You've Got Another Thing Coming

“You bastard!” I yelled over my shoulder as I walked my squelching walk back up the tiny hill. “You conniving, smirking, seductive little twit!”

The sound of laughter filled the air and a merry splashing told me my darling husband took little if no offence at my wetness-induced anger.

“I’ll get you for this,” I vowed vehemently as I wrung out my hair. “Just you wait and see, pretty boy. You will pay!”

I tossed the wet strands over my back and shivered as a breeze sent chills over my goose-bumped, naked skin. The wind decidedly picked up its speed and caught the messy, tousled mop also known as my hair and whipped it viciously in my face. The cold seemed to go through bone and marrow and I squatted down instantly in a panicked attempt to retain some body warmth.

I grunted. “If you don’t catch pneumonia,” I muttered vaguely in the direction of the river and a very content Cherokee – who was exceedingly proud of his joke well-played, “or urinal infection, then the world has no justice.”

A search for my discarded clothing later ensued, and when I found all the scattered items I had to at least admit that Cherokee might have had some grounds on which to base his practical joke. They reeked.

“Urk,” I stated and put the garment aside for further inspection and, preferably, burning. Instead I looked around, willing something to pop out of a bush and entice me to wear it. Sadly, this did not happen. As it was, it was getting a lot colder by the minute and I was getting more desperate for something to wear that did not smell of skunk, so I decided I needed to use my powers.

The thing was, though, that whatever sporadic powers I had, they were very difficult to control. And, as I tried with exceeded exasperation, I could not make clothes appear out of thin air. With a growl I went on the prowl for something – I did not yet know what – that could possibly be magically persuaded to form something akin to clothes.

The search led me no further than a gratifying three steps before me eye caught the bright yellow shape of a flower in the grass, just about to be squished by my naked toes. I bent to pick it up and heard an appreciative, throaty sound behind me.

“Stop staring at my arse,” I told him, feeling a blush well over me that had nothing to do with standing head-down.

“I’m not staring,” Cherokee said, “I’m admiring.”

I rose with the flower in one hand, glaring intently at him. “That doesn’t make any difference,” said I. “You’re goggling.”

He shrugged. “’s my legal right, apparently.”

“Bastard,” I muttered again, this time under my breath.

He motioned with his chin in my direction. “What do you propose to do with that, then?”
I eyed the flower and then eyed myself quickly. He did notice the glance, however, and grunted, amused. “Don’t tell me you’ll try and make that fit you?”

I coloured again, this time more so by simple, repellent stubbornness. “So what if I do?” I asked, sticking out my chest until I noted his eyes gluing themselves very pointedly at my naked self.

“Besides,” growled I and deflated, “it’s worth a shot. What’ve I got to lose, really?”
He shrugged and went, stark naked, to do whatever he thought prudent to do at a time like this and left me alone to my magical elaborations.

Surprisingly enough, it took me no more than ten minutes to turn the yellow flower into something that could easily have resembled a dress at a ten yard distance in foul weather, dark light and a bad squint. It took me another five minutes to turn the giant flower petals into some sort of textile and after a sum of about twenty minutes I had a perfectly acceptable dress, lying on the green grass before my feet. I’d thought about constructing a pair of shoes but had decided against it as I felt that making a pair of similar-structured objects designed to fit and aid walking would be a real death trap in my hands.

I shrugged into the dress and as I smothered it down Cherokee came prancing out of a couple of bushes, still clad in nothing more than what the Gods had given him.

“Oh,” he said as he saw me, his face faltering a little. “You made it work.”

“As a matter of fact I did,” said I, pressing the strangely living material closer to my body. “It doesn’t look too bad, either.”

Cherokee’s expression said otherwise but wisely he decided not to press his luck. He simply frowned at the yellow dress and sighed.

“So.” I did a little twirl and looked over at my husband. “What are you going to wear?”

“Dunno,” he answered me eloquently and scratched the back of his head. “Didn’t really think about it, to be honest.”

