On a very nice street on a rather large hill in Portland, Oregon was a very nice neighborhood called Winterbloom Way, which was full of individuals and families who were wealthy enough to own a home here and a winter home somewhere else so they could escape the incessant rain and depressing gray pallor that Portland got in the winter, yet not so wealthy they could afford mansions or gold-plated toilet seats. As such, the houses were of high quality, some of them large and roomy modern houses painted in neighborhood-acceptable solid colors, while others were smaller Victorian era houses that had been well maintained, modernized in ways that didn't affect the aesthetics, and sometimes remodeled or expanded in similar ways. All of the houses, regardless of when they were built, had a similar look about them, there being strict neighborhood rules about how houses should look. Not as strict as some neighborhoods, of course; this was – after all – Portland, home of a great number of hipsters, even wealthy hipsters.
The yards were very well kept as well, many of the inhabitants just hiring landscapers to make the yards as pretty as possible with trees, decorative shrubs or grasses, flowers, stones, and other plants and materials. In fact, everything about the neighborhood was under so many rules and regulations that they had an entire committee of people whose job it was to understand and enforce these rules, making sure that nothing was out of place for long. It was, put simply, a neighborhood so carefully designed and watched that a lone woman could go walking around it at midnight on a moonless night and feel perfectly safe.
One of the families living in this neighborhood was the Park family. Mr. Jason Jasper Park was a young, handsome man with brown hair, and his wife was blond. Both were fit and looked too good to be entirely natural, though neither had ever admitted to plastic surgery. Mr. Park was rarely seen wearing anything other than a three-piece suit, which he needed for his job. Around the house, he wore something more casual that nonetheless was nicer than lots of peoples' work outfits. His wife dressed in much the same way, always nicer when going out but her around the house clothes were always a bit absurdly nice. Even her jogging outfit was more expensive than some people's Sunday best. The kids dressed much more casually, in jeans and t-shirts or plainer dresses, mainly so they wouldn't soil anything nice.
Their house abided by the neighborhood rules so carefully that the Parks had never once gotten complaints about it, and had never been reprimanded or talked with negatively about any of it. It had a picket fence with the pickets rounded on the top in case kids or parachuters fell on it. The house itself was as white as its inhabitants; they could have used more interesting colors as long as those colors were within the rules of the neighborhood, but the Parks had made their house the most boringly normal color possible.
The yard of the house was perfectly manicured, and the home looked warm and welcoming despite looking like something torn from a catalog of perfect suburban homes. Several ornamental flowering cherry trees were planted in the yard. Well... “yard” was a bit generous; the Parks had had all the grass torn up out of their yard and replaced with decorative stone tiles, a flower garden, and those cherry trees of course. You wouldn't see the Parks wasting time doing something as pedestrian as mowing a lawn, nor would you ever see them paying someone else to mow a lawn either, in case the person they hired was an immigrant or was someone who wasn't white. As far as anyone knew, they didn't hire anyone to keep the flower garden maintained. They didn't seem to do it themselves either, as nobody had ever seen any of them gardening, yet it always looked in top condition. Some people had even checked to see if the flowers were fake, but they were real flowers.
Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Mr. Jason Park was a bank manager, and while everyone knew that Mrs. Park had a job with flexible hours that let her work from home a lot, nobody was quite sure what that job actually was. But they were perhaps the most normal family in the entire neighborhood, even if they mostly only socialized with a select group of their neighbors, and they were impeccable about their house following the neighborhood rules. Since Mr. Park was a bit of a stick in the mud, Mrs. Park was a little nosy but very annoying, and both of them had far more conservative beliefs than was usual for the neighborhood, most people in the neighborhood were fine with them sticking to the people who could tolerate them.
