You've Got Another Thing Coming

“GET OUT!” roared the very tough-looking guy and threw a creature out onto the small village street outside.

Rose and I sidestepped as the creature flapped its large cape and stood up, swaying dangerously as it did so.

“I wasch juscht going to have a wittle…drink!” the creature slurred, smiling wickedly in his drunken stupor.

“Yeah, well,” the bouncer replied, wiggling his index finger, “you’ve had enough!”

The creature, a disturbingly overweight old vampire, giggled slightly and spread his cape.

“No flying tonight, mister!” a female voice yelled from inside. “They’ll have your license removed, Vladimir!”

The vampire groaned. He lowered his arms and let the cape fall to his sides. A woman came rushing out the door; her hair short and messy, and she began shushing the vampire to the side of the street. She whistled loudly, and in an instant a carriage arrived – a wagon but no horse.

“Get on the bloody thing, Vlad,” the woman ordered and hoisted the heavy vampire up in the carriage.
She said something that distinctly resembled the name of a street and a number out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster, and then the carriage was off.

“Stupid vampire, always biting customers! I swear, if it wasn’t for the fact that his drinking sponsored half of the bar…” the woman muttered to herself as she strode back into the bar.

On the way, her eyes landed on the three of us, resting slightly longer at Cherokee.

“Tobias, will you please help these customers into the bar? They look slightly dehydrated,” she ordered the bouncer and smiled pleasantly.

“Of course, Egon,” the bouncer replied – flexing his muscles threateningly at us, as if to intimidate us enough so that we’d never leave.

Rose clung to my arm, gripping at my shirt as we strode closer to the large, black-haired man. He surveyed us thoroughly, and, upon seeing Cherokee, laughed out loud.

“Cherokee – my boy! The long lost man has returned!” his laughter boomed throughout the empty street and echoed against the house walls.

Cherokee grinned, and soon the two men were engulfed in a man-hug: the one where they hit each other in the back as hard as they can. When they let go, both of them cringed slightly.

“Come on in, my friends,” the bouncer, Tobias, offered and shoved us all in front of him through the door.

When we stepped inside the bar, the entire place fell silent. Everyone, except an old woman in the far back corner with a dozen empty plates in front of her, turned to stare at us as we entered with the bouncer.

“Chrissy, take good care of these three!” Tobias called out to a girl by the bar.

“I always take good care of customers!” she replied, smiling widely. “Get yourselves over here, strangers!”

Rose, Cherokee and I scrambled our way through the crowded room. The bar was built after an Irish model, with wooden floors and benches, and an impressing large bar shelf that stretched from one side of the room to the other (which was a very long way), serving as a wall of bottles. Over the two double doors with glass frames that led outside, there was a bookshelf stacked with some of the greatest novels in the world.
The room also supplied three large TV-screens that aired the latest sporting events and other such things. A stair in the far away corner led down to the cellar, in which I figured the bathrooms must be. A small, inconspicuous door behind the bar desk led into the back rooms, where I supposed the kitchen would reside.
The smell in the air was lovely and mouth-watering.

“I want the biggest, grandest, most fat-dripping thing you’ve got on the menu!” I ordered as soon as we reached the bar desk. I hopped up on a stool and placed my elbows on the desk and my chin in my hand. “Chop, chop!”

The girl, Chrissy, smiled politely and flipped a lid open on the wall behind her, which concealed a tube.

“One salamander-steak with extra butter and onions!” she called into the tube. She then looked up. “What do you want on the side?”

“French fries,” I replied, grinning lightly at the thought. I was starving.

“Whatnow?” Chrissy wondered, her blue eyes incredulous. “Are the French people frying? You actually want a fried Frenchman?”

Cherokee walked behind the desk and put one arm around Chrissy, pulling her back slightly from the tube.

“She’s human, Chrissy,” he said as if that explained everything. “What she really wants is sliced potatoes boiled in oil.”

“Oh,” Chrissy replied, but she still eyed me as if I had just donned another dozen heads.

However, when I think about it, I think I would have actually been considered more normal if I had over a dozen heads, instead of being human.