Silent reverie entered my sprawling mind and quieted every opposition to this statement that I ever could have made. In fact, it was quite hard to even think with a naked, David-esque specimen of a man before me. Nevertheless, bad temper overcame frantic hormones and I managed to sputter out, “Then you need to put on your old clothes. If they’re even close to as smelly as mine were it will require severe persuasion from your part for me to even poke you with a ten-foot stick.”

He huffed. “That is no issue of mine,” he told me vaingloriously. “It is, after all, a very manly scent.”

My eyebrows nearly went through the metaphorical roof at this point. “You mean to tell me it is considered manly to smell like a skunk-laden spoon resting in fifteen weeks’ worth of bread fungus and rotten meat?”

“…perhaps not in so many words,” conceded he, but frowned. “You think I smell like skunk-laden cutlery resting in fifteen weeks’ worth of mould and putrid flesh?”

“No,” I admitted and he relaxed his expression. “You just took a bath; now you smell like wet dog.”

The frown came back, as always, and bedraggled his otherwise gorgeous features. For some otherworldly reason I felt a need to turn that frown upside-down and walked over to him, placing one hand on his cheek and pulling his face towards mine.

“You know,” I told him between butterfly kisses, “I could try and conjure you a pair of trousers…” I could feel a smirk forming underneath my lips and sighed. “No dirty comment, thank you. I was simply being polite.”

The smirk didn’t go away, but he responded to one of the kisses and said, “I would very much appreciate having a pair of trousers.” I smiled. “They will come in handy when you feel the need to rip all my clothes off again.” I frowned. And then I smacked his arm. Feeling that this was not enough, I smacked his arm again and then crossed my own arms across my yellow-clad chest and pouted, unable to come up with a retort that did not sound or was outrageously untrue.

After a couple of silences I decided to pretend the precious conversation had not taken place.

“You need something to wear,” I stated again, poker-faced. “I’ll go and see what I can make out.”

I stalked off into the woods with nothing more than a huff and a slight “but..!” from Cherokee, though after a few minutes I found that even though Nature can provide a bountiful mass of options for dresses, She did in fact not relinquish trousers upon the ground. When my imagination had run out, or rather my stamina, I opted on taking a pair of leaves and rolling them up into two cylinders and gluing them together with prayers and hope.

This did not work.

Thus, I put the two leaves on the ground where they unrolled themselves tauntingly, and yelled at them. I cursed at them. I think I may even have called upon the Gods to burn them into ashes, but alas the Gods had their ears tuned onto something else at the time. I wiggled my fingers, I hopped and screamed ‘abracadabra’ at them but nothing seemed to work.

The way I had conjured my dress did not seem to work for trousers, as a nearby bluebell eagerly transformed itself into a fashionable tweed skirt instead of the intended leaves and general trouser-shape.

“Just work, dammit!” I shrieked with frustration and smashed a fist onto the hopeless leaves, which at the immediate touch of my skin transfigured themselves into a pair of lovely clogs.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake…”

Cherokee chose that opportune moment to walk through the trees and spot the green, silky-surfaced shoes.

“Do not say a word about the clogs,” I warned him, holding up one finger for emphasis. “If you for some reason choose to mention the leaf-patterned wooden shoes standing in front of me I will personally make sure to remove the reason you wear a hat.”

Cherokee stopped. “I do not wear hats,” he told me, severe. “But I shall take your threat to heart. Let me, on the other hand, talk to you about the aforementioned trousers?”

“What about them?” growled I, now not looking at him.

Cherokee, I supposed, senses this to be a sensitive subject – which proved to me he was not completely suicidal – and therefor he replied tentatively, “Well, you see…”

“What?”

“Well… I sort of found a pair.”

“What!”

“I found a pair of trousers. They were… sort of hanging from a bush.”

“Hanging from a bush?”

Cherokee, who was actually, I now realized, wearing a pair of dark blue, skinny jeans, squatted down next to me and put one arm around my shoulders, hugging me close to him.

“This is a strange country,” he told me. “There was bound to come something like this along eventually.”

I put my face in my hands, feeling almost like crying. “But why didn’t it come along before I started with this hopeless crap?!” I motioned to the, actually rather beautiful, clogs. “And how come I missed the trouser-bearing bush?”

