The Witch's Cousins

She splashed cold water on her face and tried to gather her wits. Unwanted, a picture of Steven stripped naked, helpless beneath her, sprang to her mind, and her hips jerked forward. Her clutching hand found the doorknob, and she had to physically restrain herself from running out and taking him right in the middle of the store. Her shaking fingers found the latch and closed it.

Slowly, deliberately, she pounded her head against the doorframe until her mind was clear.

Poise and control, Ellie. Poise and control.

When she felt more like herself again, she went back out into the shop and smiled at Steven, who was waiting by the front counter, an anxious look on his face.

"Are you all right? You looked...sick for a second, there."

"I'm all right. Just got a little dizzy. Probably caused by going from the heat out there into the AC in here." She changed the subject. "So you might be living with Mom and my kid brother and sister, huh? I talked to Hildy about you a little last night. She said you could use a helping hand." She frowned out at the street, "How were you planning on getting over there?"

Steve told Eleanor his idea, and her frown grew deeper.

"So you're going to drive to your place, load up, drive to our place, interview with my Mom, unload, drive back to your house and return this truck, and then somehow get back to our house all in the time of one church service? No way. My car's right out front. I'll follow you to your house and help you load your things into my car. That way you can avoid a return trip."

"But what if your mother doesn't like me?"

Eleanor shrugged. "I like you. So does Hilda, or she would never have given you Mom's number. I think you can relax a bit."

"But...if Calvin comes back and catches us..." he floundered. Finally he shrugged and looked at Eleanor with haunted eyes. "He can get violent."

Eleanor nodded grimly. "So can I. And my mom and my aunt made all of us kids take self-defense classes when we were younger. Considering the mood I'm in, if this guy thinks he can slap us around, he'll find a stump where his hand used to be, Steven."

He smiled, and Eleanor nearly kissed him just for the sheer beauty of his face. "Please. Call me Steve."

@@@

Steve parked the rattling, fuming truck in the gravel driveway, one last belch of blue smoke escaping from the tailpipe as it ground to a halt. Eleanor parked by the curb and popped the trunk. She tried to join him at the front door, but Steve waved her back.

"Just stay by the car. This won't take long."

In less than a minute he was out, two cardboard boxes loaded in his arms. An army-surplus knapsack was slung over his shoulder. He dumped the boxes in the trunk and the knapsack on the floor of the passenger side. He hopped into the passenger seat and frowned up at Eleanor, who was still standing at the curb. "What are you waiting for? Let's go!"

"What about the rest of your stuff?"

"That was the rest of my stuff," he opened the door and got back out. "Miss Chamberlain. Eleanor. Please. We have to go." His forehead was streaked with sweat, and his eyes darted up and down the street like a frightened rabbit.

At last Eleanor was convinced and got in. As she pulled away, Steve shuddered with relief. He dropped his face into his hands for several minutes as she drove. When he raised it again, his cheeks were wet.

"Oh God. I never thought I'd get away. Not really. Thank you." His hand covered hers where it lay on the gearshift.

Eleanor snatched it quickly away, afraid of what physical contact would do to her shaky self-control. She saw Steve's wince of distress and apologized. "I'm sorry. I'm just a bit jumpy. Was that really all of your things?"

"Yup. Two boxes of clothes and my toiletries." His voice was flat.

"No CDs? Music?"

"Work of the devil. Might make me want to dance. Or have lustful thoughts." Ellie caught a glint of amusement in Steve's eye.

"Movies? DVDs?"

"Work of the devil. And Hollywood liberals."

"Video games?"

"Work of the devil," they said in unison, and Steve laughed and laid his head back on the headrest, relaxing for the first time since...

Since Mom and Dad died, he thought, and his eyes welled up again.

"I do have a few books," he said without prompting. "Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Starship Troopers. Rocketship Galileo. But he took away all my favorites. Anything having to do with fantasy.

"I had the most beautiful paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings," he sighed. "The 1982 Ballantine Silver Jubilee Edition. Boxed set. I bought it for six bucks at a garage sale when I was fifteen and we were living in Alabama.

"I kept it hidden for three years. Dug a hole in the box-spring of my mattress. I came home one day to find out that he had torn my room apart looking for dirty magazines. Didn't find any of those, but he found Tolkien and a couple of Glen Cook paperbacks. He made me watch while he burned them."

"He burned books?" Eleanor's voice was raw with horror.

