Page 4 of Geoffrey the Very Strange
"Why would you call a rainbow-colored little hawkPeppermint?" Katya punctuated her words with stabs into her chicken.
Timms' jaw jutted defensively. "Because peppermints are little and cute."
"She's not quite as cute when she bites you." Aspic chuckled as the kestrel hopped onto his forearm to inspect his plate. "I think Sundrop. Like seeing the sun through a raindrop."
Ishi turned to him and blinked his round, golden eyes. "That's quite poetic, Aspic."
The impliedwho would've thoughtcouldn't have been clearer, but Aspic still smiled. "Oh. Well. Half-demons have bards, too."
"Aspic." The thick tengu beak snapped twice as Ishi stared at his plate. "I didn't mean—"
"I know. It's all right."
Some days the thousand little cuts were harder than others, especially from people who didn't wish ill on him. Today hadn't been bad. Thingswerebetter here, so much better. Aspic let it go and fed his tiny kestrel a bit of cricket loaf.
After dinner, Timms helped him refurbish an old wicker basket as a house for Sundrop. A few reeds woven in closed a couple of the holes, and Timms repurposed the remaining hole as a doorway with a door he made out of scrap from the woodpile. Old blanket rags went underneath for the floor.
This way, Sundrop would have a safe place when Aspic couldn't have her with him, and she wouldn't be leaving little poop presents all over Aspic's room at night.
"Thanks, Timms. It's perfect." Aspic gave him a hard hug after he set the kestrel house on his dresser.
Timms blushed prettily, his goat ears twitching as he pushed away. "No big deal. Don't get all mushy. You're welcome. When you're ready to sleep, cover her cage with a shirt or something, and she should go to sleep, too."
I have a lot to learn about bird management. "Thank you for that, too."
"Self-preservation." Timms shrugged and grinned. "I do live right next to you, and I don't want her keeping me up at night, either."
He trotted off, and Aspic hummed to himself as he got his fancy new kestrel settled for the night. Some days really were better, and more often than not now, interactions with good-hearted people were enough to shove the bad memories back into the dark. Aspic settled into bed and cocooned himself in the covers, grateful for bed, food, job, and the possibility of having friends.
2
Not A Familiar
Geoffrey poked through the ashes of his latest failed experiment. Setting chunks of limestone alight with mage fire hadn't produced any result, so he had wondered if pulverizing the limestone first would make any difference. Nothing. The deceased field mouse he'd found on his morning walk was still quite undeniably dead. There hadn't even been a twitch.
First, record results, then clean up. Consistent, accurate documentation was far more important than a clean workspace at this stage. Half of science lay in the record-keeping, after all, the painstaking tracking of variables and results. It had taken him several years of searching for some sympathetic magic link, something capable of speaking to death that other necromancers hadn't stumbled across.
In his experiments with different substances, he'd uncovered similarities between shell and bone, and from there, limestone and bone. He couldn't have been the first to discover this. It was simple alchemy. But none of his spell books or grimoires or notebooks from long-dead necromancers mentioned the link. Why would they? Sacrificial bloodletting was the most powerful tool in the necromancer's arsenal, and the ending of a life summoned the dead more surely than any other casting. Why would any of them look further than what worked?
But Geoffrey wasn't other necromancers. His priorities weren't theirs.
The shells would be his next line of inquiry, a promising one that whirled in his brain and kept him up at night. The sea lived within every shell born in her depths. The irresistible, inevitable pull of the tides would therefore live in the shells as well. That tidal pull might be enough to—
"Hey, boss!"
He didn't bother looking up from his notes. "Go away, Cecil."
"Oh, hey. That's no way to talk to your familiar." The shadow imp's smile floated in front of him, and Geoffrey put his quill down with a sigh.
"You're not my familiar."
"Sure I am, Geoffy." Cecil appeared, sitting on the edge of Geoffrey's desk, twirling his pointed tail. "I come here every day. I help you. Therefore, ergo, I am your familiar."
"You're more of a hindrance than a help, and necromancers don't have familiars."
The quill-sized imp jumped up and paced, the candlelight rendering him more and less distinct as he strode into and out of the light. "Of course they do. Agar the Horrid had a giant rat. Tepidus the Appalling had a giant spider. I mean, fine, it was more the size of a rat terrier, but stillreallybig for a spider. Bernard the Hamfisted had a… well, it was sort of a… I really don't know what it was, but it had lots of legs and eyestalks and kind ofoozedeverywhere. Smelled awful, come to think of it."
"You're still not my familiar."