“Dunno,” he told me and pressed me close to him. “But I still need a shirt.”

I sniffed. “Maybe we can find some tree that grows hoodies?”

“Wouldn’t count on it, love.”

I rubbed my face thoughtfully. “Maybe I could try and-” I stopped, having no other option than being quiet as Cherokee stuffed his hand over my mouth, almost choking me in the process.

“Be quiet,” he hissed. “I hear something!”

I fell stock-silent, fearing some kind of attack from a wild beast or another mythical creature we had not yet stumbled over; however, Cherokee’s face was tense, not frightened.

“Mffhmmmghh?” I wondered, wiggling my eyebrows at him.

“I think…” he said, and then he brightened up considerately, “No, I know that sound!”

“What is it?” I said after I’d managed to claw myself free from his large hand.

He grinned at me, his entire face shining like the sun after a spell of rain.
“It’s a hulleon, and it’s close by!”

He rose from his squat and pulled me upright as well in the process. “C’mon, it won’t be very far from here! Let’s go!”

We half-ran in a direction of Cherokee’s preference for a couple of minutes.

”There’s the hulleon right over there!”

Seeing the bright blue, swirling lights of the favoured transportation mode of the World of Dreams had Cherokee practically jumping up and down with excitement. He grabbed my arm and began to run which left me scrambling along behind him like a dog owner. “Let’s just hope we make it!”

As we ran the light grew weaker by the second. Cherokee quickened his pace and practically lift me off the ground in his hurry to reach the hulleon in time. “Oh, gods!” I moaned, my erratic breathing hitching in my throat as we came closer and closer to our goal. But just as we reached the swirling colour it disappeared completely.

I gasped for breath as Cherokee dropped my arm and drove his hands through his hair in exasperation. “Oh, motherfu-!” His oath was cut short by a curious sensation. I watched in awe as he was picked up from the ground and curled up into foetus-position by some unseen force.

“What the hell?!” I screamed, but as I reached out for my husband a strange feeling crept over me. Suddenly, something like a hand grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hoisted me into the air, pressing my limbs to my torso just like it had with Cherokee. All the while I screamed in panic, fright overcoming me and corroding my senses. I could barely hear Cherokee yell from just a few feet away, but through the haze of terror which enveloped me I could just make out him yelling my name.
As nothing more seemed to happen I forced myself to calm down enough to be able to control my hyperventilating lungs. “It’s all right, Callie!” I heard Cherokee belt loudly. “It’s how it’s supposed to go!”

Again, with Herculean effort, I managed to calm myself enough to register his words. I started. I sputtered. I lost it.

“You knew this was going to happen and you didn’t tell me?” I growled, struggling to get air down my lungs with my thighs tightly pressed against my torso.

“I’m sorry,” I heard him say, but I found it wisest not to look at him in case my eyes burned holes through his head. After all, I might not wish to be a widow just yet.

“Oh, you’re sorry,” I mimicked sarcastically, as well as one can in this kind of awkward situation. Upon inspection I found myself hovering in the air no more than a few feet off the ground. My limbs were locked and I was in foetus position face-down, and blood was gathering rapidly in my face because of gravity, but also because of anger. “When I get down from here,” I told Cherokee through gritted teeth, “the odds against you are quite overwhelming.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” he said and didn’t sound like he meant it at all. “But this is just how it works. It’ll start any minute now.”

I frowned at the grass and asked the question we all know I shouldn’t have: “What will start?” And then it started.

Travelling on the hulleon was alike the sensation of being dragged by the hair forward cavemen-style but without the pain. It was such a very unpleasant feeling it made me yelp, and the only good thing about it was that it was over quite soon. Only a few seconds later – though they seemed like a lifetime and gave me a taste of bear-skin and raw meat – we were tossed off the hulleon and left lying in the rough sand by the next hulleon stop. I relished the stinging impression the sand left on my cheek and as I opened my eyes I met Cherokee’s frantic lilac ones.

“Are you all right?” he wondered, seeming to edge away from my hardening glare.

