Tags: asexual character, biromantic character, curses (accidental), interspecies romance, magic user, magical mishap, mlm, norway, past tense, pov third person limited, reaper, witch
*
The door squeaked when it opened, letting in a gust of cold autumn air. The smell of watery asphalt and wet leaves rolled into the room and curled about the counter, bright and vibrant and rotting beneath.
Thomas was cleaning up after the afternoon rush, such as it was, loading plates and cups into the dishwasher. “Be right with you,” he called, aiming for cheerful.
It had been a weird day, emotionally speaking. Amanda had called around lunchtime about a CD he had left behind when he moved out—
“Keep it,” he’d said into the phone, speaking quietly so the old ladies from the poker club wouldn’t overhear. He and Amanda had barely talked since he moved out. It was strange to realize that they were both still out in the world, existing independently in their separate spaces.
It wasn’t that he still loved her.
He did still love her, and she still loved him, but their feelings were out of proportion and at the wrong angles, a story you read over and over until the sentences went stale.
Thinking about her listening to Postgirobygget in her Bergen apartment was almost nice. It still stung, but he liked to imagine that there was something left from the past six years—even after how everything shook out—that was worth keeping.
But Amanda had laughed, soft and warm. “You’re the only one who owns anything that’ll play it, Thomas.”
“Not true,” he said, though it was mostly true. “Some computers—”
“When can you pick it up?”
“Uh.” He glanced at the calendar over the counter, tapping his fingers against the back of his phone. He worked most days, but if he wanted to take a weekend off, it wasn’t like anyone could stop him: he owned the place. “Schedule’s pretty packed. We’ve got the last of the summer tourists driving though, and then the traffic safety charm rush…”
There was a pop of static on the line and then a crackle.
“Is that—” Amanda said, half laughing. “Are you spelling the line?”
“I’m. No,” Thomas said. He pressed his fingers against the hard plastic of his phone case, forcing them still, but it was too late—the spell was tapped out and set loose, and now the connection was breaking up, squealing in his ear.
“—better—e on your end and not mine,” Amanda said.
“I really didn’t mean to this time,” Thomas had said. With a final, spark-pop and crackle-shriek, the phone had gone dead.
The whole thing had left him off-balance; it sat in his gut like a bad meal, heavy and unpleasant and hard to digest. His phone hadn’t been able to find a signal after the call, either. God only knew when that would show back up. It had been a while since he’d had a spell mishap.
“Mishap” might be the wrong word. Usually, whatever spell he was tapping out helped solve the problem he was thinking about at the time, even if the solution was unorthodox.
Take, for example, the broken cell phone. It kept him from talking to Amanda for a while, and that was fine by him.
He washed his hands, tapped the screen to check if the signal had come back (it hadn’t), and turned to greet the new customer.
Eikehuset got a steady stream of visitors. Some passed through on their way to Bergen or Stavanger, or, if they were taking the long way around, Oslo. Others were locals, or next-to-locals from other towns-that-weren’t-really-big-enough-to-be-called-towns nearby: artsy city types living out their cottagecore dreams on newly-bought småbruk; older people meeting for cake and companionship; parents rewarding their children with cinnamon buns and hot chocolate after a walk; workers stopping by for coffee or lunch or after late shifts that ran until sunrise.
And then there was the final type of customer: those who needed a spell.
Running the food-service aspects of the shop was enjoyable, but even if it hadn’t been, his spellwork would have kept Eikehuset in business. State-authorized and state-subsidized, Eikehuset was part of a network of stores that doubled as spell suppliers. Travelling without up-to-date safety charms was dangerous, so every community needed someone who could make them. After his years-long Bergen detour with Amanda, Thomas was happy to fill that niche someplace out of the way.
He’d seen a bit of everything when it came to customers, so he expected a bit of everything when he turned to meet the stranger at the counter.
The stranger, who was—
Thomas blinked.
Who was—
The man standing in front of him was—
He had—
He was so nondescript it was difficult to look at him.
