Read your Contracts 04.2

He went bowling, of all things, in the middle of the day, spent time in the arcade wishing he had the bubbly Satilli hanging off his arm, begging him to get something for her from the crane game. That hadn't happened yet, but he was certain of the way that would have gone down if she'd been with him just then. And Memi would restrain herself from asking for one as well, but wouldn't she just beam when he "coincidentally" got the one she liked the best anyway?

She didn't like sharing him, and he knew it. He'd known it since before she recommended it in the first place! He'd told her to her face that she could have him to herself whenever she chose to make that exclusivity permanent. Did he just fail a test, and was now reaping the insecurity he'd sown? Memirellin did think about these things differently than the girls Harry knew, the human ones... but she was his first "girlfriend", human or anything else... Actually, Satilli was his first girlfriend, and she was only barely a girl... sometimes... Thinking about classifications too hard wasn't going to help anything at this point.

Having fun killed a few hours and Harry came out into the evening just when his almost private world in the bowling alley was being populated with people getting off work. He still didn't feel like going back to an empty home, so out into the city he went.

He wandered in a self-defeating, depressed state for a good while, ignoring the people with more to do than he did passing him by until the stream thinned. It had to be an hour or more later, the sky in some ruddy middle stage of sunset, when he decided to turn into a small outlet mall and browse to kill some time.

The bell at the door of the first store's door rang to announce his arrival and a woman with a wide-brimmed hat behind the counter did a double take before smiling and waving with a couple fingers from behind a dog-eared book. He'd seen this young woman before, with her thick, black braid over one shoulder and the Gothic aesthetic. He had no choice but to come all the way inside and chat.

Pippa, the apprentice witch, leaned on the counter, shifting a book aside with a subtly-inserted sticky note as a bookmark. "Harry~ good to see you in the flesh. Been a while. Things going alright with your familiar?"

"Well enough," he lied. "I know I said thank you before, on the phone, but thanks again for the contract."

She waved away the gratitude like a puff of smoke. "No, thank you. You have no idea how seldom I see a wholesome relationship come out of this place's customers." She reeled back and kicked something under the desk, causing the turtle-shell cat that had been sleeping behind a display to rear its head irritably, and a concerning grunt from down below. "So... you weren't actually trying to come here, were you?"

"Ah... no? I had no idea you guys moved your store in fact."

"We didn't. It's a whole thing, you have to know you're coming here to do it on purpose; we just leave some leeway in the formula so we can get wanderers too."

"So, you didn't move the store?"

Pippa shrugged. "It's a kind of Brownian cloud of thaumic quantum uncertainty thing. Hard to explain since I don't even know how to do it yet and Auntie is more the kind of bootstraps teacher, but don't tell her I said that."

"Ah."

"So yeah, how have things been going with you two crazy kids?"

Harry told her.

"So..." Pippa had pinched the bridge of her nose in increasing irritation over the duration of the story. "You two started swinging with this 'Laura' chick."

"Yes."

"And then you started fucking her cousin... who was an incubus that you're having shapeshift into a girl so you can call him/her your girlfriend."

Harry's cheeks burned. "Yes..."

"These are things that might have come up while we were on the phone a while back."

"You can imagine they're pretty embarrassing."

She cracked a smile. "There seems to be more than enough bare-assing to go around. Whatever, you're still more wholesome than most of the people who come here." She again kicked something under the counter and the cat properly got up to pad over and glare at her. "Sorry, Lump. Ah, Harry, this is Lump: my familiar."

Harry reached and was glad when the kitty let him scratch its fuzzy chin. "Very cute."

Pippa said, "Just so we have an understanding, I consider us friends and I will not be entering whatever love dodecahedron you plan to build."

The kitty was still letting him stroke its smooth fur and he reassured her, "I'm not building anything on purpose, you know?"

Then the cat looked at him and said with a deep voice, "I'm not joining either."

Harry quietly retrieved his hand.

"Nobody told you to stop," Lump said. "The witch doesn't even brush me, despite having plenty of time to read trash."

Harry awkwardly began petting the cat again, with Pippa hiding a grin behind the rim of her hat before collecting herself.

