2018 Halloween fic: If At First ...
Just a little bit of nonsense for Halloween. It's kind of about Brian and Justin, although they only make guest appearances.
The First Time
Melissande sat sipping a herbal tea. Something was wrong. Or rather, something hadn't gone right. She didn't know what, but it was bound to involve someone here in her particular "protection patch" on Liberty Avenue. She had the feeling she'd made a mistake in taking an early night last night.
Melissande was … well, not quite an angel, and not quite a fairy godmother; like many others on the planet, she was something between the two. It was her role in this life to try to make sure that certain key things happened. Or didn't happen. To protect not individuals so much as the correct flow of light through certain individuals.
Today, something was blocking that flow.
So, in the unlikely guise of a somewhat homely transvestite sooth-sayer named, of all ridiculous things, "Mysterious Marilyn", Melissande sat at the counter in the Liberty Diner, and sipped her lavender tea, and listened, trying to work out what had caused this blockage.
"So Brian asked me and I said they should call him Abraham because I read this thing online about how someone was trying to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln being a vampire slayer, so it's going to become a really cool name again."
The uncomfortable tingle down her spine told her that she'd just heard something related to the "wrongness". She just wasn't sure what yet.
She turned a little to view the speaker. It was Kinney's little puppy dog friend (Mikey the Mutt, as Melissande had named him to herself), yapping away as usual to the queen (Emmett the Empath) and the accountant (Tedious Ted). He was waving around photos of himself and Kinney with a baby.
Of course, Melissande reflected, the blonde woman she thought of as Lindsay the Lesbo was expecting Kinney's kid. Looks like she'd delivered.
"Abraham?" Emmett didn't sound convinced. "Mikey, I don't know. I think you've saddled the kid with a name that's only going to cause him trouble."
If she'd been standing, Melissande would almost certainly have fallen. As it was she clutched desperately at the counter, trying to retain her balance. The images flooding her brain had her completely disoriented.
She saw a child - six, maybe seven years old being chased by a pack of older boys, with shaven heads shouting something like "Come here, little jew-boy". The child, sensing the malice in the words, was desperate to get away and swerved, running into the road. The scene fractured then into glimpses of blood and bone and horror, till she was left with one final image of Kinney, his face devoid of any emotion, standing in stark isolation as they lowered a small coffin into the ground.
O-kay.
There it was. Abraham. That name couldn't happen. Shouldn't happen. Wasn't meant to happen. So why had it.
"It's lucky I dropped by the loft before I met Brian at Woody's. I heard Mel's message and made him go straight to the hospital instead of going to Babylon."
Again the tingle.
O-kay. So Kinney wasn't supposed to go "straight to the hospital".
She'd have to persuade The Powers That Be to do a re-run.
The Second Time
At her level, she didn't know why Kinney was important, but he clearly was. Because as soon as she made contact, there was a moment of frozen silence, and while she was still marshaling her powers to plead for their intervention, there was a wrenching sensation and lighting in the diner changed. She was still sitting at the counter, still sipping her lavender tea, but outside instead of morning sunlight, there was the glow of street lamps. The annoying tingle in her spine indicated that the wrongness was still there, but muted and intermittent. She had a chance.
As she was trying to work out what to do, Mutt Mikey came in the door, greeted exuberantly as always by the red-wigged woman Melissande/ Marilyn thought of as Dreadnaught Debbie. She supposed it was no wonder that Mikey was such a mewling mutt; he'd clearly never felt strong enough to stand up to his mother, but he'd learned that whining nearly always caught her attention and usually her sympathy. Tonight was no different.
"I've been calling Brian trying to get him to meet me at Woody's but he's not answering his phone. I guess I'll have to drop by the loft and see if he's there."
'Oh, no you don't', Melissande/Marilyn thought to herself. She stood. It was times like these that her Marilyn persona came in very handy. She sashayed over to the booth where DD had installed her son.