It wasn’t that he looked average, exactly, or that Thomas couldn’t take in his appearance. Part of his brain didn’t want to look at him. The visual input scanned as something as profound as wallpaper, as exciting as drying paint. And the second Thomas’s eyes slid away from him—which they did immediately, like water off a non-stick pan—it was impossible to recall how he looked, even though Thomas had just seen him.
“Hello,” said the man.
“Uh, yeah,” said Thomas, blinking. He had a headache coming on. “Sorry. How can I help you?”
The man looked at him and then at the counter between them. His expression—what little had been on his face in the first place—didn’t change. “What would you recommend?”
That, at least, was a question Thomas could answer. He forced his arms to stay straight at his sides to keep from tapping on the edge of the counter—there had been enough of that today, thanks—and smiled. “Depends what you’re looking for! We’ve got a selection of teas, coffees, and hot chocolates, as well as assorted pastries, muffins, pies, sandwiches, and the soup of the day. If you’re really jonesing for a meal, though, you might want to check out the pub down the street.”
The stranger frowned at him. “Here is fine.”
“…right,” Thomas said. This was so far shaping up to be a lot like playing charades. “So… any of those options sound interesting, or should I… just… choose something for you?”
The stranger did a little blink-and-head-twitch combo. Thomas just had the time to think his eyelashes were pretty long before the memory that gave the thought context was washed out of his brain. It was unpleasant, having a piece of himself come apart like wet tissue paper.
“Please,” the stranger said.
Thomas pushed the nail of his thumb into the pad of his pointer finger and held it there. Whatever was up with the guy, he seemed willing to experiment, and far be it for Thomas to keep a man from experiencing the luxury of indecision. As long as he could pay, everything would be fine.
“Where are you from?” Thomas asked.
“Not here,” said the stranger, and didn’t elaborate.
“Right,” Thomas said, because what else could he say? Instead, he got to work. He put a cheese melt (mushroom and red onion) on the grill. He filled a bowl with the soup of the day (tomato) and poured a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows. The stranger watched him put everything on a tray—Thomas added a marvpostei for dessert and a glass of water for free—and said nothing.
“That’ll be two hundred and ninety kroner,” Thomas said, expecting a wince, but the guy’s expression didn’t change. He fished a card from his black leather wallet. It was also black, with a raven sketched onto the surface in bright silver ink.
Thomas stared at it.
“You have that specially designed?” he asked. “Or, uh, did you draw it yourself?”
The stranger looked at him and to the card and back again. “No,” he said, his voice as bland and nondescript as his appearance. “It’s a company card.”
“Yeah?” Thomas asked. “What’s the company?”
“Private,” the guy said, and then fumbled his way through paying. It was embarrassing to watch, but like everything else about the man, Thomas found it hard to make himself care. It took a good three minutes of the man failing to find the right approach to defeating the card terminal before Thomas managed to cut through the fog of disinterest.
“Let me help you,” he said, and reached out.
Their fingers brushed.
There was a loud crack and the smell of burning gasoline—
The air shuddered and shifted like a heat haze, thick as an emulsion on the edge of breaking—
The other guy tore his hand back.
The card clattered onto the counter.
This memory stuck, too jarring to slip away like his thoughts about the stranger’s appearance had.
“Ah,” Thomas said. “Sorry.”
He wasn’t sorry.
But he might be having a stroke. He’d read something on the internet once about smelling things that weren’t there and oncoming strokes. He wasn’t sure if it was true, but it sure came to the forefront of his brain at moments like this.
He wasn’t having a stroke. Probably.
There was just something about this man, standing here in his café despite the wards Thomas had painstakingly tapped out and carved and whispered into every corner of the building.
The sensible thing to do would be to let it go and not ask questions. Maybe offer the guy a bit of rice porridge for good fortune, just in case he turned out to be a tusse or some other cryptid.
Thomas picked up the card. It was strangely greasy to the touch, like it had been smeared with oil. He glanced down, expecting the soapy, rainbow sheen of an oil slick, but it was just—normal, everyday plastic.
Carefully, he pressed the card against the reader and then slid it back across the counter.
This time, their fingers didn’t touch.
The stranger took his tray and sat down at a table in the corner. He pulled out a thick, softcover book. Thomas watched him leaf through the pages with an intensity that had him leaning over almost double, and then he watched him eat, trying not to be too obvious about staring… and failing.
