All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.

What we love is, sooner or later, changed.
But for a while we can visit our other life.( . )

Everything is still and dim. There are no lights, not in the apartment he exists in occasionally and not in the back-room laboratory where he really works and lives, not in the oft-neglected showroom littered with the semi-organized output of brain and hands inclined toward rule-bending creation above nearly all else. No lights, and nothing is on - no radio improbably tuned to some radio station half the world away, the forge and kiln both gone cold. Even the naked demon cat is gone, only token (aside from some feathers and a few vials of tears, the only token that matters) of the fire in human form (in woman form) that had wormed her way into his house and heart and bed for a flame-flicker brief span of time packed up along with a truly obscene amount of presents (thank fuck for trunks that hold far more than physics says they ought to properly be able to, and the mind - his own in this case, but that's no reason to omit credit where credit is due, the thing is damn handy - that creates such niceties). Nothing about the place hums when Buck is gone, nothing but the security system, equal parts efficiently humming machinery and invisibly vibrating old magic, both parts twisted and looped about each other until where they intersect, what precisely they should be classified as blurs and melts.

The sign on the door says Closed for the Holidays, exuberant thick marker letters effortlessly communicating their absent writer's glee. There's no place like home for the holidays.

Any and all holiday commissions ought properly be in by the third, gentle patrons. Those of you who have already taken the initiative are, as always, a superior and sparkling sort of specimen. Though apparently not so much so as to be able to handle making up your own holiday bits and ends. But no worries, perfection is an impossible dream.

Oh and if you're stopping by the shop don't be alarmed by the smell. Drying wyvern skin is not the most delicious of fragrances, and the baked goods don't so much drown it out as they do accentuate it weirdly.

[Sogbo-Bade-Agau, wind-lightning-storm. There is raucous laughter vibrating trough Buck's brain accompanied by the sound of many bare feet stamping in elaborately choreographed chaos (does the sound ring out through the thin walls into the street as well, to spill and mix with the elemental beat it reflects? Who can say? He's inside, and there's no one on the street to glance askance at seemingly unoccupied rooms all a-riot with the sound of the storm-gods reveling in that which they birth and breed, that which gives them their names and functions). He is inside, yes, in his home. His home where the veil is thin: every room with its altar, every door and window with symbols cut into the frame, every corner consecrated to spirits who have no proper place in London but for what is carved out for them, what is made available for them to take (if they will? ( No, when. For one way or another they always do). )

He scrawls almost absently but with his usual good cheer, tipping a wink to the woman who laughs out loud as she reads over his shoulder, the woman with the close-cropped black hair and the gold rings looped through her ears and the red red skirt who is leaning the full warm length of her torso against him, the woman who is not (in most quantifiable senses of the word) even there.]

All wares half-price, only today and only for those who arrive bone-dry.

One (1) cat, sans fur, possibly demonic and/or infernal, always plotting, free to good home. [...] Inexplicably fond of people who dislike cats. Answers to gremlin, fucking cat, you are a right ugly motherfucker you know, shove off and beat it.

Anyone interested in the odder bits of a hodag? Little sister thinks she's awful cute, dropping her kills off like this is a meat locker.

Buck could have asked, or sifted back in the journal's entries, or just waited for that heavy handwriting to show up again, but. Well. He hasn't said hello properly to his betters in a while, distracted by work, and he might as well kill two birds with one stone (and he misses it, that subtle drumbeat rush that hums through the blood when the ancestors are called, when the gods touch down to allow him to attend to them, but he doesn't think on that too long). Finding someone's name from their handwriting: not a typical sort of sympathetic magic, but there are many ways to walk the Gran Chemin, and calling on The Great Road and asking it to help you wind your way along some unusual route is a way to earn yourself the amusement of all the loa who Legba tells your story to (and Buck has found their amusement as useful as their favor, over the years, hears their laughter licking around the edges of his mind every now and again and knows their eyes are on him, which pleases him more than the blessings of less capricious spirits ever could). An offering of tobacco and coffee thick and black as road tar, and some chanting and bullshitting (for it's a fool who treats his gods as strangers when they're condescending to speak with him face to spirit), Buck blows out the candles and clears away the salt lines and leaves the offerings at the altar that dominates his living room.

Then, job done and only slightly burning question answered, he sleeps for a day and a half. Only then does he eat, pack up the order and show a sign of life and leisure by doodling in that other, more public journal. First up is sorta business, sorta not-quite pleasure: the formula that finally worked and the name he has so recently ferreted out written down together tidy as a math problem, Locked to Tracy Dockett etched neat and square in the handwriting he reserves for business notes and other things that need deliberate handling.

The rest is more simple. Buck has disappeared in the usual manner of Buck-working-on-a-Project, his radio silences surely as familiar to those who regularly troll the journal network as his inevitable sprawling, cryptically exuberant resurfacing.
Victory!

Mid-experiment, he gropes for a pen and scribbles a few lines down on paper, focus on the delicate stirring/measuring/chanting combination he's testing as opposed to where the pen has fallen. To anyone who witnessed it during the brief interlude between his scribbling and a heavy black marker depressing itself over the text in a neatish obscuring block, his notes would likely be nearly meaningless: a blend of numbers and symbols from alchemy, voodoo and chemistry. Abbreviated veves brush shoulders with numbers and short-hand formulas that lean against the curls and angles of elements and metals and processes. His handwriting is surprisingly neat and small and square when he's working (just as his hands on a gun or a knife move sparingly but steadily, his eyes watching a mark are sure and serene: the boyish laughter is not a cover, far from that, but it lives alongside something grounded and sure and old that is stealthy in its steadiness), but the scrawl after he discovers his error is the usual carelessness that is all he ever graces the network with.

My bad. Any arty folks out there feeling faint, just give a yell and we'll send someone over to fan your brow until the afterimages fade. How's everyone's day going?

The twenty-seventh and most of the twenty-sixth were reserved for sleeping, which meant that by the time Buck flipped the sign on the store around to the side that simply proclaimed 'happy holidays' and unlocked the door there was little trace of a transatlantic flight and the attendant annoyances and exhaustion about him. He settled back into the usual rhythm of things easily ('the usual rhythm' being something along the lines of tinker and work as usual unless the bell over the door clangs. If the bell clangs, wander out to say hello to whatever customer or person in need of directions has materialized), and eventually he reached for the smaller journal that was half-under the one he used for business - that more oft-used one being the grimoire, as he called it affectionately, an overgrown leather-bound monster that had survived explosions and fires and various chemical spills that would have overpowered a lesser volume - and scrawled out a hello to the city he'd summarily abandoned for the holidays.

You kids behave while I was gone?

The week-old sign on the shop door says Closed for the Holidays. Above the shop, the lights are out and no one at all is home to stir, not even a mouse. Halfway across the world, a farmhouse lit by thousand watt smiles is overflowing with laughter and cheerful mayhem, with badly sung carols and well-told stories. The tree is trimmed to within an inch of its fake life, the moonshine flows as freely as the eggnog and somewhere in the crush Buck is thinking of everything but the business (look, boy, look how tall Edwina has gotten, how much silver streaks Cletus' hair, how strange but familiar they all are, look and listen to the tales, all the life they've lived and when their stories are told tell your own, show them how you forge your own way away from but never without them). His arm is around his little sister's shoulders, he is discussing a possible commission, an idea that he may or may not be able to bring to fruition, with his father and an uncle. Hat knocked back to let him watch both men at once, his free hand gestures, sketching out something only he can see clearly and Buck is home sweet home, y'all.