"Why don't you let me see if the cards can tell you where he is," she offered. Then, before he could respond, she sat down and suddenly the cards were spreading themselves across the table.
"He's not at the loft," she said positively. "He's still at work."
She tapped on the 8 of Pentacles card. "Labor", she said. "Perfectionism."
"He'll be in Woody's later," tapping on the 3 of Cups. "Revelry, social drinking."
She surveyed the cards. "Around an hour from now."
"So you don't have to go to the loft and you've got time for a decent dinner," DD cut in forcefully. "The special today is meatloaf, or do you just want a burger?"
The Mutt's response was muted to Melissande as she studied the cards.
There was the King of Cups - inverted as usual for Kinney. She knew he thought of himself as anything but Cups, the "heart" cards. Pentacles, all about money, maybe. Or Rods; Rods were after all a potent male symbol which Kinney would appreciate. Or, most likely ill-omened Swords- painful lessons.
But he wasn't. He was Cups, inverted because his true nature had been warped out of shape at some point. Melissande wasn't sure but she had the feeling that TPTB had allowed that to happen for some reason. She sensed it was a process like tempering steel. Heartless, of course, but then, they weren't exactly sentimental. They needed Kinney to be a certain way, and would have no qualms about shaping him to suit their ends.
But clearly they didn't want the cold and empty man she'd glimpsed at that graveyard, so that future had to be changed.
She was about to pull the cards together when, lurking at the edge of the spread, she saw one card behaving very strangely. At one instant it was the Page of Cups - hidden emotions to be revealed. At another, it seemed to morph into the Knight of Cups - young love in action. Both indicated a fair-haired young man.
'Interesting', Melissande thought to herself.
She rose as EE and TT entered the diner and headed towards the booth where Mikey was about to start on his meatloaf.
Good. That should keep him out of mischief. They'll all go to Woody's together, and then, inevitably, on to Babylon.
She noted with relief that the tingling in her spine had stopped. Things were back on track.
Wondering if it was worth trying to use to cards to get a clearer purpose, she left the diner. Cursing the damned stupid shoes that this guise forced her to wear, she walked painfully down the street, and considered. Reluctantly she gave up the idea. Trying to do a reading for her own benefit never worked. She could do them for others, but never for herself. She wouldn't get guidance, all she would do would be to increase her own confusion.
She knew that. It was a sign of how drained this little rerun had made her that she would even think of it.
She needed chamomile tea and a good night's sleep. She should be able to relax now.
*****
Believing that she'd fixed whatever was wrong, Melissande was understandably both perturbed and annoyed when she woke the next morning to find her spine tingling once again.
Cursing the amount of time it took to apply makeup and wig and hobble anywhere in those damned shoes, she headed off as quickly as she could to the diner.
This time, Kinney was with them.
"It was just lucky I reminded him that Lindsay was almost ready to pop and he should at least put his phone on vibrate and keep it in his pocket," MM was telling his mother.
"Yeah, well, if you hadn't been trying to grope me, I could still have ignored it and I wouldn't have to have gone through that fucking trauma," Kinney grumbled.
MM, predictably, flushed like a guilty tomato. "I wasn't trying to grope you," he defended. "I just …"
"Snatch!" Kinney interrupted. "I mean who the fuck wants to see snatch? Let alone all that fucking gross shit that comes out with the baby. I may never fucking recover."
"But you're glad you were there, aren't you?" MM insisted. "I mean, he is your son."
"He's the Munchers' kid," Kinney asserted. "I'll just be around enough to give him the occasional dose of testosterone that he can't get from his Mommies."
"So what are they going to call him?" EE asked.
"Abrah…"
Third Time's Lucky - right?
No visions this time. No need to contact TPTB, just a wrenching disturbance in the ether and then, once more, the light had changed, Kinney had vanished, the clothes of the guys in the booth had changed and Melissande knew she was back to the previous evening. Again.
She flexed her fingers.