"Well," she said, "have you learned anything cool from Memirellin by now? I can't imagine her magic instruction being especially wide in scope, but there are plenty of applications for transformations and sleep stuff."

"Um, no? Mostly we've just been... you know..."

"Fucking, yes," she said dismissively. "You're the master of a succubus and the boyfriend of an incubus, this isn't the sort of thing you'll be able to be skittish about for long. And are you saying that your familiar hasn't taught you a single thing about magic so far? I mean, that's one of the main reasons to have one."

"So you're learning it from a cat?" he said. "No offense, Lump."

"None taken, just keep scratching that spot."

Pippa sighed, reached out. "Hand me your wallet."

"What?"

"I'm not sure how I could have been more clear."

"O-okay?" He handed it over and watched as she took out all of his paper money, then handed the wallet back before counting it.

"You really left the house today with twenty-three bucks?"

"I have a credit card?"

Pippa got up and went to the back of the store to rummage through a cabinet, a hand reached out to grab her leg from below the counter and she stomped on it until it retreated. "Don't bother taking it out, twenty will be enough for now." Lump came away from Harry's petting and jumped on Pippa's shoulder to whisper something in her ear. She responded, "Yes, I saw it too. Something nasty stuck itself to him, I'm helping." More whispering. "Yes, for twenty bucks. It's called doing a favor for a friend." And she finally came back up to the counter with a worn composition book studded with colored tabs, slapped it on the counter for Harry.

"So... what is it?"

She grabbed Lump by the scruff and set him aside before opening up the book to a page with some complicated-looking magic circles. "This," she said, "is the monography from my first year under Auntie Blackrod. It has beginner spells and exercises that aren't very likely at all to hurt you if you fuck them up in the casting. Auntie knew that beginners want to be able to do cool things right away, so there are some really simple spells right in the front that aren't that powerful, but they're useful."

"Are you sure you want to give me something so valuable?"

"I'm not giving it to you, I'm selling it. Big difference. And this is just the handwritten version I did first before typing it up for organization; it's not something I need anymore."

"Well, I suppose I'll have something to show Memi when she gets back. Satilli too, if she comes back..."

Pippa silently flipped pages until she came to one labeled 'dream catcher: real version' and she winked.

"Pretty sure that would make it seem like I don't trust them..."

"If they get mad," Pippa said, taking Harry's hand and for a moment becoming very serious, "tell them to talk to me about it and I'll explain things to their satisfaction. I one-hundred-percent guarantee they'll agree with my plan."

Harry nodded, numb to most things at this point.

They chatted for some time longer, Pippa pointing out this and that in her notes, getting him to practice a simple spell that only pushed things with about double the force of a punch (apparently used for practice duels, but she was quiet about with who). It was quickly turning to night when he at last emerged from the adult magic shoppe, and he had to turn around to make sure it was actually still there when he had lost sight of it for a second, earning himself another little wave from the other side of the glass door before he left.

It was interesting, the amount of weirdness one could become accustomed to over time, he thought as he started walking home. He didn't walk quickly, there was nothing waiting for him in the first place and no reason that he needed to be there early when he might end up becoming a zombie on the couch anyway until the small hours of the morning. He wasn't feeling productive, but scraped enough enthusiasm from the bottom of the barrel to avoid dragging his feet.

-

He saw, his gaze meandering down a random alleyway, a woman pinned to the wall by a man and his two friends...

Fuck, that sort of thing actually happened!? He pressed himself to the corner, fumbling his phone out of his pocket to start calling the police. He dropped his phone...

There was a flash of steel st the girl's thin throat. She pressed herself to the wall as if she wanted to meld into it, and her attacker glared down toward Harry, toward the source of the sound. But thankfully, it didn't seem like he saw Harry hugging the corner in the darkness.

Harry couldn't reach his phone anymore, having skittered into the thugs' line of sight. His heart banged against his chest as options raced before his mind too fast to pick one out as the best. He could run for help, but there was no telling what these guys could do in the meantime, and the girl was shivering with fear...

Damn, this would have been so simple if anyone else had seen been there instead of him! Memi would have lit them all on fire, Satilli... probably knew how to do something...

The girl squeaked as the cold pocket knife in the primary thug's hand touched her skin.

