Who: Nic and Lem Where: The Castell House When: Late afternoon, January 14th Status: Complete
As much as Nic wanted to go about his days acting like nothing was wrong, he couldn’t stop the mounting paranoia that the other shoe was about to drop and that he wasn’t at all prepared for it. The dream on Friday night had left him with more questions than answers, along with bruises that continued to ache even after he’d healed them. Then Saturday night had come and he’d felt a dread he couldn’t shake, along with a cold like he’d never experienced in his life. Nic doubted he could get that cold laying naked in the snow for hours and nothing he could do seemed to help warm him up except time. By the time Sunday rolled around, he was ready to call in sick, except Zania knew he wasn’t sick and probably deserved to mope more than he did.
Once he was back home he tried to keep the moping to a minimum and invited Lem over to keep him company while he started up on dinner. It was supposed to be a cold night, so he thought something like stew would be good. He thought they could sit by the fire and let it simmer as he went through a few more books from the basement. They’d already gone through everything once, but that was before they knew what they were dealing with. Now he was on a hunt for something specific to demons, though he was keeping an eye out for anything related to dreams. He didn’t expect to find anything related to what he was experiencing, but it never hurt to look again.
It had been an interesting weekend for Lem. There had been witnessing Nic’s shared dream with him, then Saturday had turned strange at night, with a chill that wouldn’t go away and a resurgence of a fear that Lem had trouble placing. It was like the feeling she’d gotten when Vex had disappeared into the fog to meet the god, only cranked up to eleven. He’d seemed to feel it too, though she was struggling more and more to figure out what he was feeling at any given moment. Besides that, she of felt like she was coming down with something -- she’d been lethargic and worn off and on for days now.
But seeing Nic always perked her up, and Vex was in a Mood, so she hadn’t hesitated to accept her boyfriend’s invitation to dinner. She bundled up for the short walk across the yard. Instead of knocking, Lem just opened the front door and came inside. They were just at that level of closeness now. “Hello!” she called into the house as she stomped her boots a bit to get the snow off. Lem started stripping off her outer layers. “It’s me, no fireballs!”
Nic could count on one hand the number of people that would walk in their front door without knocking and two of them lived next door. He assumed it was Lem even before she called out and smiled, setting down the kitchen knife and moving to wash his hands. “You’re in luck,” he grinned as he called back to her. “I suck at fireballs.” Turning the fire down on the stew, he came to meet her at the door, wrapping her up in a warm hug and and stealing a little kiss. “How’s it going?”
She was down to her flannel pants and a tanktop with the sweater-coat he had given her over it by the time Nic appeared. Lem wore it pretty much all the time now, she loved it so much. She greeted him with a big grin and raised arms to wrap around his neck, and kissed him back happily. “Fine, no waterballs either,” she murmured with a little snicker. Lem hugged him tight, barely managing to resist the urge to climb on him and cling like a koala. “I’m okay,” she said, releasing Nic instead. “Been kinda tired this weekend, but feeling okay now. How are you? Is Zan here?”
“Way too cold for waterballs,” Nic grinned. He wouldn’t have minded if she’d clung to him--hugging her was cozy and warm and made him feel safe. It wasn’t like Lem could protect him, though he knew she’d try, like a rabid chipmunk. “Zan’s at work. But she shouldn’t stay late. We’re expected to get some pretty heavy snow.” They had enough to worry about already. The last thing they needed was for Zania to get stranded at work, though there were worse places, he supposed. “I’m okay, I guess. A little… Just frustrated with everything. Not you. But everything else.”
Considering her size and disposition, Lem was constantly tempted to make bigger people carry her around everywhere. She often got piggyback rides from Vex, even just around the house. Nic was even stronger -- he at least had a younger back -- so he could probably carry her even more, but she wasn’t quite sure yet if she could just jump on him anytime. They were still figuring each other out. “Yeah?” she prompted, looking up at him with raised eyebrows. “Like, the dream stuff? Have you talked to the others yet?”
