and lean against the doorframe, watching her work. Her stomach clenched, remembering how it felt to see him sitting in the driver’s seat of his truck. For a long moment, she’d thought he was about to roar off, leave her and her ridiculous spell behind. She felt selfish for being relieved that he stayed. It might have been better for him to go, to find his pack and his family. But she wanted him here with her, wanted the opportunity to set right what she’d done.
And feeling his gaze on her as she worked lit something warm inside her.
“You gonna let me help with that?” he asked. “Or are you one of those ladies who chases out anyone who tries to get underfoot in your kitchen?”
She gestured to the knife block. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Hmmm,” he drew the chef’s knife from the block, and tipped the blade to the side to examine it in the light. “I don’t know much about chopping vegetables, but I know that this edge is worthless. Have these been sharpened at all since they were bought?”
She rummaged in the drawer until her fingers closed on the little cloth bag that contained the rarely used whetstone. “So you don’t remember your full name, but you remember how to sharpen a knife?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember specifics, but I seem to be able to tap into my skills. I had no trouble remembering how to drive. You might as well ask why I can walk and talk and button my pants.” He gave a jazzy wave of his hands. “Magic. It’s a mystery.”
He dragged the whetstone along the edge of the blade in even, confident strokes. She watched his hands as they moved, the muscles under his skin flexing with what was clearly a familiar motion. Whoever Walt was in his real life, he was clearly a solid, practical man—the kind of guy who knew how to fix things.
“There.” He held the blade to the light again, examining the edge and this time finding it much more satisfactory. He turned it around and held it out so she could grab it by the polished wooden handle. “Try that.”
The blade sliced through her cucumbers like they were made of air. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s really useful.”
“That’s why I’m here, right?” he joked, and she winced.
“I’m so—” she started, but he held up a hand.
“Please don’t apologize,” he said. He kept his eyes on the knife block, pulling the blades out and slotting them back in until he chose another one to sharpen. “Right now I’m sick of chewing it over. Let me make jokes about it if I need to.”
“That’s fair,” she said, slowly letting out a breath.
“So how many people are coming?” he asked brightly.
She shot him a smile, grateful for the smooth subject change. “Not many. Our circle is small. There’s Annette and I, obviously. Praneeta. Katie and her daughter Tila, but she’s two so she won’t eat much. And Katie’s mother, Julia.”
“Your circle,” he repeated. “Annette called it a coven?”
She shrugged. “Annette’s old-fashioned. But they are all witches—”
“Even Tila?”
“Kind of, sort of. Each family has only one grimoire, and it’s passed to the first born daughter. So technically Julia is the witch, Katie is her protégé and Tila is waiting. But Katie has started training Tila already. There are no guarantees in life.”
It hurt a little, to see Julia, Katie and Tila together. Three generations together, with all the time in the world to share their knowledge.
“Do you have your family’s grimoire, or are you a protégé?”
Both, she wants to say. She’s a protégé who somehow ended up with sole possession of a grimoire, like a mule with a spinning wheel. “I have the grimoire, yes.”
“That means you’ve lost your mom already?” Walt asked, his voice heavy with sympathy. She was surprised he could find room for such concern when he was clearly still angry, but it was obvious Walt had a heart big enough to make that work.
“No,” she said. “I lost my grandmother when I was thirteen. But my moms are both just fine. They run a real estate business back in Portland.”
She snuck a glance sideways at Walt’s face. It was always a fraught moment to mention that she had two mothers, when there were so many unpleasant potential reactions. There were the men who recoiled. The ones who looked a little too intrigued. The ones who asked insistent questions about which one of them was her real mother. But Walt just furrowed his brow. “So they’re not witches?”
“Eh.” She seesawed her hand in a kind-of-kind-of-not gesture. “Mom, the only magic she can work is with a crockpot. Maman is a witch, technically, but she passed the grimoire down to me as soon as possible. You could think of her as a kind of witch high school drop-out.”
“Why would anyone quit being a witch?” His voice was incredulous.
