Page 4 of Mischief Maker

Chapter Three

Faela

I t started in her index finger, just at the tip, a sort of mold that crept slowly across her skin, turning it black and wrinkled. When it worked its way up her hand, over her palm—that’s when her first finger died.

It only spread from there, up her arms, closer and closer to her heart.

Mother was in terrible pain for the last few days of her life.

Horrible, excruciating pain, a kind of pain that I think no one alive in this world has ever experienced or ever will after.

I’ll never forget the unbearable torment of holding her dead hand, withered and lifeless, and wishing there was anything I could do to make it better.

But I was utterly helpless. I watched her die. I wept onto her chest as the creeping black sickness finally killed her and then stopped its steady march.

I burned her body because the other villagers told me that was the only way. They said she was cursed and only fire would destroy it. But if it was a curse, burning my mother’s body wasn’t the end of its reign over the farm.

Kireth doesn’t speak as I serve our meager meal. He eats a few bites, then tastes the stale bread and decides against eating more.

“I have some dried meat, as well,” I say, hoping to pay him back in some way for the work he did today.

The demon rolls his eyes. “Your food doesn’t interest me. You should eat it.”

“Oh. Right.” The tail and horns should probably have been my first indication that Kireth doesn’t need things mortals need. “I guess I’ve just always heard of gods eating and drinking.” A lot, or so said the stories my mother told me.

“When it’s worthwhile to do so.” He pushes the plate away. “Do you have any wine? It’s been eons since I had wine.”

“No, sorry.”

I drank it all a long time ago, but I won’t tell him that. He doesn’t need to know how I tried to cope after Mother died, and I don’t want to feel ashamed of it.

Kireth lets out an immense sigh and leans back in his chair. There are raised runes along the skin of his belly and chest, the same designs that I saw carved into his temple in the woods. They look almost like scars.

“What are those?” I ask, pointing at them.

Running his hands down his body and over the strange symbols carved there, Kireth chuckles. “Oh, these old things? Just the words to dismiss me. If you ever get tired of me, you know, you just say them aloud, and I’ll vanish.”

I would never dream of sending him away, not after all he did around the farm today.

“Don’t you want to know how to use them?” he asks, still tracing his body with his hands as if just to draw my attention to it.

I swallow. I know Kireth hasn’t always been summoned just to help with chores. Humans have called on him for less savory uses, too. He’s known for his sensuality and prowess in bed.

Not that I’d know anything about bedroom activities.

“No.” I rise from the table and quickly eat the rest of the food off of his plate. “I have no reason to dismiss you.”

His eyes follow me as I clean up dinner, but he says nothing else.

When I go to bed that night, I offer him my bedroom. I’ll sleep in my mother’s room while he’s here.

“Why your room?” Kireth asks, perched against the doorway like he hasn’t a care in the world.

“I didn’t think you would want to sleep on the bed where my mother died.”

With a scoff, he bats a hand at me. “I don’t live on superstition like mortals do. I can see what is and isn’t. There is no ghost here.”

He saunters into Mother’s room and settles himself on the bed, still wearing only his loincloth. I wonder if he takes it off to go to bed at night.

“I’ll take any soft place to sleep,” Kireth says, reclining. “Or a hard one, as long as sleep is involved.”

With that, he sprawls across the bed and closes his eyes, as if already gone to dreamland. I stand there a moment longer, taking in his strong, lithe form, the horns that looked so frightening before but now remind me more of a farm animal.

I go to bed thinking that maybe I did the right thing. Perhaps summoning Kireth and bringing him home with me was the best decision I’ve made yet.

I’m up early the next morning, even though I could have used a whole extra night’s sleep after the events of the last two days. Kireth is snoring soundly, one of his arms hanging off the side of the bed. His tail is, for the first time, still.

After months of watching my life rotting like an old corpse, I feel a glimmer of hope. I was preparing the fields yesterday for new sowing, and I’m going to ask my resident god to help me bring in a bountiful harvest. In a few months’ time, perhaps things will turn around.

When I go outside to start the milking, though, I find there are just a small handful of sheep in the pen and only one cow. Off in the distance, the dog barks, and panic snakes through me.

I take off at a run.

