CHP13

Light filtered through the room from dusty curtains in the kitchen. It had been dusk when she last woke, and the twitter of morning songbirds greeted her now.

Her belly ached with hunger.

Seneya moved to sit up and shuffle from the couch to the kitchen and found it devoid of anything that could be considered food. She tried to remember the last time she ate and could only recall a few pieces of mealy fruit from a gas station in Nebraska.

As she rubbed at her eyes, she walked free of the kitchen, where she had tried to run the day before. She looked out where Kael had bathed her. The basin still sat with water in it, still red from her blood. Force of habit had her walking to it to dump the water. She braced her legs and grabbed the edge to heft it onto its side and yelped when the whole thing flipped and spilled out with a clang, far lighter than she’d expected.

Routine and chores, before all of this, filled the monotony of her days. Often, without being told, her first instinct told her to find things to do, things to clean. Plenty of things needed to be done and cleaned in this place.

Maybe Kael needed her as much as she needed him.

Yeah…He needs me.

The old wood floors of the cabin, trodden and dirty, stuck to her bare feet. He’d tossed clothing in every corner of the cabin, not just in his bedroom. And the kitchen, despite having no food or evidence cooking had happened in it, didn’t look much better. Every surface sported a thick film of dust, dirt, or residue.

With enough searching, she found a box of ancient washing soda stuck under a basin in the kitchen. Washing soda could clean anything.

With no water in the cabin, the bathroom situation—a lone outhouse with a bucket of ash—had her concerned about the new living arrangement.

She found a brush for the floor and cleaning tools in a small closet. Ironically, they were the only clean thing in the house.

Seneya went back outside and tugged on the pump to fill the basin with water and washing soda. She tossed all the clothes she found there to soak, then carried water back into the house to scrub into the floor and brush out the door.

She looked into the bedroom, tempted to tackle it for just a moment, but thought better. Instead, she closed the door politely.

She hemmed and hawed for a moment, then tossed every piece of fabric on the couch in the basin as well. The filthy cushions left a smell on her, and she felt like asking Kael about that creek to splash about in.

With the floors scrubbed and every surface wiped down she could manage, she went to the soaking clothes and began to dunk and scrub each of the items she found before draining the water and filling the tub again for a rinse. The water came back hazy, so she went for a third rinse, where the water came back mostly clean. It was enough. And she wrung each item out to hang out over an old nearly-dry-rotted drying line.

A loud thump disturbed her quiet work, and she turned with surprise to see Kael not ten feet from her, wings shaking out before drawing back in. A strange look swept over his face as he approached, a bag dangling from an arm.

He wore a pair of dark jeans, faded and worn, hung low on his hips with a backless black shirt above it, slatted and crossed in back as if it were some intentional style.

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.

“Go back and rest. Your wings are still healing,” Kael said before walking back into the cabin and swearing loudly.

“LITTLE STARLING!” Kael’s shout sent every nerve she had on edge.

“I didn’t touch your room,” She sputtered. Instinctively her hands drew to her chest, fisting as she shook.

He stuck his head in the door then looked out at the rest of the cabin.

The contrast in the line at his door between the cleaned floor and his bedroom made him feel a little self-conscious.

“You really should be resting,” He spoke again. Seneya felt his aura of anxiety peaking for just a moment. Her own anxiety spiked even without his aura, and he turned his head quickly to look at her.

“You asked me to tell you when I could feel your aura,” Kael muttered as he walked around to look at all the floor space that he didn’t know he had.

She shrank into herself and stepped back from him. She hadn’t thought of her wings once all morning, like second nature, sitting up and high on her back, drawn. Her tail hung out behind her, gently curled into an almost-alert posture. She waited for his response, shaking as she wondered if he would want her gone so soon.

“Confusion, sort of disjointed,” He muttered, “Makes me want to be annoyed in response.”

She opened her mouth to apologize but caught his hand rising to her face.

“First, you’re making it worse. Second, if you apologize, I won’t feed you,” Kael grumbled.

The prospect of food made the aura drop in a heartbeat, and he let loose a tense breath of relief.

Kael dangled the bag in front of her, and she watched with interest.

“Hungry?” He shook the reusable shopping bag over his arm a bit. Her stomach clenched, treating them both to a delightful intestinal song.

“Alright then,” He mused before laying the bag on the kitchen table.