“It’s wonderful, but it extracts a high price,” she said. “There are so many rules and pitfalls. Nothing can be for personal gain. My mother once cast a spell to make a house she was showing smell like fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. It’s an old real estate trick, but this one time she forgot to pick up the dough on her way in. She cast the spell at home all the time with no problems, but because it was to help her make money, boom. Within twenty-four hours, every listing she had disappeared. They’d decided not to sell after all. Their job relocation got canceled. Another agent offered to take the listing for a half a percent less commission. Every reason was different, but it was nothing but call after call. The firm almost went under, and we had to move in with my grandmother for a while. Over the smell of freshly baked cookies.”
There were other downsides too. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling, and wondered if Annette was listening to them from the attic.
He passed her the knife. The blade rested against his palm, which he curled around it like his newly honed edge was a baby bird. It was such a small thing, to offer her the handle so there was no risk she would be cut, but it said so much about him. Maybe it said a lot about the other young men she’d crossed paths with, that such a basic act of care for other people stood out.
Her fingers brushed against his thumb as she took it, sending a shiver up her arm that made her pull the knife away too fast. A bright line of blood appeared across the white skin of his palm, and Elysian gasped. The knife clattered to the floor.
“Hey, hey, it’s OK,” Walt said, his voice low and calm. He held his palm up, showing her. Before her eyes the skin knitted back together. After it was dotted with drops of red, but the skin was whole, not even marked by a scar.
“It’s not OK,” she said, her voice shaking. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I did. Again.”
“Not meaning to counts for a lot,” he said. He squeezed her shoulder with his other hand, sweeping his fingers in a soothing circle. “So long as you don’t stab me again, I’m not going to hold it against you.”
“Given that I didn’t mean to do it the first time, how can I be sure I won’t?” she asked. “Ugh, I’m such a fuck-up. Maybe my mother was right.”
“Your mother told you you’re a fuck-up?” he asked, his brow furrowing in concern.
“No! God no, my mother’s awesome. She just… worries. A little. A lot.” Elysian laughed, a tepid, breathless sound. “Constantly. That’s why I moved here from Portland.”
“That makes sense,” he said. He crossed over to the sink and ran his hand under the tap, letting the blood she’d spilled wash down the drain. She missed the weight of his hand on her shoulder. “Sometimes you have to get out to grow up, right?”
“It was a little more than that,” Elysian said carefully. She picked up the knife and laid it to one side, then turned back to her salad. “I mentioned that I inherited my grimoire pretty young, right?”
He nodded. He picked up a basket that she had left sitting on the counter, filled with fresh corn still wrapped in thick green leaves. He shucked one with a practiced hand and put the creamy yellow corn beside her cutting board.
“Well,” she said, picking it up and slicing it into inch rounds with the first knife he had sharpened. “My mother rushed me through my apprenticeship. She was never very comfortable with the whole thing after the cookie scent incident. And moving in with my grandmother just took a wrecking ball to her self-esteem.”
“That must have been tough for you. Do you think that’s why you panicked so much when you got laid off that you… you know…” he gestured to himself.
“Maybe,” she said. That was probably true, and definitely not something she was ready to examine closely right now. “My mother was pretty scared of the grimoire from that point onward. Once we lost my grandmother, she didn’t want it on her shoulders, so I asked to have it. But she never really felt comfortable with her decision to let me take responsibility for it either. When I still lived in the same city as her, I felt like her anxiety was hanging over my head. Like she might drop in at any moment and take it back. And if she finds out that I did this…” She drove the knife through the corn, hitting the chopping board with a satisfying ‘thunk’. “It’ll go straight in her attic and I won’t see it again until I’m eighty.”
“You’re going to undo all of my hard work doing that,” he said, nodding at the way she was letting the blade crash against the cutting board. “Let me chop, you can tear up the lettuce.”
She dropped the knife on the board and put her hands up in surrender. “Fine by me,” she said.
She was used to sharing the small kitchen with Annette, who was a significantly less burly presence than Walt. He took his place at the chopping board, then put a hand on her hip and gently nudged her to the side.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said once they had found a decent rhythm, her pulling vegetables from her shopping basket, washing them and setting them out for him while he made short work of the slicing and dicing. “You summoned me to be your familiar. So maybe the key to resolving this little snafu is to just lean in to it.”