It was easy enough. She used the same strategy to ensure the Mutt didn't go to the loft, lurked outside Woody's till Kinney arrived, allowed a drunken twink to bump her into Kinney, picked the phone right out of his pocket, and tossed it onto the floor of his jeep as she walked past.
The tingle in her spine eased. Again.
*****
"Honestly, Deb, you should have seen this kid. Talk about a little lamb just asking for a big bad wolf to come along. He says he's seventeen, but he only looks about fourteen. He could have got himself into so much trouble. It turns out the kid lives in suburbia and Mommy and Daddy thought he was staying the night at a friend's house. So I said he could stay at our place. Teddy drove us over there while Michael waited for Brian to finish in the back room. It's just lucky we saw him."
EE shuddered, and that damned tingle was back in Melissande's spine.
She wasn't sure what went wrong this time. Kinney obviously made it to Babylon.
"Who cares about some kid?" the Mutt asked, "Brian's a dad. I named his kid. Linds wanted to call him 'Gus' but that's just dumb. So he's called Abra…"
Okay. Now she was getting seriously annoyed. She was also getting worried. Once or twice might indicate some kind of glitch - three times argues that someone was deliberately messing with things.
Fourth, and finally …
She sat at the counter regarding the return to darkness outside the diner and asked DD for a cup of hot water. Into it she cast some leaves. She hated rosemary tea, but it would definitely clear her mind.
Sipping, she came up with a plan.
First, make sure MM stays at the diner. Then get rid Kinney's phone. Then she'd need to do some surveillance.
A little over an hour later, she walked down the street, for once in comfortable shoes. These were the times that being a transvestite had its advantages. Sometimes Melissande found her biologically male persona very difficult. Tonight she was grateful for it. Everyone knew "Marilyn". Very few people knew or would recognize, Marty.
S/he followed Kinney and his crew from Woody's to Babylon. S/he propped up the bar and observed Kinney get wasted as usual, and make several trips to the backroom as usual. S/he almost followed him that last time, but s/he saw EE, TT and the Mutt heading to the cloakroom and s/he followed them instead.
They collected their coats, and then waited outside the club for Kinney.
S/he felt the Other before s/he saw him. If the world around noticed him at all, it would see a fairly nondescript kind of guy. But what Melissande saw was more like a goblin. A being twisted and warped by the darkness it served.
S/he moved deeper into shadow and observed. The Other approached the group and spoke briefly to the Mutt. Melissande saw the Other and MM look down the street to where a fair-haired boy was approaching a lamp post.
S/he concentrated hard and heard: "The kid's obviously jailbait. Kinney could get into real trouble if he messes with that. You should get him out of here before Kinney comes out." Then the Other moved away.
The kid? It was all tied up with the blond kid?
Well, okay.
Melissande/ Marty waited till the Other had disappeared into the night and then approached the group. The Mutt was saying something about the kid but Melissande/ Marty broke in. "Have any of you guys seen Mysterious Marilyn tonight? I have to find her. I need some help."
As s/he could have predicted, TT just shrugged, but EE immediately tried to assist. "Oh, honey, I saw her earlier in the diner, but not since then. Maybe you could try there."
"Look at that kid … he looks … " MM tried to interrupt.
"I've been to the diner. You didn't see her in Babylon, did you? Do you think she might be in there? Where else would she go?"
"She's probably at home by now," EE said. "Is there anything we can do to help?"
"Someone should help that kid," MM tried again.
"Hey, kids, did you miss me?"
Thank the Powers. Kinney finally showed up.
"I got bored," he explained.
Melissande drew away into the shadows, but stood watching to make sure that nothing else got in the way of Kinney hooking up with the blond twink.
She supposed she should feel a little guilty that she wasn't intervening to protect the boy from big bad wolf Kinney. But as she watched, as she saw the way their gazes met and locked, saw how the little twink became the instant and complete focus of Kinney's attention, she knew there was something happening here that was inherently just "right". Something that definitely needed to happen.
She was about to walk home, grateful for the flat shoes, when she saw the look on the Mutt's face.
