Demons & Dragons

by Gina Kincade

  A few other texts that had wasted her time, proven useless, had been tossed as far as her aching arm would allow, in various directions in frustration. Apparently her love of the written word and vow to preserve the books they were in didn’t completely apply in her current state of nervous energy fraught with rapid heartbeats, spontaneous outbursts of grumbling, and unexplainable streams of tears. The notebook she had in front of her, in which she was trying to concoct and pen her own spell, no longer appeared to be even written in an intelligible language. Her scribbles here and there, in the margins, between the lines, made it a mess of letters and lines with arrows, quite appropriate symbolically to the mess of thoughts in her head.

  They had to come together soon. She needed this spell done yesterday, and failure wasn’t an option lest she hyperventilate into a puddle of stress on the floor, stiff, unable to move her hand or head. Her body buzzed with both magick and anticipation until her head spun at times, and she gripped her mountain of books for support and to ground her. She stopped a moment, avoiding looking at him, letting the words swim before her eyes as they watered. She tried to regulate her breathing, to stop the burning in her lungs. The butterflies in her stomach did an upbeat dance around the solid brick of sickness residing there.

  “You’re running out of time for what? Halloween?” Kyle vented, his ghostly voice as deep as she’d heard it so far. “You are going to turn me into some kind of hideous monster, or worse... Who the hell knows what half dead, half alive, not even me thing, possibly. Neither of us even knows what will happen for sure if you go through with this scheme of yours. Stop reading the stupid books!”

  Her dead boyfriend’s words had started coming out in a sort of hiss, meshing with the old drapes she’d hung at the windows which moved with the warmish breeze October had going today. So far, though, what little chill the draft offered helped to keep her awake along with the abundance of coffee she’d consumed, despite her body's protests given coffee drinking wasn’t her thing.

  As he started to hover about at a frantic pace for a specter, the pages in all the open books started to flutter, as did the ends of her hair. The few candles she’d lit magically, with just a thought, put up a good fight then gave up, flickering and blowing out despite her concentration. She let out a hiss, closed her eyes tight, and willed the flames to resume with the magic that crackled inside her, the power itself even on edge these days.

  “Stop it, Kyle,” Amara warned, opening her eyes to see his form looming mere inches from her, his ghostly hands in fists, a challenge to the glare prominent in the squint of her eyes.

  She’d known he’d been there, that close, before she’d opened her eyes. Bone cold when he dared this proximity, she welcomed the chill. It was the closest thing to alive she’d felt since Kyle had passed away a little over a month ago. She’d spent the first week here in his house they’d shared, sobbing or sleeping. Each room, each item in them, taunted her with another memory of how happy they’d been, of their hopes for a blissful future together, which had been slashed to hell the night he’d been killed.

  “I don’t want you to do this,” he said, his voice, again full of anger in her head, yet only echoed in the room, as if emphatically whispered.

  She couldn’t be sure of the why to this phenomenon. She had summoned his ghost in a fit of rage and sorrow, laced with some magickal know how. So, for some unworldly reason, he projected louder in her head. Maybe the magick had given them a connection. Maybe it had been their love. Whatever the case, she had no problem hearing him, and right now, his voice reverberated through her head. While it caused some slight semblance of a headache, and threatened worse, she wouldn’t give up whatever she could get of him at this point.

  The ache in her heart, the pulsing all over her skin, the need to be touched by him again, it drove her to the brink of sanity, and she’d lost the will to care, to stop it. Her mission clear, to bring him back to her, in human form, had dimmed all other possibilities, extinguished any realities where she might doubt her abilities to do so. His ghost seemed to be the only voice of reason she couldn’t silence, because she wouldn’t give up hearing him to do so. Crazy, well it had become a slippery slope, a way of being she wouldn’t judge herself for right now. Who would? Okay, besides him? Well, her ancestors, and maybe every witch she’d ever known, but she’d firmly cut everyone who still had a pulse out of her life lest someone interfere, or worse, make her see reason and change her mind. It was a chance she couldn’t–no, wouldn’t–take.

  “I have to,” she finally replied, shaking her head to rally herself from her frantic thoughts, as she tried to talk and keep her teeth from chattering at the same time lest he moved away from her.

  Even as a spirit, his guilt got the best of him. He mainly kept his distance to keep her warm. It was best anyway, most of the time, because the closer he got, the more the painful urge to touch him grew. Her trembling hand would move close to his form only to fall right through the image, doing nothing more than getting colder rather than the warm, skin on skin contact she desired so badly she swore she could will it into being. Yet, so far she hadn’t been able to. Determined to prove otherwise with the spell she currently worked to manufacture, she utilized every branch, every magickal school of thought, she could get her hands on. A powerful witch, she figured, mixing magick, every necromancy type spell she could find, she could bring him back to life.

