I considered the term for a while.  The problem is, the only familiars I was really, um, familiar with were generally cats. Oh, I knew a couple of dogs, but as a rule of thumb dogs were suspicious of magic. One turtle. A very odd turtle to be sure, I actually thought the turtle might have been a wizard who had done something, well, bad, with reality. I was sure there were others, but no one kept a human as one.  Maybe a cat girl from anime? Nah.  Plus, she’d have to have those cute pointed ears on the top of her head, and her ears appeared (app-EAR-ed?) to be normal.

I shook my head. What was a familiar, then?  I had a handful of definitions to choose from, magic being that lovely place of overlapping terminology based on a combination of sources in common.  The lowest denominator of magic, some of it being based on terms in science fiction or casual deterioration of religious vocabulary, I supposed.  I occasionally toyed with the idea of writing a book about a time in the future where magic was a standardized form of study and the terms were set, but if I was writing it while it wouldn’t have terrible Latin-based constructions I’d probably still be terrible and lose some culture’s contribution.

Which was an amusing side-note to being “woke,” as an opposition to the living dream of the maya.  I had struggled with the term ‘awake’ already, personally caught between Shirley Jackson’s, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream,” and Peter S. Beagle’s, ” Most people are wide awake only now and then—on special occasions, as you might say. But a magician is wide awake all the time, on call for everything, which is why most people call him a magician.”  I kind of put myself (in both cases) as someone too prone to hitting the snooze button.

But that’s far from knowing what Nen meant as ‘a familiar.’ Was Janet someone like the Sources of Fionavar, there to be tapped for power? A companion to offer occasional guidance, like Rosetta of Joan Carris’ Witch-Cat? Or what he seemed to be suggesting, a convenient host for demons to pop in and out of?  And where did the sigils fall into it, if anywhere?

“What do you mean by ‘familiar’?” I finally asked.

“Touched,” Rayya said, but there was the hint of her hiding her smile.  Nen turned to share some kind of expression with her, but I didn’t catch what it was.

“Touched,” I repeated. “And what does that mean?” I was afraid to keep speculating as it would drag me down rabbit holes I had no intention of touching with the hares of my chinny-chin-chin.

Nevermind. It didn’t sound good even to the weird depths of my head.

“Just as you are,” she said.

“Oh, I’m touched, all right. Touched by your compassion and easy-to-comprehend descriptions,” I said, making sure the sarcasm was laid out nice and evenly. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know what day it is?” Nen asked, and I don’t know why I detected a bit of anxiety to it.

“Um,” I glanced at my watch to tell him.

“Tomorrow will be a year and a day,” Nen said.

“Since… a year and a day ago?” I glanced at my calendar.

I hadn’t planned on any kind of celebration, any kind of anniversary marking my return to the world.  I still had many of the same problems, the same questions, but I had fit right back in, culture shock retreating like a wave on the shore of my personal beach-being… which meant it probably hadn’t been all that much of a tidal wave.  “Oh,” I said, feeling like I had to respond to him.

He and his sister had been unwanted guests at first. Not like the kind on Ed’s pens, but an evil I only found necessary the time I watched Nen fight a Beyonder I originally called a demon.  Since learning more about demons, I wasn’t sure I would keep the epithet.  Over the … year, I guess, they’d turned more like friends.  Even after our spat where Nen had said he wasn’t there to be one… we bought books together, and I remembered to get them cake pops, and I knew their favourite cereals, and even if we didn’t understand each other a lot of the time, we were… friends.  Right?

I felt very cold and alone in the dark for a moment.

“What does that mean?” I finally asked.  He hadn’t said anything, just stared at me with his strange eyes and his wild hair, and his weird clothes and everything I had actually learned to find kind of adorable, to be honest.  I put up with the weird organic and herbal soaps and their occasional silences and pointed looks.

He glanced at Rayya, and I believe my heart jumped a beat.

She inclined her head to him, and he turned back to me.  “Nothing.  Except perhaps we should have a…” he took a deep breath, and said, conversationally, “party.”

“A party?” I asked? My emotions were strained.

“A party,” he said, and I didn’t understand his look.

“Who would we invite?” I asked, ignoring everything we’d been talking about up to that point.

“I will write the guest list,” Rayya said.  She was leaning on the door, now.

“It’s kind of short notice,” I pointed out.

“The people who need to come will find time in their schedule,” she said, and I got a creepy vibe from it.

“Don’t go killing loved ones or anything,” I warned, as if I could stop her. “That’s never a great way to have a celebration.  And it is a celebration, right?” if my voice cracked a little on that last, I ignored it.

“Yes,” but there was a pause I was getting ready to over-analyze.  Nen shook his head.  “I cannot lie to you. We have made a decision.”

If I had learned nothing over the year, I might have asked more questions, but I could tell now.  It wasn’t body language, exactly, what they shared, but it was a sense I had grown.

I would ask more questions.  Later.