Mrs. Park liked the neighborhood she lived in very much, oblivious as she was to the fact that most people in it didn't particularly like her. She waved at neighbors whenever she went out jogging, not noticing that their return waves were feeble and unenthusiastic. She talked to Mrs. Richardson and petted her dog, a Shih Tzu named Foofoo, without noticing that Mrs. Richardson didn't give permission to pet the dog, nor did she think much of Foofoo barking at her. Yes, Mrs. Park was one of those people who was so confident in her social status and in how likable she was that she never noticed any fact that contradicted this confidence. Which made it all the more remarkable that she was the first adult to notice something weird that none of the other adults had noticed.
It happened on an unusually sunny December day, unusual because Portland winters were almost always either gray and raining or gray and not raining, but at least it was still cold. Mrs. Park had breakfast as usual, dealt with the usual behavior problems from her kids (nothing too drastic, she expected her kids to mostly behave themselves well, and mostly they did), and an hour after breakfast, she went out on a jog. However, she'd barely gone two houses down when she noticed one of the neighborhood kids staring wide-eyed at something to her left. She stopped and looked where the boy was looking.
It was a house. It was a Victorian-era house, Queen Anne style with a prominent tower on the left side, and was painted blood red with black trim and black roof. It was also two stories tall, with a tall stone wall covered in moss. Nothing about it stood out to the average observer, not for Portland at least, except that it was beautiful. Heather didn’t quite like the color, but still thought the house quite lovely. But while the house looked superficially like many others in the neighborhood, it also looked rather menacing in a way. It might have been from the fact that the stone wall was topped with metal spikes that looked like they'd been sharpened only this morning by someone who thought they were meant to be weapons. Or it may have been the signs posted on the wall, such as 'beware of dog,' 'no trespassing,' and 'no soliciting,' which were hand-painted and didn't break any neighborhood rules, even if they were unusual. Or it may have been the fact that just last night there had been a totally empty lot where the house now stood.
Mrs. Heather Park stared at the house along with the boy. Oblivious as she was to people not liking her, it was kind of hard to miss an empty lot sprouting a fully-formed house overnight. But looking around, she saw several other adults walking around the neighborhood, all of them somehow doing just that. Heather was agog, wondering how so many people had failed to notice this, were still failing to notice this.
She thought, at first, that the house was some sort of hallucination or illusion. Maybe the boy was staring at something else, or maybe he was an illusion himself. But he opened the gate of the fence he was at and closed it; she heard the gate close, and she felt it when he brushed against her as he hid himself behind her, looking around her at the house. So he at least was real.
Being across the street from this house, she wondered if she should get closer to investigate. After a few minutes thinking about it, she did. The boy ran back inside the fence of his yard and cowered behind it, watching her over the top as she approached the house.
A house suddenly springing into existence overnight would have been quite creepy enough to be going on with, but it didn't end there, no not at all. A Himalayan blackberry tangle sat visible in the yard over the top of the unusually-tall wall, its thorny vines covered in bright, delicious-looking berries, even though it was nearly the end of December. While there wasn't any snow and the sun was out, it was still too cold for there to be berries on a blackberry bush. As Heather approached the house, she felt like the blackberry bramble was looking at her, even though that was silly; plants don't have eyes. Well, except for potatoes, but potato eyes don't actually see, and generally speaking, potatoes don't feel like menacing ambush predators waiting for their chance to strike. And that's exactly what that blackberry bramble felt like to Heather.
Moving away from the part of the wall with the blackberry bramble, she touched the wall with one hand. It felt like normal stone, but it also felt wet, and almost alive with some kind of warmth. She then noticed the gate in the wall, which filled the bottom half of a gap in the wall that showed a good view of the front porch and the front-facing windows. There was movement inside the window, and Heather thought she saw someone in sand-colored clothes pointing at something toward the back of the house.
Feeling scared yet brave, Heather grabbed the gate's handle and tried to open it. It didn't budge, so she let go and continued examining the gate and surrounding wall. Right to the right of the gate was a hole with the front of a mailbox sticking out of it, and no little red flag. Underneath the mailbox was a small doorbell. She blinked at it.