It brought her to a halt as she considered it. Clearly Mutt Mikey saw something different here as well, saw something different in Kinney's attraction to this boy.
And by the look on his face he didn't like it.
He didn't like it at all.
Melissande decided she would need to keep an eye on the Mutt. He'd already allowed himself to be influenced by the Other. If this kid was going to be around for any length of time, the Darkness might try to use him in some other, more direct, way to prevent whatever change he was bringing into Kinney's life.
But for now, at least, the kid was getting into Kinney's jeep, not exactly safe, maybe, but at least where he was meant to be, and the tingle in her spine had finally died away and she could go home and sleep. Hopefully things would be better in the morning. This time.
*****
Melissande made sure she was sitting in the diner next morning.
DD was there. So were TT and EE but there was no sign of the Mutt or of Kinney.
"You should have seen the jeep." EE was saying. "Brian is going to be so pissed."
"So what did they wind up calling the kid?" DD wanting to know it all as usual.
"Mel wanted to call him Abraham, after her grandfather," TT contributed. "She told me."
"Well, Michael said Lindsay asked Brian to choose between Abraham and the name she wanted. Like Michael told me, there's no way he'd pick Mel over Lindsay. You know how Brian is about Mel."
"So what did they call him?"
"Can you believe it - Gus."
Relishing the continued sunlight, Melissande took a deep appreciative sip of her peppermint tea.
One crisis dealt with at least.
She'd just have to remember to keep an eye on Mikey the Mutt. That instant jealousy just couldn't be healthy.
She had the feeling that it was important that the kid stayed around.
She took a quick peek at the cards, just to confirm that things were back on track. As she'd expected the Knight of Cups card, firmly itself now, had moved to the center, right next to the King. And now it was that King of Cups card that was behaving strangely - one moment reversed as usual, the next doing its best to turn upright. Now that really was interesting. If the kid could help Kinney reclaim his emotional center, well … no wonder TPTB wanted them together.
Now if she only knew why Kinney was so damned important. With a sigh, she stacked the cards together, reluctantly accepting that she would probably never know.
.
The First Time
Melissande sat sipping a herbal tea. Something was wrong. Or rather, something hadn't gone right. She didn't know what, but it was bound to involve someone here in her particular "protection patch" on Liberty Avenue. She had the feeling she'd made a mistake in taking an early night last night.
Melissande was … well, not quite an angel, and not quite a fairy godmother; like many others on the planet, she was something between the two. It was her role in this life to try to make sure that certain key things happened. Or didn't happen. To protect not individuals so much as the correct flow of light through certain individuals.
Today, something was blocking that flow.
So, in the unlikely guise of a somewhat homely transvestite sooth-sayer named, of all ridiculous things, "Mysterious Marilyn", Melissande sat at the counter in the Liberty Diner, and sipped her lavender tea, and listened, trying to work out what had caused this blockage.
"So Brian asked me and I said they should call him Abraham because I read this thing online about how someone was trying to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln being a vampire slayer, so it's going to become a really cool name again."
The uncomfortable tingle down her spine told her that she'd just heard something related to the "wrongness". She just wasn't sure what yet.
She turned a little to view the speaker. It was Kinney's little puppy dog friend (Mikey the Mutt, as Melissande had named him to herself), yapping away as usual to the queen (Emmett the Empath) and the accountant (Tedious Ted). He was waving around photos of himself and Kinney with a baby.
Of course, Melissande reflected, the blonde woman she thought of as Lindsay the Lesbo was expecting Kinney's kid. Looks like she'd delivered.
"Abraham?" Emmett didn't sound convinced. "Mikey, I don't know. I think you've saddled the kid with a name that's only going to cause him trouble."
If she'd been standing, Melissande would almost certainly have fallen. As it was she clutched desperately at the counter, trying to retain her balance. The images flooding her brain had her completely disoriented.
