The WR(ite) Blog

When Athelas went to fetch the paper that morning, there was a tie croaking at him from the welcome mat. If Athelas had had anything to do with it, there would not have been a welcome mat by the front door—in which opinion he had been surprisingly backed up by the vampire, who remarked that it was making things too easy for any passing vampires. The other two occupants of the house had remained indifferent to the risk. Zero, fae lord and Athelas’ employer, no doubt had the right to a vote that counted for more than the other inhabitants; Pet, the little human he had adopted and kept around the house, should certainly not count for so much of the vote.

The business of the welcome mat aside, however, the fact that this tie was both familiar and croaking at him made Athelas shut the door rather hastily once he had seized his paper. He had been under the impression that this particular tie—now animate, mobile, and halfway between being a tie and being a frog—had been safely left behind in another place of residence. The pet had caused it to spring from one of the vampire’s neckties in a fit of whimsy and revenge, and Athelas found its making and existence similarly troubling.

Nor did he particularly want it in the house, if it must exist.

In principle, Athelas approved of a piece of clothing that was capable of strangling its wearer. In practise, he was not sure that allowing Pet to make a pet of something else was the best idea—and if she knew the tie frog was once more in the house, Pet undoubtedly would make a pet of it.

He took a quick look out the window before moving back down the hall, and was very slightly relieved not to see the tie-frog any longer. Yes, it was certainly best if the pet didn’t see that particular reminder of her own whimsy.

And speaking of the pet; she hadn’t come down from her bedroom yet this morning. He had been waiting for a cup of tea before he started on his paper, but if things continued like this, he would have to begin making his own tea again, and that would be a shame.

The pet had a peculiar talent for making tea in just the way he liked it.

The creak of floorboards sounded above his head, and Athelas couldn’t help sending a quick look up at the ceiling. He was rather sure that Pet was actually awake, but she had taken to staying above stairs much longer than usual over the last few weeks. It was sometimes difficult to gauge the Pet’s motives for doing things, as they ranged anywhere from mischief to self-sacrifice, but he was quite sure there was a reason, and he would very much like to know what it was. She had left the house early yesterday and returned quite late with the smell of bridge troll on her, only to return to her own room to work on her contract.

If Athelas wasn’t very much mistaken, she was also avoiding Zero very slightly. That was, he thought, as he returned to the living room with his prize, both interesting and troubling.

Having returned to the room, he stopped short and sighed. The vampire had emerged from the shower while Athelas fetched the paper, and was at present lounging shirtless on the couch he shared with the Pet, one leg dangling over the armrest and surrounded by piles of books.

Athelas was at once assailed by two very different urges: one, to call Pet down at this moment to confront what she had unwittingly wrought; two, to remind JinYeong very softly and quietly how very much Zero would object to his current state of undress and the reason attaching thereto.

Zero was, of course, perfectly well aware of the state of JinYeong’s heart, such as it was. Athelas had watched the inevitable crumbling of said heart with both cool interest and a certainty that it would not be allowed to go as far as it had gone—a certainty that had been proved wrong. Zero did nothing more than warn—perhaps he expected JinYeong to do as he was told—but he certainly knew.

Even the banshees, hiding behind the stairway bannisters to hurl pistachio shells at JinYeong whenever he was otherwise occupied, knew.

In fact, arguably the only person in the house who didn’t know it was Pet herself.

The pet, Athelas reminded himself, sitting down. Not Pet. He was very good at making sure some thoughts stayed soft while the others were loud and easily heard, but it was better to keep his mind in order altogether. There was never any knowing when someone would come along to dust out the corners of his mind and shake out the cushions for crumbs. Far better that there be no crumbs to find—or at least, only the ones he wanted found.

He engaged himself with the paper, ignoring the files he had been reading earlier and smiling faintly at the headline stories—explosion in a café in North Hobart, group amnesia outbreak at the Hobart Library coinciding with a major energy spike—but looked up when Zero emerged from the alcove he sometimes used as a study.