Someone passed by just then, looking strangely at Heather before pausing. Heather looked at the woman; a heavyset widowed white woman in her 70's, wearing a tailored dress, glasses with green frames, and walking a Shih Tzu on a leash; Mrs. Richardson.
“Thinking of buying that house?” Mrs. Richardson asked.
“So you can see the house?”
Mrs. Richardson narrowed her eyes at Heather as though angry.
“Yes, I can. Brand new prescription, you know. And I'm not yet so blind I can't see without them, things just look a little blurry without them is all.”
“Oh. Right. I'm sorry.”
Mrs. Richardson sniffed. “I should hope so. Young people these days, so rude,” she said, muttering the last sentence as she walked off.
At last Heather snapped back to her senses as if from a daze, and looked the whole house up and down once more, sighing. She knew what she had to do. For now, her jog was over, so she went back across the street.
“Jackson?” she said to the boy.
“Yes, Mrs. Park?” he responded.
She paused with her mouth open, trying to think of what she should say. What she could say. Glancing around, she noticed several more children staring at the house, but none of the adults were even noticing it. Wait, no, scratch that: there was Mr. Smith-Jones and his wife, they were staring at it too. This reinforced her theory about the house. Finally, she thought of something to tell Jackson.
“Um... don't go near that house. Not until I've found out who lives there, at least.”
His eyes went wide. “But it wasn't there last night! It's like, I dunno, a monster house or something! It's going to eat us all!”
“Oh don't be silly, houses don't appear overnight,” she lied, laughing nervously. Then she took off and left before he could respond, because she really didn't know what to tell him. Maybe Mr. Smith-Jones would fare better.
Once she got into her own house, she picked up her cell phone and dialed a friend of hers from work. After four rings he finally picked up.
“Starling residence,” the man said wearily.
“Hello Christopher? It's me, Heather. Heather Park?”
He sighed. “Yes, Heather, I do have caller ID, you know,” he said, his voice full of a weariness Mrs. Park didn't pick up on.
“Good, good,” she said distractedly. “Christopher, I have something very... unusual to report.”
“You do, do you?” he asked, sounding bored. “And what is it this time? Did Mr. Smith-Jones make an automaton just a bit too realistic to pass mundane notice? Or did Juniper Carmichael accidentally levitate in public again?”
“Oh no, far, far more than that. Do you know the empty lot across the street and two doors down from my house?”
There was a pause filled with breathing and crackling static. Then, “Oh yes, the one you keep complaining about for being an eyesore, overgrown with weeds? The one you keep trying to convince the neighborhood association to turn into a small park, even though we already have a park? Is that the one you mean?”
“It's the only empty lot in the neighborhood, so yes. Or rather, it was the only empty lot. There's a house there now.”
“Fascinating. And why did it take you so long to tell me this? I would've thought a new house going up would be all you could talk about for months.”
“No, Christopher, I mean that as recently as yesterday, it was still an empty lot, still overgrown with weeds. Now there's a house there. It just appeared overnight.”
“WHAT?!” Christopher sounded panic-stricken now. “I'll call the Council and the PSA at once! Has the video gone viral yet? How many--”
“Calm down, Christopher! The only people who even noticed the house are children and... Gifted people like us.”
“I-- You're sure?”
“Yes. I saw it, Mr. and Mrs. Smith-Jones saw it, and little Jackson Dreyfuss saw it, as well as some other kids in the neighborhood, but the mundane adults are all walking right by it without even noticing it. I talked with Mrs. Richardson, and she sees the house, but doesn't notice it. She asked me if I was thinking of buying it, when she caught me staring at it. Seemed to think there'd been a house there all along.”
“She did? Wow. That's... I don't think I've ever heard of a spell that can do that.”
“What should we do?”
“Hmm... I'll look into it. If it's a Gifted family, they're required by our law to register moves with the Council, it's only really a problem if they haven't. So if---wait, you live on Winterbloom Way, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And the house is on the same street?”
“Yes, Christopher.”