She saw a child - six, maybe seven years old being chased by a pack of older boys, with shaven heads shouting something like "Come here, little jew-boy". The child, sensing the malice in the words, was desperate to get away and swerved, running into the road. The scene fractured then into glimpses of blood and bone and horror, till she was left with one final image of Kinney, his face devoid of any emotion, standing in stark isolation as they lowered a small coffin into the ground.
O-kay.
There it was. Abraham. That name couldn't happen. Shouldn't happen. Wasn't meant to happen. So why had it.
"It's lucky I dropped by the loft before I met Brian at Woody's. I heard Mel's message and made him go straight to the hospital instead of going to Babylon."
Again the tingle.
O-kay. So Kinney wasn't supposed to go "straight to the hospital".
She'd have to persuade The Powers That Be to do a re-run.
The Second Time
At her level, she didn't know why Kinney was important, but he clearly was. Because as soon as she made contact, there was a moment of frozen silence, and while she was still marshaling her powers to plead for their intervention, there was a wrenching sensation and lighting in the diner changed. She was still sitting at the counter, still sipping her lavender tea, but outside instead of morning sunlight, there was the glow of street lamps. The annoying tingle in her spine indicated that the wrongness was still there, but muted and intermittent. She had a chance.
As she was trying to work out what to do, Mutt Mikey came in the door, greeted exuberantly as always by the red-wigged woman Melissande/ Marilyn thought of as Dreadnaught Debbie. She supposed it was no wonder that Mikey was such a mewling mutt; he'd clearly never felt strong enough to stand up to his mother, but he'd learned that whining nearly always caught her attention and usually her sympathy. Tonight was no different.
"I've been calling Brian trying to get him to meet me at Woody's but he's not answering his phone. I guess I'll have to drop by the loft and see if he's there."
'Oh, no you don't', Melissande/Marilyn thought to herself. She stood. It was times like these that her Marilyn persona came in very handy. She sashayed over to the booth where DD had installed her son.
"Why don't you let me see if the cards can tell you where he is," she offered. Then, before he could respond, she sat down and suddenly the cards were spreading themselves across the table.
"He's not at the loft," she said positively. "He's still at work."
She tapped on the 8 of Pentacles card. "Labor", she said. "Perfectionism."
"He'll be in Woody's later," tapping on the 3 of Cups. "Revelry, social drinking."
She surveyed the cards. "Around an hour from now."
"So you don't have to go to the loft and you've got time for a decent dinner," DD cut in forcefully. "The special today is meatloaf, or do you just want a burger?"
The Mutt's response was muted to Melissande as she studied the cards.
There was the King of Cups - inverted as usual for Kinney. She knew he thought of himself as anything but Cups, the "heart" cards. Pentacles, all about money, maybe. Or Rods; Rods were after all a potent male symbol which Kinney would appreciate. Or, most likely ill-omened Swords- painful lessons.
But he wasn't. He was Cups, inverted because his true nature had been warped out of shape at some point. Melissande wasn't sure but she had the feeling that TPTB had allowed that to happen for some reason. She sensed it was a process like tempering steel. Heartless, of course, but then, they weren't exactly sentimental. They needed Kinney to be a certain way, and would have no qualms about shaping him to suit their ends.
But clearly they didn't want the cold and empty man she'd glimpsed at that graveyard, so that future had to be changed.
She was about to pull the cards together when, lurking at the edge of the spread, she saw one card behaving very strangely. At one instant it was the Page of Cups - hidden emotions to be revealed. At another, it seemed to morph into the Knight of Cups - young love in action. Both indicated a fair-haired young man.
'Interesting', Melissande thought to herself.
She rose as EE and TT entered the diner and headed towards the booth where Mikey was about to start on his meatloaf.
Good. That should keep him out of mischief. They'll all go to Woody's together, and then, inevitably, on to Babylon.
She noted with relief that the tingling in her spine had stopped. Things were back on track.