Tentatively I sat up, massaging my sore scalp. “I’m fine,” I proclaimed. “But no thanks to you.” I shot him a dirty look before looking up and around. “Where are we?”

“Dunno,” said Cherokee as he rose to his feet. “It looks vaguely familiar, though…” he trailed off, regarding the trees in front of him with some apprehension.

“Well well, look who’s decided to drop in!” A deep, heavy voice boomed behind us with a clear hint of amusement. Cherokee spun around on his heels faster than I did on my arse, but we both gasped in unison at the sight of the large bouncer named Tobias we had met some 20 chapters ago.

The terror I had felt on the hulleon hadn’t quite left me and now bloomed up with renewed capacity. The last we had seen of this man we had robbed his relatives of several night’s worth of rent and food. The bar in which he worked contained his relatives – a bunch of fitful witches with family issues – and Rose who was with us then – Cherokee’s sister, remember? – had taken off in hope they might chase after her instead of us and thus giving us a chance to carry on with the mission appointed to me by Aberton Olav Pears (Wzrd). Slowly, I let my eyes travel the length and width of the huge man. As I contemplated how screwed we were I could almost taste the magical torture the witches were going to put us through.

“Cherokee,” I said, softly. “We’re dead, aren’t we?” As I looked over at my husband he seemed to unfreeze at my words. And then he did something I did not expect.

“Tobias!” he roared happily and grabbed the huge man’s ham-like fist and shook it violently. “Long time no see! How are you?”

The bouncer gleefully pumped Cherokee’s arm, delight shining off of him. “Cherokee, m’boy! I’m absolutely splendid, but it does me good to see your face again!”

My mouth, which had been forming pleas of mercy on its own accord, turned slack in surprise. Cherokee turned to me with a smile on his face that turned into a frown. “Callie, close your mouth; you look like a fish.”

“Ah yes, the pretty Callie,” said the huge man and unleashed a dashing smile in my direction. “And how are you, little friend? I heard some rumours about a wedding?” He wiggled his dark eyebrows suggestively at me. “Frankly, we were all a bit stumped we weren’t invited but we all figured it had been a spur of the moment kind of thing,” he said smoothly, nudging Cherokee suggestively in the gut.

Cherokee oof-ed and rubbed his sore abdomen, but grinned nonetheless. “That’s right, Tobias. Otherwise you and your relatives would be our number one choice of guests, you know that.”

“Haha!” the man bellowed, slapping his knees in delight. “I know, mate, I know!” He straightened up and wiped the corner of his eye surreptiously. “But what say ye to coming back to the bar with me and having a drink or two, eh? I bet the girls wouldn’t mind seeing you two again!”

Cherokee ignored my frantic shaking of the head (and my quite obvious shaking of the body, as well) and graciously accepted the invitation. As the huge man bounded away ahead of us Cherokee gentlemanly helped me off the ground. As we looked around we could indeed see that we were at the edge of the town we had once visited. The small houses looked the same, and as we drew closer to the square I could recognize the façade of the bar looming ahead of us.

“Are you insane?!” I hissed in Cherokee’s ear. “They’ll have our guts for garters!”

But he simply patted my hand and shushed me. Looking at me through the corner of his eye he asked me: “Have you heard about a little something called Alzheimer’s disease?”

I frowned at the randomness of the question, but nodded affirmatively. “Yeah?” I told him. “It’s a disease that affects older people and makes them forget stuff.”

He regarded me sceptically. “What?” I said. “I used the easy definition!”

One blonde eyebrow was sarcastically hoisted, but he wisely decided to move on instead of discussing my lack of knowledge concerning brain diseases of the elderly. “Well, this entire family has got the light version of that disease,” he told me, walking along like he had no care in the world and no clan of witches about to rip him to shreds. “It’s, like, they seem to forget about anything that bothers them and that they’d rather not to know anything about.”

My brain tried to cope with the information. “What, like selective hearing?” I was more than confused. “The entire family have selective memory?”

Cherokee nodded. “Sort of; if they’re upset or whatever because of something, this disease makes them forget it.”

