Halloween I.F. – “Something Rich and Strange” – Day 7

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Star heard himself thinking about all the things they could do to Dom and if he should let it happen and huffed in irritation at himself, sinking down against Dandelion’s chest like he was some kind of throne to sprawl on. “Hang on here. I think ultimately this has to be Dom’s decision.”

“There is a chance he may not choose… correctly… if he is enchanted,” Caoimhe pointed out, concern starting to edge into her dreamy voice. 

“No, Star’s right,” Dandelion agreed, and Star tried not to wiggle like he’d been patted and called a good boy. “Yes, perhaps, if he refuses all aid, or acts odd about it, we may want to intervene and judge according to what will best protect him from it. But we cannot simply do these things to him without his permission, either.”

Star hopped up, getting space between himself and Dandelion before he could do something embarrassing like fawning or something. “I’ll call him.”

He headed up the stairs to get some privacy, though he was pretty sure at least some of the others would sneak halfway up to listen. He sat in the kitchen, absently playing with one of the little uncanny glass trinkets Dandelion was so fond of, and dialed.

“Hey!” Dom said, picking up almost at once. “I charged my phone.”

“I see that,” Star said, grinning a bit. Modern phones were more convenient but lacked cords to twirl like you were in an 80s romcom, so he let go of the glass bauble to wind some of his hair around a finger instead. “Anything weird that you noticed about it?”

“I don’t know. I guess, a little. My charger was still set up and the cord was over the bed, which I’d made” Dom said. “Which… meant that I’d been charging it on there after waking up this morning, and yeah, I remember doing that. I should have headed out with a full charge. I don’t know how the battery ran out so fast. Going dead, I guess.”

It was as good a lead-in as any. “Dom, I’m going to be very serious with you right now,” Star said. He closed his eyes. He’d let Dom put a halter on him before. Dom already could control him whenever it was on. He trusted him on the track. He’d trust him here. “I swear on my soulless heart that I’m not trying to trick you or play a joke.”

“Star…?” Dom’s voice had dropped too, also serious. Definitely worried. “What’s wrong?”

“I genuinely think you’ve been ensorcelled in some way,” Star said. “I talked to Halle and she saw you talking for a while with two people. That’s exactly when you lost time. One of them looked kind of like me. You’d remember that normally, right?”

Dom was uneasily silent. 

“If you’re forgetting other things and it wasn’t just this afternoon, you should let me know now.”

“No,” Dom said, slowly. “My memory’s great. You know that.”

“My strategical racetrack genius,” Star agreed, frowning down at his fingers in his own hair. Some pond weeds had ended up tangled in it again. He began to work them out. “I think that whatever they did drained your battery. Maybe on purpose, if they found out you were expected somewhere and didn’t want to be interrupted. Maybe they just absorbed energy and it was a useful source, I don’t know. But also, you swung really fast from kind of wanting to meet Dandelion to being super eager.”

“He’s just so important to you.”

“Yeah,” Star said softly. “And if it didn’t align completely with whatever happened with those two people you don’t remember, I’d be super stoked right now.”

Dom was silent for another few long moments. Uncomfortable at best, Star imagined. “So I’m not coming over for dinner, huh?”

“That’s the thing,” Star said. “I’ve told everyone and they’re worried too. About what this means and why and how and all that, sure, but also about you.” He didn’t think that was wrong. Dom probably didn’t mean much to any of them on an individual basis, but they knew that Star had inexplicably put his life in Dom’s hands, and would care about him by proxy at least while the two of them were so entangled. “We do want to meet. We have a few options…”

Star ran over the options they’d already discussed, pros and cons: Dandelion could try to view the events through Dom’s eyes, but that could be harmful if the spell couldn’t be bypassed easily that way. Viv might, or might not, be able to suppress the spell at all, but they probably wouldn’t get a lot of direct information that way. “Personally, I’m leaning toward the latter,” Star said. “Viv failing to suppress the spell would just fail, and any info is better than none. I mean, I trust Dandelion with my whole being, but it might leave him open and vulnerable to someone trying to attack him, and we don’t know if it’d work fully or do something unexpected.”