Steve nodded. He scrubbed away the tears with the heel of his hand. He looked at Eleanor, and in his eyes she could see the small boy he had once been. "I've been with him and Rachel since I was twelve. And I will do anything to keep away from him."

Eleanor was silent, dwelling on what Steve's life must have been like. She nodded through the windshield.

"We're here."

Chapter 10

Steve got out of the car with Eleanor. He looked at his potential new home. It was a large, rambling house with a big front yard. A couple of maples were planted on either side of the sidewalk leading to the door. In front of him was an attached garage. From the cars in the driveway and at the curb, it appeared that several other people were already there.

To his left was the main body of the house. It was wood, two stories high, and painted white, with bright green shutters framing the many windows. The shingles on the roof were a dark red, and served to give the house a welcoming, almost Christmas-y look.

"Should I get my things out of the car, or should I wait?" he asked Eleanor.

Ellie frowned. "Best to leave them here for the time being," she said. "I'm pretty sure you'll be moving in, but you don't want to give the impression that you are assuming you'll be staying."

Steve nodded. He started for the front door, but Eleanor caught his arm and stopped him.

"Let me tell them all that you're here," she said. "From the cars, everyone is here for the cookout, including my aunt and cousins. I don't want them thinking that I'm here with a new boyfriend."

"If only that were true," said Steve with a smile. "I'll wait until you give me the word."

@@@

Ellie hit the front door so hard it bounced off the kitchen wall and nearly hit her in the face on the rebound. She looked around the kitchen. Her Aunt Sybil was putting together a pasta salad at the counter. Susanna and Agatha were talking near the entranceway to the front hall.

"Someone get me a fucking drink. Right fucking now!" she hissed, trying to keep her voice low.

They all goggled at her in surprise. "Ellie, what the hell..." started Agatha.

Eleanor huffed in exasperation and made a beeline for the fridge. She grabbed the first beer she saw, popped the top with a muttered spell, and drained half of it in one swig.

"Where is Hilda? John? And my mom?"

"Hilda and your brother are still upstairs," giggled Agatha. "Perverts." The slur would have had more sting if Ellie hadn't known exactly how well John had laid Aggie the day before, because Aggie had called her up and related their encounter in agonizing detail, while Eleanor altered between screaming at her cousin to shut up and merely yelling as she desperately fingered her aching love-hole.

"And my sister is in the basement, getting it ready for our newest candidate," said Aunt Sybil. "Is that him out front? Looks tasty. Is that why you are swigging down perfectly good Leinenkugel's like it was Milwaukee's Best?"

"Goddess help us," said Eleanor. "Yes. That's him. I've spent the last hour with him, because he somehow managed to get into the store while I was there earlier this afternoon. And it has been all I could do to not rape him. Goddess, he's powerful. Maybe more than John. I need a buzz just to dull the pull.

"This is a warning, ladies. Watch out. Between the power and his innocence and the kicked-puppy look he has when he talks about himself, you won't know whether to kiss him to make him feel better, or whether to kiss him because you think he is a nine-point-six on the Fuckability Scale." She chugged the rest of her beer and slammed the empty bottle on the counter. "I'm bringing him in now. Control yourselves."

@@@

Fifteen minutes later, Steve thought he was drowning in beauty.

He was a young man, and had a young man's desires. Surrounded by gorgeous women, it seemed to him that he had died and gone to the sort of heaven which only exists in the dreams of adolescent boys. Eleanor was tempting enough, with her sweet face, ink-black hair, and subtly curved body. But she had then introduced him to her sister Susanna, her cousin Agatha, and to Agatha's mother, Eleanor's Aunt Sybil. Agatha was a petite if somewhat busty blonde who was an engineering student in college, while Sybil Chamberlain was a tall, svelte mother, shop-keeper, and, apparently, a yoga instructor. And Susanna was a fantasy come to life, with blond hair like her cousin Agatha, falling in gentle waves down her back, and a smile that somehow managed to be wholesome and wicked at the same time.

They had just managed to sit him on the side porch, screened from the street outside by a high privacy fence, with a glass of lemonade in his hand when Hilda had come down from upstairs with Eleanor's younger brother, John. Hilda looked much as she had when he met her the day before, a playboy bunny in workout clothes, while John had shook his hand, apologized for all the women, and grabbed a plate of hamburgers and brats to grill on the back deck.

A few minutes later yet another unfamiliar woman made an appearance. She was of medium height and pleasantly rounded at hip, breast, and thigh. Her brown hair was long, streaked with gray. She smiled at him as she sat down at the patio table nearby, holding a glass of wine.