Athelas saw the quick upward glance his lord sent toward the staircase, and tapped one finger lightly against his lips. So Zero was wondering about the pet, too. Enough so that his first glance was toward where she could reasonably be expected to appear instead of the sight of JinYeong, shirtless on the couch and surrounded by books.

It couldn’t distract for long, however. JinYeong turned a page, and Zero’s cold eyes flicked over him. The vampire studiously engaged himself in his current book.

“Get dressed, JinYeong,” said Zero, and continued through the house to the hall stand, ignoring the small snarl that pulled at JinYeong’s lips.

JinYeong’s eyes, stormy and dark, did not waver from the printed page, and Athelas was assailed anew by those two urges that would each have an entirely different reaction. Perhaps fortunately, he became aware of a faint, clothy slapping from the direction of the kitchen, and rose, swift and silent. He crossed the living room at his hunting run and entered the kitchen just in time to see the tie frog make a leap from the open kitchen window to the island bench in the centre of the kitchen area.

“I think not,” he told it, dangling it in front of his face by two fingers. If it had had eyes, he would have locked gazes with it to show it he meant business, but it had no such appendages. No use wondering how it managed to map its surroundings, of course: items of whimsy very rarely worked by the usual rules of the worlds they inhabited.

Since he couldn’t stare it into submission, Athelas merely tossed the tie-frog back out the window through which it had entered and closed that window with a touch of repelling magic to discourage it from coming back again.

That done, he filled the electric kettle and started it boiling with the hope that the sound of it would draw the pet out of her bedroom to brew his tea. Zero was still in the hall when he stepped down into the living room again, running small touches of magic down the flat of the sword that was pretending to be an umbrella in the hall stand.

Athelas wasn’t surprised. The sword had vanished without warning some time in the preceding months while Pet was out, and again yesterday while she was out. One didn’t like to jump to conclusions, of course, but there was certainly something odd happening, and odd things around this house almost always did involve the pet.

JinYeong was still scowling and pretending to read by the time Athelas returned to his seat,  but his urge to needle the vampire had vanished with all the speed of the tie frog and possibly the longevity of that disappearance.

“May I suggest that lounging around the house half-dressed will not be conducive to your end goal?” he said as he sat down, instead of either of the more nuclear options that had occurred to him earlier.

JinYeong looked up from his book, stared at Athelas coldly and said, “I am beautiful.”

“The pet,” said Athelas gently, picking up his paper once again, “has seen many beautiful Behindkind.”

The vampire’s mouth grew a little sulky and almost opened—to insist, no doubt, that he was the most beautiful of them all—but pressed itself shut again. He said, instead, indicating the novels around him with a soupçon of irritation, “The book covers—”

“—are, one would suggest, designed to appeal to a different kind of female than our pet. Another woman would no doubt find your state of undress attractive—the Pet, I believe, is rather too well acquainted with your personality at this point.”

One of JinYeong’s brows went up, and his chin tilted. He was thinking, however, and when the thoughtful look had completely replaced the challenging one, JinYeong rose and padded away to his own room, emerging again in a soft silk shirt of muted green to throw himself back on the couch. In deference, one presumed, to the supposed better knowledge of romance book covers, that shirt was not buttoned up as much as it might be, but it seemed unlikely that an actual fight would break out with JinYeong now technically clothed.

The vampire had barely settled himself in again when the pet trotted down the stairs, braiding the last of her hair as she came, a hairband between her teeth.

“Heard the jug,” she said, removing the hairband to wrap it around the tail of her braid. “S’pose you lot want tea and coffee and breakfast?”

Athelas waved the paper at her in a languid fashion. “It is a pet’s job to fetch these, is it not?”

Pet gazed at him for a few moments with her head on one side, grey eyes dancing—trying to decide what he meant by what he said, as usual—and at last said obliquely, “You know you can get those online?”