“Well it's just... I think I may know something about it. I was feeling a bit under the weather last week, but I seem to recall getting an email, let me just check here...”
She heard the clunk of a phone being set down, then the clack of keyboard keys and clicks of a computer mouse. She waited patiently for several minutes before he picked the phone back up.
“Ah yes, right here, an email from Donald about a family moving to Winterbloom Way. Surname is 'Ravenstone.' According to the email, everything is in order. Oh dear, what a mistake I made. I apologize, Heather, for not warning you about this, I was ill as I said and it quite slipped my mind. Though I must say, there's nothing in the paperwork to suggest a house going up overnight.”
“You're sure everything is in order?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because they've got a blackberry bramble in their yard that feels like it's looking at me as though I was dinner.”
“Hmm... well, they'll have to have an inspection within a couple weeks of moving in to make sure they’re following the laws, so we'll know then what that's about. Don't you go snooping! Leave the information gathering to me, Heather.”
“I make no promises, Christopher.”
“I mean it, Heather, you're not on the welcoming committee, don't go scaring them off!”
“You offend me, Christopher!”
“Sorry, but I've told you before that some people are put off by your beliefs. They're unusual for Portland, and even more unusual for the Gifted community.”
“Yes, yes. Call me when you know more, won't you?”
He sighed. “Yes, I will.”
She hung up then, and went to the window to stare down the street at the mysterious house from nowhere.
~
Heather was right to be wary of the blackberry bramble, as it transpired. She watched the house over the next week, and a lot happened in that time. The blackberry bramble sometimes appeared to move, even when there was no wind. Several times she saw a bird flying towards its tempting berries, and whatever happened to those birds was too fast for Heather to see. She only saw birds fly in, then an explosion of feathers, the bird nowhere to be found and the blackberry vines moving as though a gust of wind had hit them. After a week of this, the birds started avoiding that plant.
Nor was that the only odd thing to happen with birds around the Ravenstone house. Heather, several children, and once even Mrs. Smith-Jones all saw birds fly straight at the empty space above the second floor and suddenly smack into something invisible with such force that they fell to the ground, stunned or dead they couldn't tell from a distance. More than once when this happened, when the witnesses looked in horror at one another and then looked back (if they happened to be able to see into the yard) the dead birds were gone, and the blackberry bramble was once more rattling as though it could move on its own.
All of those sightings of dying birds took place in the first week of the house's existence, and then overnight on the 8th day, it just stopped happening. Something more peculiar took its place, as entire flocks of crows or other birds could be seen avoiding the deadly invisible barrier in a panic, so suddenly that some of the witnesses speculated that whatever invisible thing was there was suddenly visible if you crossed past the threshold of the wall.
It wasn't just birds, either, as proved by the goat incident. Another neighbor had been dealing with her own blackberry bramble problem as it was getting out of hand, and so being a rich Portlander, she hired a man who brought a small herd of goats into the neighborhood to eat the blackberry brambles in her yard. He'd started out with 14 goats, but when he rounded them all up, one was missing. The only clue to the missing goat's whereabouts was one witness who last saw one of the goats nibbling on the blackberry vines of the creepy house, but hadn't seen the goat less than a minute later when he'd looked back again at the sound of the goat's terrified bleating. Again, the blackberry bramble was shaking as though in a breeze.
Juniper Carmichael, a rather serious 15 year old brown-skinned girl with black hair and glasses, even reported to Mrs. Park that she'd been coming home from school for the winter holidays when it had been raining, and she had seen the rain gathering on an invisible roof, pouring off it down to the yard below, while the only visible roof remained dry as a bone. When the kids and adults who knew the house was weird tried to witness this for themselves the next day, though, the visible roof was wet and the water was running from its eaves instead of the invisible one above it. Nothing supernatural to see here, run along now ladies and gentlemen.