"Steven Johnson?" she asked.

"Steve, please, but yes," he replied with a frazzled smile. "And please tell me that you are Claire Chamberlain, because if I have to remember another name, I think I'll go bonkers!"

Claire snorted. "Yes, we're quite the harem, aren't we? I don't know how John stands it, sometimes, with all this estrogen around. But he seems to have turned out all right. Yes," she continued, "I'm Claire. And I am glad you met Ellie earlier and she was able to help you get over here, although I'm a little unclear on the details.

"We'll talk about the arrangements after we eat. I don't feel like conducting an interview while we cook, and you look like you can use a good meal." With that, she stood up and shook his hand as he scrambled to his feet. "Take a look around. Talk to people. If you decide you would like to stay with us, you'll be seeing all of them pretty often. We're a close family."

After a few minutes, Steve got up and wandered through the house. He tried to ignore the way everyone's eyes seemed to follow him around. Eventually, he found himself on the back deck, watching John grill.

"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.

"Kind of a one-man job right now," John replied. "I might send you inside as my go-fer in a bit. I'll need barbeque sauce eventually. I forgot it earlier."

He sighed and turned away from the grill, meeting Steve's eyes with a curiously blank face. "If you are going to be staying here, I think we may as well lay down some ground rules," he said.

"Well, I don't know if I will be staying here..." Steve started, somewhat defensively.

"Just in case," John said. "I need to know what kind of person my mother is letting into our house."

Steve sweated. What the hell was this guy talking about?

"First," said John, "Baseball?"

"Huh?" replied Steve.

John sighed. "Dear me, the man is dense," he said, in a terrible Irish accent. "I'm a Cardinal fan. Do you like baseball?"

Steve brightened. "Yeah. But not the Cardinals. We didn't ever have cable, so most of the baseball I saw was on WGN."

"Oh, Goddess. That means..."

"I'm afraid so."

"You're a Cub fan," John grimaced and rubbed his forehead. "Well, it could be worse. It could be an AL team."

"With a DH?" scoffed Steve. "No way."

"Okay, then. Football?"

"Not terribly interested. Bears, I suppose, by default, since I am in Iowa now."

"You're going to be in the minority again. Mom and Aunt Sybil grew up in Colorado. We like the Broncos here. Basketball?"

"Meh"

"Hockey?"

"Bleah."

"College?"

"Not yet. Maybe not ever. Depends on the school, I think. But as for sports, I was born in Minnesota, so I'm a Big Ten man."

"Good deal," grinned John. "Susie and me are going to the U of I in the fall."

"You are? Jeez, I'm sorry. Couldn't you get into a good school?"

"Get bent. They have one of the top engineering and computer science programs in the country."

"Yeah, too bad all those brains can't help them win any football games."

"I'm sorry, too. Because didn't Illinois beat Minnesota in football last year?"

"I'm pretty sure that was a hallucination. Any other questions?"

John frowned. "Well, Ellie told me you were nuts for sci-fi and fantasy books, so that's good. Oh. I know. Star Wars or Star Trek?"

"Star Wars."

"Han..."

"Shot first."

John grinned and punched Steve on the shoulder.

"That'll do, Steve. That'll do."

@@@

Less than an hour later, Steve was sitting down with what he had labeled in his mind as
"Clan Chamberlain" in the big table in the kitchen. John's burgers and bratwurst were served up along with Sybil's pasta salad, a veggie tray that Susanna had pulled out of the fridge, and this being Iowa, a plate of sweet corn that Hilda had made.

Steve loaded up his plate, took a bite, and turned up his eyes in rapture. "John, this burger is fantastic. What's your secret?"

"Letting my mom mix up the meat," John replied with a grin. "Once I put it on the grill it's pretty hard to screw up."

Steve turned to Claire. She smiled at him. "It's nothing too difficult. Good ground beef, Worcestershire sauce for a little kick, diced onions, one egg for every two pounds of meat, and ground up crackers to help hold it together. I'll be happy to teach you if you want."

Steve nodded. "I would love to. I'm going to have to learn to cook sometime." He looked at the rest of the table, trying to decide who to compliment next. "The pasta salad is really good, too, Miss Chamberlain."

