Halloween I.F. – “Something Rich and Strange” – Day 8

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Star quickly realized that everyone was looking at him to be the one asking questions. He shied back, pushing himself against the padded booth bench, his hands splayed on the table. He hated taking point. He wasn’t made to be a leader in anything, he’d often told people. Dr. W had things to say about that, too.

But it made sense. Star was the only one here who knew Dom at all, let alone what might be normal for him, or for the track, or anything else. He stretched his neck anxiously, turning to Adrien, then Caoimhe. “You two, keep an eye on the room. If someone can feel the spell being disturbed, they might find us.”

“I don’t think they will,” Viv said, but didn’t actually argue when the other two leaned back on their seats, scanning the opposite sides of the room. Well, Adrien leaned back. Caoimhe, always stiff, just kind of tilted. 

He made eye contact with Dandelion, his lord’s liquid mercury eyes shifting and rolling uneasily in the confines of their irises. “Be ready to jump in if you need to,” Star said, and gestured to the spot beside Dom. Dandelion nodded, and shifted over there. 

Good. Now Star could keep an eye on both of them, in case Dandelion recognized anything Dom was talking about. He didn’t think Dandelion would deliberately withhold information, per se, if he thought it was relevant, but he was pretty sure Dandelion might avoid talking about something before he was very sure it was relevant, and this might give Star something to ask him about deliberately. Dandelion didn’t tell Star much about himself. 

Star drew a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s start a bit earlier, with your morning. Why’d you go to the racetrack in the first place?”

“I woke up late. I was drinking my coffee and eating breakfast while doing a sudoku,” Dom said. This with confidence; Star was sure this was before the spell had started. “I got a call from the track about a scheduling conflict that would be easier to deal with in person.”

“From who?”

“Heronika.” That was the scheduling manager, so that tracked. “There was a lane double-booked in the race we’ve got in two weeks. Somehow, it had been put down for both us and for Vayne and the Manotaur. Since the rest of the race was set, she wanted to see if one of us was willing to bump out to the next local race.”

Ugh, the Manotaur, whose actual name was Georgio. Where had Jack Vayne even dug that guy up? Star hated racing him. He wasn’t even a horse, he was just a guy with a bull’s body and a man’s head, and he talked like fucking Randy Savage literally all the time. Star wasn’t even sure it was a bit. The cow just had no grace. Unfortunately, so many of the other mounts in the magical league were also not technically horses, so the Manotaur stayed. 

Well, if nothing else, it gave more potential leads. Not that Star wanted to talk to them. “And that meeting did happen?”

“Yeah. Vayne and the Manotaur were both there. We worked it out. Jack got his entry fee waived for the next race.”

“Why’d I not get a call if fucking Georgio did,” Star complained.

Dom snorted a laugh, relaxing just a little. “I mean, I don’t think Georgio got a call. I don’t think he can use a phone. I think he just went wherever Vayne did.”

“No, it’s discrimination. Nobody ever calls the horse.”

“Focus, please,” Viv said, as the invisible spell-eel—the speel, Star decided—gave a thrashing. “I can only hold this so long.”

Star sighed. He was so bad at focus. “Dom, did you find it odd you were asked to go in instead of just dealing with this online somehow?”

“Not too odd. It was inconvenient, though; it did have big ‘this could have been an email’ energy, but it may have been more convenient for Heronika, if not for us.”

Star wasn’t convinced it hadn’t been a setup, somehow, to get Dom out at the track in the first place. But Dom could only answer from his own perspective. “Okay. It was after that where you met these two mysterious strangers.”

“Yes,” Dom said, a bit more hesitantly. “When I was leaving that meeting, Halle told me someone had asked to see me. I got your call right after that asking me out for coffee.”

Dandelion glanced at Star. Star tried to keep his own gaze on Dom’s face. “Right. You’d said on that call that ‘someone asked for me’ but you didn’t think it’d take long. And you didn’t remember what happened next.”

“I don’t remember,” Dom agreed. “But you’re going to ask me anyway while the spell’s, uh, caught.”

Star nodded. He tried making his voice a bit gentler. “So someone asked to speak to you. Who did you talk to? What did they look like.”