“Yeah,” Dom said. “Okay. I’ll meet you, and I agree. We’ll try this thing your friend Vivian can do, I guess? Like you said, if this is actually some really winding way to get someone to Dandelion, he shouldn’t be touching it directly. Also, I don’t like the sound of ‘potential harm’. That is how people get killed down there.”

“So true, bestie.”

Dom snorted a laugh, sounding reluctant, despite himself. “So what’s your address?”

If this is actually some really winding way to get someone to Dandelion… Star sat up straighter, banging an elbow into the table. “Oh shit, you shouldn’t come here, right?”

“…Damn. No, you’re right. If they found me once they could do it again. Then they’d have your address.”

“Third party location,” Star said. “Somewhere neutral where we can still get dinner.”

“How about Hanger 7?” Dom asked. “It’s a restaurant, bar and grill sort of place. It doesn’t usually get active until later in the evening, and there’s these big, curved, C-shaped booths, so we can have privacy too.”

“Fantastic call. Love it,” Star said. Dom had mentioned it before to other jockeys and workers at the track, he recalled, though Star himself hadn’t gone there with him. It was a normal place for him to suggest, and Star truly did not think that someone would think far enough ahead to plant other locations in his brain, anyway. Plus it’d be hard for a strange witch to start something there. “Meet at six?”

“I’ll be there.” There was enough of a pause that Star wasn’t totally sure if he’d been dismissed, then: “Star?”

“Yeah, Dom?”

“Thank you.” He said it quietly, almost awkward. “I’m kind of freaked out, but it means a lot that you were honest and gave me a choice here.”

Star’s sweaty hand was sticking to the table, he realized. “Of course. You’re my guy.”

“See you soon.” This time, Dom did hang up.

Star brought the news of Dom’s choice back to the others, and they spent the rest of time just preparing a little, Dandelion upping the glamours around himself to deflect spying eyes, Viv researching on the internet to try to make sure she had the spell right, and the other three, Star included, just kind of getting ready for a normal dinner hangout. Ugh, clothes. Star picked silk pants that flowed around his legs and a graphic tee with ATTENTION HORSE written across the chest.

Then it was time to go.

Hanger 7 was exactly as Dom had described it: dark rooms, music just loud enough to make it hard to hear other people, and mostly-enclosed booths that let them all look at each other. Star introduced Dom to the others, and Dom and Dandelion eyed each other up with the way that guys got when they both cared about the same person and didn’t know each other yet. They declined to shake hands, but Dom said it was because if this spell thing had an effect he didn’t want it to trigger on touch.

They ordered drinks to start with, and once their drinks came they then ordered entrees, knowing it would buy them time without any servers stopping by while their meals were cooked. Then Dom groaned, “Okay, I’d like to get it over with, I am really freaked out.”

“Yeah, I get you,” Viv said. “It’s fine. We can do it right now, have a nice meal after. Put your hands in mine and try not to think about anything in particular. You’re gonna start to feel like you’re dreaming, if this works.”

“Cool. Not at all nerve wracking.” He put his big hands in her tiny ones, and closed his eyes, taking a few deep breaths.

Viv held them for a few moments, chanting softly, and Star smelled the sudden sharp pumpkin scent of her magic. Slowly, she pulled her hands back from Dom’s, looking all to the world like she was holding a very squirmy invisible eel that she was desperately trying not to let go of. She pinned it to the table with her palms. “Okay,” Viv said, in that carefully-enunciated way of drunks and of spellcasters mid-spell. “I can’t take it off entirely. It’s suppressed, but not cancelled. Dominic won’t remember things directly himself, but if you ask questions, he may be able to actually reach answers this time. Only what he’d actually have known or heard or seen at the time, though, it’s still him we’re interrogating, not the spell.”

Shit. What should they ask?

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