  When she’d initially tried, in her grief, without study, just sheer will of mind and heart, along with her powers, only his ghost had come. Since then, he’d stayed here with her in this dilapidated home they’d bought together. A picture perfect haunted house, though. This amused her, as close to happy as she could be. Far from done, it at least provided creature comforts while she worked, and still provided them both a place to reside together. She wouldn’t let herself think about how he might be able to move on, to find peace, if only she could let him go. But, she couldn’t find it in herself to do so yet anyway. She couldn’t dare a sane or rational thought, or she risked losing him all over again. He stayed because she needed him to at this point. Her, the alive soulmate on the verge of losing her ever-loving mind. She’d be sure of it if she let herself spend time on the notion.

  Instead, in the past weeks, this new, nearly maniacal drive had dried her tears, and given her endless nights and days of energy as she searched each and every religion, each and every magickal way, to find a means to bring him back to flesh and bone. All her life she’d been told it couldn’t be done without disastrous consequences. Raised in the craft, she’d been gifted with larger amounts of powers than most for no reason anyone could deem the why of. She’d felt it her duty to respect her powers though. Until now. She’d been taught about the fragile lines between life and death, between this world and the spirit one, about what could rightly be done, and what shouldn’t be attempted.

  In the recent past, she would have agreed, but before now she’d never lost the love of her life, her soulmate. Now, she dealt with this loss beyond comprehension, of being dead inside herself, of an emptiness so pervasive she’d wished to end her own life by sheer will until his ghost had appeared to her here in this house. Her spell had been born of desperation. Yet, it had worked, and propelled her forward into insane territory that she wouldn’t let herself think too hard on lest it deter her in anyway from doing what she knew wrong, but stubbornly ignored the fact at the moment. She ignored any level headed deliberation, purposefully determined to reside here in what she deemed a raving drive toward a goal, a need, not a want, at this point. Each breath, every beat of her heart, any steps forward in this life she had left, seemed to depend upon it.

  At first, her dead fiancé had just lingered, unsure of how to help her, she guessed. She knew he attempted to ease her pain, though, by just being here, and it did to an extent. Still, she could feel the weight of his emotions, from love and loss, to fearful and frustrated, crushing down on her chest when he appeared. It gave this place a whole new definition o
f haunted that included depressing. No matter what she did, the world now looked colorless and held only the physical aches and pains brought on by mental anguish. Her arms hung heavy, the pencil almost too much of a weight to bear, her fingers cramping up as she squinted away threatening tears, dropping her chin with a sigh when she closed her eyes against them. She hadn’t the time, and had little motivation or patience for anything but her spell work.

  After a few moments had passed, the menacing watering in her eyes avoided, she glanced up to take him in, a semi-transparent phantom, hovering above his toolbox, who couldn’t lift a hammer now unless maybe highly provoked. Although, so far, he’d managed little poltergeist type activity. In life, he’d worked as a construction worker, and this home had been his project, promising to make it amazing for them to spend their life together in. Before his unexpected death, he’d barely gotten to clearing it out enough for them to put a few basic necessities in for them to live there. They’d made due with a bed in the living room, along with a microwave and coffee pot in the kitchen, for the first few weeks. They hadn’t been able to move in until the old well had been decommissioned, and a new one dug, but with Kyle’s connections in the business, that hadn’t taken too long. They’d had a new water heater installed right away, but a new furnace had been put off until sometime in September since it had been summer when they’d moved in.

  Only, by late September, still oddly warm for Ohio, they’d continued to put off the furnace, and then, suddenly, he’d been gone. They’d planned to have the chimney cleaned out then, too, so she could begin cooking over the open hearth. They’d looked at it like camping with a semi-solid roof over their heads, but it had never come to pass. As the nights had gotten colder, she’d relented, letting the chimney guy come and make it usable. Still, the new furnace, and all other projects had been halted as she grieved, especially now that she had a new mission to focus on.

  “Amara, you don’t have to do anything but let me go, babe. I’m sorry that I’ve left you there alone. So, so sorry. If I’d have known, I’d have maybe been more careful when I stopped to help that lady that day. But, I wasn’t. I was just focusing on being helpful of an old woman who’d just been in a car accident. The guy who hit me didn’t mean to. I can’t imagine how he feels now. We can’t know, and we can’t go back and change it. Even you can’t change this, babe. No one knows the how or the when of their death, for the most part, and very few of us get a say in it. Especially not after the fact. So, we both just have to accept it. You can move on. Find love again,” he said, though she heard his voice haunting her head, catch on the last of his sentence.

  “I won’t!” she yelled. “I won’t let you go. I don’t want to find love again. I want you, and I want you back now. I’m going to do it. You just have to have faith in me. I will bring you back as you were. Just as you were. I can do this. What I’m formulating here, no one has done before. I am just crunched for time given Samhain is tonight. Now, let me work. I’m almost there. I know I am.”

  “Amara, I don’t want you to. Doesn’t that count for anything? It used to. We used to work as a team.” His voice had grown so loud in her head, not a scream, but a deep anger, one that resonated through the veins throbbing in there to push blood through despite her stress, irritating every nerve ending, until she held her hands over her ears even though it proved useless given his voice was louder in her mind.

  “You are just afraid. Don’t tell me if given the opportunity to come back to me you wouldn’t. You can’t say that. And, don’t tell me that if the situations were reversed, if you had my powers, that you wouldn’t at least try. Fucking tears,” she hissed, swiping at her face.