“You heard the kettle?” countered Athelas. He wondered if she had heard anything else, or if she really had come downstairs after merely hearing the kettle boiling.

“You and Blackpoint should have a word,” she said. Athelas would have liked to know if she was ignoring it or merely sticking to her own point. “Reckon you’d get along real well. And maybe he could teach you how to interact with modern technology.”

“Thank you, I’m sufficiently acquainted with Blackpoint,” Athelas told her. “However, considering what he did to the computer upstairs, not to mention JinYeong, I think we’ll have to ask a few questions of that merman friend of yours rather shortly.”

To his amusement, the pet’s cheeks grew warmer in colour. She said, “Oh yeah? Reckon he can help with Blackpoint?” and turned to enter the kitchen with a very creditable casualness.

“I should think so,” he replied, watching her shadow until it, too, disappeared and all he could see was the flickering of light as she passed by the kitchen window.

He withdrew his gaze, smiling, to find that he was being watched over the top of a book by a pair of dark, liquid eyes.

“You irritate me,” said the vampire coldly.

“The feeling is entirely mutual,” Athelas assured him affably.

“Reckon I should try to tell that human group about where the bridge troll was?” called Pet from the kitchen. “And other thinner places like that where it’s easier for Behindkind to get through?”

“It would certainly free us up for more important things,” agreed Athelas. “My lord? Do you have a preference?”

Zero appeared by the kitchen entrance for a moment, and Pet’s voice said, startled, “Heck! How long have you been there?”

“You can try,” Zero told her. “But I’m not sure they’ll talk to you again.”

“Me either,” said Pet gloomily, appearing beside him. “I’ll text Abigail; even if she only reads the text, she’ll know about it. Then she can decide what to do about it.”

Zero nodded and as Athelas watched, laid his hand on her head briefly.

Pet flinched a little—almost as if she had begun to shy away but stopped herself in time—but allowed the pat on the head, and Athelas felt a faint tickle of amusement.

He met Zero’s eyes and saw in them the same question that was in his own mind, but the other fae looked away quickly enough and went back to the hall, leaving Athelas to his thoughts.

This was new, and potentially interesting. There were at least three or four reasons he could think of that would cause the reaction he had seen, and Zero’s reaction to Pet’s subtle flinch had rid his mind of two of those. The pet certainly was a scintillating housemate.

She returned to the kitchen before he could return his gaze to her face, and he heard the collection of small rustles and clinks that meant Pet was gathering together the tea tray.

Athelas was not quite sure when he became aware of it, but there was a niggling at the back of his mind as Pet came back into the room. The very faint gibbering of banshees became audible a moment later, and JinYeong frowned, looking away from his book.

He opened his mouth to direct a question at Athelas, but shut it again when Pet sat down beside him and peered at his stacks of books as she set the tray on the coffee table.

“Good grief!” she said. She looked as though she was trying very hard not to be horrified. “What are you reading those for?”

“I believe that JinYeong is conducting a species of inquiry into the female mind,” Athelas explained to her, flicking a glance toward the staircase. “Human female, of course.”

“What, through those?” Pet went through the stacks, swiftly and ruthlessly. She said to JinYeong, “You’ll only get a very partial insight if man-chest covers are all you stick to. Where did you get these, anyway? They have library tags, but you can only get out ten books at a time.”

“The librarian was verrrrry helpful,” said JinYeong, looking at her unblinkingly over the top of his book.

Pet grinned. “Female, was she? All right, at least she got you a few others—there’s a few classics in here as well as the man-chest, so you’ll get a bit of variety. Didn’t she tell you that there’s different kinds of romance?”

A slight tug to the house set off one of Athelas’ boundary magic spells, and Zero said from the hallway, “Athelas?”

“Right away, my lord,” Athelas said, which made the pet grin.