“Very useful, I’m sure,” I said before it hit me and a wave of hope surged wildly through my veins. I turned to Cherokee and yanked roughly at his arm. “Does that mean they’ve forgotten about us?”

“Not forgotten about us per se,” he explained. “They remember all the bits about us that fit into their happy picture.” He looked momentarily confused. “Incidentally, this does not seem to work within the family. They can have one tiny little dispute and remember it for generations.”

Relief hit me like a ton of bricks. It made me almost feel like skipping and I did a little one-step jig. “So they’re not mad at us?”

Cherokee shook his head, smiling confidently. “Not even the least.”

Our minds flying high we crossed the paved square and marched up to the bar. Cherokee reached out and opened the door for me, bowing slightly as I walked passed him and then took my arm and led me up to the bar counter which one of the witches stood and tended.

“Cherokee!” Egon called out in, surprised joy lacing her features. “And his little missus, how wonderful it is to see you!”

It was the first time I had been addressed as a ‘missus’ and I can’t say I relished the word, but nonetheless I smiled back.

“Thank you, Egon; it’s lovely to see you too,” Cherokee grinned. “Is everything all right with you?”

“Oh, absolutely!” said Egon. She flung her towel across her shoulder and walked out from behind the long, wooden bar desk. “The girls in the kitchen are a bit fitful because they can’t agree on how to best make sushi, but we got all the boiled rice out of the cellar and Tobias finally managed to get the squid down from the ceiling rafters.” She paused and looked expectantly at us, holding each other’s arms. “When did you two fall in love?”

Such a bare-faced, abrupt question caught both me and Cherokee off guard, but before any of us had time to answer Egon received a large ding round the ear from a curly-haired, blue-eyed girl behind her.

“You’re even ruder than Grandmother,” the girl growled at Egon, but shifted her attention rapidly to me and my stunned fairy. “I’m sorry, guys.” She smiled politely, though narrowing her eyes suspiciously at me. “I hope she didn’t make you too uncomfortable? She has a tendency to do that. I honestly don’t know why we ever let her deal with customers…”

“No, Chrissy,” Cherokee managed, “We’re absolutely fine. Aren’t we, Callie?” His lilac eyes urged me to agree, so I nodded affirmatively.

“Just peachy,” I added, smiling nervously. The fair-skinned witch had me on edge; it felt like she suspected something, though she could not put her finger on it, and it definitely bothered me.

She kept her eye on us just a little bit too long, but nodded after all. “Right then. It’s nice to see you both again; can I get you something to eat?”

She then regarded us both, really looked, and said, “Or something to wear?”

It was then that both Cherokee and I truly paid attention to our appearances. I was still clad in my strange, yellow flower-dress that could not have been a worse fit even if it tried. On the other hand, I was at least wearing something. The only thing Cherokee had on was his pair of skinny, dark blue jeans – not that I’m complaining – though it was not very proper attire even for a bar.

Chrissy took pity on us when she saw us both go beet red. “Perhaps you would wish to freshen up in one of our rooms first?” she kindly offered. “I could send one of the girls down to the tailor’s to fetch some basic clothes as well.”

I reddened even more, and, to actually have the matter done and over with, undecidedly sputtered out, “We actually don’t have any money to pay you with.”

Silence fell. Chrissy scrutinized us intently, looked over her shoulder at her fellow witch who gave a curt nod, and then said, “That’s okay. It’s on the house. Egon will take you up to your room and we’ll sort this through eventually.”

I have never experienced shame in the same way I did as when Cherokee and I walked behind the rotund little witch up some flights of stairs. After having fled from their previous hospitality without giving them so much as a ‘thank you, we’re robbing you’ we were now not only welcome back but actually offered free housing and clothes.

Cherokee seemed to be of the same thoughts, as he was quiet until we reached a door in a hallway that looked quite the same as the hallways we had passed before. Egon produced a key from somewhere and opened the door without much ceremony.

“It’s not our grandest room,” she seemed to apologize, “but under the circumstances I hope it’ll be all right.”

I turned to her. “It’s more than we could have hoped for.” I smiled sincerely, taking her by the hand. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” Cherokee said, a strange tone in his voice. “Thank you very much.”