He fished inside and pulled free a bundle of wrapped paper.

“I have a friend with a restaurant nearby. We have an arrangement,” Kael said before unwrapping the paper to reveal a raw slab of liver.

“I think that one’s yours,” he mused, then reached in again for another. He lifted the paper, and some sort of rich red meat peeked out. He grabbed an apple from in the bag, gestured for her to take what she wanted, and went outside, meat still in hand.

She stared at the liver. In her cleaning, she hadn’t seen anything save for a few saucepans. The propane tank on the stove appeared to be empty, and she wilted.

She selected one of the apples and stared down at the liver with confusion. Kael left with his earlier, so maybe he had a fire or something out there?

She took a bite of the apple, and her eyes watered with delight. Her belly ached and longed for her first swallow. She poured herself some water from a pitcher on the counter and into a cup she had cleaned. Every swallow brought chills of delight over her.

She took another bite, then another, and resolved herself to go see where Kael had taken the meat he’d brought in. So, she stepped outside and looked up to see him perched up on the log pile as he had been yesterday, tearing into the raw meat, biting at it with his sharp teeth.

She pursed her lips as he looked over and saw the look on her face.

He looked down at the food in his hands.

“How do I cook it?” She asked, dreading what the answer would be.

“Cook?” He raised a brow.

“I can’t eat raw meat, Kael. I don’t even know how you’re doing it!”

He stared down at the remnants of his food, then back up at her with a shrug and a grin. The gore of it clung between his sharp teeth in strands. “Why not?”

“It’ll make me sick! You just can’t eat uncooked food.” Seneya shook the paper-wrapped package at him.

“I’m going to point out that you didn’t cook that apple there.”

She stared at him, watching as he took another bite. “It’s very different.”

He chewed slowly and swallowed. “Protein, iron, fat, everything you need… Well, you need more iron, and until your teeth are clipped, you’re just going to have to deal with-.”

“Clipped!?” she squeaked.

“Yeah, so you can eat? Liver is soft and has more iron, so it’s good for now.” He waved his hand dismissively.

“I can eat by cooking my food, Kael.”

“Thirty minutes of clipping and filing versus hours of cooking. Think about it.”

“I’m fine with spending hours cooking. You can’t just eat raw meat!”

He stared at her with apparent confusion, and she wondered for a moment if it was her gift causing it, but she was just as dumbfounded as him.

“Okay, so you obviously can eat raw meat… You do this often?”

“Once or twice a day, yes?” He raised a thick eyebrow as the corners of his mouth curled in delight.

“But like, you never get sick?”

“From meat? From food? Have you ever gotten sick before?”

Seneya had to think about it, genuinely. She couldn’t honestly remember a time that she had been sick, not even a fever before the last year. But then, she thought about the past few months and the months before that. She couldn’t stomach food, felt nauseous. She told him this, and he looked down at the ground in thought.

“What were they feeding you?”

“Uhh…” She thought of the words to use in his language, but it didn’t come. She swapped to English. “Waffles, burgers, meatloaf-.”

He stopped her, lip curled in disgust as he jumped down. “You’re not sick. That’s just not food for us. Your body was rejecting it.”

“And this is?” She said, pointing to the last bite in his folded paper.

“Yes,” he said succinctly.

“So like how….”

He sighed with exasperation and went inside the kitchen, then to the living quarters where the fireplace was. He stoked it and rummaged over the logs for a bit before the fire roared to life, far too quickly for his attempts.

He grabbed a kettle hung by the fireplace, filled it with water from the kitchen pitcher, and let it hang over the fire.

“We’ll pour a little boiling water over it to cook the outside a bit and get you a knife or something. I’m not cooking your food. That will make you sick,” Kael said resolutely.

Her tongue toyed with her teeth, still shocked about the prospect of ‘clipping’ and ‘filing’ them.

“If this works for you, we’ll clip your teeth later. If you don’t like it then, we just won’t do it when they grow back.

“Grow back? My teeth grow back?”

“We live a long time, too long just to have one set of teeth, peh. You’ve lost a tooth or two, surely,” He muttered.

“No! I lost my baby teeth, but….”

“It’s just like that. Once they get worn, they’ll start feeling itchy, and you can just… you know, pop it out and wait for the next to come in after a day or so,” He flicked his tongue over the lower half of his jaw and toyed with one of his canines.

