Chapter 2
Well, fuck. Beckett had a second shot of vodka. How could Castle be a Witchfinder? She'd never spotted a single hint of anything untoward about him.
(You never looked, either, said the annoying voice in her head. Too busy looking at, hmm, other things. Cases, Beckett thought crossly. Yeah, right. Like cases normally reside behind a zipper. Shut up. Gotcha. You were thinking dirty thoughts, too. I said shut up.)
Finally, the irritating voice shut up. It was worse than drunk Lanie handing out advice, which usually followed the same jump his bones pattern, and it didn't help the instant problem, which was that Castle –
Oh. Oh, shit. Ohshitohshitohshit. Castle – or at least Castle's Witchfinder investigative skill – had been scanning her. Oh, shit. That meant he'd know that she wasn't exactly human. She was utterly astonished that he hadn't already called her, clamouring to know all about it – oh. Oh, that sneaky, conniving, bastard. He thought that she wouldn't have noticed.
Well, she would just see about that. Tomorrow, that sneaking, spying, sonofabitch would find out exactly how big a mistake he'd just made. Oh, yes.
(Oh, really? You shut up. Shan't. If he's a little more than human too, just think what fun you could have.)
"Won't," Beckett said very childishly, and went to bed, pulling the covers right up over her head. Spy on her in her own bedroom? He was going to suffer.
Castle stared at his simulacrum, completely flabbergasted. Beckett wasn't human. He hadn't the faintest idea what she was, which was almost equally flabbergasting, because he thought he'd researched every type of not-quite-human out there, and there had been plenty in practice. At least, he'd found plenty.
He'd gone and Looked, and found that she...wasn't wholly there. Which might have been bearable, except he'd made the huge mistake of letting his mental projection sit on the edge of her bed, cup her face and kiss her. So of course she'd woken up. He'd whisked himself back again, and now he didn't know what to do. He wanted to call her and extract answers to the thousand million questions boiling in his brain. He wanted to go to her apartment and kiss her again, and again, and again.
An odd sparkle flickered at the corner of his eye, and disappeared before he could decide if it were real. He concluded that it was a product of tiredness, and trudged to bed, remembering as he did so that the day ahead was closer than he'd like.
His dreams bubbled with over-heated sexuality, and he woke frustrated and uncomfortable.
One more day, and then it would be Hallowe'en. Maybe he'd be able to achieve something that day. After all, it was the day when all ghosties, ghoulies and long-leggety beasties became rather more corporeal. He began to plan.
When Castle bounced in, apparently full of the joys of spooky Hallowe'en-tide, Beckett looked up, rolled her eyes, and turned back to her file.
"What have we got?" he asked.
"Cold cases. Nothing to interest you."
"Good."
"What?
"Good. I wanna talk to you and I don't want cases getting in the way." He grabbed her coat and held it for her. "C'mon. Let's go get proper coffee in barrel-sized cups." We're going to need it, he thought, and then changed the plan.
Beckett didn't want to. She didn't want to go anywhere with Castle. He might learn too much.
(Or not enough. Could that irritating little voice just shut the fuck up?)
"Okay," she grudged. "But I don't see why we can't just get coffee in the break room."
"Nope. The boys'll interrupt." Castle smirked. "You won't want them to hear this."
"Fine." Beckett stomped out ahead of him. Even her back was glowering at him. He smirked some more, for effect, which was wasted on Beckett's spine. He was pretty sure she knew, though.
"So what did you want to say?"
"I want you to come out to dinner with me tomorrow night."
Beckett knocked her coffee over. "You what?" she squawked, staring at him.
"I want to take you to dinner tomorrow night. You dress up, I dress up – you know I'm even more ruggedly handsome in a tux – and I'll do all the organising. I'll pick you up, and we'll have a wonderful dinner."
The coffee dripped off the side of the table, completely unnoticed by Beckett. Castle took a handful of napkins and mopped it up before it splattered on his pants.
"Dinner?" she squeaked.
"Yep." He smiled, and managed to erase any trace of wolfishness from his expression. "I'll do everything. You just have to put on a gorgeous dress and show up."
"Why?" snapped very-firmly-Detective Beckett.
Castle acquired an expression of strained patience. "Beckett, Beckett. I've been trying to take you to dinner somewhere better than Remy's for months."
(That's true. You should let him. Dress up nicely and knock his socks off. And then the rest of his clothes. Shut up, Beckett thought. The voice was not helping. You want to. I said shut up! Pipe down or I won't go anywhere. Spoilsport. The voice humphed into silence, with a considerable quality of offended sulking.)
"Was that it?" Beckett snipped.
"Yep."
"You could have asked me that in the break room."
