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Willow lifts and lowers her weights in measured movements. Each dumbbell is a near-perfect sphere designed by former members of the Construction Coven to be more compact than any before it. She was happy to pay for the service, but for a Penstagram post a week and a logo on a uniform sleeve, the Emerald Entrails gained a sponsor and everyone got free equipment. It’s more bang for her buck— more avail for her snail.
Hunter has no idea how heavy the weights are. They once measured Willow’s strength in how many multiples of him she could lift. He lost track at around three and a half Hunters. He’d learned from Cosmic Frontier that up in the sky are stars so heavy that a teaspoon would weigh trillions of pounds. The weights probably aren’t that heavy, but what if they were? She could do it. He believes Willow could lower the Left Arm if the task came to her.
Face warm, Hunter watches her body work, the strength rippling in her arms. He listens to the control in her breath. Every muscle fiber worn, torn, and mended is another strand she’ll squeeze him with. Occasionally, he remembers he’s holding a pencil and adds a stroke to a palisman sketch in his cream-colored notebook. If he’s not careful, he ends up drawing her. Usually, he gives in.
The heart-pumping music streaming in on Willow’s scroll chokes off mid-lyric.
A flatter voice speaks. “Be advised: the Boiling Isles Meteorological Bureau Officer has issued a hazard rain warning for regions between the Right Wrist and Shoulder, moving across to the Torso within one to two hours. This system has high stomach acid content. Its intensity rating is scalding.”
Willow uses the rhythmic rattle of the announcer’s voice as a new metronome for her reps.
“We have reports of the first drops falling in the Bonesborough outskirts. Please cease all activity and find shelter immediately if outdoors.”
“Oh shoot,” Willow says with a piston-powered exhale. “The plants! The garden! I totally forgot. Hunter, babe, can you—”
“I’m off to battle.” Hunter bows his head unnecessarily low and covers his face with a bent-fingered hand, as if donning a secret identity. Perched in the thick of his hair, Waffles mimics him, her eye glowing gold behind spread feathers. Hunter turns back, batting thick lashes, fast enough that his hair wags like a puppy’s tail. “Don’t weep when thoughts of me keep you awake at night.”
Willow rolls her eyes even as the corners of her mouth creep up. She manages to fend off a blush until he’s outside.
Their yard sprawls into a palistrom grove. Hunter has taken to calling them the cousins, even though he sees them more as both children and parents than part of the same generation. What’s true in any case is the sturdy trees need no protection from this rain and neither does he.
Hunter zips between rows of plants in their spacious garden, raising the rain shields in an efficient zigzag. Straight lines could work just as well— they’d timed it out once at Willow’s request and found no difference—but he’s grown partial to lightning bolts and whispering kachow when he thinks Willow can’t hear. The rain sizzles and fizzles against him, but he feels only a tickle. It doesn’t even singe his arm hair.
He greets the plants breathlessly as he meets them: hello lupin, hello boiling watermelons, hello roses, hello morning glories, hello scary one with spiky leaves that curl around my fingers if I get too close.
The first time he ran out into the rain was on a dare from other coven scouts-in-training. He remembers lying in his scratchy knit sleeping bag, trying not to itch his elbows as a dozen other initiates did the same. The tent pitched over their heads was a vomit green-yellow, cut from unwieldy fabric that made transiting a pain. As the first drops fell, someone turned to him and said, “hey Hunter, bet you couldn’t walk outside in this.”
It was all ego and bluster, but he was up for the challenge of proving himself to his social world. The taut-necked grimaces of is he really gonna do it? should have been a sign, but he never could figure out why in the moment he forgot the rain was boiling. He doesn’t remember ever knowing before then. Like so much of his youth, it was a smear of color, a lineless smudge. The laughter faded as he trotted out into the storm, spun around as the drops hissed against his hair, and came back in. He offered a nonchalant “what?”
