The Lovebirds - III
“I was trying to fix this disaster of a marriage before you even knew there was anything that needed fixing!”
Stolitz felt himself moving very far, very fast, spinning and tumbling and twisting in a rushing vortex of sickening smear of mixing, shifting, pulsing colors that defied language and human comprehension for what felt like both an eternity and only a brief, fleeting microsecond all at once before it came to a stop as suddenly as it started.
For a moment - just a moment - he felt himself linger in the air before gravity reasserted itself and pulled him down. He yelped in surprise, and he heard his wife shriek as, together, they fell. Before he could even properly fear for his feathers, the fall came to a mercifully quick end, broken by a splash of cold water. He launched upright like a spring-loaded toy, soaked hair-feathers slapping against his face, drenched clothes clinging to his skin. As he pushed his sopping hair-feathers out of his eyes, he heard the gurgling and sputtering of his wife as she struggled in the water beside him, gasping for breath as if she’d been drowning.
She wasn’t - she was fine. The water was shallow, enough that, sitting up, the surface sat around his waist. And, even if she wasn’t… he wasn’t exactly in the mood to care all that much. As she regained her bearings and coughed up water, Stolitz surveyed his surroundings.
One thing was apparent - they were Topside. In the mortal realm. The world of humans. The material plane.
Stolitz had been there many times over his life; he could identify it just from the feeling of being there. It felt different, in a way he was never quite able to articulate. It smelled different, too, though it wasn’t that there was some unique scent or distinct stench to it, but rather a lack of one. Heaven had a smell. Hell had a smell. Earth? Not really.
As he blinked away the water in his eyes, details began to emerge. He realized that he and his wife had been deposited from the portal and into the basin of a fountain. A stone monument rose behind him from the center, water streaming from the top and onto his head. Whether or not that was by happenstance, or some last calculated indignity on the part of his father, he was uncertain.
The fountain itself sat in the middle of a plaza, of some sort, surrounded by neatly manicured patches of greenery, benches, and boxed in by two-story buildings with stucco facades that housed businesses that all appeared to be closed. The sky was dark and starless, and the plaza illuminated by the harsh and sterile white glow of LED lights.
With a groan, he slapped a wet hand on the stone side of the fountain and pushed himself to his feet. Glancing down, he saw his wife attempting to do the same, whimpering like a miserable little animal as she did. Her dress was glued to her body, drooping off her reedy frame in heavy, sopping folds that, with one hand, she attempted to pry from herself, and, with another, she tried to peel back the wet mass of hair-feathers that hung in front of her face.
Once Stolitz stepped out onto dry, solid ground, he extended a hand. Why, he wasn’t sure - it wasn’t as if she deserved it. He wasn’t particularly surprised as she ignored the gesture entirely and staggered out of the fountain of her own volition, her claws clenched around wet masses of white fabric. Slowly, he lowered his arm back to his side.
The two stood in silence for a moment, with only the steady drip, drip, drip of their waterlogged clothes pattering against the ground and the soft rustle of leaves in the trees around them to fill the void. Out of his peripheral vision, Stolitz could see his wife staring at him.
He didn’t know what to say to her. That wasn’t all that uncommon, but now, he was unsure of what he even could say, or what she would even want to hear.
They were stuck. Marooned. Banished and cast out into the realm of mortals for… well, given the stipulations put forth by his father, it seemed like a real possibility that they’d never get back to Hell. His father hadn’t even told them what criteria they would have to meet to get his approval for the return trip. Stolitz figured that was part of the ambiguity was part of whatever lesson he had sent them here to learn. Assuming they even managed learned anything save for how to hate one another even more.
Stolitz sighed. “Agratta,” he said under his breath. “I-”
A furious cry interrupted his words as he was forced off of his feet by a hard push. His legs caught against the rim of the fountain and, with a cry of his own, Stolitz pitched back into the water, the top of his head missing the fountain’s centerpiece by mere inches.
“This is your fault!”
Agratta’s shout echoed in the empty stillness of the shopping plaza, the accusation repeating several times like the words of ghostly, tormenting spirits.
Stolitz balked. “My fault?”