Nic shook his head. “We’re supposed to tomorrow, but I’m sure some of that will depend on the weather. I volunteered the shop. It kind of feels like neutral ground.” It was also a public place where they could talk about the bizarre and not worry about people overhearing them. The library might have worked for that too, but Nic doubted Neil wanted them in his space again. “There’s also Zan’s curse. The demon,” he corrected himself as he led her towards the kitchen. “Gabriel was attacked recently, so it’s really just a matter of time before it comes for me, whatever it is. And Zan’s hitting that point where she’s just a mess.”
Lem trailed along a step behind him, noticing finally that things were smelling good in the kitchen already. Oh yeah, Nic had said dinner. Her stomach rumbled its own reminder. Maybe there would be enough left over for her to take home to Vex. He wouldn’t eat on his own otherwise, she was pretty sure. Lem pushed that thought aside to focus in on what Nic was saying. He’d filled her in about the whole curse thing, and it made her stomach hurt to think about too much. There wasn’t anything she could do to help, which was frustrating. She just wanted Nic to be okay. “What did Gabriel get attacked by?” she asked as they entered the kitchen. “Has anything else come after Zan?”
“Birds came for Zan last week, and ants for Gabriel,” Nic said as he went to check on the stew. He didn’t need to do much at this point, other than make sure it didn’t burn. “They’ve gotten progressively bigger with Zan, so I’m expecting something small and mostly harmless, but still not looking forward to it.” He couldn’t set things on fire like his sister could, and if he even tried he’d probably just end up burning the house down. He almost would’ve been better with small mammals that he could freeze to death. “I should warn you, it might not be safe here. I’m overdue at this point, unless something came in my sleep and just couldn’t get in.”
Lem peered into the stew pot briefly, then found an unoccupied section of counter to boost herself up onto. She dangled her socked feet and gazed at her boyfriend. He looked tired and stressed, and that sucked. It made her wish her abilities were actually useful when it came to helping people. Being an Observer Only really blew sometimes. “I’m not scared,” she told Nic with confidence. “Especially not of like, bugs. They’re not gonna keep me away from you.” Lem lightly thumped her heels against the cabinet door under her. The risk was way worth it, to her, especially considering how Vex had been acting lately. Lem needed a break. “Anything I can do to help?”
Nic smiled and shifted over to stand in front of Lem, his hands resting lightly on her thighs. Sometimes, at times like this, he wished Lem was into skirts, but that was only so he could slip his hands up them and that seemed like an unfair ask. “You can keep me company,” he smiled, leaning in for a small kiss. “You keep me sane. Out of my own head for a bit.” It might not seem like a big task, but Nic knew how useless he could be if he really got himself wound up. He needed to be productive, to be able to think, not devolve to punching walls just for something to punch. “How’re things back home? No more unexpected visitors, I hope?”
That made Lem smile and she lifted one hand to ruffle Nic’s hair while he was still close, stealing another smooch before she answered. The idea of her keeping anybody sane was probably laughable, but it was sweet of him to say. “I can definitely try to be distracting,” she said, grinning a bit and bouncing her eyebrows at him a couple of times. Flirting was distracting, right? Lem then rolled her eyes and gave a little huff. “No, no visitors. Vex is like, so moody lately though, it’s annoying. He’s just wearing me out, honestly. So I’m happy to come over here to maybe fight off a shitton of bugs with you.” Lem smiled again, wrapping her legs around the backs of his to pull him in closer.
Flirting was always a pleasant distraction and Nic would never say no to it. He’d much rather make out with Lem than think about all the things that were going wrong in his life, problems with no solution. He was glad to hear they hadn’t had any more visitors, though he was still concerned about the visit Anthony D’Onofrio had paid them. The man oozed power and if there was a witch in town to be feared, Nic thought it was probably him. He had no evidence of that though, just a feeling and gossip from Zania, but he’d be happier if Anthony stayed far away from the people he cared about. “You think he’s bored or something?” Nic asked with a little laugh, leaning in for another kiss as his hands slid up to her hips. “Maybe he needs a new hobby.”