"And the boys could have come in and interrupted like they always do," Castle pointed out. "I told you that already. Now, are you going to come out to dinner tomorrow night?"
"I'll let you know." She regarded him closely. "By the end of the working day."
Beckett had been expecting a conversation starting with You're not human, so what are you? She was still expecting it, but by tomorrow night and with an exceedingly good dinner, she'd be able to handle it.
(Probably.)
She ignored that. She also ignored Castle, all the way back. Unfortunately Castle wasn't ignoring her. She could feel his gaze on her skin. She was absolutely certain he was using his Witchfinder powers to examine her up, down and sideways, and she couldn't flay the skin from his bones for doing it without exposing both herself and her snooping.
Beckett wasn't wrong. Castle was indeed examining her, though not only with his Witchfinder skills, since examining Beckett's extremely sexy self, as often as possible and preferably at all times, required only the use of his eyes.
He still didn't know what she was. He knew what she wasn't. She wasn't a were-thing, vampire, or witch. She wasn't a goddess. She wasn't a monster in disguise – and when he'd examined her, her burning bright integrity had shone. There was no evil in her, just as there had been none in Ryan or Espo. Anger, for sure, but it fuelled her brilliant investigative skill, rather than being taken out on victims, suspects, witnesses, or anyone else.
So what was she? She didn't feel like a ghost, and anyway, no ghost could be as corporeal as Beckett. (She could be thoroughly corporeal – and carnal – in his bed, he thought.) So which of the more things in Heaven and Earth, metaphorical Horatio, could he dream of in his philosophy? Because he was all out of answers.
Maybe Beckett would tell him, over their dinner.
Maybe pigs would land at JFK. Beckett never told anyone anything…but if he shared, maybe she'd share? Surely his dinner plans would clue her in to his desire to…um…share supernatural abilities? He could try. He'd have to.
He began to plan, in the hope that since he hadn't been shut down instantly, Beckett would more likely say yes than no.
Beckett herself was exerting considerable self-control not simply to disappear in a shower of scintillating sparks and then rematerialize someplace else. Alaska, maybe. Or the Antarctic. Somewhere that would cool down her considerably overheating imagination and bring her back to her normal serene self. Walking out with Castle to get coffee felt faintly naughty. Castle inviting her to a nice dinner felt exceedingly like being asked on a date, and the only reason she hadn't bitten his hand off at the elbow was because she wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing that she really wanted to say yes. She wasn't going to act like one of his Storm groupies.
(No, you want to act a lot more intimately. Not you again. Get lost. I'm you. Can't, won't, shan't get lost. You need help, and I'm the bit of you that's providing it. What help? You're no help. If you listened to me, the voice grumped, you wouldn't need help, you'd need an extra box of condoms.)
Beckett forced herself not to blush, and nearly succeeded. She stared at the cold case file, wished that Hallowe'en were over, since that wasn't aiding her ability to think logically (or at all, muttered the voice) in any way whatsoever, and forced herself through the day, in which she achieved a sum total of nothing.
At shift end, she became aware (that's not true: you've known he was waiting for the last hour, and you've been keeping him on tenterhooks. Unkind) that Castle was exuding expectancy, tinged with a nice mixture of hopefulness and worry. His eyes were particularly cute-puppy-ish: wide and pleading. She told her disobedient heart to toughen up, straightened her face, and rolled her eyes.
"I guess I could come to dinner," she grudged.
"Great. I'll collect you tomorrow. Dress up, it's going to be formal."
Beckett stomped home. Well. Beckett stomped part-way home, then changed her mind and stomped into Macy's, as a starting point.
Four stores later, she gave up on the big names and wended her way to a small store in a smaller side street. She'd seen it before, but because it billed itself as a costumier, she'd never really looked into it. However, she hadn't found anything in any other dress store, so she might as well search this one.
She entered through the narrow door, expecting nothing, and nearly dropped her purse along with her jaw. There were dresses, women's tuxes, sparkles, sequins, jewels, feathers, marabou, ruffles, frills, lace – and laces – embroidery: everything. There were elegant sheaths, and dresses so over-elaborate that they'd be rejected by the draggest of drag acts. Every colour of the rainbow glowed; and when she looked more closely, there were fabrics that shifted colour as they moved. There were ballgowns and cocktail dresses, and everything in between: indecently short to trains that would grace the coronation of the next Queen of England. Silk, satin, gauze, velvet, brocade, more lace, gold or silver or bronze lamé: every unbelievably gorgeous fabric she could think of, and a dozen more she would never have imagined.
Beckett's latent love of dressing up in high style burst into glorious life. This was far better even than the dress Castle had provided for the charity ball. This was heavenly.