On the bright side, the stranger didn’t appear to have noticed. He was eating with the kind of singular focus Thomas had rarely seen outside of a monster movie.
But it was probably fine. Thomas tapped his fingers on the countertop, unable to stop, needing to get some energy out somehow without pacing. The stranger had never been here before and was probably just passing through—it was unlikely that he’d come again. And even if he did—well.
Hopefully, he’d be a bit easier to pin down next time.
The stranger finished his meal. He left the dishes on the table, and, without looking back, he walked out of the door and out of Thomas’s life.
*
And that’s where it might have ended, if it hadn’t been for the spell.
*
Three days later saw the first properly miserable autumn storm of the year. The rain came down in sheets. The wind tore into any patch of exposed skin, digging in deep and sour. The sky stayed dark even in the middle of the day, the colour of coffee stains. Even the café was affected: the lights dimmed and brightened and dimmed again at random; cold seeped under the door and through the windows; and the wind shrieked through the glass. Thomas tried to combat it by peddling out a couple of space heaters and cranking the temperature up, but the heat refused to spread out into the rest of the room. Instead, it hung around the counter like a listless ghost.
Maybe it was lucky that any potential customer was staying home today.
As he thought it, the door to the café swung open.
The stranger with the weird credit card stepped inside.
Thomas wasn’t sure how he recognised him, but he did—the moment the guy came in, there was this shift in the air, a shiver that made him think: oh. It’s you.
The guy was wearing a cherry-red all-weather jacket today, its edges lined with silver high-visibility stripes. Everything above his neck was soaked, and his hair was dark with water; it ran down his forehead and temples in lazy little rivulets.
“How can I help you?” Thomas asked.
The stranger marched up to the counter, leaving mud in his wake.
“You cursed me,” he said. His eyelashes were clumped together with rainwater, spiky and long like the legs of a spider, and his eyes were dark and very, very wide.
Scared, Thomas’s mind supplied.
“Sorry?” he managed. He hadn’t—
But he remembered tapping his fingers against the grain of the wood. With a sinking feeling, he remembered thinking, idly, that he hoped the guy would be easier to pin down next time.
He hadn’t meant to curse him.
But he had.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again, more sincerely.
The stranger’s mouth thinned. He drew in a short, shaky breath. It sounded like he was breathing through a straw.
“You need to reverse it,” he said. “I can’t do my job like this. I’m useless. I’ll—I’ll give you anything you want.”
“I, uh,” Thomas said. “It was an accident.”
“That doesn’t help,” the stranger snapped, and then went pale. “Not… that… you’re obligated to help, of course, but I promise the compensation will be worth it.”
“Okay,” Thomas said, trying to calm him down. “Why don’t you come behind the counter and sit down, and I’ll get us both some tea.”
“I don’t want tea,” the stranger said, bleak as bones. “I want you to fix this.”
“Right, well,” Thomas said. “That’s good and all, but I need to figure out what the spell did before I can fix it, and that’ll take a hot minute, so I suggest you send your boss a message and settle down with a cup of something.”
The stranger crossed his arms.
“Fine,” he said. “But I want hot chocolate.”
*
“You look… different,” Thomas said. “Than last time, I mean.”
The stranger was perched by the same table he had sat at his previous visit, staring into the depths of his mug with an unnerving intensity.
“Part of the job is to not be noticed,” he said into his hot chocolate. “You took that away from me, so now you’re noticing.”
As he talked, he seemed to fill out more, taking up space like a drop of ink spreading through a glass of milk. Every minute, Thomas noticed new details about him—the soft curve of his chin, and the way his hair curled with the rain. Or had it always curled like that?
He cleared his throat. “I really am sorry.”
“Me too,” the stranger muttered, then winced. His mouth moved soundlessly, like he was rehearsing, and then he said, “Sorry. Please don’t change your mind on this.”
“On what? Helping you?” Thomas asked, bewildered. “Why would I? It’s my fault.”
“Affective magic,” the stranger said. “You must have thought I was a threat in some way.”