Sybil laughed. "Honey, if you insist on calling us all 'Miss Chamberlain', we are all going to be looking over our shoulders, trying to figure out who you're talking to. The only one here who answers to that name is Eleanor over there, and her kids at school usually call her 'Miss Ellie' rather than Miss Chamberlain. My name is Sybil."

Steve smiled at his rescuer on the other side of the table. And blushed, as she returned his smile with interest, gentle face warm with friendship. He was on one side, with Susanna and Agatha bracketing him. On the other, John was surrounded by Hilda and Eleanor. The two older women sat at the head and foot of the table.

Steve ate and relaxed and let the conversation flow around him. Thankfully, the Chamberlains seemed more interested in catching up with each other than talking to him. He gathered in snippets that John and Susanna were about to graduate high school, that Agatha, the small, shapely blond, was in college at Drake University, and that Hilda was a fitness instructor.

"Which one of you runs the store?" he asked during a lull in the conversation.

"Steve wandered in there this afternoon," Eleanor explained to her aunt. "I think we might want to put the book section under lock and key, because he looked like he wanted to pick them all up and run away with them."

Steve smiled wryly as the rest of the family laughed. "Sybil and I usually do the heavy lifting as far as the store is concerned," said Claire, answering his original question. "All of the kids have worked there part time at some point. Which reminds me," she continued, looking at John and Susanna. "Do either of you have any idea what you are going to do all summer? You might want to go to Champaign with some money in your pocket. I don't want either of you trying to hold down a job your freshman year."

Susanna glanced at John. "I didn't have a whole lot of fun last summer," she said. "Standing behind a counter at the mall while the freshmen animals from my high school hit on me is not my idea of a good time. I'm going to see if I can get hired on as a lifeguard at one of the local pools for the park district. At least that way I will have my nights free."

"If you don't pass out from heat stroke," John said teasingly. He looked at his mother. "Whatever I do, it is not going to be fast food again. Coming home late very night stinking of fry grease is just terrible. I filled out some online applications this afternoon for stock jobs at groceries and clothing stores. That way I can stay inside in the AC all summer."

"This afternoon?" asked Hilda. "When did you do that?"

"While you were napping," John said. "You were out like a light."

"I certainly was," said Hilda, with a small smile that Steve couldn't quite interpret.

"And if the stock job doesn't work out, well, the lawn care and landscaping companies are always hiring," finished John.

"Hah!" said Susanna. "And you think I'll get heat stroke? While you're on a hot smelly mower I'll be at a nice pool, with a shade and all the suntan lotion I need."

"And every male with a pulse in three counties drooling over you," put in Hilda with a grin.

"Let them drool. I've got all the men I need at home. Johnny may not be perfect, but he's good enough for now."

An awkward silence settled over the room. "Cree-peee," mocked Agatha as Claire put her head in her hands.

"Our children," she said to Steve with a shake of her head. She addressed the rest of the table. "Is everyone done? Good. Susanna and John, you clear up, please. When you're done, come on back here so we can talk with Steve."

John and Susie quickly cleared the table. "Anyone want anything to drink?" asked John. Hilda and Eleanor asked for beer, while Sybil, Claire, and Agatha each had a glass of wine. When they were finished cleaning the table, John and Susanna sat down with glasses of iced tea. Steve decided to refresh his mug of lemonade. He looked at the rest of Claire's family, feeling uncomfortably like a prisoner in front of a not-quite-sympathetic jury.

"Okay, Steven," said Claire. She had pushed back her chair and crossed her legs, and had a notepad in her lap. "Tell us about yourself."

Steve closed his eyes briefly. Focus, dammit. He opened them up and looked around at the other faces. He could see wariness, especially with Agatha and Sybil. But no hostility, thank goodness. He took a sip of lemonade and tried to slow his heartbeat.

"My name is Steve Johnson," he began. "I'm nineteen years old. I'm an only child. I was born in Minnesota. My parents were named Tom and Ingrid Johnson. My father was a mining engineer and my mother was a nurse.

"We moved to West Virginia I was six when my father got a job with one of the coal companies in the area.

"My parents were killed when I was twelve."

"How?" asked Claire, her voice gentle.

"The police said that my mom must have been driving drunk, to run off the road like she did, slam through the guardrail, and end up at the bottom of a ravine. Their bodies..." Steve choked on old anger and grief. "They were burned too badly for a toxicology report. They were identified using the car's plates and their dental records. I think the police were full of crap. My mother barely drank at all. Maybe a glass of wine on a weekend. That was it. And Dad would never have let her drive if she was tipsy.