“You two are as good a show sometimes,” she told him. “All hidden signals and double-speak. You could do a stage show like that. Oi. Are these all romance?”

“Ne,” said JinYeong precisely, as Athelas rose once again and strode toward the staircase.

There was certainly a disturbance upstairs, and loth as he was to think it, the most likely cause of it was—yes, there it was, just hopping out from the upper living room doorway. The tie frog; as smug as anything made of cloth and magic and mischief could be.

Athelas took the stairs swiftly and silently as Pet argued, “You can’t just read romance if you want to get insight into the female mind! We care about other stuff too, you know! Anyway, you’re always biting women—why don’t you ask them?”

JinYeong’s tones were sulky. “They cannot answer properly when I am biting them. I am a distraction too great.”

“You’re a mosquito, you mean,” Pet’s voice said, without mincing matters. “Oi! Are you all right up there, Athelas?”

Athelas, who had leapt for and just barely missed the tie frog, took a moment to steady his voice before he replied, “Certainly. Do pour out, Pet; I’ll only be a moment. I trust there are shortbreads?”

“Got you some special ones,” she said.

She was a good pet, thought Athelas, making another dive for the tie frog.

He missed. It was certainly getting faster, and it had by now gotten the idea that he was not willing to allow it into the house. As mischievous as Pet, and every bit as determined, it seemed as though the tie frog was set upon seeking out its maker. Athelas caught it with a touch of sticky magic instead of by hand, and escorted it out by the window through which it had evidently gained ingress; an impressive feat, considering the fact that the window was open a bare centimetre.

Had the pet really been sneaking in and out again, then? He’d thought that she had recently become secure enough in her position in the household not to need to do so. This was certainly the same trick she’d used when she was hiding in the house, however; one might wonder exactly what it was that had led her to start sneaking out again.

One did, in fact, wonder.

When he returned to the lower living room, Pet was going through JinYeong’s stacks of books while he alternately objected, pretended to be reading, and hung over the edge of the couch to jealously observe which of the books she was spiriting away into which piles.

Athelas picked up his teacup and the file he had been going through that morning—now perilously close to the pet, and assuredly not safe for pet consumption—and sat back in his chair. The movement made Pet look up at him, her grey eyes bright and sharp.

“Still looking in odd corners for our murderer?”

“Always,” murmured Athelas, resisting the urge to hide the file. The pet would certainly notice—she had a terrier-like nose for discovering things that would be better not discovered—and he fancied it wasn’t yet time for her to go over that particular set of documents and reports. Instead, he crossed one leg over the other and coolly opened the file to sort through its contents. He was already quite well aware of the contents, but he had too much respect for the pet’s nose for trouble to do anything else.

It also seemed good to him, as he was sipping the last of his tea, to enquire of JinYeong, “And what has your reading hitherto taught you of the effects of biting stray women—or perhaps pets?”

Pet gave vent to a small, deep chuckle and said, “That’s just business, though, isn’t it? You need blood and you have to bite to take it. There shouldn’t be any effects that aren’t covered under side effects of vampire spit.”

JinYeong stared at her. “My bites,” he said frostily, “are soft and warm and—”

“If you start talking about how warm you are again, I’m gunna—”

“Athelas,” said Zero from the hall, in a voice that rumbled and couldn’t be ignored. “I’d appreciate it if you took a look at this.”

Athelas closed his file and put it tidily beneath his teacup on the coffee table.

“A bite is not a transaction!” snarled JinYeong. “Would you say a kiss is a transaction?”

“With you, it is,” Pet said, as Athelas rose. “Sometimes I need extra speed and strength, and you need to not feel like I’m gunna die every five minutes. Of course it’s a transaction! What else would it be?”

JinYeong’s eyes widened in outrage, sparking a small, amused delight very deep within Athelas where it couldn’t be seen without careful digging. He crossed the room in the warmth of that amusement and heard the vampire still spluttering behind him.