“No,” Thomas lied. The stranger levelled him with a stare. “Okay, mostly no. I just”—he tapped the table twice before he could stop himself—“you didn’t feel right.”
The look the stranger gave him was flat, and the tone of his voice was worse. “Didn’t I.”
“When something messes with my thoughts, that’s a bad sign, typically,” Thomas said.
“You weren’t supposed to notice!” the stranger snapped. “I’m”—and his hands came up to hide his face, fingers pressing against his eyelids—“I’m a ferryman. When someone dies on the road, I pick up their spirit and drive them to the other side. If everyone can see me, that’s not the kind of thing I can get away with for long.”
Thomas stared at him. His brain felt like a staircase with steps missing. “When you say ‘drive’…?”
“I have a company car,” the stranger said miserably.
“Right,” Thomas said. Then, gently teasing, “And does it have ravens on it too?”
The stranger blinked up at him. His head twitched to the side. Then he snorted. “I wish.”
“Maybe suggest it at the next employee meeting?”
The stranger lowered his hands, placing them flat on the table. His fingernails were painted turquoise except for a small part on his thumbnail; he must have touched it before it could dry. The sight of it—that tiny gap in the blueish-green—made Thomas feel… something. Fondness, maybe. It was this mark of being a person, of being someone who carefully filled in the blank space and then ruined it just a little, stamped into this guy’s nail. Thomas couldn’t look away.
“I’m Thomas, by the way,” he said. “And my powers have been a bit out of whack since I, ah. Well. They’ve been unreliable lately.”
The stranger shot him another long look, though this one was less flat. His head did that little twitch again. “…you can call me Jay.”
“Right,” Thomas said, smiling. “Sorry again, Jay. Let’s break you of that curse.”
*
And he meant to.
He hadn’t had to undo one of his own curses before. Mostly, he steered clear of casting them; it seemed like bad luck to bring misfortune on someone else. The Jay Debacle (as he called it quietly in his own head) was proof of that.
Curses came in all shapes and sizes, some thin like a spider’s web and others spiky like barbed wire, some sharp like glass and others soft and suffocating like a living and particularly malicious blanket. They were invisible unless one knew how to look, and Thomas pulled out his quartz glasses from the back office, just to be sure.
Jay was sitting with his knees up in one of the booths. He looked up from his plasticky guidebook—the cover read “NAF VEIBOK” in large, golden letters—and startled. “What are those?”
Thomas’s face heated. “They help—”
“—your uniform?” Jay asked, grinning.
“The curse-finding.” Thomas put the glasses on. The light in the room shifted. Jay looked the same, but what resembled a thick, rose-coloured rope came out of his chest, right between the ribs. It hung lazily in the air between them, and—
Oh.
Oh, great.
It was tethered to Thomas’s sternum. The sight of it coming out of his own chest, solid in every way but the tangible, made him light-headed. He sat down next to Jay with a heavy thump. The tether between them shrank to fit their closeness. Experimentally, Thomas leaned away; the tether lengthened again.
“Thank God,” he said under his breath.
“What?” Jay asked, frowning. When Thomas told him about the tether, he winced and then tucked his book into the depths of his bright-red jacket. “That’s not ideal.”
“It could be worse?”
Jay frowned harder. “My boss would disagree.”
*
After some testing, they managed to get a better feeling for how the tether worked. They were tied together, but there didn’t seem to be a limit to how far from each other they could go. Disguise spells and potions refused to stick to either of them. Now that he knew the tether was there, Thomas could feel it. It sat in his chest like the soft hum of the motor in an expensive car, or the sound of the café refrigerator kicking on, blending into the background noise of his body.
It was harder to work out how to break the curse. That first week, they tried verbal and somatic approaches, a bottled curse-dispeller, and a pair of enchanted silver scissors, but to no avail. The thread between them refused to be broken.
“I really thought this would do it.” Thomas sighed, stabbing listlessly at the tether between them with the scissors.
“It would have been nice,” said Jay. “As a metaphor.”
“Yeah, no luck there.” Thomas sighed. “I’ll try calling in a favour.”
“And get me some hot chocolate?”
“Sure.”
“Oh,” Jay said, like he hadn’t expected Thomas to agree. He jerked his head down, mouth a sharp, unhappy line. “I can’t really pay?”