“Well,” she continued nonetheless. “You have to go and tell Marlin and Lynnea how to cook that. They’ll be all over themselves to be able to make something that strange!”

Cherokee nodded, pecked Chrissy’s cheek (which made me feel ill to my stomach, for some reason) and headed through the door that led to the back rooms and, obviously, the kitchen.

Rose hopped up on the stool next to me and smiled at the blue eyed bartender.
“I just want some water, thank you. Preferably mineral, if you have”, she ordered.

We both watched the curly-haired, pale girl move around at impossible speed, collecting a glass and a flask, water and some ice in less time than it took for me to turn on a tap.

“There you go!” she said and put a glass of perfect mineral water in front of Rose after just a few seconds. “Enjoy!”

Rose took a sip, and smiled joyfully.
“Ah, this is the best place for a water-drink!” she exclaimed and smiled appreciatively at Chrissy.

“So, you must be Cherokee’s sister,” Chrissy concluded all of a sudden. Both Rose and I started, but Chrissy waved a little with her hand, and we instantly fell back on our stools.

“Yes, I am…” Rose answered, clearing her throat from the water that had almost choked her. “How did you know?”

Chrissy smiled – she seemed to be doing that a lot – and replied:
“Well, as a bartender, you learn to recognize certain kinds of people. I mean, there are the usual ones; if you’re a devil or a doctor, an angel or an ass, if you’re a witch or a vampire and all that.
But, beside that, you learn to read people very well. You can see who they are to each other by the way they act around one another. You,” she pointed at me, “clearly have a strange relationship towards them fairies you hang out with. You’re scared of them, but you trust them nonetheless. As for you,” she now turned her finger towards Rose, “you love Cherokee. One can tell from the way you listen to his words and the way you move around him, and how you look at him like he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

Rose and I sat quiet, listening intently at the unravelling of our personal relations.

“Besides,” Chrissy finished, now mopping a clean glass with a white towel, “you and Cherokee look like the male–female version of the same person. It’s creepy.”

I laughed; breaking the trance Chrissy had put us in with her little speech.

“That’s exactly what I though the first time I saw them together!” I told her, grinning as I recalled the occasion, and then cringing as I remembered the entire course of events.

“Well, it’s true,” Chrissy grinned back, her dark locks waving about around her slightly freckled face. “So,” she continued. “Who are you?”

“I’m just the wrong person who was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” I told her, stealing some of Rose’s water and loving it.

“Cher said you’re human?” Chrissy carried on, making the statement more of a question, as if she didn’t believe it in the first place.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “I am human.” With a sudden urge of curiosity, I wondered out loud: “And what are you?”

Chrissy laughed out loud, an intoxicating laugh that made everyone who heard it want to laugh along. She finished with a snort, and told me:
“I’m a witch.”

It turned out as such, that Chrissy was, in fact, a witch in training. She and her cousin Egon – that was the woman who had helped the vampire out on the street – worked together at the bar as bartenders/waitresses. She, too, was a witch, and the old lady in the far back corner with a dozen plates or so in front of her was their grandmother; a half senile witch who kept pulling people aside to tell them stories about long lost times, and then mutter ever so often ‘not at all, not at all!’ and plop another tablet or two in her mouth, and chew vigorously.

“So you two don’t own the bar?” Rose asked, referring to Chrissy and Egon.

“Nah,” Chrissy replied, and her whole persona shrunk and darkened significantly. “We just work here.”

Her tone had turned short, and she snapped at another customer to put his glass on the tablet, or she would have the bouncer throw him out quicker than he could stutter an apology.

“So,” Rose continued, ignoring the obvious warning signs. “Who does own this place?”

I, on the other hand, could easily read the pale-faced bartender’s mood, and I did everything in my power to silence Rose before anything she said actually ended up with an assault.

However, Chrissy had more self control than I gave her credit for.

“You see those two over there?” she wondered and pointed at a table in the darkest part of the bar, near the stairs.
Two women sat there, bent over the polished wood, discussing something intently. One looked to be around twenty-five, perhaps younger, tall and bespectacled with shoulder length, light brown hair with blonde tints. The other one seemed to be no older than eighteen; her tall and well-built frame giving her a very sporty appearance, and her dark brown hair was sleek and fastened in a stylish pony tail.
Next to them on the floor stood two buckets of water and soap, and against their chairs leaned two brooms and a swab.

