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Ruth had that well-lived-in look. People seemed to gravitate toward her, maybe because she looked grandmotherly and sweet. Her lips had a natural upward tilt to them, as if she was always smiling, and the crinkles around her eyes reinforced this impression.
When Seventh Sister was Ruth, she liked herself best.
She experienced human life in all three forms. Her emotions, thoughts, actions and reactions differed depending on which form she took. Yet, there was always a consistency amongst them as well, for her soul was the same.
But regardless of the body she inhabited, being susceptible to illness was the worst.
The first time she caught a “cold,” she thought she was dying. She wanted to die, honestly.
It had taken her two weeks to recover from the worst of it, from runny nose, fever, sore throat and a hacking cough, to body aches and dizziness. She didn’t set foot out of her one-bedroom apartment situated on top of the café-by-day-bar-by-night she worked at,Drink of Me, for all of that time.
Her boss, a woman by the name of Maddie Peterson, was kind enough to bring her medicines and hearty soups she loved the warmth of going down her gullet but couldn’t taste. If not for Maddie’s help, she might have been incapacitated longer.
Seventh Sister would like to think that the human-turned-immortal (because she was Mated to the Tiger King, Goya), was merely trying to minimize the number of hours an employee was out of commission by helping her recover faster. Because that’s what Seventh Sister would do, logically, were their roles reversed.
But Maddie never pressed her to come back to work. She genuinely seemed tocarehow Seventh Sister felt.
She suffered manifestations of thiscaringthing quite a lot in her three human lives.
When she loitered aimlessly as Eve outside of the café the second morning she’d been in town, the head waitress named Mikayla Lane (Mike to her friends) let her in, got her a giant cup of cocoa on the house. And shortly thereafter, Maddie took her under her wing and offered her a job and a room and board.
For nothing, really.
They didn’t know her, didn’t interrogate her, didn’t ask for anything in return. Just because she was looking particularly forlorn and bedraggled that day, huddled under the awning waiting out a bout of rain.
Eve became a waitress at the café the very next day, had a comfortable place to call her own that barely cost her anything, leaving half her wages to save.
Which was important, it turned out, the earning and saving money thing. Because all she possessed when she entered the human world were the clothes on her back for her three different forms, and a few accessories that accompanied them.
While the knitting needles, a large canvas bag and an array of yarn gave her old woman form something to do, for example, they weren’t particularly helpful in the procurement of basic needs, like food and shelter.
Maddie helped her open a bank account. And Mike gave her an old “smart phone” to use so she could “keep in touch” with people and for emergencies.
Eve had all of two numbers saved on that phone. Mike’s and Maddie’s. Once she learned how to navigate the device, she used it rarely, and only when either woman texted or called her.
Eve became Seventh Sister’s main form, and she took it (or it took her) in the mornings and at night.
Michael and Ruth took over her body with a predictable randomness. Michael appeared mostly during weekends, and Ruth, in the afternoons when Eve was off shift.
As Ruth, she liked to sit in the café to sip tea or hot chocolate, knit and people watch. Or do the same at the town library, often napping for an hour or two in one of the comfortable, extra-large armchairs.
As Michael, Seventh Sister apprenticed at the master woodworker’s shop with Tal-Telal, to whom Michael was introduced through a guest chef atDrink of Me, Tal’s Mate, Estelle Martin (a.k.a., Mama Bear, a.k.a. Ishtar Anshar, a Dark Princess once upon a time). Michael wasn’t paid for the work he did, but he got to learn new skills and encountered males neither Eve nor Ruth had the same access to.
Male comradery was a mysterious thing, in many ways more mysterious than female friendship. Even though Seventh Sister couldn’t claim to have “friends” in the Celestial Realm, at least she’d always been female.
But men were vastly different. Not just their physicality, which was obvious, but how they interacted, spoke (or didn’t speak as the case might be), thought and felt. It was fascinating to Seventh Sister.
All in all, being human might be the pits, but she was absorbing knowledge she’d never acquired, much less experienced first-hand, like an endlessly thirsty sponge. Despite herself, she couldn’t help but be drawn into the human world, to take personal interest in human interactions.
Especially as it related to one Benjamin Larkin D’Angelo. A golden warrior angel of godly masculine beauty who had taken over the Jade Emperor’s quests from his sire, Erebu, in recent years.
His outer shell had the power to render her speechless as Eve, make her rather envious in a worshipful way as Michael, and wish she were decades younger as Ruth.
But it wasn’t his physical attributes that she found most compelling about the twenty-something young man with an old soul. It was other things she noticed most. Small, seemingly irrelevant, inconsequential things.
She didn’t like to dwell on them. They made her feel…
Too much.
