Chapter 13: Erin

“My contract will be up tomorrow,” Rowan announced as he opened another bottle of wine.

The four of us humans gathered on Dez’s sailboat in the middle of the lake, the waves crashing leisurely against its sides. Lucille and I lay flat on our backs, gazing up at the night sky. They’ve all gone stargazing before, but it was my first time, and it was beautiful. There was too much light pollution back home to appreciate the stars, but here, it felt as if I could reach out and grab them. They were so vibrant.

“Congrats!” Saya smiled, taking a sip from her glass flute. Her pale cheeks were as flushed as the rest of us. That’s what happened after several bottles of wine.

“I can’t wait to see my family again, but I’ll sure miss you guys.” His brown eyes lingered on Saya, almost similar to the look Megan had given me when she had agreed to leave with Dez. As if she had wanted to bring me with her, but knew I wouldn’t or couldn’t go.

Saya rubbed his shoulder. “I’m so happy for you. When I first arrived here, I remember you telling me stories about your sisters, how you couldn’t wait to see them all grown up and living the lives they chose.”

Rowan’s smile was the brightest I’d ever seen it. “It’ll have made all of this worth it to see them happy.”

Lucille rolled over onto her stomach. She wore a jumpsuit with an attached skirt that extended on the sides and had frills. When I asked her if she was going night swimming with the rest of us, she gave me a dull look and pointed to her clothes as if that answered anything. When I removed my robe to reveal the yellow two-piece bathing suit underneath, courtesy of Dez, her eyes nearly bulged. However, they weren’t nearly as wide as when Rowan and Saya had stripped naked entirely before jumping off the sailboat with a cheerful yell into the freezing icy lake. Megan would’ve loved these people.

“I know it’s against the rules,” Lucille started as if she could feel a lecture coming on from Rowan, “but since you’ll be leaving tomorrow, tell us: what were your contract terms?”

Rowan skipped the glass and swigged from the wine bottle itself before offering it to us. I took it; the white wine was too sweet as it hit the back of my throat. I preferred my wine dry, but the others enjoyed it.

“I guess I can share that now.” He peered around us as if Dez was hiding behind the lowered mast or would come up from below decks. He had joined us earlier, having had a few glasses himself. When we got to our second bottle and talked about taking a dip, his expression grew distant, and he excused himself. He still hadn’t returned, even after the sun completely set and the starry sky replaced the pink and blue one.

“I come from a place where it’s expected of our women to be sold off into other families to bear children. It wasn’t always bad, but most of the time, they weren’t treated well and had no say in the matter. My father passed when I was a babe, and my mother had little money left from his savings. I didn’t make much, as I was only a young boy. Too young to protect my sisters from being taken or to support the six of us. My oldest sister was very bright and wanted to pursue an education, but that was unheard of for women in our village. When she tried, they had beaten her to death and tied her body to a stake in the center of the village as a reminder.”

We all sat in stunned silence except Saya, who continued to rub Rowan’s shoulder in consolation.

“I didn’t want my remaining sisters to share a similar fate. I wanted them to live a full life, one they chose, but what could I do? I was a scrawny nobody with no money or power to help them. Then, one night, one of the older women in the village visited my mother. I hid in the dark, listening as she told a story that had been passed down for generations of a magical being that would show up and give you anything you wanted—in exchange for your soul.

“My mother had yelled at the woman to leave, that she would bring more bad luck to the family, but the woman’s words stuck with me. Desperate, I snuck out of our home that same night and went to the woman’s home, which was far nicer than ours. She smiled as if she already knew why I was there and helped me draw the summoning circle, telling me what to say. That’s when Master showed up. He listened to my pleas and offered me a contract. We agreed that if he helped free my sisters from this place, I would work for him in The Higher Realms for the same number of years it would take for my sisters to get an education overseas.”

That seemed awfully nice of Dez to do that. Rowan’s price to pay must have been steep and I didn’t dare ask.

But Lucille did when she said, “What kind of work?”

Rowan shrugged. “Whatever he needs. Mostly, it’s just errands where he’ll send me to the shopping dimension to pick up whatever is on his list. Books, clothes, different sweets, and things I’d never seen before, like staffs that would turn into gold snakes or pendants the size of my palm that made my brain feel fuzzy. I assumed Master could use those items better than I could.”

That’s surprisingly tame compared to what I had been thinking. Had I gotten Dez all wrong? “He can’t go himself?” I asked, handing the wine bottle to Lucille who grimaced and poured herself a glass.

“He never left the house, or at least he didn’t for the longest time. I worked up the courage to ask him one day why he didn’t leave, but it was as if I had lit a fuse. We had been in his study when suddenly books flew off the shelves, windows shattered, and the floor started to collapse. Meanwhile, Master had stood frozen in the center of it all. I don’t even know if he saw me. It wasn’t until a piece of glass cut across my arm that he snapped out of it and warped me back to my room. After that, he gave me a set of rules to follow, and I didn’t dare step out of line again.”