“The cleaning girls?” Rose asked doubtfully. “Yeah, I see them.”

“They're not cleaning girls!” Chrissy muttered, clenching her fists. “They’re the owners of the bar. They’re two of the richest people in this country!”

Rose and I gaped at Chrissy.

“They won a fortune at a lottery; they’ve spent the last couple of years doubling their stock per quarter of a year. They’re filthy rich! This bar is just one of their hobbies.”

“Whoa,” Rose and I exclaimed, looking with new eyes at the two girls at the table.

“Yeah,” Chrissy muttered again. “The funny thing is that the younger one’s only fourteen years old; and the other one’s twenty-three.”

Rose’s and my impressed gasps could be heard again. However, our open mouths dipped even lower when Chrissy practically hissed:
“I hate working for my baby sister!”

She then tossed the towel at the desk, turned and angrily stomped through the doors that led to the kitchen.

“Never mind her,” a light voice suggested from behind us.

We spun around and faced the woman from outside, Egon. Strange name, by the way; especially for a woman…

“She just gets easily upset,” Egon told us. “She has a very short fuse when it comes to her sister.”

“Yeah, we kind of noticed,” I replied, still a little too shocked to be able to come up with anything comprehendible.

“It’s nothing, really,” the woman tried to convince us. She plopped down on the stool next to Rose, propping her elbows up in the same manner as I had.

I stared at the short-haired, rotund bartender with eyes the exact same shade of blue as her cousin who had just stormed out the door.

“Err,” I said eloquently, “shouldn’t you go after her?”

Egon just shook her head and fingered on a napkin she found. “Nah, she’s a reasonable girl. She’ll come around in another second or two.”

She poked the napkin and it was suddenly ablaze. “And if not, my sister and older cousin work down in the kitchen. They’ll know what to do.”

The woman spoke very quickly and quietly, the way some people with bad hearing does. I felt a strong sense of connection with her, only I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

“Egon!” a loud voice called from the tube on the wall, and she was immediately by its side, the lid off and her ear tightly pressed against it.

“Egon!” the voice called again, now from the doorway, as the door had swung open and now revealed a short, stubby person with frizzy hair and armed to the teeth with a spatula and a deep-fry boiling pot.

Egon started and stared in surprise at the tube. “Wow, that’s good reception!”

“I’m over here, you twit,” the newcomer sourly stated.

Another start, another stare; and Egon yelped in another surprise:

“Lynnea! Geesus, you scared me!”

The person, Lynnea, ignored her cousin’s frightened cackle, and moved to stand just an inch away from said cousin’s face, reaching no higher than just below Egon’s nose.

“I can’t do this!” she bellowed, waving the spatula and deep-fry boiling pot in the air as if to clarify what she couldn’t do. “Marlin and I have tried everything, and I think Cherokee was actually in tears when I left!”

Customers in the bar turned towards us at the loud noise, staring at the scene that was taking place behind the desk. However, they soon turned away again; the locals had clearly seen this too many times to even be bothered any more.

“French fries are impossible to make!” Lynnea finished, determined.

Rose stood from her stool, inching closer to the slightly dangerously-looking woman with much care.
She poked her once, but as Lynnea didn’t even flinch, Rose poked her twice.

“I could give it a shot,” she murmured meekly to the apron-clad woman. “If you don’t mind?”

Lynnea surveyed her appraisingly, and nodded once.
“You get one try,” she told Rose, tossed the spatula into the pot, grabbed Rose and pulled her through the back door.

Egon glanced at their retreating backs, a worried gleam in her eyes.
“I hope she’ll make it through,” she whispered to herself, before rising and positioning herself behind the bar.
“People who messes up Lynnea’s kitchen rarely remember anything else than a large fridge coming at them at a very high speed,” Egon told me, picked up Chrissy’s towel and began to mindlessly wipe another glass, as I stared at her in horror.