It wasn't until the 9th day of the house being there that anyone spotted somebody who might have lived there, aside from the hazy image Mrs. Park had seen through the window that first day. Mrs. Richardson had been walking Foofoo past the house when she'd been jerked back by the leash and fell over on her backside, the leash leading up into the blackberry bramble. In that same moment, Juniper Carmichael and the red-headed Mrs. Smith-Jones had been watching the house, and spotted someone running out the front door in a panic, holding something long in one hand.
The man, who was black, threw open the gate and pointed the thing in his left hand at the plant. There was something that sounded like singing, a flash of light, and the dog fell out of the plant, his normally well-groomed hair a mess of blood, leaves, twigs, and dirt. Ignoring his fallen mistress, he ran off back towards his house, yelping all the way. Mrs. Smith-Jones pulled Mrs. Richardson up to her feet, both of them surprised she hadn't broken anything, and Mrs. Richardson limped back home to comfort her dog. Several of the children who had witnessed the whole thing took off running once they saw the dog was fine, leaving only the teenager and the adult behind.
“Oh those silly dogs,” the man said nervously, “always uh, you know, climbing into bushes. Ha! Silly scamp.” He hastily stowed away whatever had been in his hand, shrugging apologetically.
He was a tall black man with close-cropped hair, no older than 25, and was so thin he was nearly gaunt, even sickly, though his skin was a very healthy dark color. He was dressed like a hippie, complete with fringed vest, granny glasses, and bell-bottom pants. He also had on a wide-brimmed, white straw hat with a lovely black rose pinned to it. The whole effect was like looking at someone from the 1960's had been picked up by a time traveler from their garden and dropped into the modern world, except he wasn't the race most people would expect a hippie to be.
“Are you Mr. Ravenstone?” Mrs. Smith-Jones asked him.
“What? Oh yeah. Yes. Yes, I'm Orpheus Ravenstone. And um, who ah... who might you be?”
“I'm Lexa Smith-Jones. My husband and I are Gifted, like you.”
“I see,” he said. “And you?”
The teenage girl pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Juniper Carmichael, I'm also a witch.”
Mrs. Smith-Jones looked incredulously at her.
“What? All the mundane kids are gone, nobody else mundane is hanging around.”
“Witches, really? Good. Well pardon me a moment,” Orpheus said, as he took out the long thing he'd had earlier – a wand, of course – out of his pocket and turned around to cast some invisible spells at the blackberry plant, causing its vines to go back to the other side of the wall.
Lexa looked shocked. “In broad daylight?”
“Don’t worry. The wards keep it hidden from sight. Um, usually. From a distance. This close up, though, that's another matter.”
He had stowed his wand again.
“I see you're a southpaw,” Lexa said.
“Er, yes. Is that a problem?”
“Not at all. My husband is a lefty, too.”
“Oh. Well it's good to meet some of the local witches,” he said, tipping his hat at them, and they noticed he had an extra finger on his left hand. “My wives Morgana and Nizoni are around here somewhere. We'll be introducing ourselves around the neighborhood shortly.” He smiled at them some more.
“Wives? Plural?”
“Yes. Nothing official, polyamorous marriage being illegal in this country, but yes. In the eyes of the gods, we three are married. But before you go making assumptions, I assure you it's an equal partnership. They were actually married to each other first, and then I got added later.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Smith-Jones.
“Somebody die?” asked Juniper.
“Pardon?” Orpheus asked, confused.
“Your hat, it's got a black rose on it. That usually symbolizes death. Which is why I asked if somebody died.”
“Oh, that. No, nobody died. Well uh, I mean I'm sure many people have died today, but, you know... nobody we know. Er, so far as we know, I mean. But no, I just thought it was pretty. Had it preserved with magic. I'm a phytomancer. I grow rare plants.”