Dom closed his eyes like it would help him recall. “There were two people. Yes. One looked like a young woman. She seemed like she might be a brook horse like you. Similar long greenish-blue hair with weeds in it, a lean figure like she was built for speed. She hung back, though. Didn’t do much of the talking.”

Star chewed the inside of his cheek briefly. He did not like that. “And the other?”

“I’m… not sure, even now,” Dom admitted, sounding worried.

“Maybe the person was also disguising themself. If they had a spell on themself, we wouldn’t be able to get around that,” Dandelion suggested.

Dom nodded. “Maybe. I remember bits only. I remember their skin was dull. Not white, or black, but… pale, ashy brown. It read as unhealthy to me.  Black hair, I think. They seemed… tall? Too tall. Or, hm, rather, a sense of being bigger than the space they took up.”

If they’d had a strong magical scent while they’d cast magic, or were carrying enchanted items, that might give that impression, Star thought, though he kept this to himself. Humans couldn’t smell it consciously, not the way other folks could, but maybe they sensed it unconsciously somehow. Or perhaps it was something else.

“Their voice was really soft,” Dom added, after a moment. “It’s hard to focus on the words they said, but I remember the timbre. I’d noted it at the time because it was such a change after being in a room with Vayne and Georgio.”

Star folded his own hands on the table, clenching them on each other. Now they were getting to the meat of the situation. “And what did you talk about?”

“First, they confirmed I was the Dominic Toulali that raced on Son, That Ain’t Right. After I said I was, it was the only time the brook horse woman spoke up, I think,” Dom said, a bit uncertainly. “She said it was a stupid name and you had no dignity or ability to take things seriously.”

A bit irritated, Star shook his hair out. “I resemble that remark.”

“Then, they…” Dom seemed reluctant to say it, his black eyes sliding briefly to Dandelion before shifting back to Star. “They asked if it was true that my mount also performed in a band under the leadership of the sidhe lord Dandelion-Seeds-Fall-Careless-to-the-Earth.”

Dandelion straightened at that, frowning, the shifting liquid movement of his irises stilling as he began to watch Dom even more closely.

“I said, I mean, I hadn’t heard him by that name, but yes, he performed with Dandelion and the band the Merry Gentry. They asked if I knew him, and I said no, though I might meet him later. That interested them. They pushed, and…” Dom bit his lip. “I can’t remember. Fuck.”

He wasn’t the only one having trouble. Viv’s hands rose from the table and she frantically grabbed again at the invisible speel, apparently just barely grabbing it and pinning back down.

“Okay. I’ll ask you,” Star said. “When you said you might meet Dandelion later, they pushed. What did they do?”

“I think they encouraged me to do so. Said it would be good for a young man like myself to get in the good graces of a sidhe lord,” Dom said, lifting a hand to rub his head. “They asked what I knew about him, but I didn’t have anything more to say than I already had. They asked what I knew about you too, Star, and… I… didn’t have much more there either. I said not a lot, I didn’t want to reveal the little I did know. They asked me again and… I think… I mentioned that you’d sworn not to kill and eat humans any more?”

It wasn’t exactly something Star talked about much one way or another, but yeah, Dom knew that, obviously. Still, he didn’t like the idea of a prouder brook horse than himself knowing it. Not Dom’s fault, though. “How’d they react?”

“Surprised. I said it was one of the reasons I’d initially trusted you enough to ride you. I …maybe it was the brook horse, maybe the other one, one of them said I was stupid. Fairies could lie, it was just rude enough to that they usually didn’t. I didn’t answer. They didn’t ask about how we met, so they don’t know anything about that, though. I kept that much back.”

Star remembered how thick Dom’s voice had been with tears, how miserable and afraid he’d been when they first met. He reached over and squeezed Dom’s hand. “It’s fine. You didn’t share any secrets.” Because he hadn’t given Dom any, he didn’t say. He wondered if Dom was as shockingly aware as Star was right now of how he’d never told Dom about his own past.