“You wanted this,” Agratta growled, throwing the wet bundles of fabric she’d had bunched in her hands down with a splat. “And don’t say you didn’t! I saw the way you just gave up back there!”
“Give up? And what would you have had me do? Get into a fist fight with my father?”
“I’d have rather you done fucking anything, you useless bastard! You could have at least tried to do something, but - but you just… you laid down! You laid down like a beaten hellhound and you took it, just like you always do! You wanted this to happen! You wanted to drag me here!”
“Oh, you - don’t you flatter yourself like that,” Stolitz shouted back from down in the fountain. “As if I’d really I’d ever want to be stuck somewhere like here with someone like you for any reason. Why would I do that to myself?”
“Because you want me to suffer,” Agratta snapped. “You hate me, and you want me to suffer.”
“Trust me, Agratta, I couldn’t hate you enough to put myself through torment like this just for the sake of spiting you,” Stolitz replied. He gripped the fountain’s edge and, again, hauled himself up, freshly wet and his rear now sore. Agratta marched to the fountain’s rim and, for a second, Stolitz braced himself for another push. Instead, she simply planted her hands on her hips and leaned forward a bit, as if it might add a physical, stabbing pain to accompany her withering glare.
“Well, even if that was true, we still wouldn’t be in this position if you’d been anything other than incompetent as a husband,” said Agratta.
“Oh, right, right,” Stolitz muttered. He didn’t roll his eyes, but rather his entire head. “Because you, now - you’ve just been doing a bang-up job as a wife. Simply phenomenal, you’ve been.”
“Better than you’ve been as a partner, at any rate.”
Stolitz moved to reply, only to draw back. A small, joyless laugh, both bitter and incredulous, burst from his throat as he spun around, looking everywhere but at his wife as he searched desperately for an answer as to where she was finding the audacity to make such a claim, because he was in dire need of some of his own.
“Where - just where are you getting that idea from?” Stolitz asked with more laughter. “Where in every layer of Hell did you get the slightest notion that you’ve been a good wife? Seriously? I’m asking, genuinely. I want to know, so, please - tell me. Enlighten me. How do you reason that one, hm?”
“Because at the very least I’ve been trying, which is more than you can say,” Agratta said through a clenched beak.
“Trying?” Stolitz spit the word. “Trying? You’ve - you’ve been trying to be a good wife? Well - you could have fooled me! You’ve got a bloody funny way of trying, because all this time it seemed to me like you were going out of your way to make both of our lives miserable while I -” He rapped his fingers against his chest and leaned forward to match Agratta’s hostile posture. “I have been the only one who’s actually been trying to salvage this marriage!”
Agratta raised her hands as if she meant to push Stolitz again, only to snap back her arms and clench her fists before throwing them to her sides with a snarl. “I was trying to fix this disaster of a marriage before you even knew there was anything that needed fixing!”
“Well you never bothered to fucking tell me!” Stolitz roared.
“And you never bothered to fucking ask!” Agratta yelled back.
“Well I gotta ask what the fuck you two think you’re doin’ right now.”
Agratta and Stolitz both whipped around to look behind them. The man standing behind them flinched as the water that slung off their clothes splattered against his face. In the heat of their argument, the two had failed to hear anyone approaching. Stolitz thought it was something of a surprise that they even heard him say anything, though, he hadn’t been too quiet about announcing his presence.
The man wore a black short-sleeved shirt bearing a silver badge on one side of his breast, a radio on the other, and a patches on either shoulder. If the patches and equipment on his shirt hadn’t betrayed the fact he was a police officer, the belt equipped with handcuffs and a gun did. He wiped a broad hand across his face, which, as it fell away, revealed an expression of both bewilderment and mounting irritation. He looked at the couple - justifiably so - as if he’d caught them in the nude. Or, perhaps more accurately, gawking at them like they were a pair of demons.
He couldn’t see them, of course. At least, he couldn’t see them for what they really were. To him, Stolitz knew, he and his wife looked like perfectly normal and inconspicuous humans. Demons possessed a natural glamour that obscured their true appearances while on the mortal plane, but, even when that glamour lapsed in moments of great emotion, most humans still wouldn’t be able to perceive them for what they were. Humans, after all, didn’t want to see demons. Some of them, foolishly, didn’t even believe demons existed at all. And, Stolitz had learned, when a human didn’t want to see something, very often, they simply didn’t.