The door opened again, and a black woman just as tall as Orpheus but a more healthy weight than him stepped out. She had her hair in many tight braids, which Juniper recognized from the Internet as box braids. But she looked a bit... well, she was dressed like it was Halloween in a blood red dress with silver cobweb patterns on it, her fingernails were painted black with white cobweb design, she wore white lipstick, and had eye shadow the color of a bruise. Speaking of eyes, hers were such a vibrant red they had to be contact lenses, especially seeing as her pupils looked slitted like those of a cat. She had in her arms a small infant girl with dark brown skin like her parents and a full head of black hair that was styled in braids with colorful plastic beads woven into it. The infant, who was missing a foot (in what looked like a congenital way), was chewing on a rubber bat.
“Orpheus, have you taken care of Scylla yet? We don't need any more--- why hello there, neighbors. I'm Morgana Ravenstone.”
“Honey, the redhead is Mrs. Lexa Smith-Jones, and this lovely brown young lady is Juniper Carmichael. They're fellow Gifted women.”
“Lovely to meet you two,” Morgana said, curtsying.
After they nodded back at her, she turned to her husband and said, “So, what about Scylla?”
“Yes, my jasmine flower, Scylla will be ready for the inspection soon. We just need to put up some more containment runes, I think. That should stop her from attempting to eat any more pets.”
“It will have to wait, Orpheus. Nizoni is rather busy right now completing the anchoring of the third story, and she's run into a strange anomaly.”
Orpheus looked curiously at his wife and leaned against the wall. “Anomaly?”
“Some kind of odd spacial disturbance. I don't pretend to understand it. But she says stuff is leaking through into our world from Tirffiniol.”
“Huh. Okay. Did you call Ressa for her?”
“Yes, Ressa is on her way.”
“Good, good,” he said a little distractedly. “You got the welcoming pies made yet, honey?”
“Not until tomorrow, Orpheus dear. I'm sure you know why.”
“What? Oh yeah, right, right. Silly me. We just uh, got the utilities turned on today, you see,” he explained to the two neighbors. He sounded more nervous than ever. He hastily added, “Long process, moving, and we’ve been living elsewhere while doing it. We’ll be uh, moving in here very shortly.”
Mrs. Smith-Jones thought the Ravenstones were nice without being too nice, even if they were weird and a little creepy, so she gave them the benefit of the doubt.
“Your house is creepy,” Juniper said suddenly. “What's the big invisible thing above your roof?”
“The third story,” Morgana said. “But since it's not allowed by the mundane rules of this neighborhood, we hid it with a glamour. I do hate HOAs, but I’d rather not pick a fight with them. Not yet, anyway.”
The infant, with their free hand, put their thumb on their forehead with the rest of their fingers splayed. The child then repeated the gesture twice. Morgana transferred the child over to Orpheus when they noticed this, Orpheus softly saying, “Papa's right here, sweetie. Oh, you're such a calm baby, aren't you?” Lexa and Juniper noticed, then, that Morgana was a lefty as well.
Holding the bat in their right hand, that arm across their stomach, the baby took their left hand – palm open and facing themselves – and moved it twice towards themselves.
“Yes, Beloved, Papa will sing to you. What do you want to hear?”
The infant just repeated the movement.
“Oh okay, Papa will pick. How about 'Baa Baa Black Sheep'?”
The baby giggled at this, waving their arms.
“Are you... is that baby talking to you?” Mrs. Smith-Jones asked.
“They're 'speaking' with sign language, yes. We taught them how, so they wouldn't need to cry.” Morgana said as Orpheus began to sing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' to the baby in a lovely tenor voice.
“Sounds handy. Wish I'd known that was an option.”
“It is handy. Even more so now that our second child is deaf.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.”
“Don't be sorry. We're not.” Her voice was happy, and as she continued, it became filled with wonder. “They'll experience the world in a way we can scarcely imagine, their perspective radically different from our own. Nothing they experience will be the same as the way we experience it. It's exciting, and I'm a little envious. I think when I die I shall choose to be reincarnated as a deaf child, so I can experience it for myself.”
“I... wow. I feel ashamed of myself now, for suggesting your other child might be... I dunno, incomplete or something.”
