Page 19 of The Fantastic Fluke

As I unlocked the door, I glanced down at foxy. “It’s a good thing I like you. Also, we’re gonna have to build you a little sled or a backpack or something, so you can carry this thing home yourself twice a month.”

He pressed up against my leg, and I sighed in defeat.

Then I passed the box of dad’s ashes, still sitting on the entryway table, and couldn’t even look at them. I needed to decide what to do with them when I hadn’t just spent the day being insulted by the man in the box. Right that moment I was inclined to find a dumpster, and that would be a mistake. I’d be sorry later if I did that.

I took foxy’s dishes and food over to the dining area and set them on the table. “Do you want your water on the floor? It’ll be more convenient.”

He looked up at the table, then at the floor a few times. Finally, he walked over to a place with a counter overhang, near the entrance of the kitchen. Out of the way, but on the floor and easy to get to.

“You got it, foxy,” I agreed, filling the bowl at the tap and then setting it down in front of him. “I guess we should come up with a better name for you if you’re staying. And if I’m gonna pay like five hundred bucks to license and feed you, I really hope you’re staying. I’d rather not be brokeandalone.”

I refrained from saying that the alone part was more important. That was obvious, given that I was going to lie to the familiar registration people. Whatever Gideon had said, if I were going to attract a familiar, it would have happened decades ago.

Then there was the fact that I was planning to spend money that had been earmarked for groceries on his licensing fee. It was just going to be a ramen-heavy month, was all.

This would be the first month I ran the store’s finances, and I didn’t think my father had been paying me at a loss to himself, so hopefully I’d have more than usual come November.

I should probably talk to his accountant or his lawyer, but I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with business professionals who were used to my charismatic, personable father. I didn’t see those exchanges going well for me. At the very least, I was likely to be told I needed to pay more than my father had, and with money I still wasn’t sure existed.

Did I really suspect my father had used his ability as a social mage to absorb energy from his accountant and lawyer and then used it to manipulate them into giving him what he wanted? Yes, I did. And even if I were willing to be that unethical and frankly, gross, I didn’t have that kind of power.

Yup. Ramen time. It was a good thing I liked ramen and boiled eggs. I started water on the stove and shelled one of the eggs I’d boiled a few days earlier, putting it aside to wait.

“So what do you think about some ghost telling me I’m the chosen one, foxy?” I asked him. He was as likely as anyone to have a rational answer, because the whole situation was laughable. I scoffed and shook my head. “Arcane magic.”

I set foxy’s bowl on the table, grabbed a mug from the cupboard and used it to dish out his dinner. He hopped up onto the chair in front of his food but didn’t start eating. He just sat there, watching me, waiting.

I made my noodles, poured them into a bowl with the meager supplements I had—a little red pepper and the egg, mostly. It’s not like normal people keep green onions and shallots and whatever sitting around. Do they?

When I joined foxy at the table, he was still sitting there waiting. The moment I took a bite, he finally started eating.

Foxy had table manners. Probably better than mine. I tried to stifle my shame at that idea for long enough to eat.

After a few minutes, and a few bites, foxy stopped and looked at me expectantly. Maybe I’d been quiet too long, and he was expecting me to continue playing chatterbox. Instead, I waved at him. “Your turn. You tell me if I’m secretly King Arthur, and I ought to be looking for a woman in a lake.”

“I never said you were Arthur Pendragon,” a lazy drawl said behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin.

“What the hell, man?”

Gideon, leaning against the edge of the archway between the dining area and the living room, shrugged. “Sorry. You’re stuck with me till you learn what you’ve got to learn. No choice. I get tugged to where you are.”

“So you just come into my house? This is private property.”

He continued to look unconcerned. “So call the authorities.”

“There are probably Aureum mages who could banish you,” I pointed out, even though I doubted I could bring myself to ask for that. I couldn’t even bring myself to look into banishing my father’s ghost. Maybe Gideon was off his rocker, but he seemed like a nice guy.

Yeah, okay, a nice guy who was incredibly easy on the eyes in every way I favored: broad-shouldered, with big, work-roughened hands... He probably had a six pack under that shirt. And he was so freaking tall. His head fell against the curved part of the archway, and that thing went up like eight feet at the top, so he had to be pushing six and a half. Maybe more.

I wondered if he was proportional, then thought about the old stories about how shoe size equals, um, endowment size. A glance at his shoes suggested that was unlikely, if not anatomically impossible. Those things had to be custom made.

“Something wrong with my boots?” he asked, amusement in his voice. I glanced up, got as far as the bulge in his dark pants, and turned to stare at my dinner.

“Nope. They’re nice boots. Excellent boots. Bespoke boots, probably.”

His chuckle was as low and deep as his voice, and it sent a shudder through me. Fuck, the things I’d let someone like him do to me...

But that wasn’t too likely to ever happen. First, of course, he was dead. Second, it had been ages since I’d found a man I trusted enough to have sex with, let alone anything more than sex, or anything rougher than a little plain lights-out under the covers vanilla action.

---