And then it became even better, because a tiny woman, with a dark, Sassoon-Sixties style geometric bob (who bore an amazing resemblance to the dressmaker/couturiere from the Incredibles) appeared from a back room. For an instant, as the woman locked the front door and switched the sign to Closed, Beckett's nerves twinged, but then she remembered her dematerialising ability.
"Hey," Beckett said. "Uh, I need a really good dress for a formal dinner tomorrow night…"
The miniature woman smiled. "I know," she said. "Welcome to my world." She snapped her fingers, and a chair appeared. "In a moment, we'll look. First, measurements."
"I'm" –
"No. I measure. You do not." She snapped her fingers again, and every window and pane of glass opaqued. "Down to your underwear, please. No-one will enter now. They won't even notice the store is here."
Beckett's yammering brain finally caught up. "How do you know? And" – she stared at the woman. "You're not human."
"Nor are you, my dear. That's why you could see this store, and me." She smiled, though it had a slight do-as-I-say edge. "Now, strip to your underwear. I need to take proper measurements, and then" – the smile became joyful – "we'll have a lot of fun. It's not often I get to play with someone who could wear almost anything and look fabulous, so just do as you're told and let this old brownie with a new career – cleaning is so seventeenth-century, darling – exercise her talent."
Beckett smiled, and gave up any thoughts of choosing on her own. Brownies were a law unto themselves, and left to themselves would do a wonderful job of whatever they did. Interfered with…they'd simply disappear. Someone to help her with a wonderful dress…Yep.
She stripped to her pretty panties and bra. The brownie's large brown eyes widened. "My, my. Flawless. Turn around, please."
Beckett did, flattered. "What should I call you?" she asked.
"Well…I'm not a Fairy Godmother," the brownie said, "so we'll go with something appropriate. Sienna."
Beckett smiled. "As in the shade of brown?"
"Exactly. Now, help me out here. What's your talent?"
"I guess you don't mean investigation," Beckett said dryly. "This." She dissolved in a little swirl of sparkles, and then reformed.
"Oh. Oh, my. Darling, I haven't seen that one in centuries, positively centuries. You're unique. I hear everything."
"You do?" Beckett snapped to attention.
"Relax, dear. I'm measuring. Yes, I hear everything that goes through the non-human grapevine. Information is power. You know that. I haven't heard of one like you since" – she thought, and hummed, and thought – "around thirteen-fifty, back in the Old Country."
Beckett stared, and then recovered. "I guess you know that there's a Witchfinder in town?"
"I always have. Didn't you?"
"Not till he investigated me." The brownie gaped, displaying small, sharp teeth. "That's who I'm having dinner with."
The brownie's – Sienna's – face lit up. "Oh, my. Oh, what fun. That boy needs shaken out of his silk and cashmere socks. He won't be able to take his eyes off you. He'll be enthralled" – she caught Beckett's look. "Oh, not like that, darling. No spells, no charms, no magic. All natural. I don't do love spells. They never work out well for anyone."
"It would be cheating," Beckett said.
"Yes, dear. Ethics are very important in our world – your word has meaning."
"If I give it, I keep it. I might mislead with truth, but I don't lie."
"Good girl."
Beckett hadn't been called good girl since she was eight, but she wasn't going to argue with Sienna.
"Turn around slowly, now. Thank you. Stay there, and hold quite still."
Beckett did exactly as she was told.
"Thank you. You're all measured up."
"Okay?" Beckett hadn't seen anything like a tape measure.
"Here's a nice robe for you. Pop that on, and sit down here."
The chair moved itself to a convenient point as Beckett slipped the robe on. It was silk, and cobweb-light. "This is beautiful," she said. "Uh…will I be able to find this store again?"
"Of course. For you, it will always be here." Sienna winked. "I will make you the most wonderful trousseau."
Beckett choked.
"I told you, I hear everything. Your Witchfinder is most of the way to being in love with you, and now that he's investigated you, the last obstacle is out of his way."
"Do I get a say?"
"Naturally, darling. Naturally. You have free will. However, don't cut off your nose to spite your face. There aren't that many sexy supernaturals around." Sienna smirked. "The sex is simply fabulous, you know."
She smiled, while Beckett boggled.
"Now, dresses!" Sienna snapped her fingers. The piles of fabric shook themselves, and began to parade. "Fantasia is so inspiring," the brownie said, as the dresses danced. "Putting them on hangers is so last century. This way, we can see them move." She watched the movements of fabric. "Nothing too fussy. You don't need to hide any flaws." Half the dresses lay down again. "Colour. Hmmm. Not pure black. You'd look fabulous, but it's terribly boring and worse, such a cliché." Another few dresses tucked themselves away. "And not pastels, acid green, or mustard yellow. Or pink. Strong, jewel colours for you – white is out."