Wondering if it was worth trying to use to cards to get a clearer purpose, she left the diner. Cursing the damned stupid shoes that this guise forced her to wear, she walked painfully down the street, and considered. Reluctantly she gave up the idea. Trying to do a reading for her own benefit never worked. She could do them for others, but never for herself. She wouldn't get guidance, all she would do would be to increase her own confusion.
She knew that. It was a sign of how drained this little rerun had made her that she would even think of it.
She needed chamomile tea and a good night's sleep. She should be able to relax now.
*****
Believing that she'd fixed whatever was wrong, Melissande was understandably both perturbed and annoyed when she woke the next morning to find her spine tingling once again.
Cursing the amount of time it took to apply makeup and wig and hobble anywhere in those damned shoes, she headed off as quickly as she could to the diner.
This time, Kinney was with them.
"It was just lucky I reminded him that Lindsay was almost ready to pop and he should at least put his phone on vibrate and keep it in his pocket," MM was telling his mother.
"Yeah, well, if you hadn't been trying to grope me, I could still have ignored it and I wouldn't have to have gone through that fucking trauma," Kinney grumbled.
MM, predictably, flushed like a guilty tomato. "I wasn't trying to grope you," he defended. "I just …"
"Snatch!" Kinney interrupted. "I mean who the fuck wants to see snatch? Let alone all that fucking gross shit that comes out with the baby. I may never fucking recover."
"But you're glad you were there, aren't you?" MM insisted. "I mean, he is your son."
"He's the Munchers' kid," Kinney asserted. "I'll just be around enough to give him the occasional dose of testosterone that he can't get from his Mommies."
"So what are they going to call him?" EE asked.
"Abrah…"
Third Time's Lucky - right?
No visions this time. No need to contact TPTB, just a wrenching disturbance in the ether and then, once more, the light had changed, Kinney had vanished, the clothes of the guys in the booth had changed and Melissande knew she was back to the previous evening. Again.
She flexed her fingers.
It was easy enough. She used the same strategy to ensure the Mutt didn't go to the loft, lurked outside Woody's till Kinney arrived, allowed a drunken twink to bump her into Kinney, picked the phone right out of his pocket, and tossed it onto the floor of his jeep as she walked past.
The tingle in her spine eased. Again.
*****
"Honestly, Deb, you should have seen this kid. Talk about a little lamb just asking for a big bad wolf to come along. He says he's seventeen, but he only looks about fourteen. He could have got himself into so much trouble. It turns out the kid lives in suburbia and Mommy and Daddy thought he was staying the night at a friend's house. So I said he could stay at our place. Teddy drove us over there while Michael waited for Brian to finish in the back room. It's just lucky we saw him."
EE shuddered, and that damned tingle was back in Melissande's spine.
She wasn't sure what went wrong this time. Kinney obviously made it to Babylon.
"Who cares about some kid?" the Mutt asked, "Brian's a dad. I named his kid. Linds wanted to call him 'Gus' but that's just dumb. So he's called Abra…"
Okay. Now she was getting seriously annoyed. She was also getting worried. Once or twice might indicate some kind of glitch - three times argues that someone was deliberately messing with things.
Fourth, and finally …
She sat at the counter regarding the return to darkness outside the diner and asked DD for a cup of hot water. Into it she cast some leaves. She hated rosemary tea, but it would definitely clear her mind.
Sipping, she came up with a plan.
First, make sure MM stays at the diner. Then get rid Kinney's phone. Then she'd need to do some surveillance.
A little over an hour later, she walked down the street, for once in comfortable shoes. These were the times that being a transvestite had its advantages. Sometimes Melissande found her biologically male persona very difficult. Tonight she was grateful for it. Everyone knew "Marilyn". Very few people knew or would recognize, Marty.
S/he followed Kinney and his crew from Woody's to Babylon. S/he propped up the bar and observed Kinney get wasted as usual, and make several trips to the backroom as usual. S/he almost followed him that last time, but s/he saw EE, TT and the Mutt heading to the cloakroom and s/he followed them instead.
They collected their coats, and then waited outside the club for Kinney.