“Please don’t,” she said, looking away.

He grumbled as the kettle began to whistle, snatching it off the fire bare-handed, carried it to the kitchen, and threw her liver into one of the clean pots. He poured the water over it, swirling as he did so before draining it off just as quickly just outside the door.

“There, now eat!” he commanded, shaking the pot at her. She stepped back self-consciously.

“EAT, or no more apples,” he said, shaking the pot at her. She grimaced and pulled the slab of liver from the pot, lamenting the lack of cutlery or anything. She held it to her mouth, closing her eyes as she bit down onto it and tugged. It peeled away easier than she thought, and though the texture was nearly offensive, her mouth watered harder than it had in nearly a year when she first started feeling the changes.

“Right?” he asked, watching as her disgusted reaction moved to ambivalence.

She averted her gaze. It tasted better than anything she had put in her mouth in a long time. She looked over at her half-eaten apple, then to the slab of liver—she preferred the liver.

“You’re starved, yesterday took a lot out of you, and today you’re insisting on cleaning my home. I appreciate it, and you did good, but what I do for you is not dependent on whether or not you’re washing my linens!”

“Linens?”

He tugged at the waistband of his pants and showed off the bandage-like linen wraps that were all over the cabin. Seneya had washed nearly a dozen of them.

Of course.

They were his underwear…

She pursed her lips.

“Once I can find his royal pain in my thrin, I’ll have some and clothes sent for you,” he muttered as he gazed from her to the newly-cleaned cabin.

“Thrin?”

“Ass!” he announced in plain English, “I swear, whatever that spirit taught you, he didn’t teach you the important words.”

She shook her head, rather preoccupied with the food he’d given her. She felt disgusting with it in her hands, lukewarm, slimy, lightly textured from the boiled water poured over it. Something instinctual kicked in, and she almost wished that Kael hadn’t done that with the water.

“Want your teeth clipped now, after all?” He grinned.

She shook her head and excused herself to go outside to finish it. She felt so weird eating it in front of him. It seemed embarrassing somehow. But clearly, he had no compunction with doing it in front of her. The more she thought about it, picked apart the logic, the more she assumed it was because she felt strange eating something so abnormal.

He stuck his head out the door, watching as she tugged another mouthful free.

“By the way. It’s grains,” he said before ducking back in the house.

She swallowed the food in her mouth and stuck her head back in. “What?”

“Why you haven’t been able to eat. Grains, corn sugar, rice, wheat, you now, grains. Your body doesn’t get any nutritional value from it and rejects it. Same for most cooked food.”

She thought about it and realized that most food she had been given over the past year of her life has been just that, very grain heavy.

She finished her liver and went back for her apple and a second, much to Kael’s approval.

“Eat. You’ll snap in half just like that,” Kael said, snapping his fingers. As he did so, a black flame lit and flickered between his digits before dissipating, startling Seneya. “If you don’t get some muscle or something soon….”

“Oh, right, you’ve not gotten your fire,” He mused.

The look of bewilderment across her face drove him to hold his palm out, face-up, letting a cluster of jet-black starlight flicker over it for a moment.

“Don’t touch it,” He warned, and her eyes went wide, full of delight.

“How?” She asked. She swallowed a mouthful of apple and choked lightly with a cough, torn between her desperate appetite for both food and knowledge.

“Well, it just happens. You’ll feel your skin tingle, and you can just concentrate on it, and it’ll….” As he said this, his arms up to his elbows flashed into flame. It looked good against the tattoos, and she recalled maybe seeing it before he unbound her.

She jumped back.

“Relax. As long as you don’t touch it, it’s fine,” Kael chuckled as he lowered his flaming hand to the table to touch one of the apples. He cupped it in his palm and twitched his fingers lightly.

The flame flicked in sharp ribbons, each glint of starlight, not a light, but a glint. It shivered, and Kael tilted his fingers. The apple held its shape for only a second, then juice splattered between his fingers, dripping onto the table in a slow drool. Finally, he let the flame go and deposited the apple back onto the table as it cascaded down into a pile of thousands of small wet pieces, each precision cut.

“Perfectly edible, I assure you,” Kael said as he watched her pick up a small piece and squint at it.

“Have you hurt anyone with it by accident before?”

He looked down at his hand and nodded.

“Don’t sneak up on someone when their flames are out,” was all he said in response.