“My husband, my wife, and I are telepaths. Do non-telepaths feel incomplete for not being telepathic? I personally know someone who can see in the infrared spectrum, and another old friend of mine can always feel where true north is. I do not feel incomplete for not having those senses, though I do occasionally envy those gifts. Why should our child feel incomplete for not having a sense of hearing? Anyway, it is not a complete deafness. The doctors say they can hear some sounds, but not well. They will have to learn to read lips, most likely, but they should be able to hear when someone is talking to them, even though they won't be able to understand what is being said.
“As to shame, I strive not to feel shame, it's like guilt. I prefer to feel varying degrees of remorse, and use that to learn from my mistakes and move on to make entirely new mistakes. We are all of us naught but people fumbling in the dark for answers. Instead of feeling shame for stepping on someone's toe, or guilt for accidentally kicking someone in the shins, just... recognize you goofed, and try not to do it again.”
Mrs. Smith-Jones nodded. “Very wise of you.”
“I still wanna know, what was that about 'anchoring' the third story?” Juniper asked, since the discussion had come to a lull.
“It's a bit complicated to go into right now. We're still rather busy, and we ran into unforeseen complications. Perhaps after the inspection we'll have time to talk. We would like to get to know our neighbors,” Morgana said, smiling with her mouth closed.
Everyone froze as someone with a dog came jogging by. The blackberry bush's vines rattled menacingly, one of the vines actually moving like it was a tentacle. Orpheus spun around to glare at it, pointing a finger at it with the hand that wasn't holding the baby, like the finger was a deadly weapon; which, since he was a witch like them, it likely was.
“Naughty girl, Scylla! I thought we had you trained better than this. No pig's blood for a month!”
The rattling of the brambles intensified, the vines moving more intently. Seeing this, Orpheus began to sing a lullaby to the plant. Just a minute of this, and Scylla's brambles quivered and slunk down behind the wall, out of sight.
“Good. Now remember, no eating dogs or cats, no goats, and definitely no eating mail carriers, not even in a playful way,” Orpheus said sternly. “Luckily we never had to worry about you eating kids.”
“And as tempting as it is to say otherwise,” Morgana added, smiling, “don't eat any of the Jehovah's Witnesses again, not even if you spit them out without hurting them like before. This move was difficult enough, we don't have the time or patience to move again.”
“What is that thing, anyway?” Mrs. Smith-Jones asked.
“Himalayan blackberry strangler. A rare magical plant,” Orpheus explained.
“Honestly, Orpheus, would it have killed you to put Scylla in the other yard?”
“You know I can't, honey; she and Charybdis would tear each other apart. They're too territorial.”
She sighed. “I'll never understand you. Man-eating plants don't bother you at all, but hand you a Chinese Bamboo Octopus and you freak out.”
“Chinese Bamboo Octopi are venomous, honey. Venomous enough to kill a grown man.”
“And that plant would eat you as soon as look at you if you hadn't raised it from a seedling.”
Orpheus rolled his eyes and rubbed his neck with his free hand in embarrassment, still holding the baby, but smiled warmly. “Yeah, I know. Anyway, I'll have to put an enchantment up on the wall to keep her contained.”
“Himalayan runic magic?” she asked.
“Yes, that would work best. In the meantime, I'm gonna go check on Nizoni.”
She smiled again. “Okay, dear. I'll be in the bedroom preparing to relocate the bogeymen to the attic. I think they'll like it better in there once we get settled in.”
Scylla's vines rattled again. Orpheus turned to look at her again with a glower.
“No, Scylla, I've told you a thousand times already, you can't eat any lawyers either, they give you indigestion!”
As Scylla settled down again, Mrs. Smith-Jones said, “Um... well, it was nice meeting you.”
“You as well, my dear.”
As the two Ravenstone adults went back into their house with their baby, Mrs. Smith-Jones smiled, thinking her husband would be most interested in meeting them; they sounded far more interesting than most of the other witches in the neighborhood, especially Mrs. Park.
~
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