All of the stuff with the Institute and D’Onofrio and his wife and the other people who were involved was all complicated and gave Lem a headache if she thought about it too much. She was just along for the ride on that stuff, more or less. She believed in what they were doing, trying to destroy the people who used and tortured children, but knowing what-all was going on was Vex’s territory, not hers. “I dunno,” she said, smiling in spite of how put out she felt about Vex’s moods. “But he needs to get over it, or I’m gonna like ... poop in his shoes or something, I dunno.” Lem laughed softly and rolled her eyes again, then scooted her ass forward a bit to cling more solidly to Nic. “You make me feel better though,” she added in a murmur, leaning in for another kiss as she ran her hands down and then up his arms again.
Nic snickered at the thought, though if someone did that to him he would probably have a conniption. It made him wonder how bad these moods of Vex’s were, though it was probably more likely that Lem was overexaggerating a little. “Good,” he murmured softly, kissing her back, his hold on her tightening a touch. He couldn’t get completely caught up in her, not while cooking, but they were almost at a point where he could turn off the burner for a bit. He hummed happily and deepened the kiss, then paused when he felt something brush over the top of his foot. Nic pulled away a touch and looked down, then cursed loudly. “Shit!” A snake had started to wrap around his foot and he kicked it away, then immediately began to look for more. “Come here,” he said, hurriedly reaching out to pick her up. “I’m gonna put you on the table.”
Things were feeling good and warm in a way that had nothing to do with the proximity of the stove, and Lem was sinking into those good feelings when everything changed abruptly. Her eyes popped open with surprise when he pulled away and cursed. She was already on the counter, but she clung to Nic as he picked her up anyway, startled into obedience. “Oh shit,” she said when she spotted the first snake. The possibility of a flood of bugs had been one thing, but snakes were definitely worse.
For some reason the kitchen table seemed safer to Nic, away from the stove and with more room to flee, if needed. He carried Lem there as he spotted another snake skirting across the floor towards him, this one at least an inch thick and three feet long. “Stay there,” he said, taking a step back from the table as he tried to figure out what to do next. He thought he knew how to handle bugs, but snakes? Where were they even coming from? There was snow on the ground, they should be hibernating, but now wasn’t the time to debate their authenticity. “Shit. Shit,” he muttered as he spotted another, red and yellow and black and he didn’t have time to figure out if it was the poisonous kind. He needed off the floor. He climbed up on the counter, then looked to Lem to make sure she was okay before glancing at the floor again. There were at least ten now, maybe fifteen snakes slithering across the kitchen floor, all crowding the space he’d just left. “You okay?”
Lem crouched on the table, one knee and both hands pressed against it as she looked around at the floor with growing alarm. Some of those were definitely bad snakes. Her dark eyes were a little wild ass they darted up to Nic. At least he’d gotten up off the floor too, which she’d been about to demand he do. “Yeah, I mean -- yeah, but what are we gonna do?” she asked urgently. Nothing had bitten her, though one of them was curling around the leg of the table like it wanted to climb it. Could snakes even do that? How did they get into trees? “Can you like, can you drown them?” Lem’s voice was rising in volume and pitch as fear really started to settle in. There were more slithering through the door and what if they ended up really stuck?
Nic had remembered Zania telling him about the spiders that had come for her in the shop, how they’d all but ignored the guy that was there with her. He was banking on that being the same this time, that Lem would be safe so long as there was some distance between them. It didn’t give him the peace of mind that he’d hoped it would-- she felt so far away and the snakes seemed to have noticed her. “I can’t drown them without flooding the house,” Nic frowned. Couldn’t snakes swim? Or was that just some of them? “I might be able to freeze them, but… I dunno. They’re cold blooded. They shouldn’t even be out in this weather. I can try.” But if they were magical in any way, it wasn’t going to work. Nic felt like he had to do something though. The floor was covered in them and they were starting to climb the cabinets. At the sound of a rattle, Nic decided he couldn’t wait any longer and began to mentally lay a frost down across the floor, aiming for the vermin and not his girlfriend.
Lem could feel the temperature in the room drop, since she wasn’t bundled up anymore, and she looked anxiously down at all the snakes in the kitchen, hoping they would all freeze without trouble. It wasn’t like her to feel so scared, and she hated it. Lem could handle one or two snakes, but this was so many, and they were under the magical influence of something, so who the fuck knew what they were capable of. Lem gripped the edge of the table, worrying at her bottom lip with her teeth as she watched.