S/he felt the Other before s/he saw him. If the world around noticed him at all, it would see a fairly nondescript kind of guy. But what Melissande saw was more like a goblin. A being twisted and warped by the darkness it served.
S/he moved deeper into shadow and observed. The Other approached the group and spoke briefly to the Mutt. Melissande saw the Other and MM look down the street to where a fair-haired boy was approaching a lamp post.
S/he concentrated hard and heard: "The kid's obviously jailbait. Kinney could get into real trouble if he messes with that. You should get him out of here before Kinney comes out." Then the Other moved away.
The kid? It was all tied up with the blond kid?
Well, okay.
Melissande/ Marty waited till the Other had disappeared into the night and then approached the group. The Mutt was saying something about the kid but Melissande/ Marty broke in. "Have any of you guys seen Mysterious Marilyn tonight? I have to find her. I need some help."
As s/he could have predicted, TT just shrugged, but EE immediately tried to assist. "Oh, honey, I saw her earlier in the diner, but not since then. Maybe you could try there."
"Look at that kid … he looks … " MM tried to interrupt.
"I've been to the diner. You didn't see her in Babylon, did you? Do you think she might be in there? Where else would she go?"
"She's probably at home by now," EE said. "Is there anything we can do to help?"
"Someone should help that kid," MM tried again.
"Hey, kids, did you miss me?"
Thank the Powers. Kinney finally showed up.
"I got bored," he explained.
Melissande drew away into the shadows, but stood watching to make sure that nothing else got in the way of Kinney hooking up with the blond twink.
She supposed she should feel a little guilty that she wasn't intervening to protect the boy from big bad wolf Kinney. But as she watched, as she saw the way their gazes met and locked, saw how the little twink became the instant and complete focus of Kinney's attention, she knew there was something happening here that was inherently just "right". Something that definitely needed to happen.
She was about to walk home, grateful for the flat shoes, when she saw the look on the Mutt's face.
It brought her to a halt as she considered it. Clearly Mutt Mikey saw something different here as well, saw something different in Kinney's attraction to this boy.
And by the look on his face he didn't like it.
He didn't like it at all.
Melissande decided she would need to keep an eye on the Mutt. He'd already allowed himself to be influenced by the Other. If this kid was going to be around for any length of time, the Darkness might try to use him in some other, more direct, way to prevent whatever change he was bringing into Kinney's life.
But for now, at least, the kid was getting into Kinney's jeep, not exactly safe, maybe, but at least where he was meant to be, and the tingle in her spine had finally died away and she could go home and sleep. Hopefully things would be better in the morning. This time.
*****
Melissande made sure she was sitting in the diner next morning.
DD was there. So were TT and EE but there was no sign of the Mutt or of Kinney.
"You should have seen the jeep." EE was saying. "Brian is going to be so pissed."
"So what did they wind up calling the kid?" DD wanting to know it all as usual.
"Mel wanted to call him Abraham, after her grandfather," TT contributed. "She told me."
"Well, Michael said Lindsay asked Brian to choose between Abraham and the name she wanted. Like Michael told me, there's no way he'd pick Mel over Lindsay. You know how Brian is about Mel."
"So what did they call him?"
"Can you believe it - Gus."
Relishing the continued sunlight, Melissande took a deep appreciative sip of her peppermint tea.
One crisis dealt with at least.
She'd just have to remember to keep an eye on Mikey the Mutt. That instant jealousy just couldn't be healthy.
She had the feeling that it was important that the kid stayed around.
She took a quick peek at the cards, just to confirm that things were back on track. As she'd expected the Knight of Cups card, firmly itself now, had moved to the center, right next to the King. And now it was that King of Cups card that was behaving strangely - one moment reversed as usual, the next doing its best to turn upright. Now that really was interesting. If the kid could help Kinney reclaim his emotional center, well … no wonder TPTB wanted them together.
Now if she only knew why Kinney was so damned important. With a sigh, she stacked the cards together, reluctantly accepting that she would probably never know.
.