Both Agratta and Stolitz exchanged glances of mutual concern that, in only a second, cemented an unspoken agreement between two to cooperate - at least for as long as the officer was present. It wouldn’t take much for either one of them to just kill the man and go on their way, but Stolitz had a feeling that murdering a human police officer within the first five minutes of his arrival on Earth would not be a productive start his time there.
So, rather than leap out, take the man by the neck, and squeeze until he stopped moving, Stolitz flashed him a stiff and awkward wave.
“Er - good evening, sir.”
“It don’t sound like it’s a good evenin’ to me,” the officer said. “Any particular reason you two are out here havin’ a screamin’ match in the fountain at -” He paused and glanced at his watch. “Midnight on a Monday?” He put his hands back on his hips and continued to eye the demonic couple with naked suspicion.
“Oh…” Stolitz made vague gestures with his hands as he struggled to provide an answer that wasn’t, My father just kicked me out of my own house with my bitch wife. Oh, and I’m also a demon, by the way. Just so you know.
“Y-you - you know, we were just… ah…”
“My apologies, officer.”
Agratta sounded like an entirely different demon when she addressed others. Just about everyone who wasn’t Stolitz, really. In fact, she actually sounded pleasant. So much so that, if Stolitz hadn’t born the brunt of her misery for the three centuries, he would have actually believed that she was, at her core, a rather amiable demon.
Or, maybe she actually is a rather amiable demon, said a small, oily little voice in the back of Stolitz’s head. Just not towards you.
Well… given the way she treated him, his father, his own family, and, at times, Astoria, he knew that wasn’t entirely true. But, at the same time, it did remind him - she hadn’t always spoken to him so coldly.
When had she started? And, more importantly… when had everything else stopped?
“You must forgive my husband.”
Agratta’s alien tone of feigned yet convincing cordiality snapped Stolitz out of his thoughts and back to the unfortunate reality he found himself in.
“We were out getting some dinner and drinks and, well - he might have over indulged.” She pinched her forefinger and thumb together in the universal gesture for not much. “Ju-u-ust a little,” she added in a very uncharacteristic sing-song tone.
The officer’s scowl remained unchanged as he listened. If he was buying the story, he wasn’t showing it. He nodded towards Stolitz. “Is that why slim over here decided to take a nice dip in the -” He paused and, with a grunt of frustration, shot Stolitz a caustic glare. “C’mon, man. Get outta there, already.”
Stolitz looked to see that - oh. Right. He was still standing in the fountain. One leg at a time, he stepped out, careful not to get too stand too close to Agratta.
“Well,” Agratta began with a sigh. “He was… he wasn’t exactly paying much mind to where he was going and, well - he took a bit of a spill, yes. I offered a hand, one thing led to another and…” She took handfuls of her drenched dress, raised them, and let them slop back against the ground and her hands slap against her side. “Here we are.”
The officer was quiet. Skeptically so.
“That right?” he asked.
Agratta flashed her most disarming smile and nodded. “God’s honest truth, Officer.”
Stolitz, again, felt his mind begin to drift as he contemplated - when was the last time he’d seen her smile like that? A quick elbow to the side and a tense, side-long glance, both from his wife, reminded him - oh. Right.
He started nodding and smiling. He should probably be doing that.
“Sounded to me like you two were about to kill each other.”
Agratta shrugged and, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to say, replied, “Oh. We were.”
Stolitz felt his eyes bulge in their sockets. The officer’s brow furrowed.
“He didn’t lay no hands on you, did he?” he asked. “Be honest, now.”
Stolitz looked at his wife, and found her looking at him, as well, wearing a heavy-lidded expression of dangerously smug satisfaction; the look of someone who knew that she could make his life very difficult with a single word. Wordlessly, Stolitz pleaded with her with his eyes alone, asking silently, Oh, you wouldn’t…
Agratta turned back to the officer and gave a small sigh. “Officer,” she said in satisfied purr. “My husband is… many, many things, but… abusive is not one of them. He’s never raised a hand against me.”