It would’ve been so much easier to freeze the snakes if Nic could touch them, but there was no way he was sticking his hand down there. Instead he had to focus on one snake at a time, eyes rapidly darting from one to another, forcing their blood to cool and freeze. Any bit of movement caught his attention and he focused there next, eventually covering the entire room. He could feel the cold radiating from the floor like it was covered in ice, and he glanced up at Lem to make sure she was okay. When the floor stopped moving, Nic sighed and shut his eyes for a second, pain beginning to pulse between them. That much death by his element was bound to bring on backlash. “I think I got ‘em all,” he said, frowning at the floor. What was he supposed to do with a room full of dead snakes?
Lem couldn’t exactly feel what he was doing, just that something was happening and it was cold. She hunched herself into a smaller ball on the table, her fretful eyes moving between Nic and the floor full of snakes. Gradually they stopped moving, until all of them were still. Dead or just hibernation-frozen, she didn’t know, but it was safer, at least. For now. “Yeah I think so,” she agreed in a murmur, glancing around at the floor to look for any movement. Lem still wasn’t eager to put her feet down, though. Nibbling on her bottom lip, she looked at Nic again. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Nic said softly as he continued to watch the floor for another minute. He was reluctant to get down, but he also wanted them out of his house. He wasn’t going to feel safe perched up on the counter indefinitely. “I’m thinking… We can dump ‘em out back, maybe burn ‘em in a trash can or something.” He should probably cut their heads off too, but he really didn’t want to go through all the trouble. Besides, if they weren’t dead and managed to escape, maybe they’d just leave. “Zan said the assault eventually stopped, with the bugs and the birds, and she didn’t have to worry about them after, even though she hadn’t killed them. But I don’t like the idea of dumping the snakes in the yard if they’re not going to disappear.”
The dumb thing was, all of them shouldn’t even be out of hibernation burrows or whatever, Lem was pretty sure. Her knowledge about snakes was pretty limited, but she knew they were cold-blooded and the sun wasn’t exactly out in full force at this time of year. She gave the snake-floor another reluctant look, then carefully moved to the edge of the table to put her legs down. She remembered that nothing had attacked Gabriel or the other guy when the spiders had been after Zan, so while she didn’t like the idea of putting her feet into a bunch of snakes, if any of them were still alive, she had a better shot than Nic did at not getting bitten. “Too bad we don’t have a wood-chipper,” she muttered as she found some footing between the long, frozen bodies. It was definitely cold down there. Lem tip-toed her way to the cabinet under the sink. “I’ll get a trash bag, make some room for you,” she told Nic. Maybe she would grab an oven mitt too, because the dead snakes were frigid.
Nic didn’t realize how shaken up he was until he realized he was still standing on the counter, looking down at the carpet of dead snakes as Lem climbed down from the table. He felt a moment of panic, fearful that the snakes weren’t really dead, but when Lem stepped on one it crunched under her feet, breaking in half. It had been a small one, as big around as his pinky, but it made him a bit more confident that he’d succeeded. The worst was at his feet, the bodies so wound together he couldn’t see the floor, so he shuffled along the edge, moving to a space that was easier to clear. He watched her with a touch of awe, absolutely positive that he’d never dated a girl that would handle this with the ease that Lem was. Once she’d cleared the worst of them, Nic hopped off the counter, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her.
Breaking one of them had felt weird and kind of hurt her foot through her sock, but Lem didn’t let that stop her from cleaning up the area directly under Nic. He’d done the magical work, she didn’t mind doing the physical. The ice-snakes clicked together in a macabre sort of way as she piled them into the black trash bag, using a towel to protect her hand from actually touching them. She made a tiny noise of surprise when Nic embraced and kissed her, but Lem immediately dropped the trash bag and the towel to hug him back. She curled her fingers in the back of his shirt and squeezed him tight, relief that they were both okay bubbling up in her all over again. She kissed him with feeling. Whatever this curse was about, they really had to fix it, because she couldn’t lose Nic.