The gate is hanging wide open. A few of the sheep mill about outside the pen, just eating. I sprint through the swinging gate and into the field.

The sound of buzzing flies draws me to the body. They are swarming a ripe, bloody corpse, with the head and legs of a sheep, and everything in the middle gone.

Bile pools in my mouth. It’s one thing to butcher a sheep myself, and another to see one mutilated by a bear or some wolves. My dog has seen me and runs over, barking, to let me know what’s happened. There’s another body further off, also swarming with flies.

“I know, Petal,” I tell her, rubbing her head. “There wasn’t anything you could do.” I’m just glad that Petal didn’t get hurt, too. I wouldn’t survive without her.

I send her off to gather up the rest of the sheep and make my way back to the gate.

“Damn it!” I sit down in the grass and pound the ground with a fist, biting back tears. I needed those two sheep. Who knew how many I’ll have to butcher over the winter to survive? Will I still have a herd left next year?

Nearby I hear a poof ! and Kireth appears, certainly by magic. I didn’t know he could do that.

“So angry so early,” he says with a yawn. “You’re making a lot of noise out here.”

I get to my feet slowly. “The gate was open, and I found two of the sheep dead.” I gesture out at the field. “That’s two fewer sheep for the winter.”

His tail lashes back and forth, faster than before, but his face remains impassive. I wipe at my cheeks, wishing he wasn’t seeing me cry like this. I just have to hope that these seeds today take, and maybe I’ll get by long enough to see them grow tall and strong.

“What will you have me do today, mistress ?” Kireth asks, and there’s an edge to his voice.

“Planting,” I say. I get back up to my feet, trying to shake off my grief so I can focus on what still needs doing. “Everything is marked out and ready to be sown.” I know I should be more specific. “The carrots go first, then the onions, and the wheat in the smaller field.”

His eyebrows twitch, but there’s no lightness to him like there was yesterday.

“Of course.” He makes a tally gesture. “Ninety-eight left.”

Kireth

I do not like how it felt to see her cry, hunched in the grass, her shoulders shivering with the force of her grief. It made me want to crouch beside her and comfort her, to try to stop her tears. It is irrational, but I can’t remember a time when I made someone cry.

I hadn’t intended to kill her sheep. They were supposed to run around a little, enjoy their freedom, and give that greedy human an extra chore to do to pay her back for yesterday’s task. My plan had been for her to chase them to round them up, forcing her to fix her broken gate.

This is what I do. It’s who I am.

As she dusts herself off and stands up with a grim determination, though, I restrain my urge to assure her that she’ll survive without those two sheep.

But how could I say such a thing with certainty?

I won’t be here. It’s none of my concern whether she lives or dies once I’m finished with my obligation.

I do what I’m told and sow the seeds just how Faela has laid out. Her instructions are specific, giving me few opportunities to subvert her. Only because my body craves mischief do I switch the carrots with the onions, just to give her a little surprise when the stalks come up.

It’s past midday when I finish with my task and find my mistress still working with the livestock. She’s crouched by the gate, examining the latch. I say nothing as I stand there idly, watching.

“You’re finished?” She gets to her feet and smiles brightly. “You’re good.”

A part of me preens a little at the praise, but I endeavor not to let it show. Instead, I flick my hand with disinterest. “What else would you have me do today?”

“You can rest, if you like,” she says, getting to her feet and dusting off her filthy dress.

“I do not need rest.” And standing around while she works doesn’t sound very attractive, either. “Give me a task to do.”

Her brows draw together in worry. She is reluctant to use more tasks, but we both know there are plenty of things around the farm for me to help with.

Harried by her need to come up with something, she hastily says, “Can you work on the house, then?”

As if she needs my approval in order to give me a command.

“If that’s what you wish.” I make another tally mark in the air. “Ninety-seven.”

She lets out a resigned sigh. “Thank you.”

I don’t need to be thanked again, but I don’t bother correcting her as I head toward the house.

Work on the house . It’s such a general instruction that there are plenty of ways for me to interpret it.

I know what she wants, of course—the stairs repaired, or the window fixed, or many of the gaps in the walls closed to keep out the heat.

But she’s left it so wide open for me, I have no choice but to seize on it.