The silence in the tent was filled only by the breathlike heaves of rain falling in waves from the storm before the other scouts-to-be burst into cheer. They were shocked that he did it and more shocked that he survived. One told him of a human legend, a hero dipped in a river like a cookie in milk, gilt with invincibility at all but one point, how he was taken down by a well-placed hit.
Hunter’s response was immediate. “Well that’s silly, why not just dip him twice and hold a different part the second time?”
“Because at first, everyone thinks being almost completely covered is enough. Just wait,” the darer said, blue eyes scheming, half a smirk reaching toward the moles on his cheek. “You’ll find part of you that’s not so invulnerable.”
They had already found it. Hunter remembers this moment not because his feat would have killed anyone else, but because it was one of the few times someone knew his name and bothered to use it.
Reminiscing lasts him long enough to trace a circuit through the yard. The land bursts with rain-weak vegetation, leaves as soft as Willow’s cheeks, but Hunter works quickly. He’s back inside in minutes. No-longer-boiling water drips from his hair, down his nose, and drops at his lips.
“All done, and I didn’t get bitten by the nipping nettles once,” Hunter announces with pride. “That’s a record low score!” He pumps both fists in the air.
Willow sets her weights down and walks over to him, paces slow and sorry.
“Why so gloomy all of a sudden? You like rain. Or well, you like that plants like rain, once it’s cooled.” He reaches for her shoulder. “Wait. Don’t tell me, did the cute flyer derby player from Palm Stings get voted off Last Witch Standing?”
“No, she found the hidden immunity palisman, remember?” Willow’s shoulders fall as she realizes she’ll be the bearer of bad news. She touches Hunter’s chest so his eyes see the issue. “It’s your shirt.”
Hunter follows Willow’s arm back to himself.
The night-blue backdrop is poked through with stars the color of his chest. The craters on the moon have become portals to his skin. The wolves stand on limbs with holes in them, have sores in their body that would ooze pus, blood and acid if they were real.
“Oh.” Hunter’s face finds a bittersweet smile, all the sadness running to his eyes.
“Hunter, I’m sorry—” Willow starts, but he doesn’t hear.
He examines the damage as if it were a wound, his fingertips exploring the edges. There it’s all frayed fabric, dissolved paint. The shirt wasn't ready for the Boiling Isles— no part of it had been dipped in a powerful river or reinforced with witches’ wool.
His lip trembles. At last he speaks beyond a squeak, the delayed reaction time of numbed nerves. “My wolves.” It feels like the last naming of a thing before it dies forever.
Waffles pinches two sides of a hole with her beak and looks to Hunter for guidance. She should already know this, but her attention is selective and her memory sometimes so like a sieve.
He tells her again. She helps him learn patience. “This shirt was with me through a lot, like your brother. The worst day of my life— and so many of the best ones. But I was actually thinking, even before this, maybe it’s okay to retire it now.”
He hesitated to call any moment of his time in the human realm and saving the Isles the best and worst. He chose them and they happened to him. He was broken, scarred, recast, and changed. How could he assign value to the rending and mending of body and soul? When growth only comes after injury and life springs forth from fallow, how dare he?
“The howlers have had more than a good run.” Willow agrees, gently lifting his arm. “Exhibits A and B.”
Hunter pinches the largest wolves and makes a soft awoo as his arms chicken-wing up.
Across each armpit is a fabric patch. One is just darker than the rest of the shirt. The other is just lighter. Both patches were needed. Waffles had made a habit of sticking her head through the holes, just as she did with the sleeves and the blown-out knees of his jeans. For her part, Willow had taken to tickling him whenever she saw his skin peeping out. “It’s just so target-shaped,” she said. One moment he would be sprawled across their couch watching Bleeding Hearts spinoffs, then he would be laughing and breathless, stomach tense and limbs flailing. It was a shame Willow wasn’t ticklish in the slightest, although she could act it if she tried. If she got carried away, and she usually did, it ended with her pinning him to the floor and smothering him with kisses as Waffles laughed and Clover looked away. It was a strange thing to associate with the feeling of a shag rug soft against his neck.