“I think I might love you,” Nic murmured with a soft laugh. He knew, in that moment, that it was true, and then couldn’t believe he’d said it aloud. It was too much for his head to take on at the moment, too many feelings piled on top of mountains of stress and fear that didn’t need anything added to them. If he spent too long thinking about it, he’d probably freak the both of them out, so instead he loosened his hold on her and picked up the trash bag full of snakes. “I really wish we had a wood chipper,” he agreed, looking in at them in distaste. “But fire kills almost everything. It should kill these.” They didn’t look magical in nature, though he couldn’t begin to understand what they were even doing out at this time of year. Had the demon compelled them? Or had they been summoned out of the earth, brought to life from some dark magic beyond his abilities? It seemed to him that a demon could be capable of anything.
A weird feeling curled in Lem’s stomach at those words, and she let out a huff that was part amusement and part surprise. It wasn’t a great way to respond to someone confessing their love, but Nic had said ‘think I might’ anyway and they had other shit to worry about at the moment, didn’t they? Who knew how long they had before another wave of snakes or whatever was next showed up -- Lem couldn’t remember how long it had been between Zan’s attack, or if she even knew about all of them. So she focused on the task in front of them instead, glancing around at the snake-cicles still on the floor. “Let’s get ‘em all up and tied up in bags first,” she suggested. “They can’t get outta those, even if they thaw out. Then we can ... whatever with them.” Burn them, bury them, throw them in the ocean, Lem had no qualms about killing evil demon-controlled snakes. She went to get another trash bag, eager to keep her hands busy so the fear and worry didn’t overwhelm everything else.
Nic wasn’t expecting a response, seeing as how he hadn’t intended to say it in the first place. He wasn’t even sure what came over him, but he was too overwhelmed with everything else to question it. More than anything, he was glad that Lem didn’t freak out. The last thing he wanted was to scare her off. “I would’ve preferred ants. Or spiders. Fuck,” Nic sighed, then took a bag from her to start gathering snakes. Using an oven mitt had been smart, especially for Lem, the snakes were so cold just touching them would bite at her skin. Nic used a dish rag, keeping his eyes peeled for any sort of movement. He didn’t think anything could survive that level of cold, but he wasn’t ready to drop his guard either. “It used to be when we burned things in the backyard or did anything even slightly witchy, we’d wonder what the neighbors might think,” he said, shooting her a little smile.
Lem got back to work too, clearing up all the snakes. She was just glad there hadn’t been a never-ending stream of them coming from somewhere; when she checked the doorways out of the kitchen, there was nothing there. They’d all just piled together as they went for Nic. She looked over at what he said with a smile of her own. “Now you can count on them to come over and get naked with you to do witchy shit,” she said, giving a tiny laugh. “Even when you don’t want one of them to.” Okay so that had never specifically happened, but if Nic invited her to a nude ritual under the moonlight, Lem would definitely be game. Especially with a big-ass bonfire involved. “Are we gonna burn ‘em? Is that the plan?” she asked as she tied off the last trash bag. It was going to be heavy as hell, but they would manage.
“I would never turn down a reason to get naked with you,” Nic snickered softly. Maybe in the spring he could invite Lem to reinforce the wards with him, perhaps the summer solstice. It was normally Zan’s thing and Lem being there wouldn’t really serve a purpose, but it would be fun. It was something better to think about than the mess in his kitchen, though he really couldn’t avoid dealing with that. If Zania came home to a house full of snakes she would probably freak out and she really didn’t need the extra stress. None of them did. “I think so,” he said, coming to take the bag from her. They could drag it across the kitchen floor, but he’d actually have to pick it up to get it outside and he could already tell how heavy his own bag was. “I can’t think of a better plan. I can always put a circle around it to make sure the fire stays contained.”
She would’ve been happy to strip down for him at any time, especially outside, but she doubted Vex would be just as welcome. But maybe not, the Castells were pretty open about everything, so who knew. That was in the much warmer future though, and right now they had a fuckton of frozen snakes to deal with. “Okay,” she said, nodding a bit. “Lemme go like, get my boots and coat back on and everything, we’ll get it done.” Lem paused, then reached up to cup the sides of Nic’s face. She rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him firmly on the mouth, then looked him dead in the eye. “We’ll figure this out. It’ll be okay.” Nic might not have needed to hear it, but maybe she needed to say it. Lem gave him a tiny smile, then let go and turned to go get her stuff to bundle up with so they could get the nasty part of this out of the way.