Eveline

It was a Thursday afternoon, unseasonably warm, with snow melting into the gutters in the sunshine. Julie was writing report cards. There was a knock on the open door.

She glanced up; it was a sleek girl her own age with impeccable posture and a discreet designer handbag. Julie, feeling instantly frumpy, nodded a polite greeting. "How can I help you?"

The girl raised a manicured eyebrow apologetically. "My name is Eveline. I hate to disturb you, but I’m looking for an associate of mine, and I was wondering if you could help." Her voice was low and soft and deliberate, with a foreign rumbling of sorts behind the r’s. Julie wondered how she had gotten into the school building after hours, but presumably someone had let her in. And all in all, she didn’t seem dangerous. Not in any traditional way. Maybe she was a foreign exchange person. Her gaze was just slightly unnerving.

"I’m happy to help to the extent that I can," Julie replied cautiously. "But there’s information that as a teacher I can’t disclose."

"Oh, of course," the girl replied understandingly. "I’m not looking for a student. Moi, je cherche un hamster."

"You what?" Julie asked, blinking.

"I’m looking for a hamster," Eveline replied matter-of-factly, as if she couldn’t understand why Julie hadn’t just understood her the first time. Her eyes glinted with unnatural keenness in the fluorescent light. "A hamster who owes me lunch."

Julie blinked. "Lunch in what sense?" she asked guardedly.

Eveline laughed, a sweet sounded utterly lacking her general reserve. "I beat him at chess. He owes me lunch. Don’t worry, I have no intentions of eating him myself. That would be very boring and pointless and would probably get me drunk."

Julie couldn’t help but burst out laughing at this. She had no idea who this person – or whatever – was, but she had to like her. "Unfortunately," Eveline continued, "to collect it seems I have to find him first."

"Is he avoiding it?" Julie asked curiously. "Or did he just forget?"

"I suspect," Eveline replied wryly, "that he doesn’t want to admit he lost. I’ve offered him a rematch, of course. But he seems to prefer to avoid the issue. Still, I suppose he may have forgotten. He doesn’t forget much in the long run, but I think all the laboratory research has done things to his mind."

"So what do you want me to do about this?" Julie asked, fascinated with this third-party perspective on someone she’d sort of thought of as her imaginary friend.

"Would you happen to know where he is?"

"Now, how on earth would I know that?"

Eveline laughed. "Touché," she said, her accent impeccable. "Do you have any way of contacting him?"

Julie paused, awkwardly aware that her silence was itself an answer of sorts. "Why should I trust you?" she said finally.

"Good question," Eveline responded thoughtfully. "I’m not sure I could give you a satisfactory answer, except to note that since one can’t hurt an elemental directly it’s unlikely I would be trying. I have better sense than that. I just want to find him and argue with him."

Julie had no way of judging if this were true, but it seemed to make sense, and to fit with everything else she knew about Tim and about elementals. Besides, she was quite sure he could ultimately take care of himself. "Why don’t you hang around here for a few minutes?" she suggested.

Eveline slid a pack of European cigarettes and a lighter out of her pocketbook, with such style that she had lit a cigarette before Julie realized what she was doing. She finally managed a choked, "Not in a school building!" hoping she didn’t sound too school-marmish.

"It’s okay," Eveline replied. "I don’t actually emit smoke."

Fortunately, before Julie had to find a reply to this, there was a knock on the door, and Tim’s familiar face peered in. "How is the grading go – " He backed up hard against the wall and threw up his hands in an instinctive gesture; his eyes shooting in panic between the two women. It was, Julie noted with relief, the panic of someone who was caught evading a social obligation, not any sort of deeper fear. Eveline remained still, smiling slowly.

"I thought you were my friend!" he glared at Julie, muttering something in Arabic under his breath.

"Watch your language!" Eveline said.

Julie grinned. "The problem with humans, see, is that we’re susceptible to reason. If you owe her lunch, that’s not my problem."

"Reason. Hah. And from a snake from Syria, too."

Eveline lowered her eyelids demurely and arched her eyebrows. "I offered you a rematch…"

"Besides," Tim said, ignoring this with an admirable attempt at equanimity and dignity, "I thought it was dinner I owed you."

"You do. You also owe me lunch. Dinner was backgammon."

Tim watched very carefully, ears cocked, until she was well out of sight (and presumably also hearing). He sagged wearily to an incongruously low seat in one of the adorably short student chairs. "Egads," he sighed weakly.

"I’ve never heard anyone actually use that word before," Julie observed with interest.

"Well now you have," he replied. "Egads. Though," he said thoughtfully, "it was actually kind of nice to see her – it’s been a while. But – eesh."

"Who – what was that?" Julie asked. "When did she beat you in chess?"

"Fairly recently. Twenty years ago, maybe?"

"And it took her that long to collect?" Julie marveled. Eveline hadn’t seemed like the sort to beat around the bush, or to be outwitted by, well, probably anything.

Tim shrugged. "We don’t see each other nearly as often as we used to, since I don’t spend much time in Syria anymore, and she rarely leaves. And there’s always the convention, I guess, but we hang out in different crowds there. I guess I tend to assume I still see her more often than I do, since I always have before. I imagine she finally just got bored and decided to come looking for me. Syria’s seen more interesting incarnations."

"Who is she, exactly?"

"Her name’s Eveline, or anyway that’s what she goes by these days – "

"What did she used to go by?" Julie inquired.

"She didn’t, I think, same as me. Not that I know of, anyway. But I think she decided she needed a name more urgently. If you tell someone you’re a hamster, they’ll just sort of laugh and grin and assume you’re one of those fun kind of lunatics. If you go around identifying yourself as a Palestine viper, you get weird looks."

"Oh, so that’s what she is," Julie observed, pieces falling into place.

He nodded. "She – I – we have what I guess you would call a predator-prey relationship. Except that we’re both immortal and inedible, so we eventually sort of got to be friends. She still scares the living daylights out of me, though, and she knows it. Likes it, too." He shuddered. "Sometimes I do wish she could just eat me and get it over with."

Julie couldn’t help laughing, and hoped it wasn’t too callous of her.

"I’m not sure I see her as quite so scary," she said. "Intimidating, certainly – "

"Have you ever been eaten by a snake?"

"No," she admitted. "But neither have you."

"True." He sighed. "But I’m scared of water, and I can’t drown, either."