“I do this spell at home,” Calladia slurred, pointing at the fireplace. The third margarita had been a mistake, but she was so full and relaxed she couldn’t regret it. The sky was dark outside, and wind whistled through the treetops.
“Yeah?” Astaroth sounded buzzed, too. He reclined at the other end of the couch, a half-empty glass dangling from his fingertips. “How do you do it?”
Calladia fumbled in her pocket for a piece of yarn. She tried to knot it a few times, ultimately giving up when she realized she was tying a knot for explosion rather than ignition. This was why doing magic while drinking was a bad idea.
“There’s more than one way to do it,” she said, “but ultimately, it’s a mix of action and words. You tie a few knots or scribble some runes to define what you want.” She stared into the fire, thinking about what spells she might do if she weren’t intoxicated. “I could tie one knot for fire, one for safety, one to contain it to the fireplace.” She waved a hand. “Some other stuff to be thorough. And then you have to pick which spell words to speak.”
“The language of magic is far too complicated,” Astaroth said. “I don’t know how witches and warlocks manage.”
“You get used to it eventually.” With a lot of memorization, since the rules of conjugation and grammar were haphazard. It was impossible to know every word of the language of magic, since people were always inventing new ones or jamming words together, so witches learned what was most helpful for the kind of magic they wanted to do and discarded the rest.
“Are your fires blue, too?” Astaroth asked.
“Yeah. You can pick what color you want, but I think blue looks nice with all the white and yellow in my house.”
Except her house didn’t exist anymore. Calladia rubbed her chest against the ache that swelled at the reminder.
Her beautiful house was gone, burned to ashes. In all the chaos of the last two days, it had been easier to ignore what she was leaving behind and focus on the next steps of the quest, but the loss still throbbed beneath, an unacknowledged wound.
That house hadn’t gotten the opportunity to hold many memories, but damn it, the memories it did hold had been hers. She didn’t care about the clothes that had gone up in smoke or the flimsy LYKEA furniture that had been blasted to smithereens. A structure could be rebuilt, and the things inside it were replaceable.
No, Calladia didn’t mourn stuff. She missed cooking breakfast for Mariel after a night out or seeing Themmie curled up on a beanbag watching TV. She missed dinner parties and nights reading alone on her couch and the warm feeling of having a place that welcomed her exactly as she was.
“You look maudlin,” Astaroth said. His head lolled on the sofa as he looked at her.
It wasn’t a question, but Calladia answered anyway. “Just remembering that my house isn’t there anymore.”
“Ah.” Astaroth lifted the glass to his lips. “Losing things gets easier with time.”
He sounded a shade melancholy, but Calladia didn’t want to be preached at. “Like your memory?” she asked waspishly.
Astaroth winced. “Touché.”
Calladia sighed. She didn’t need to jump down his throat because she was a grumpy woman with mommy issues and nowhere to live. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m still on edge from my mother calling.”
“Yeah?” Astaroth shifted to face her, bracing his head on his hand. He looked drowsy and flushed, and his hair was still damp from his own bath. He’d donned a white robe they’d found in the dresser, and it was odd to see the demon looking so cuddly and domestic.
She’d thought of him as a wild animal when she’d first let him stay with her. Dangerous and unpredictable, an exotic intrusion into Calladia’s boring life. His deadly edges seemed dulled, but how much of that was real, and how much a product of his amnesia?
And were they really dulled? Or had he blunted his edges for her alone?
Calladia liked that idea a bit too much, so she shrugged it off. What had they been talking about?
Oh. Right. Her mother.
Not great, but if she couldn’t talk about her mom with the enemy-turned-road-trip-buddy she’d never see again after this trip, who could she talk to about the situation? At least if Calladia was truly in the wrong, he wouldn’t pull his punches to tell her so.
“My mom’s demanding,” Calladia said. The word was woefully inadequate, so she tried again. “More than that. She knows exactly how the world should be, and if anything or anyone around her doesn’t fit that vision, she either changes them or destroys them.”
“Metaphorical destruction?” Astaroth asked. “Or is she as murderous as my own dear mother?”
There were books dedicated to Lilith’s exploits over the centuries: the good, the bad, and the chaotic. Cynthia Cunnington would undoubtedly love to be memorialized to that extent, but so far she was only small-town famous, her printed legacy limited to op-eds and gossip pieces in the Glimmer Falls Gazette.
“She doesn’t murder people,” Calladia said. Although who could say what would happen should society devolve and public execution come into vogue again? “She does get people who disagree with her fired though. And she’s good at gossip. Misinformation and all that.”
Not that her mom would call it misinformation. She’d term it a strategic communication choice.
“Do you know why she called you?” Astaroth asked.
Blue reflections from the fire danced over his glossy black horns. Calladia watched the flickers, wondering if the aurora borealis looked something like that on a grander scale. “She wants me to come to dinner tomorrow.”
Astaroth sat up straight, sending the margarita splashing over the rim of his glass. “You can’t. We’ve got to see Isobel, and even if it only takes a few hours, there’s the drive back to consider—”
“Don’t work yourself into a tizzy,” Calladia said. “I’m not going.”
“Oh.” Astaroth sagged back into the couch. “Good.”
“She’s going to be pissed though. More pissed than she already was anyway. I guess she’s dealing with the rumor mill about me skipping town. But yeah, this will be bad.” Calladia made a face. “She’s meeting donors for her reelection campaign.”
“Reelection for what?” Astaroth asked.
Calladia was taken aback. Everyone in her life knew Cynthia Cunnington, so she’d taken her mom’s notoriety as fact. But Astaroth wasn’t from Glimmer Falls and didn’t care who was small-town famous. Even pre-amnesia, he likely wouldn’t have known a thing about her mother.
The thought was oddly comforting. Calladia’s life might have been shaped by one powerful, destructive force, like a sandstone cliff at the mercy of a raging river, but there were oodles of beings out there who didn’t give a damn about Cynthia Cunnington and her machinations. The world—the universe—was far bigger than the petty politics of Glimmer Falls.