It was Stolitz’s turn to sigh as he felt a metaphorical bullet pass through his hair-feathers.
“He doesn’t have the balls to hit me even if he felt like it.”
Stolitz choked on his own tongue. In that moment, he didn’t want to hit Agratta, but he did feel inclined to shake her violently until she stopped talking.
The officer didn’t appear to know how to take that comment. He continued to look the two over with increasing scrutiny until, if the change in his expression was anything to go by, decided that whatever was going on, he didn’t care enough to involve himself in it any further.
“That’s… that’s good. I guess,” he said. He adjusted his belt, the handcuffs glinting as they caught the light of a nearby lamppost. “Well,” he continued. “I could write y’all a ticket for disturbin’ the peace with all your hollerin’ and shoutin’, but you caught me in a good mood, so - go on and get yourselves home.” Then, as an afterthought, pointed to Agratta, and added, “You’d better be the one drivin’, though.”
He turned to leave the two, only to be stopped by the sound of Agratta clearing her throat.
“Actually, officer - if, ah - you would be so kind as to stay a moment…”
The officer kept his back to the two, but didn’t move. Then, with open reluctantly, the officer turned back around.
“Yes?”
“Yes, well, you see, officer, my… my husband here, in all his… infinite wisdom seems to have lost the keys to our car over the course of the night, so, um -” Agratta put her hands together and held them against her face. “If you wouldn’t mind lending a hand to two dem- ah, two people who are having a very, very bad night and giving us a ride home… well, it would be greatly appreciated.”
Home? Home? Stolitz wasn’t sure what his wife was trying to do. His father had told them that he’d arranged accommodations for them, yes, but he’d conveniently failed to tell them where those accommodations were. Or even what they were. For all either of them knew, he could have set up a cardboard box in some dingy back-alley and expected them to sleep in that.
The request seemed to puzzle the cop.
“Did you check the fountain?”
Agratta nodded. “Oh, yes, yes. Believe me, I had the opportunity to look - thoroughly, at that.”
“Did you check wherever you ate?”
Again, Agratta nodded. “Yes, officer, we did go back and ask the staff if they’d found anything, but, unfortunately - no luck.”
“Can’t you just call, like, an Uber or something?”
Agratta paused for a beat. Stolitz knew her well enough to know that the line of questioning was beginning to grate on her. “I’m just going to be honest with you, officer,” she said, her tone betraying nothing of her irritation. “I have no idea what an Uber is.”
The officer sighed again. His eyes drifted down to his feet as he waged an internal debate with himself. He removed his hat and scratched at his close-cropped hair, which Stolitz noticed was beginning to gray around the temples.
“Yeah,” he said with another sigh. “Yeah, I don’t really get that stuff, either, to be real with ya.” He put his cap back on and, nodded. “Alright. Alright. I’ll give ya a lift.”
“Oh, thank you, officer,” said Agratta, her voice dripping with faux gratitude. “That’s awful kind of you, truly, it is.”
“Mhm,” the cop grunted. “Like I said. Ya caught me in a good mood.”
His tone implied otherwise.
“Alright. Follow me. I’ll get ya home.” He waved for them to follow and began to walk away at a leisurely pace, thumbs looped through his belt. Agratta let some distance spread between them before following suit, only acknowledging Stolitz’s intense staring as she did.
“What?” Agratta asked in a sharp whisper.
“What do you mean what?” Stolitz whispered back, matching her pointed tone. “Are you daft, asking him for a ride home? Where is he supposed to take us?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Because -!” Stolitz caught his voice verging on audible to the cop, who, if he was hearing the hushed argument, made no show of it. Tempering his voice, he continued. “Because you’re the one who asked him to take us to a home we don’t have!”
“Your father said he made arrangements for us,” Agratta said.
“He did,” Stolitz agreed. “But - tell me, did I miss when he told you where that would be?”
“No,” said Agratta, now visibly annoyed.
“Then how do we find it?”
“I don’t know,” he wife hissed. “But I know your father wouldn’t just throw us out on the streets on Earth with no recourse. He wouldn’t leave you to share a cardboard box with me on the side of the road.”
