Page 13 of Never Nix Up (The Arun Nixes #2)

13

Hazel

I feel fucking glorious .

Even as the water from the shower drums against my skin, coming away as rainbows, I can’t help but feel alert and alive.

Showers don’t always do that for me. Sometimes I just stumble in and get it over with as quick as I can because the sensations against my skin can be overwhelming. But not today. Today I luxuriate in it. Because Finn is in the shower with me, all naked and damn the woman is hot. She soaps the washcloth and then runs it across my belly and breasts, blending the colours all together.

I’ve never been the art before. I’ve always been the artist, and it’s strangely nice being the canvas for once. To be seen. To be the centre of attention.

To be the centre of Finn’s attention.

Because her attention is nice. It buoys me, giving me a level of confidence that feels almost alien. Almost, because there’s something I recognise in there, something I feel when the brush is in my own hand and I’m putting my heart and soul into a piece.

I wriggle my bum when I get out of the shower and Finn literally falls to her knees behind me. “Wait, are you okay?”

“No!” she wails. “You have slain me, Hazel. You and that butt dimple of yours. I am deceased.”

But she’s not so deceased that she doesn’t make a snack bowl for us to eat in bed. Grapes and chopped up bread and some vegan cheese that is far more delicious than I thought it would be. There’s a second bowl though, and that she takes into the living room. I pad after her, not bothering with her towel, because it doesn’t fit.

There’s a pen in the other room that I think I was just too horny to notice before, and a large tortoise ambles over see what’s going on. When he sees that Finn is carrying a bowl, he starts snapping at her impatiently, and then tries to mount a log in his desperation to get some food.

“This is Luci,” says Finn, after she puts the bowl down. He is not paying any attention to her after that. “Officially named Lucifer, being the devil that he is. Luci would eat his pen if he could work out how to digest metal.” She opens a small gate in the side. “He usually runs around freestyle, I just close him up here when I’m working or he smells the bread from the bakery and tries to get down to eat some.”

She gestures towards a mark at the bottom of the door to the apartment. “Damned tortoise tried to ram it one time. Don’t worry, he’s not allowed in my bedroom. I don’t trust him not to chomp on my bedsheets.”

Finn tops up his water bowl and scratches the bottom of his shell for a few moments before heading back into her bedroom. She pauses in the doorway and looks back at me. “You’re staying over, right?”

I nod, and she sighs in relief. “Oh good. I only just realised that I forgot to ask.”

Snacking in bed is yummy, and when it’s time to go to sleep, Finn nudges me over until she can spoon me. She’s big spoon, and she slots in next to me as perfectly as if we were made to lie together.

Maybe we were. I don’t know much about afterlifes, but I work with a Goddess. There’re some elements of the mysteries of life that I try not to think about too hard. Either way, if I was made for something, I hope it was this.

This is a far nicer purpose.

Perhaps that’s why the nightmare I have is so brutal: Trisantona reminding me that whatever I think my life’s purpose may be, sex with a mortal is not it.

It’s worse than usual, in that I know that it’s a dream, but I can’t seem to snap myself out of it. And in that it’s not me being drowned this time. It’s Johnny.

Of all the drownings that I’ve witnessed, this one has never come up–perhaps it’s because it’s too recent, and there a thousand other deaths that Trisantona wants me to witness first. Or perhaps it’s because I knew him. But either way, I have to watch.

There’s nothing to do but watch.

I never knew for certain who drowned Johnny. He was Marla’s younger brother and we didn’t quite move in the same circles, but I saw the ripple effect his death had, especially as it coincided with the fall of the Veil. Trisantona and our magic all came back just as a teenage boy died.

It was a tragedy that the whole village mourned, but I knew. Us nixes, we all knew. It wasn’t the accident the coroner said it was.

He’s swimming in front of me, looking below the surface and in the starwort along the riverbank, looking for something. He’s so alive, the same mess of red curls plastered to his face as those that adorn Marla’s. He takes a breath and is diving deeper until his hand catches in someone else’s.

My breath hitches and I can’t breathe, which makes no sense. I’m a river nix and we can breathe underwater, but in this moment I am both Johnny and myself, watching and feeling and knowing what happened for the first time.

The face I see so resembles Kit’s that for a horrible brief moment, I think it’s her. And then he moves back and I see that it isn’t Kit, but it is her brother Ryder. Her father swims up beside them, and Johnny is starting to thrash now, looking confused, trying to kick his way up to the surface of the river, but they don’t let him. They each take a hand and drag him further down into the river’s depths and Johnny, sweet Johnny, is kicking and struggling.

Then he’s not really kicking and struggling anymore.

His movements become weaker and weaker until they stop completely, and his body floats in the water until Ryder ties some rocks to him, and he sinks.

And I wake up.