"Will I be allowed to open a garden?" she asked, ignoring his jab.
To that, Ace sighed, reaching to grab two mugs out of the cabinet.
"If Ly will handle the ordering of supplies as well as babysitting you while you work in said garden, I have no current objections. She should get a kick out of ordering seeds online," he added, shooting me a smirk as he pressed a mug full of hot coffee into the witch's hands before making his way out of the kitchen.
"You can drink it," I told her, moving to grab a cup for myself, switching off the range as I went. "No one here is going to tell on you," I added.
"As if that would stop me," she mumbled into the cup. "It does smell divine." Or at least she thought so until she took a sip and spat it out onto my bare chest. "Oh, oh my. That is... that is awful," she declared, scraping her tongue over the roof of her mouth.
I was not, in general, a man who found humor easily. But I felt a chuckle move up through me at her reaction, as I reached back into a cabinet to produce some sugar—Minos's guilty pleasure—and dropped a couple teaspoons into her cup, giving it a mix. "Try it now," I suggested.
She shot me a distrustful look, but took another sip. "Oh, that is like magic," she declared, giving me a warm smile.
"That is like sugar, actually," I corrected, putting a teaspoon in my mug. "Sugar is natural. How have you ever experienced it?"
"We have honey and fruit sugars," she told me.
"It's not the same."
"No," she agreed, taking another sip. "It is not. But the objection to sugar is the same to alcohol, I believe. They can cause addictions. Addictions make our magic work differently."
"That won't be a concern right now," I told her, leaving off that in a future, when her spirit was broken down a bit, when she was over her objections to being here, her magic would become a big factor.
We'd decided long ago that not telling the witches their fate was the best way to get the results we wanted down the road.
In the past, all that meant was keeping them in the basement, throwing food down to them until they submitted. Which made the whole process all but effortless for us.
This time around, though, there seemed already to be a lot of effort. Bathing and temptation and babysitting and helping the woman pick out fucking garden seeds.
I should have been pissed.
But what I felt, instead, was something akin to eagerness.
It wasn't an unfamiliar emotion. We all felt it leading up to the parties we threw for the MC. When we anticipated finally getting back to our work, our passions, our missions on this earthly plane.
But I rarely felt it outside of those nights.
I stood there watching as the witch moved around the space, chopping up our meager vegetable supply, tssking over our lack of spices, and making the saddest-looking soup I'd ever seen.
"Bring it upstairs," I demanded, already walking in that direction, waiting to make sure she followed behind.
"Eating should be done communally and at a table," she complained as I pointed toward my bed as I went to grab my laptop.
"Tough shit," I said, shrugging. "Here. Seeds," I told her, bringing up the website, turning the screen half toward her.
Her brows furrowed as she looked. "But these are just pictures."
"Yes. And when you hit this button," I said, clicking the 'add to cart,' "those pictures get sent as an order to the person who has the seeds who then packages them up, and sends them here."
"Wouldn't it be easier to save your own seeds?"
"No."
"But—"
"For fuck's sake, just pick the foods you want to grow so I can place the order. It will take a couple days to get here."
I should have known better than to show the internet to someone who had never seen it before. Because an hour later, the cart had over two-hundred dollars worth of seeds collected. I didn't even fucking object when the witch added things like asparagus that took years to grow.
She would be here, after all.
And, I reminded myself, it was all a one-time purchase if she knew how to do shit like save her seeds. She could even build up a seed vault for future witches.
Why the idea of future witches sent a strange, sharp pang through my system was beyond me, though.
"I need to rest if I am going to start the garden tomorrow," the witch declared, taking a deep breath, making her tits press up against the thin material of her cloak, her nipples hardened from the chill in the room. "Are you bringing me back to the basement?"
"No. Just sleep here."
What the fuck?
She belonged in the basement.
That was where all the generations of witches went. That was where we'd agreed they belonged. To help the transition, to make sure they became compliant, to break their spirits enough to have them do what needed to be done.
If I allowed her to walk around the estate, make demands, sleeping in my fucking bed, what were the chances that we could break her spirit enough to bend her to our will?
She shifted down in the bed, one of her hands pressed to her full stomach, the other over her head, toying with her hair a bit, the cloak slipping open down to her navel, revealing the outline of her tits. Her eyes drifted closed as she hummed something soothing and ancient—some song of her coven—and I had a startling realization.
I didn't want to break her spirit.
I wanted her to stay just as she was.
What the fuck was that about?
Chapter Five
Lenore
The days stretched long even as the sun moved further away.
On my first full day out of the basement, I opened up a large garden under the watchful eye of Ly. And, as it turned out, I caught most of his demon friends glancing out of windows as I dug up the weedy grass and turned the dirt, sprinkling the grounds of coffee from the kitchen into the soil after asking Ace if it would work like tea did, adding needed elements to the dirt.
It was far too late, of course, to plant a summer garden, but it was early enough in this climate to plant various fall and winter vegetables.
Beets, carrots, onions, broccoli, bush beans, small cucumbers, and salad greens.
Everything else would need to wait until the spring unless I could convince the demons that I could plant some crops in front of the massive windows they had in each of the rooms of their home.
At the very least, some herbs.
I didn't know if the issue was their demonic nature, or simply not knowing how to cook and therefore, what tasted good, but I could not wrap my head around the fact that they did not even have basil or oregano stored for cooking.
Aside from my garden, I wasn't given much to do. There were no elderly to care for, no babies or children to teach, no chores to be carried out.
So on the third day, while Ly was watching something bloody and horrific on that awful television set of his in the living room, I took myself down to the basement, sorting through all the books left there over the years by Ace who, as I learned, was a lover of reading and learning.
True, it made him smug and superior-sounding when you tried to discuss a topic with him, but I was not opposed to learning the ways of this new world I had never known.
I tossed books to the side about governments and economics, choosing instead to read the guides about electronics, about how appliances worked, what the internet was, how the heating worked without fireplaces. I also became fascinated by a thick, old tome with browning pages and patchy ink that talked about The Burning Times and the Inquisition and about how the Old Ways got hidden away. How, over time, humans not only forgot that witches and demons and other creatures existed, but vehemently denied their reality, calling them figments of writers' imaginations, the stuff of children's stories.