THE TROUBLE WITH WARLOCKS
A few years ago, before I moved out of the coven house, I started seeing a warlock named Chester. Well, Chester wasn’t his real name; that was some fancy thing like Charleston Copernicus Throckmorton, but he’d shortened it to Chester because he wanted to blend in with humans. I mean, I’ve never met a human named Chester, but whatever. That was right about the time when we got the word from the Elders about it being a good idea to hang out with humans and get jobs and all that, and Chester, like me, was young enough to be willing to give it a try. Or so I thought, anyway.
Actually, I was more than willing. I was already well on my way to being out-of-my-mind bored with traditional witchkind life. I’d already had enough of being trapped in the coven house tatting doilies and brewing dumb little spells in the kitchen for a few hundred years, waiting for my older sisters to decide to go to the Beyond so that I could move up the coven ranks and—whoopie!—become a senior witch, who got to move around the Circle closer to the head and tell the younger witches what to do. And then go the Beyond myself when I got to be four hundred. I mean, what’s the point of that? Are doilies the only reason we’re here on this plane, so powerful and long-lived? I didn’t think so.
But I digress. Suffice it to say, it seemed perfectly fantastic to me, to get out into the world a little more.
I met Chester at one of the bars in the Castro where I’d started to hang out after work. Because I got a job, too. This was not long after I’d started at CORP, the magical research lab across the bay over in Berkeley. It wasn’t that I had a drinking problem or anything. It was just that I’d have all this fun going to work all day, doing science and running projects and making real decisions and all that, and then when it would be time to get back to the coven house, I’d think, Oh, just one little glass, then I’ll go home. I just couldn’t stand to get back to the doily-tatting marathon. Of course my coven mother Leonora wanted me home, and Elnor, my familiar, missed me, but hey, I was having too good a time.
As part of hanging out with humans, I was making a project of trying to get used to human grape-wine, which is a pale imitation of elderflower wine, not to mention Witch’s Mead. But my options were limited. You don’t exactly sidle up to a human bartender and ask for a big smoking glass of demonbrew. Not if you want to stay welcome in his bar, that is.
I knew Chester was a warlock the moment he entered the bar. We can tell, you know; there’s an aura about us that you humans can’t see, but that we witchkind can. It’s like magic. Ha-ha, actually, it is magic.
“So this warlock walks into a bar...” I wish it was a joke. With the distance of a few years, and everything that’s happened to me in the meantime, I’ll admit it seems funnier than it used to. The thing that was funny at the moment was that it was a gay bar—it was in the Castro, naturally—and this clearly not-gay warlock walks in. What was he doing there? Trolling for men? I don’t think so.
And don’t ask me what I was doing there—a totally heterosexual witch. I wasn’t looking for action for myself. I was just getting a drink, and, you know, exploring all the aspects of humanity out there. Plus, it was a convenient neighborhood for me, right at the end of the big transbay ley line and just down the hill from the coven house. And like I said, I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet.
Okay, if you must know: gay bars are kinda hot. But you didn’t hear it from me.
So I’m sitting at a strategic table near the back corner of the bar, watching the pretty boys parade for each other, listening to a really great band (with a very cute redheaded bass player), sipping my Cabernet, and I see this warlock. He stands in the doorway for a moment, his blond hair lit from behind by the setting sun. He’s checking out the scene, scanning the room as though his eyes were adjusting to the dark room, which of course they weren’t, because our eyes adjust almost instantly, and see way better than your human eyes do anyway. But he’s putting on this show of trying to see, when all he’s doing is wanting to be seen. I can almost see him fluffing out an invisible cape, unfurling it behind him. I mean, honestly.
He’s so busy preening and getting the pretty boys to notice him that it takes him a moment to see me in the back corner. When he does, his eyes widen a bit, and then he smirks and starts walking over to me. I just watch him as he crosses the room. He takes a seat at my table without even asking and says, “Well, what have we here? A pretty little witch in the White Swallow?”
I guess I need to explain the trouble with warlocks here, to help you understand why I didn’t just smack him with a burn charm, or turn him into a spider, or even throw my lousy Cabernet in his face. You see, there are way fewer warlocks than there are witches. Witches control the sex of our offspring, and we pretty much always decide to have daughters. It’s a crappy system, but that’s the way it is. We talk all the time about how we should have more sons and all, to even out the balance, but everyone thinks someone else should do it. I can totally understand that. I mean, little magical boys: ew.
The obvious consequence of the far fewer warlocks thing is that they act like they can have any witch they want. And because they’re so rare, plenty of us witches let them get away with this. Otherwise we’d never hook up with anyone at all. Yeah, it does suck. But what am I supposed to do about it?
So this little worm sits down at my table, acts like The Mother’s gift to all witchkind, and what do I do? I smile back at him, raise my glass, and say, “My name’s Callie. Calendula Isadora.” I mean, he wasn’t all that bad-looking, and it had been a while since I’d laid eyes on any warlock at all, besides my eight-hundred-year-old dad and my, like, two-thousand-year-old boss. So I’m interested, kind of automatically, although I hadn’t been expecting anything like this to happen tonight. Seriously—I’m in a human gay bar watching man candy, I’m supposed to expect a straight warlock to saunter in?
“I’m Chester,” he says, and then elaborates with the rest of his name, Chesterfield Winthrop Pfeffenfinger or whatever it was. He puts the name in a sort of fake-English accent that sets my teeth on edge, but then he laughs and shrugs, and he has a nice smile, and it’s like we’re both making fun of his pretentious name together, and, well, long story short, I don’t drag my sorry self back to the coven house till past midnight.