Harry stepped out into the light and shouted, "Hey, stop that!" Fine, lame, but you get what you get...

The main guy hooked his chin at Harry and one of the others went to take care of the interruption as he himself started unzipping the girl's hoodie.

"Pippa, this had better work..." Harry whispered to himself as the thug approached, gathering his will as a pearl in the cusp of his fingertip, then brought up his hand and flicked the pearl out like a paper football. He felt a burst in the air around his hand as the impulse of kinesis crossed the couple feet to the thug's head and it snapped back as though Harry had wound up and cracked him in the face with a bat.

"I said," he said with a shaking voice, "s-stop that."

The other two looked at their friend bleeding on the ground from some unseen weapon and they began backing further into the alley, the one dropping his knife against the concrete before shoving the girl onto the ground between them and Harry, booking it in different directions deeper into the recesses of the city.

Good for them, Harry didn't know whether he could do that a second time, his arm already felt drained and cold. He went to the girl's side and offered his hand.

She looked up at him through long, messy bangs. Her eyes so brown that the lighting made them appear black. Tentatively, she reached out and let Harry help her to her feet, shaking like a newborn deer until they emerged at the street and Harry finally got his phone off the ground, a little the worse for wear.

"Hold on, I'll call the cops." He opened his phone and she slapped it out of his hand, making him catch it before it broke entirely on the pavement. "Miss, are you alright? I swear, I'll just call the police and have them start looking for those guys."

She was hyperventilating, clutching his sleeve tightly, pleaded, "Don't... please... I'll be..."

Harry smoothly closed his phone and slipped it into his pocket. "Okay, I get it, no police." For now, he added in his mind. "How about we take a minute to calm down, okay?" He smiled his most genuine smile and she started catching her breath.

They ended up walking together for a little while and went into a local cafe. She'd said, in as many words, that being around more people felt better at that point than being alone, and she sipped hot chocolate with a solemness, tucked with Harry into the table at the back of the cafe so they would have a wall to touch her back to.

"Do you, um, want to talk about it?" he asked, really wishing she'd let him call someone with more, any, experience with this kind of thing. Huh... he did actually have a lot of experience with some kinds of rape...

She shook her head slowly, drawing her hood over her forehead. The hoodie was two sizes too big, letting her petite form soak into it and start disappearing. Then there were the sweatpants, torn at some point so that her pale thigh and peeks of her butt were visible from the outside; Harry thought it was wise not to say anything. And at last, a shirt that was so long it came halfway down to her knees, bunched up as she sat, further even than her oversized hoodie. Though she was taller, by a sliver, than Satilli, who had become one of Harry's standard comparison points, or would be if she didn't slump.

"Thank you..." she said almost too quietly to be heard even in the sparsely-occupied space.

"Of course... You're sure you don't want to call the cops and at least give them a description of those guys?"

She shook her head again. "They don't matter anymore."

"If you say so I guess. I just don't like the idea of thugs like that running around in my city."

"They always were," she said with a brief, faint smile that was gone as soon as it was noticed. "Like cockroaches... You're not like I thought you would be..."

Harry jumped in his seat. "Wait, you know me?"

She nodded. "I live under you. There are always girls coming and going..."

"Ah, that's..." he briefly considered social suicide by blabbing all of the details of his odd relationships and summarily rejected the urge in favor of a more innocent-sounding explanation that was strangely honest. "My girlfriend, her cousin, and the cousin's girlfriend. I'm anything but a player. Even my girlfriend, I'm still confused as to why she asked me out in the first place..." And now he felt guilty that he was putting Satilli at the front of these introductions instead of Memirellin. "Umm, I'm Harry."

A fragile, pale hand extended past her long sleeve and took his in a dead-fish shake. "Sitte," she said.

"German? No, never mind. Do you want me to walk you home now? It's pretty late, unless you have something else you have to do. Nobody's waiting for me at home today so I could help out with whatever until you're ready to go."

"Nobody?"

"Nope. Everyone's off doing their own things so I'm all alone for a while. Even if I wasn't, I'm sure none of them would mind me helping out like this. And I really don't like the thought of sending you home by yourself at this point."