Beckett watched in amazement as the parade of dresses reduced to only a third of the starting line-up.
"That's better." Sienna grinned. "What colours has your Witchfinder seen you in?"
Her Witchfinder? Castle was not her anything.
(You want him to be. Your lover, for a start. Shut up.)
"Only work clothes," Beckett admitted, "and he bought me a dress for a charity event – crimson."
"This one?" An exact copy of Beckett's dress for the MADT ball swooshed itself out of the remaining line up.
"How did you – oh. I see. He came here. So why did you need to measure, if you already had the measurements?"
"People change, darling. You're a little thinner – don't lose any more weight, it won't be flattering – than for that dress. His photo of you was remarkably accurate."
Beckett emitted the noise that an angry F1 fighter might make.
"Be complimented," Sienna said dryly. "You know that you looked fabulous. Only I could have achieved that from a photo and description. Your Witchfinder came to me because he knew that. He wanted you to be stunning."
Beckett gleeped, sounding rather like a confused duckling. "He talked about me?" she squeaked out.
"Darling, the man never stopped talking about you. I'm not sure he drew breath from walking in to walking out. That could be an amazing advantage, you know…"
Beckett blushed so hard that she almost combusted.
"I mean, he came by his playboy reputation honestly, and the gossip is that he's very good at being very bad. You certainly wouldn't be disappointed."
A swirl of sparkles momentarily replaced a physical Beckett.
"Oh, darling. Don't be embarrassed."
Blush appeared, followed by the rest of Beckett.
"Now, let's see what we have left here. Obviously you can't wear the same dress twice, so let's not go with red at all." All the red dresses flounced off and lay down, apparently sulking. "Midnight blue…maybe. Emerald green. Deep violet."
"Not Deep Purple?"
"I make dresses. Not elderly rock bands. They have no style, my dear. You will have style. Not royal blue. It tries too hard. Understated elegance." Her brow wrinkled. "Embroidery, I think, rather than sequins or beads." A few more dresses lay down. "That's better. These are the ones you'll try on. Stand up, please, and drop the robe."
Beckett did as she was told. She reached for the first dress, and was tutted at.
"Do not touch. The dress will come to you." And it did. They all did. They were all utterly gorgeous. Beckett stared with utter lust as each confection clothed her. Sienna fussed and fretted, moving from dress to dress, never quite satisfied.
"That one," she finally said, as Beckett was enrobed in the very last dress. "That, darling, is perfect."
Beckett stared into the mirror. It was. "Wow," she said, and twirled. "Oh, wow."
"As I said, perfect. No matter where you dine, you will be the cynosure of all eyes. And a wrap to complement it, too."
Another twirl. "It's wonderful." The dress and wrap whisked themselves off, folded themselves impeccably neatly, and landed on a pile of tissue paper, ready to be wrapped. Beckett swiftly dressed, and presented herself and her wallet at the desk.
"You don't pay with money here."
Beckett raised highly cynical eyebrows. "I don't have a first-born son, and I don't give open favours."
"Oh, I don't accept open favours. My price is simple: an invitation to your wedding, and you will accept your wedding dress from me."
"I'm sorry?"
"An invitation to the wedding, and I will make your wedding dress." Sienna smirked. "After they see you in it, every supernatural in the whole of the USA will flock to me, and then the world will follow."
Beckett considered very, very carefully. "Okay." She stopped herself thanking the brownie. "It's a wonderful dress. You're amazingly talented."
Sienna smiled. "I am glad you'll wear it." A small chuckle escaped. "The Witchfinder's had it all his own way. It's about time he had to make some effort."
"You can be sure of that."
Beckett practically danced home, cradling her amazing dress, and hung it delicately in the closet, in plenty of space, so that there wasn't the slightest chance of a crease. That done, she snuggled into soft sweats, and prepared for a nice, quiet, evening.
Thank you to all readers and reviewers.
For those of you not from a British (and possibly European) mythological background: Sienna is a brownie. In Scottish folklore, brownies were a household spirit (sometimes called a hobgoblin), who would clean the home and perform other household (or farm) tasks during the night, and expected an offering of milk, cream, or cake in return. If they feel that they've been criticised or insulted, they will leave forever. (Courtesy of Wikipedia, summarised heavily, under Brownie-Folklore.)
You'll see that I've, er, messed around with the tradition slightly. Or a lot. Sienna has several names, depending on who she's talking to.
Castle's variety of Witchfinder will be explained during the story, but rest assured he's not a bad guy!
