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    A Little Familiar
    A Little Familiar
    A Little Familiar
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    A Little Familiar

    By R. Cooper

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    About this ebook

    A powerful witch, Piotr Russell has resigned himself to loneliness, because ordinary humans can’t know what he is, and other witches are intimidated by his abilities. Generations of Russells have lived and died with only their familiars at their side. The presence of a friendly familiar is enough to keep even the loneliest witch sane, and yet Piotr deliberately hasn’t chosen one. He forces himself to keep busy instead, but the emptiness of his house haunts him even more the spirit of Great-Great-Aunt Elysia in the parlor. With Samhain and Halloween approaching, he’ll have much to do, and knowing that, his concerned coven seizes the chance to intervene and sends help to his door in the form of Bartleby Dorchester.

    The rarest of rare jewels, Bartleby is a human familiar: a witch with no magic of his own, and a desire to find a strong witch to help and serve. In particular, he desires to help and serve Piotr, and everything in Piotr wants to let him. Bartleby was meant to be his familiar; Piotr knows it as surely as he knows when it will rain or when the apples in his garden will ripen. But what Piotr wants from Bartleby, all he’s ever wanted, is for Bartleby to love him, something he thinks is impossible.

    Russells live and die unloved, and he won’t allow Bartleby to feel obligated to spend his life with him as his familiar if he could be happy in love with someone else. But Samhain is a time for change, when walls come down and borders grow thin, and Bartleby isn’t going to waste what might be his last chance to convince Piotr that they were meant to be. He might have no magic, but love is a power all its own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherR. Cooper
    Release dateOct 3, 2015
    ISBN9781311976505
    Author

    R. Cooper

    I'm a somewhat absentminded, often distracted, writer of queer romance. I'm probably most known for the Being(s) in Love series and the occasional story about witches or firefighters in love. Also known as, "Ah, yes, the one with the dragons."You can find me on in the usual places, or subscribe to my newsletter (link through website).www.riscooper.comI can also be found at...Tumblr @sweetfirebirdFacebook @thealmightyrisInstagram @riscoopsPillowfort @RCooperPatreon @ patreon.com/rcoopsBluesky @ rcooper.bsky.social

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    • 4/5
      Last pages are missing!!!! You can guess the end though.

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    Book preview

    A Little Familiar - R. Cooper

    A Little Familiar

    Familiar Spirits Book One

    R. Cooper

    Copyright 2015 R. Cooper

    Cover art by Kimieye Graham

    Content tags: witchcraft, onpage sex, intense loneliness, genderfluid character, some alcohol consumption, jealousy

    Piotr shut the kitchen door behind him, which muted the urgent howling of the wind but didn’t silence it, since the glass in the windows was thin and almost as old as the house itself. The wind hadn’t been so fierce when he’d gotten home from work. He felt the message it had for him although he didn’t understand it, and paused with his armful of late apples to stare out the window over the sink.

    The dark sky was rolling with clouds. Ominous, to those who thought of rain as bad weather instead of necessary and life-giving.

    All the same, Piotr put the apples in the sink to be washed and then went into the adjoining dining room. He pulled a sweater off the back of a chair and slipped it on before returning to the kitchen. He’d put his leftovers in the oven before heading outside to check on the garden, and the room had warmed up although it was still cool enough to make him shiver. The only sounds in the house were his footsteps and the ticking of the clock in Aunt Elysia’s parlor. Pallas the raven was perched on the refrigerator, but didn’t make a single noise as she watched Piotr wash his apples and leave them to dry.

    Piotr listened to wind whistling through the six apple trees in the garden. He waited for whatever it had to tell him before he realized that the message was the sound itself. The silence was so profound he could hear the faint rattle of the shed door, and the shed was yards from the house.

    He tightened his mouth and glanced up at Pallas, who looked back, unblinking. Pallas was not his, although Piotr fed her. She’d belonged to Piotr’s grandmother, a tough old bird herself, but since his grandmother’s death in January, Pallas had no master. It didn’t stop her from acting like Piotr’s familiar, of a sort. Pallas didn’t help him in any way, but she was fond of watching him with judgment in her black eyes. It was her way of guiding him without directly interfering as might have done if she had been his.

    Piotr didn’t have a familiar and wouldn’t have chosen an elderly bird for one in any case, certainly not one who’d been devoted to his grandmother for most of its preternaturally long life. But there was a reason witches with any significant power to speak of had them around.

    Nature was about balance, and a potent witch required something, or someone, who could help them grow their power while keeping them grounded. His grandmother had said it was about connection. Besides a coven, a witch needed a link to another living creature to stop them from going mad as Merlin. But Piotr had often suspected the bond was more than that. His grandmother had possessed a fiery temper and a short fuse with idiots, and Pallas had been able to calm tense situations with a well-timed comment, or a beady stare, in a way that had nothing to do with magic.