Don’t worry, I can take care of you.
Thomas cleared his throat. He tried to clear the thought away, too, but it stuck. It was just—
He felt bad about cursing him, of course, but in the days since Jay returned to the café, Thomas had increasingly come to like the guy. Maybe it was the laser-sharp intensity of his focus, or how he treated every task like it was the most important thing he would ever do, or how he could never just sit like a normal person, or the sharp way he smiled, or the way he wore nail polish but never neatly—
It was just. God help him, he liked having Jay around.
“You get the ‘friends and family’ discount,” Thomas said.
“We’re friends?” Jay asked, like he wanted to be sarcastic, but he was smiling, still looking down at his shoes.
“You get free hot chocolate regardless,” Thomas said, and went to make a cup. Over his shoulder he said, “The ‘friend’ part is up to you.”
“We’ll see,” Jay called after him. Thomas grabbed a mug from the rack, hiding a smile in his free hand.
*
After the scissors failed, Thomas called a potioneer from Andøya, who rolled in with a small army of tiny crystal bottles and succeeded solely in turning both of their hair bright purple.
Jay called in a friend of a friend who covered them head to toe in red ink and made them stand back to back in a circle of pine trees for the final two hours before dawn, shivering.
“Is this some kind of reaper hazing?” Thomas had hissed. It was very dark and very cold. The trees around them were lined with perching ravens. “I know that species of raven isn’t endemic to this region.”
“Ferryman, not reaper,” Jay said. Thomas could practically feel him rolling his eyes. “And I don’t know what hazing is.”
“What?”
Jay went stiff. “I’ve been a bit busy! What is it?”
Thomas grinned into the darkness, grateful that Jay couldn’t see him. It was just—he just felt—
Fondness.
You’re a person, he thought. And I’m a person. And we’re standing back to back in the woods, and it sucks, but we’re here, together, in this moment.
“Well,” he said, “hazing is…”
*
Five months later, Jay still didn’t get hazing, and they still hadn’t found a way to break the curse. Jay camped out at Eikehuset, coming in every morning to sit with his knees up in one of the booths, feet planted firmly on the upholstery. It had started as passive aggression, but now it was… nice. Familiar.
“My boss is still angry,” Jay reported, leaning his chin against his knees. “So, nothing new there. And reaping is pretty much my whole life, so. This is an adjustment.”
“Enjoying your extended vacation?” Thomas asked, handing him a mug of hot chocolate.
Jay looked at the mug and then at him. For a moment, his eyes seemed huge. The bright light of the sun reflecting off of the snow outside lit them up, gave them the colours of a forest pond in the middle of summer. Out of nowhere, Thomas was struck with the urge to hug him. He didn’t know why, but he felt it, all the way down to his bones—like he was already watching a future version of himself do it and feeling jealous.
“I’m a bit restless,” Jay said quietly. He unfolded himself like a letter and took a sip of cocoa. “Thank you for this.”
“No problem. Never a problem,” Thomas said. “And I’m sorry. Again. I really didn’t mean to do this to you.”
“To us. And I know. You’re making up for it.”
Thomas sighed. “Trying to, anyway.”
“What’s next?”
“I’m following some leads. There’s a guy in Finland who might be willing to take a trip down to take a look. He does—what was it?—spectral analytics.”
Jay did his little blink-and-head-twitch thing. It was really—
Cute, Thomas realised. It was incredibly cute.
“Ghosts?” Jay asked. He put down the mug and dug into his pockets, pulling out a bottle of nail polish.
“Apparently, he’s working on a method to apply it to all intangible phenomena.”
Jay gave a small, judgmental “hmm” as he unscrewed the nail polish. “Good luck to him.”
Thomas laughed. “You don’t think we should ask him?”
“No,” Jay said, applying an uneven streak of turquoise to his thumbnail. He was practically allergic to straight lines, and it showed. “But we might as well try.”
Without any input from his brain, Thomas asked: “Do you—Do you want me to do that for you? The nail polish?”
Jay blinked at him, iceberg slow. “I— Sure.”
Which was how Thomas found himself holding Jay’s hand in one of his own and applying nail polish with the other.