“Lean in?” she repeated. “Like Sheryl Sandberg? I heard that book had some pretty significant flaws.”
He laughed. “Lean in as in stop fighting this whole ‘familiar’ idea and just go with it. Maybe if I help you resolve the problem you summoned me over, I’ll get my memories back.”
“Huh. That’s pretty smart.”
“Thanks. You seem pretty smart yourself.”
She snorted. “Yeah, aside from being the dumbest person I know.”
“We all do dumb shit when we’re scared, Elysian.” He grabbed a carrot stick and popped it in his mouth. He held out a second one for her, his intense dark eyes meeting hers.
She could have just grabbed it, but something about the way he was looking at her made her lean in a little and part her lips. His eyes widened a little in surprise, but the corners of his mouth quirked up and he slipped it into her mouth.
“What were you imagining?” he asked, still holding her eyes.
“What?” she squeaked, feeling her cheeks flood with heat.
“When you cast the spell,” he said, turning back to julienning carrots like nothing had happened. “If you just wanted a pet you would have gone to a store. You must have been picturing something more.”
Elysian stared down at the bowl of salad, feeling stupid at how worked up she had gotten over a slice of carrot and an innocent question. “I wasn’t picturing anything,” she said. She fished a cucumber out of the basket and started peeling it to have something to occupy her hands. “I guess I had this stupid idea about having something amazing show up. Like a bald eagle. When I was a kid I used to go hiking with my moms, and they must have a thousand SD cards of blurry pictures I took of every bird we crossed paths with,” she laughed. “That’s what I wanted to do, you know. Wildlife photography.”
“That’s really cool,” Walt said.
“There aren’t exactly a dozen help wanted ads every week looking for one, though,” Elysian said. “I grew up and discovered that most people who do it for a living actually have a spouse or parents who support them.”
Walt nodded thoughtfully. It was actually a relief to have him just listen to her—most people would immediately start arguing with her, spouting children’s book platitudes about never giving up on your dreams. Walt looked like he was actually hearing her. “So what you need then, is a job that will still let you explore that part of yourself. Something that pays the bills, but doesn’t grind you down and take up all your creative energy. So you can take the photos you want to take on weekends and holidays.”
“Sounds great,” Elysian said with a bitter laugh. “I’ll just go grab one of those jobs at the job store.”
“Well, I’d offer you a job if I could,” Walt said. “But I don’t even know what I do for a living. Plus I’m probably super fired for just disappearing.”
Ick. That was a nasty point that Elysian hadn’t considered before. “Hopefully you had the weekend off.”
“Fingers crossed,” he said. “But back to my original question. I wasn’t asking what animal you were trying to summon. I was asking, why a familiar at all? Surely there were better spells to resolve your job situation. Something for luck, or prosperity, or even psychic powers so you know the interview questions ahead of time.”
“The grimoire fell open to that page,” she said. “Sometimes it chooses the spell for me.”
“Come on,” he nudged her hip with his. “Own your choice. Why?”
Her hip tingled. She wanted to shuffle over half an inch, to let their bodies brush together and see if he would step away, but she didn’t. “You’re going to keep asking why until I give you a deep dark confession, aren’t you?” she joked.
“I hate to play this card, but I think you owe me.”
“Ugh, you mind-whammy and enslave a guy one time and he holds it over your head forever,” she mock grumbled.
“I meant you owe me for the amazing job I did on these knives,” he said. “But hey, now that you mention it.”
Elysian considered his question silently. Without their jokes and laughter, the only sound in the kitchen was Walt sliding the knife through the carrots with practiced strokes. “I think,” she said finally, “that I got suckered in by the idea of having something that would be mine. I’d just lost my job, and all of the relationships I’d been building there. I’m probably going to lose this house, which means going back to Portland and leaving my circle behind and rejoining Maman’s. Having a familiar meant having something that would always be mine.”
“But instead of something, you got someone,” he said quietly.
“I—” She met his eyes, but couldn’t read in them what that meant. Was he offering something? She desperately wanted him to be offering something, but at the same time it seemed impossible, and she didn’t have the strength to put herself out there and humiliate herself. “I should go shower. They’ll be here soon.”