    An older witch a few hours away in Wellington had a golden retriever for a familiar. The retriever served more as a therapy dog than a sarcastic best friend like Pallas. That witch, socially awkward and tense at large gatherings, needed the friendly, openly adoring presence of the dog, as well as its watchful eye. The retriever allowed him to focus on his magic, to let it grow without tempting him toward abusing it—not that every witch would lose their mind or begin to practice selfish, twisted magic without a familiar around, but something about unattached witches stabilized in the presence of their familiar.

    Piotr wasn’t certain what that was, but he knew people—and witches were very much human. Humans could get so heartsick they could die from it. Loneliness could turn a person inward, leave them without a bridge to the outside world. That could have considerable consequences for someone who could summon a storm, or cause flowers to bloom, or hex with the power of life and death.

    This had most likely led to the need for familiars in the first place. Covens wanted powerful witches to help lead them, but no one desired to live with one. As a consequence, the more powerful the witch, the lonelier their lives often were. Familiars would have begun as mere companions, and then witches would have noticed the effect magic had on them, or, maybe the effect the presence of another had on their own magic. Whichever it was, Piotr could judge a witch’s strength from their choice of companion.

    His grandmother had been formidable. Naturally, the smartest of birds had found her.

    Piotr considered Pallas, who managed to express her view of the situation with a mere cock of her head.

    Pallas thought he was making a mistake by living alone. Despite that, she’d felt the same about his last two attempts at relationships. She’d glared at Kyle for demanding Piotr learn how to act like a normal boyfriend, and outright cackled in glee when Xander—who she had absolutely detested—had admitted Piotr was too weird, too into his hippie shit to be suitable for someone who worked at a bank. No one who looked like a big, fearsome bear should be so interested in gardening, or canning, or whatever it was Piotr and his farmer’s market friends" did.

    Since that had not been the time to finally explain a family history of witchcraft, Piotr had once again left it unsaid. That was one of the problems with dating ordinary humans; eventually it became necessary to either tell them the truth or to break up with them. Relationships could be done, of course, with the right sort of person, the kind already inclined to gaze longingly at full moons, the ones who searched for fairies when they saw a circle of mushrooms, or ran toward breaking waves instead of away from them. Not, apparently, the kind who looked up at all six feet, three inches of Piotr and saw his thick, drawn eyebrows, his sooty black hair and beard, and assumed he spent his Saturdays doing something more interesting than weeding his herb and vegetable gardens.

    Hippie shit, Pallas croaked at him. She’d taken to repeating that phrase when she was most amused with him. It was not the first time the ways of the craft had been mistaken for some kind of hippie, organic foods movement by outsiders. Piotr should have been grateful for the recent trends toward home gardens and sustainability. They certainly made hiding in plain sight far easier than it must have been in past centuries.

    But he turned his back on the stubborn corvid and filled the kettle for a warming cup of tea. He checked on what was left of his vegetable pot pie in the oven, then scrubbed the dirt from under his nails. Outside of the kitchen, the big house would be cold, so he crossed to the thermostat to at least turn on the heat upstairs, and then returned when the kettle began to whistle.

    The hour was fairly late, after seven, but he pulled a caffeinated tea blend from his overstuffed open pantry and got out the antique teapot with the faulty strainer. Pallas gurgled at him for a moment, repentant about hurting his feelings but unwilling to come down from her perch.

    Piotr could remember his grandmother gently scratching the raven’s back and how Pallas had preened for it. There was nothing like the bond between a witch and their familiar. In the days of the witch hunts, fearful humans had assumed the close partnerships had something to do with the devil, or involved some kind of bestiality, which said more about those humans than the witches on trial. Familiars were more than beasts. They were animals with a magic of their own, who were drawn to the human witch who needed them.

    Piotr forgave Pallas because the bird was still grieving, and set one of the apples on top of the fridge for her to peck at without actually eating. Outside, the wind picked up, making the windows shiver and the bells hanging along the porch ring as though they had an announcement.

    Piotr poured his tea into his favorite cup, the one round and trimmed with pink and big enough to not be dwarfed by his hands, and went into the dining room. His notebook was open by his usual chair, his pen beside it. He had his choice of rooms for his workspace but had always felt more comfortable around the center of the home—the kitchen and dining room. He scratched a few items off his to-do list, jotted down a few others, and pretended the ticking of the grandfather clock in the parlor wasn’t louder than it should have been.

    He was already planning for the winter months. Even in the modern world of

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