She nodded.

-

They walked home with her clinging to his sleeve, something that maybe Memirellin would have had a problem with, but she wasn't around now, was she? In fact, Harry would have welcomed her being there so he could send her off in pursuit of those jackasses, but he would have to settle for having brained one of them himself. Sitte didn't ask a single time what he had done to save her and he chose to think that she thought he'd thrown a rock or something else suitably mundane; who would believe her about magic spells and the like anyway?

She was very quiet, her eyes flicking from one extreme of vision to the other like a bird, sussing out potential threats even as she clung to him with her fingers digging into his jacket. Beneath the shadow of her hood, Harry could just make out the dark circles around her eyes as though she'd been awake for the last week. Even in better light, her eyes were so deeply brown that they appeared black like pitch.

Sitte didn't even let go to ascend the stairs with him, stopping at the floor below his and going to the mirrored room number. She turned the key and dispassionately pushed the door open, which stuck in its frame for an instant as the wood had swollen. She entered the darkness within without shutting the door behind her and a few seconds later reappeared to leer at him from the darkness.

Inside, It looked like she was using the room to store her things, barely like she'd lived there at all. Worse, a pipe had burst; the room seemed to only contain stacked boxes getting progressively wetter from the bottom up.

"Thank you for everything," Sitte said, looking up into his eyes with a trembling smile. She tried to close the door, but Harry put his foot in the way.

"Haven't you told the landlord about that leak?" The carpet squished underfoot and there was the undeniable scent of growing mold heavy in the air. With a light on, he thought that he might see actual spores wafting here and there. "You aren't really going to sleep in here, are you?"

"I have to..."

Harry grit his teeth, he knew he wasn't going to get through to the landlord this late at night. Even if he did, he was looking straight into several days worth of cleanup for a half dozen people. "Do you know anyone you can stay with? I'll escort you all the way there."

Sitte shook her head slowly.

"Then you're staying with me." Harry took her by the wrist and didn't take no for an answer, lead her upstairs to his room while explaining the situation to the landlord's answering machine. She seemed numb to the world, allowed him to put her into his bed without complaint.

-

He was sitting on the couch an hour later, unable to sleep with the light of the television washing over him. Something about the situation seemed familiar. At least he knew it wasn't Satilli playing a joke on him again, he'd have been fucked by then if that was the case...

-

Chapter 06

-

Fyelline's target was a difficult man to approach without the right connections. He was too rich to have to do most of his own errands and had few friends which could be 'coincidentally mutual' in an exploitative way. That said, there was a limit to how isolated a person could be and still have any effect on the world; a company owner didn't live at work, no matter how much it felt like it at any given time, and any homeowner had vulnerabilities built directly into the property.

Satilli was musing on these small vulnerabilities as he worked in hotpants and little else with a pool scoop. He didn't love that mistress had insisted he change his hair color to chestnut brown for the job, but it was an apparent taste issue, as was the rest of the debatable outfit. It may seem simple that more skin meant more sexy, but even Satilli had been in the game long enough to know better; he'd started the day in a sleeveless shirt and discarded it after "slipping" and falling into the pool when a certain person was watching, having to peel it off his slender, youthful form in full view of the unsubtle home security camera.

Getting the job had been as easy as lady Fyelline dragging the pool-cleaning company's manager into a backroom for five minutes. The poor man had come out with wobbly knees and mistress had been licking her lips. Satilli was just glad he wasn't made to do it himself; fatties' cum didn't taste great. As for why Carillyss hadn't been the one to get the pool-cleaning job, as the river daemon she was... she had her own role, and it wouldn't start until Satilli had fulfilled his part.

That Carillyss' job was doing laps around the pool in a bikini wasn't lost on him. She was gorgeous, of course, despite having no real relation to Lilith; these days she tended to pass for Hispanic, but she'd originally passed for Aztec (or so she said, it might just have been that the contemporary society she was spawned from wasn't as recognizable) and being beautiful was one way to lure her victims into the river. River spirits tended toward that sort of predation, though one would hardly call her a predator when all she was doing at the moment was a backstroke (specifically, because that was the way to have her dark, creamy breasts cresting the rippling surface of the water).