“With me? With me? Yah! Noh! Who else are you kissing, then?”

“There’s something wrong with you,” said Pet’s voice with finality, softening a little as Athelas passed into the hallway.

Athelas found the eyes of his lord already upon him, and came to a leisurely halt in front of him.

“Are you,” asked Zero, his voice as cold as ice, “encouraging or discouraging JinYeong?”

“In general, whatever is the most amusing in any given circumstance,” Athelas said. There was real ice in his lord’s voice, and for very good reason, but Athelas was also quite well aware of the humour there, too. “Are you suggesting that I should cease to bait the vampire? Or are you perhaps irritated by my twitting of the pet, earlier?”

There was a brief pause where Athelas was quite sure Zero was swiftly working his way through to the safest answer. At length, his lord said, “I won’t concern myself with the pet’s crushes unless they threaten our standing. JinYeong, on the other hand, shouldn’t be encouraged: he’s already unstable and I strongly disapprove of—”

“Yes, my lord?”

“—of whatever it is that’s going on in his head right now,” Zero finished, with an exasperated tone that suggested he was very conscious of how weakly he had finished the sentence.

“I was under the impression that encouragement was a stabilizing force, my lord,” he explained. “Amongst other…influences.”

“Were you,” Zero said, the certain grimness to his tone making a doubt of the question.

“Certainly, my lord. JinYeong does seem rather more…predictable in his wildness these days. Are you saying you wish me to cease er, encouraging him?”

“Don’t bait me, either,” advised Zero, but there was a cool shade of amusement to his eyes. “I still haven’t decided whether it was encouragement or discouragement.”

“You suggested that you might care for assistance, my lord?” Athelas reminded him gently. Zero was holding the heirling sword, and there was certainly something odd about it; had been ever since the pet picked it up and brought it into the human world with her.

Zero frowned, his attention elsewhere. “I’ve a feeling it will have to wait. Perhaps you could tell me why there’s a…disturbance in the toilet room?”

At the same time, Pet’s voice said, “Oi! There’s something fishy going on in the toilet!”

“It is a toilet, not a fish-bowl,” muttered JinYeong, as she got up and trotted toward the back of the house.

Athelas sighed, and set swiftly across the room in an attempt to mitigate the almost certain defeat, but when he caught up with the pet, it was already too late: she had pushed open the hanging door and was in the act of tipping up the edge of the seat with one careful finger.

To Athelas’ faintly horrified startlement, the tie frog was clammily attached to the bowl of the toilet, hunched under the toilet seat like any normal frog might have been.

Pet made a small, explosive sound of laughter and said to it, “There you are! I’ve been looking for you!”

“Really, Pet!” he expostulated, but it was certainly far too late.

“Don’t worry,” she said cheerfully, removing the tie from the toilet bowl. “I’ll wash my hands—and the frog, too. Can’t let it go hopping around in the outside world for people to see, can we?”

“I fail to see why it should hop around the inside of the house, either,” Athelas said, making one last, feeble attempt at ridding the house of the nuisance before it really took hold. “It would be far better off outside and more frog than tie, or turned back into a tie.”

“Heck!” said Pet, sounding startled, as the tie frog attempted a hasty, long-legged leap through the doorway. She caught it and murmured, “No, don’t worry, I won’t let them turn you back into a tie!”

Athelas sighed faintly. She was already crooning at it. “Very well, Pet,” he said. “But if you must keep it in the house, you’ll need to take care of it.”

“What, you mean you’re not gunna feed it and take it for walks?”

She was grinning in a most reprehensible manner.

More coldly, Athelas said, “I shall certainly not bother myself to take care of it.”

“Yes, dad,” she said.

“Becoming attached is a very bad habit of yours,” he said to her, with a three-fold layer of meaning. “You should fix that.”

And the pet, who had understood every layer, still grinned back up at him once more, and said, “Yes, dad.”