The Demon in the Pastry Shop

54: Pouring into Cracks

 The sound of glass shattering sprung Kit's eyes wide open in time to see Silus launch from the couch to his gun on the coffee table. Kit's heart tumbled out of her gaping mouth as he pointed it at the intruder, the napkin covering it falling off as he aimed. When the second slipped by and so did the napkin, both of them were very much confused to see his fingers gripping a croissant.

Kit sat up. Silus frowned at the croissant and eased himself back on the couch next to Kit. He returned it to the coffee table, now laden with chipped and cracked porcelain wares. The airy bread softly plinked against a plate and the man in the sofa across from them gave a smiling sigh, picking up fragments of some dish he dropped.

"I wasn't sure your piece matched the china," he said with a congenial hum. He leaned back into the armchair in a way that made Kit wonder if he'd owned it before her mothers. His hair was black and cut by his shoulders. His eyes were a shifting hazel hue that seemed to forever swirl in and out of hard candy green and caramel brown.

Silus dropped his guard and his face into his hands, groaning, "what are you doing here, Ravitavah?"

Kit narrowed her eyes at him. He knew who this was? How did he get in her parents' house? How did he get on their island, for that matter? She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was three in the morning! She gestured at the freckled man in the green sweater and then waved her hands in front of her face with the most disgruntled expression she could muster.

Silus briefly peeked through his fingers and then snapped into an upright sit. He winced.

"Well, I guess I should be happy for you that you've never met the Ace of Mistakes before."

Ravitavah waved at her when she snapped her eyes back to him and a couple of broken pieces of the teacup he dropped earlier slid off his saucer and onto the carpet. Kit quirked an eyebrow. The Ace of Mistakes? She'd never heard of an Ace like that. Mavah, the Ace of Wishes, was sleek, refined, if not a little weary. Ravitavah was... not.

With a little cloud of puffy yellow specks Ravitavah swirled his hand around the broken pieces until they rose up into the air and pieced themselves back together into a teacup again. The fragments never fully mended, leaving a map of every which way the cup had broken. The teapot floated into the air obediently to Ravitavah's outstretched hand. He poured tea into the fixed teacup and Kit was surprised it held fluid, seeing it shattered only seconds ago (though when the teapot returned to the table, she noticed a drop of tea peeping out of the middle of the cup from a wider crack).

"I shouldn't have dropped in like this, that was pretty rude of me, wasn't it? I'm sorry, that's my mistake," Ravitavah explained with what seemed like genuine guilt, "but I needed to talk with you."

He leaned forward and nudged the teapot with the back of his hand. The teapot came to life again and tipped its contents into the cup in front of Silus and then the cup in front of Kit. She picked up her cup and stared into the light green tint.

"I understand you prefer to write your words down, isn't that right, Kit?"

Her eyes bounced up. She nodded.

Ravitavah set his teacup down on a solid shelf of air as he reached over the arm of his chair. There was nothing there but he seemed determined to take hold of it as he told her, "I thought that might be the case, so I went looking for the book you write in. I was a bit shocked to find it in the junk drawer..."

The heart inside Kit shriveled up and threatened to fall from its branch. Her mothers didn't want to believe that her silence was real, was not something to be cured, but they wouldn't go as far as to stick her most important belonging in the junk drawer, would they? She felt the sting of tears well up as Ravitavah pulled something out of thin air and handed it to her.

"This is your note-taking paper, if I'm not mistaken?"

Her fingers took the corners of a thin paper booklet and she stared at it until her heart swelled back to its original size on the tree. His was very mistaken. This was a printed menu booklet from a diner and it must've been quite old because there weren't any diners on the island to order takeout from. Her mothers must've kept this menu since before they moved. She laughed quietly through her nose.

Silus shook his head though the corner of his mouth turned up. He grabbed a pen from his jacket on the floor and handed it to her. As he sat back up and his snakes danced around, stretching into awakeness, he asked Ravitavah, "what did you need to talk to me about?"

"This very strange thing happened to me on my midnight stroll..." he said, leaning down to fetch whatnot from the empty air next to his armchair. Ravitavah straightened back up and held up a suspiciously anatomical hunk of stone, "it seems somebody left your heart out on the pier."