“At that point, my phone rang. I guess it was one of the times you were trying to see why I was held up? I took it out to check, and the one with black hair—oh! They were wearing black too, I think. They reached out and gently pushed my hand with the phone back to my side. It stopped ringing. They talked a little more, nothing new, just encouraging me as a great racer, someone they really wanted to see come up in the world, and how sponsorship with a sidhe lord could be a big step for me, stuff like that. It’s all hazy, but I remember feeling very encouraged.”

Star couldn’t just ask something like anything else and get an answer, but he wished he could. Even though that spell was no longer on Dom or they’d notice, it sounded like there’d been a second layer of one, encouraging him to talk more, maybe influencing his reaction to them in the moment. “Did they ask to see you again?”

“I … not exactly,” Dom said. “But they said they looked forward to hearing how it went, so I guess they plan to meet me again at some point soon. The one with black hair said, I remember the phrasing exactly on this one now, said, ‘We can be really good friends, I think.'”

Weird. No reaction from Dandelion either, beyond a deepening frown. Star sighed. “Well, fuck that guy,” he said. “Dom, do you have any idea what point in the conversation the spell was cast?”

“No,” Dom said. “It could have been any time in there, I didn’t see anything.”

Dandelion spoke up, voice soft. “A lot of witchcraft can be done ahead of time and imbued in objects, if someone knows something’s going to happen and can prepare. It’s done for faster or quieter casting.” Viv nodded her agreement.

Star made a face at that. Great. “Based on when you talked to me first, I’m guessing it lasted about half an hour? Forty minutes?”

“About that,” Dom said. “The rest was general politeness, I think. Inquiries about what it was like to race here and stuff like that. They didn’t seem interested in the responses to those, exactly, and I don’t think I said anything that wouldn’t have been easy to get from someone else.”

Padding to give time for the spell to take effect? More likely, they were making it seem like a normal conversation to anyone else passing by, Star thought. There were always people around at the track, even when there was no race on that day.

“Then they told me to leave, and I guess I left first,” Dom said. “Once I was outside, all I was thinking about was not being late to coffee. And then I was late to coffee. You know the rest.”

“Just in time,” Viv muttered. “Any last questions? I can’t hold this beast much longer.”

Star couldn’t think of any. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake as he shook his head. Viv released her grip with a groan.

Dom straightened, putting a hand back to his head, presumably as the spell popped back in there. “Ugh,” he complained. “The weirdest part of this is that I remember what I just told you, but I no longer remember those things happening to me.”

“Be careful to keep the two separate,” Dandelion warned him. “It’s easy for humans to replace their own memories with things that someone tells them. Fairies take advantage of this often. Perhaps not relevant here, but I shouldn’t like to see you confuse yourself that way.”

“Mm,” Dom said, a bit uneasily. “Well, in this case it was definitely a spell, since…” He gestured at Viv.

“Speaking of,” Viv said, holding a hand out, “can I see your phone? If there was a spell on that too…”

With a hiss of suddenly concerned breath, Dom dug it out and handed it over. Viv turned it over in her hands a few times, then offered it back. “Nah,” she said. “The spell on you was very defined. I’m certain that its only purpose is to block your memories of interacting with those two people. No spell on the phone, though. It looks like the spellcaster just used it as an energy battery when they touched it. Witches definitely can do that. Not sure about anything else, though,” she added.

Their meals arrived just as Dom took his phone back, and everyone fell silent until the server was gone again. “I didn’t see anything odd around the room,” Caoimhe said.

“Me neither,” Adrien said. “There’s a really cute couple two tables over, though.”

Star glanced, in case he was trying to code-word that it was their guys, but no, it was just a young couple who was almost certainly on their first date. He rolled his eyes. “Thanks. Not what I wanted you keeping an eye out for.”

“I can multitask,” Adrien protested lazily. “Wonder if they’re looking for a third.

Dom kind of poked at his noodles, clearly not willing to be drawn out by a satyr’s bawdy banter after all that. “So… now what?”

It was a good question. It’d be nighttime once they were done here, and getting rest would probably be a good idea unless there was something they could specifically do at night. It’d give him time to talk to Dandelion alone if he wanted to, also. 

But… what should his next steps be on this, anyway?

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