  The moisture sliding down her cheeks, the enemy to her reading, her progress, as was this time spent fighting with him. It took her away from her current narrow-minded vision. She’d been called stubborn before, but never when it came to something so risky, so clearly misguided even if rooted in the spin of love devastated by grief, stirring up her feelings, mixing up her thoughts, and now baking each and every part of her body, basically burning her out, exhausting her to the point of delirium though she pressed on, urgent to succeed before she came to her senses.

  Of the stages of grief, she most feared acceptance. Denial hadn’t lasted near long enough, and now she seemed to be stuck in a perpetual mixture of anger, bargaining, and depression. The next step, acceptance, loomed like a monster out to destroy her only hope. So, she willed back any rationality that seeped through, and his each and every word made that increasingly harder to do. She’d begun to tell herself that he was the crazy one, driven by fear and weakness, though she’d never known him to have been so in life. Just another trick of the mind and she’s be back on her way.

  “Amara, I love you, and life dealt us a fucking shitty hand, but damn it, stop this nonsense. I admit that sometimes your powers scared me, the unknown of them, the unfamiliarity with that life, but now, you are just truly terrifying. I don’t blame you. Everyone deals with grief and loss differently, but please, babe, I’m begging you to stop and think this through, because I know if you do that for just a second instead of blindly pushing through, that you will see this my way.”

  “Why can’t you just believe in me?” she stated flatly, the low growl prominent in her voice would have made a lesser man rethink crossing her, especially if they knew of the power she held within her.

  “Don’t pull that,” he went on as she hunched back down over her books, one finger of her left hand poised to read a line, while the right gripped a pen to the point of snapping it and started to scribble.

  “Amara! Damn it! Stop!” he screamed, the sound vibrating through her head, making what had been tiny sparks of pain before join to present a full on headache.

  As she reached up for her temples, a great gust of wind blew through the almost dark room, lit now only by the falling sun. The chill of his windstorm slapped her in the face like icy tendrils. A few books slid against her legs while one slammed into her gut. Not enough to knock the wind out of her, but enough to make her gasp, the shock not helping the situation. He’d never had an outburst like this before. Just as the thought slipped through her mind, the vision of him loomed over her, going in and out like static electricity in a dark room created by sock and carpet. Only the breaking of glass diverted her attention.

  “Your emotional outburst created enough energy to break glass?” she exclaimed, her magickal mind already wondering how she could utilize such power tonight to her advantage.

  “No, it was... It was a book. It went out...”

  She broke into maniacal laughter, sort of scaring herself if she let herself think on it too hard. “So, that’s your plan? Throw all of my books out the window. Going to take a lot of effort, buddy, and I just have to go retrieve them to get them back.”

  “You’re amused?” He fumed, seemingly pacing back and forth in front of her though his booted feet never touched the floor, nor needed to move to keep him going.

  “Look, babe,” she said, standing up, braving his cold to get as close as she could to him. With her teeth already chattering, she continued, “you know I would never hurt you. I’m going to do this and do it right, without risk. I promise you that. I just need a little more time. I am so close. If I can’t get it just right, I won’t do it,” she said, hoping it wasn’t a lie come tonight.

  She couldn’t think on the irrationality of her current state. Not even for a second. Worse than a dog with a bone, she was a witch with a mission, meshing together magick of light and dark and all shades of gray until she could come up with something blessedly wonderful to bring him back to her. That way, the pervasive emptiness that left her nothing more than bones covered in skin, a little sickness in the middle, might leave her be. She’d found the state so maddening, she’d succumbed to violent trembling, covering her ears and humming to herself, just to avoid pesky thoughts of suicide, a term she’d been blessed to never fully understand the release it offered until now. She couldn
’t go there, some thin line drawn inside her wouldn’t allow it, but still she wasn’t herself at all. Who could fucking expect her to be?

  The broken window allowed the chill of the looming night in. At least the book that had broken it had not been an important one. So she gathered up all she could, shoving it all into a bag, to move downstairs to work in front of the fireplace she would need soon anyway. She’d left all of the supplies she’d gathered over the past weeks down there. She’d bought anything and everything she could possibly think she might need as she’d read. She worked tirelessly despite the fatigue weighing down her limbs.

  As she stood, throwing the heavy bag of books over her shoulder, gathering up to carry those that wouldn’t fit in her arms, the vision of him disappeared. The void in her heart made it feel as if it had stopped beating. Still, her body moved, her fierce will to save him all she had left to keep her limbs moving forward. With a last glance through the jagged edges of glass that used to be a window pane, she saw the sun still beginning to sink lower on the horizon, spurring her to move forward with her plan before anything he said caught in her brain to change her mind.

  When The Snow Flies

  When The Snow Flies

  Kiki Howell & Gina Kincade

  Naughty Nights Press ● Canada

  About

  Anna never dreamed her spiritual journey would capture the attention of dragons.

  After a tragic accident tears her entire family from her, Anna is pretty much a recluse with little care for the things she once loved. Her one vice, something to help her deal with the pain of loss and aid in her spiritual journey to healing, takes her to a labyrinth where she can be alone, walk in a snow globe world and escape the real one.