I perform one of the tasks I know she wants done—repairing the balustrade that goes up the stairs—and then set to the other half of my work. I laugh to myself as I do it, at the puny mortal who has summoned me to serve her.

What a weak choice of words. She was more careless than I expected.

When Faela returns around sunset, she stops in her tracks and her face slackens. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” I hammer in another nail next to the hundred others I’ve put in the wall. “Working on the house. Just as you asked.”

Her face tightens as she peers into the bucket of nails, which is now almost empty.

“You used... all of them? Every last nail?” She sighs and buries her head in her hands. “This is my fault. I wasn’t specific enough, was I?”

I just shrug and hammer in the last nail I had held in my hand. She takes the bucket away, murmuring chastisements to herself.

“Stupid,” she mutters. “You’re so stupid, Faela. Always so stupid.”

This earns my attention. I would hardly call her stupid. It was a thoughtless request, sure, but everyone who’s summoned me has made a few of those. And usually they blame me, not themselves.

She leaves me there, taking the bucket to the tool shed, and doesn’t return for a long time. I sit by the wall, examining my handiwork, but I no longer feel the same mischievous joy I felt while doing it. Her drawn face, her disappointment, has stirred a shimmer of regret inside me.

Perhaps I should pull the nails out again. But immortals do not take back the choices we’ve made, especially not ones that punish mortals for their foolishness and arrogance.

When at last Faela returns, her expression is hard though her eyes are red. She walks past me without a word, carrying a squash and a few more soft carrots into the house. The door slams closed behind her.

It seems as though I am not welcome inside any longer. Since when has that stopped me? And yet, I don’t barge in.

Instead, I examine the animal pen where all the livestock are safely closed in and check the gate. It’s firmly closed this time, the latch now repaired. The dog runs up to me, tail wagging, and I kneel to scratch her head.

Night falls, and still the door to the house remains closed. A candle is lit upstairs, and I wonder what Faela is doing in her room. Is she removing that old dress that seems to be the only thing she owns? I imagine what her sun-kissed flesh looks like underneath it, bare and inviting.

Bah, what am I thinking? This woman would never make a request like that. But if she did, I certainly wouldn’t mind. I rather like her angular face, with the pointed chin and high cheekbones. She has such a slender neck—too slender, really—and a generous bosom for how thin she is.

It’s been centuries since I pleased myself in any form, but clearly those desires still exist. I head into the barn, where the chickens all scatter when I enter, and find a cozy place to sleep on the few bales of hay that remain.

Once I’m settled, I pull my loincloth aside and, to my surprise, discover that my cock is stiff and alert.

Hmm. It can’t possibly want this small slip of a woman, can it?

I’ve had hundreds, if not thousands of partners in my immeasurable existence, gods and mortals alike.

When my hand drops to my shaft, I summon my memories of them: a beautiful man I found tilling a field.

A forest nymph who discovered me gathering in the woods on an errand and rode my cock until she was pink and full of my seed.

The widow who needed companionship and respite.

Perhaps I even had children out there once upon a time—half-mortals who lingered on this plane for two or three hundred years before the sands of time took them. There’s no way to know.

And yet, as I try to picture the forest nymph’s sweet cunt around me, a young woman with hazel eyes and dirty brown hair appears in my imagination.

Faela’s face is blotchy red as gasping moans fall from her full lips.

I imagine how tight she would be for me as my hand slides up and down my thirsty cock.

It’s easy to picture her breasts bouncing as I ram into her, and I think she would have pretty pink nipples with broad areolas. This pleases me.

I keep pumping, imagining her cries and moans and the pinch of her belly as she raises her hips to meet mine, participating enthusiastically. I might even turn her around, press her flat on her stomach and take her from behind so I can bury my face in the nape of her neck.

Physically, I’m satisfied when it’s over. As I sprawl across the hay and it pokes roughly at my backside, though, I wish I hadn’t made her so angry. It would’ve been far more pleasant to sleep in a bed knowing she was in the next room.

I sigh and close my eyes. No sweet young maiden like Faela would open her legs for a creature like me. She is probably a virgin, all alone out here at this farm, shunned by the other villagers.

Ah, well. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.