“It’s a good colour,” he said. “It suits you.”
“Thank you,” Jay said with a small smile, not quite looking at him.
“Did you… were you wearing it the first time you came in?” Thomas asked, because his mind was blank, and they were practically holding hands, and he couldn’t think of what else to say.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Even if no one else could see it, I still could, you know? It’s nice to have a thing that’s mine.”
Thomas squeezed his hand gently, careful not to mess up the nail polish. For a moment, he’d thought that holding hands would feel strange. Like touching some forbidden, magical artefact that might break beneath his fingers. Instead, it just felt nice. Familiar.
“I guess I won’t be able to see it anymore once the curse is broken,” Thomas said.
“It’ll be different,” Jay said. They were sitting very close. “You know me now.”
His thumb stroked up the line of Thomas’s palm. Thomas couldn’t look away from the motion. It was a light touch, but it was grounding, settling him inside himself. When he looked up, Jay was smiling, bright enough to steal the breath right out of his lungs, and—
Oh.
*
In the end, Thomas called a curse breaker. She came into the café six months after the curse had set in, heels clicking on the floor tiles, and put a small paper bag onto the counter.
“First of all,” she said, “here’s your CD back.”
Thomas gave Amanda an awkward smile. She leaned up to kiss his cheek. At the other end of the café, Jay stood up so fast his chair fell over.
Amanda looked at him and then back at Thomas. “Thomas,” she said, half laughing. “That’s not a curse. It’s a soul bond.”
“A what?”
“Once in a blue moon, two people meet and their souls catch—like, hook onto each other and spin out like a tether. A soul bond spells out unrealised potential, romantic or platonic. It’s like… a need for connection so strong it ties two people together until the connection becomes real and internalised.”
As Amanda broke it down for them, Jay kept looking at him, eyes unreadable and bright like copper.
“What does that mean, ‘internalised’ ?” Jay asked.
“It means that you have to come over here and hold hands. Whatever is at the core of your connection, you both need to say it out loud,” Amanda said. “And you both need to believe it. Then you won’t need an outside link anymore.”
Jay came over, moving like a spooked animal.
Thomas took his hand and squeezed it. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
Jay nodded jerkily. “I’m good.”
“I…” Thomas said. Now they were both looking at him. “I think I came here because it felt safe. After Amanda… that felt like that was it for me. I couldn’t imagine caring for anyone else like that again. I couldn’t touch that part of myself without it hurting, but I couldn’t let go of it, either, so I was holding on and trying not to at the same time. And then you came in the door, and even when I couldn’t keep my eyes on you I wanted to know you. And now that I know you, how could I do anything but love you?” His vision blurred with tears. “How could I do anything but let go?”
“Are you crying?” Jay asked, teasing, but he was looking misty, too. “I. Me too. Without the ex, sorry Amanda—”
“It’s fine.”
Jay smiled at her and took a deep breath. He turned back to Thomas. “I hated being seen, in the beginning. And then I hated that I didn’t hate it, when it was you looking at me. You were kind to me when I was a stranger. You gave me hot chocolate, you fixed my nail polish, you’re—you’re good. And I love you. Clearly.”
“Clearly?” Thomas laughed. His blood was singing like an electrical current. There was a rushing sound, growing louder.
“Yeah,” Jay said, squeezing his hand. The noise around them was deafening, but Thomas could still hear Jay clearly.
There was a loud crack!, then silence. Amanda gave them a sly smile and went outside without another word.
“Did it work?” Thomas asked.
“I think so,” Jay said. “I feel different.”
Thomas looked at him. His dark eyes were huge in the fluorescent lights of the café. “You look the same.”
“I’m not the same,” Jay said. His appearance rippled like water, turning nondescript and then back again. “And you aren’t, either.”
“I’m not what?” Thomas asked. He felt a smile coming on, unstoppable, filling his mouth like sunlight. Jay was smiling, too, baring a sharp little slice of teeth.
“You’re not the same,” he said. “You look settled.”
“Yeah?” Thomas said, but he wasn’t really asking. As Jay said it, he felt it; in his bones, in his body, right between the ribs.