Stolitz scoffed. “I thought you knew my father better than that.”
“On the contrary, I think I have a better read on the old bastard than you do. He’s arsehole, yes, but he’s an arsehole with high standards and a very high opinion of himself.”
I suppose it takes one to know one, Stolitz thought, but, for the sake of his continued survival, kept the thought to himself.
“He couldn’t stomach the thought of any members of his oh-so-august bloodline crouching in a cardboard box like an indigent, penniless bum. If he was so offended at the very insinuation by the press that you’re a bloody cuckold and I’m a whore, I can’t imagine he’d risk us being seen as destitute squatters and having that blasted across the front page of every gossip rag in Hell.”
“You… you are really putting a lot of faith in him right now,” Stolitz muttered.
“I’m not placing an ounce of faith in him, just his narcissism,” Agratta corrected. “I thi-” Her words caught in her throat and her eyes narrowed as she focused on Stolitz’s body. “What’s that?” She pointed at something on his vest.
Stolitz looked down at himself. He expected to find some unseemly blemish or stain on his woolen vest, but, instead, found himself staring at an unfamiliar bulge in one of the pockets. He reached in and brushed his fingers against something that filled him with a frenzied excitement. He pulled it out and, in his hand was a black leather wallet; a little damp from the water but unassuming in size, thickness, and quality, bearing a small and simple metal owl logo on the bottom right corner. It wasn’t his - the moment he got home, he deposited his in the same spot on the kitchen counter as part of his routine. He never kept anything in his vest pockets, either; so far as he was concerned, those were for show. He could see Agratta watching intently as he flipped the wallet open. The interior sleeve was lined with fresh (and wet) bills of American currency, arranged in a neat stack. A lot of them. Stolitz made a note to count them later, since it seemed more pressing to study the two colorful plastic cards slotted in one of the pockets.
“What?” Agratta hissed. Half her attention was fixed on the officer and following him, while the other was focused on Stolitz. “What are those?” she asked.
“Driver’s licenses,” Stolitz mumbled as he scanned the cards.
One for him. One for Agratta. He ignored most of information on it, focusing only on the address line. For the first time that night, and for what felt like the first time in much longer, Stolitz smiled.
“There’s an address on these,” he said.
Agratta heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank Lucifer.” She held out her hand. “Here. Give me one.”
Her patience was more limited than Stolitz’s reaction time. Before he could offer his wife her new license, she snatched both from his hand and began to feverishly study them.
She came to a stop. Stolitz did as well, while the officer continued on, blissfully unaware.
“Come on,” Stolitz whispered. “Don’t tarry, now.”
Agratta stared at the cards in her hand with naked disbelief, her beak parted and trembling.
“Oh… oh, sweet mother of sin…”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“This - this picture of me,” she mumbled. “It’s ghastly.”
“Really?” Stolitz had to laugh, though, he tried to keep it quiet. He glanced over his shoulder. The officer had noticed they’d stopped and come to a pause himself, waiting, and tapping his foot with impatience. Stolitz flashed him a weak smile held up a single finger, asking him to spare a moment. He whirled back to find his wife still staring at her own photo, rubbing her thumb against the card as if she hoped it might erase it. “Really, now, Agratta? That’s what your worried about right now? An unflattering photograph?”
She shook her head. “It’s not just that…”
“What? What is it, then?”
“Did you not notice?”
“Notice what, damn it?”
Slowly, his wife’s head rose, her red eyes filled with equal parts dread and panic. She held up one of the cards and pointed a claw to the words printed across the top. In a quiet, trembling voice, she answered.
“We’re in Florida.”
Remember how I said this was an urban fantasy dark romantic comedy, but also another, undisclosed thing? Yeah, well, it’s actually an urban fantasy dark romantic comedy that’s also a reverse isekai.
This is the second installment of my ongoing series for Thorny Thursday, which is spearheaded by Kathrine Elaine and The Brothers Krynn. I encourage you to check out the other authors that are participating, a full list of which can be found on either of their pages.
As always, I sincerely hope you enjoyed this installment.