He looks at the rug now before meeting Willow’s gaze. If he wanted her to do that to him now, he knows he could just ask.
“I don’t need a shirt anymore to remind me that I have people who love me, who protect me, and who I want to protect. The evidence is all around me.” He looks Willow in the eye. “And I’ve made so many wolf palismen that they’re not just mystical beasts, they’re real now, here in the Boiling Isles!”
“This is the last thing from our time in the Human Realm that either of us actively use.” Willow glances at the game consoles that Luz smuggled through the portal and clarifies. “You made this there when you were first finding yourself. I think it deserves something special.”
“Special, hm.” Hunter frowns. “Like what?”
Willow draws a spell circle to cover his entire torso. Seeds propagate from the edges of every rain-burnt tear.
The wandering roots barely tickle Hunter’s skin, their crawls and curls slight enough he can almost will it away. He wants to laugh, so he does, for himself and for Willow.
“Now look at it.”
All at once the plants send out leaves, small and fresh and curious. The wolves’ barren outcrop blooms into a lush paradise.
Willow’s eyes glow. Lanky cotton plants flower and throw out white tufts that spin themselves into cloth. Indigo throws out pink flowers as handfuls of its spade-shaped leaves weep night blue into the cotton. With help, the shirt repairs itself.
“Do you like it?”
Hunter’s eyes wet with wonder. He touches the new fabric, indistinguishable under his fingers from the old. “How—?” His voice breaks like a wave disintegrating into foam on a shore.
“I wondered whether a technique like this could work since we were at Luz’s house. You were so into making clothes with that sewing contraption that some of your enthusiasm rubbed off on me.”
“But you always come to me with your torn clothes.”
“You have this kind of creativity, and—” Willow cuts herself off. She pats his cheek and traces the lightning bolt edges of his scar. “You like to watch me work out, well— I like to watch you work too.”
“Oh. Wow. You don’t say.” Hunter reddens slowly, steadily, then totally.
“You think I don’t see you checking me out? Heh.” Willow flexes her arms to give him something to look at. “When I watch you, your concentrating face is so intense. Your fingers are so careful.” She doesn’t add how he bites or purses his lip, sticks his tongue out at every angle, or how his eyebrows dance like plucked strings.
“So anyway,” she continues. “It’s good as new, almost. I can make the plants go away now, or—”
Hunter crosses his arms over himself, as if to protect the new growth. “They can stay. I love it like this, like you made it. When I take it off, we can frame it.”
“You like it that much?” Willow bites her lip and forces herself to smile. Emotion finds its way out through her eyes.
“And more.” Hunter wipes the tear that escapes down her cheek. He takes her hands in his, a tug-o-war between levity and gravity playing out in his grip. “I’m thinking, if you can tailor now— will you help me make little outfits for our palismen?”
Willow brightens. “You know, I always told Clover she would be the cutest little lion.”
“Because she already has the mane, right!” Hunter mimes his brain exploding at Willow’s brilliance.
“Exactly! And Waffles— um—” Willow spins her hands. “Her namesake is too low-hanging fruit. Her free spirit demands pizzazz.”
“Yeah, pizzazz!” Hunter likes the zing and sizzle of the word on his tongue, fizzy like boiling rain. “Razzle-dazzle! I was thinking— harpy Waffles.” Hunter whistles at her. “What do you think girl, do you want four more wings and glowing eyes?”
Waffles gives an empty-eyed chirp. Her bird brain swells with thought. She chirps again as thunder rumbles outside. Hunter startles into Willow’s arms. When they part, she un-snaps broken leaves with magic.
“Did you hear that? She wants eight wings! Phew!” Hunter wipes his forehead of sweat that isn’t there. “We better get started.”