by J. Kowallis
I run my finger down the sides of the pages, over the aged inks that have been so wonderfully and magically preserved. Traditional hexen iconography combined with ornate motifs similar to the Insular art of the Book of Kells decorate the pages. Images of hexens, animals, and legendary creatures are all tied into a Celtic root system that seems to lace from one page to the next. I ignore the script on each page, following the decorative elements until I reach the back cover where the knots lead to a tree that’s imprinted into the leather. The Himilæsa.
Flipping back through the pages, I start reading the ancient Hexen language, translating it into English as I go. Each page is dedicated to the earliest hexens of record, their families and children. Not to mention their greatest contributions to the craft.
For two hours I pour over the books, flipping from page to page, learning more about prominent members of the Geri, Grim, Ravn, and Druw clans. Any notes that I think might be worthwhile, I carefully script into my grimoire with the black felt pen.
After a while, my eyes start to feel heavy. The thought, “I’ll just close my eyes for a few seconds,” results in me slowly shifting under the heavy smell of burnt cloves, strong lemongrass, and . . . something horribly musty. For a while, the smells affect my half-awake dreams. There’s not much to remember, except for a giant pumpkin pie rolling down a hill and into the mouth of a toadstool monster. It may have even been chasing me down the hill—the pumpkin pie, not the monster.
The sound of a startling screech jolts me out of the madness. Books fall to the floor, pages askew, while Angie does some form of a dance in the kitchen.
“Oh my gosh, what time is it?” I ask, brushing the string of saliva off my chin and the cover of the book I’d been sleeping on.
“I don’t know, I don’t care. All I can tell you is that I’ve got it!” Angie announces.
“Got what?” my voice croaks.
“I figured out the potion and spell. Well, at least I think I did. We won’t know for sure until we try it on Coll.”
At that, I scramble to carefully stack the rest of the books around me before walking to Angie. Outside the windows the sky is still a murky gray color. It has to be only four in the morning.
“How do you know?” I ask. Then I notice the sleeping caged animals on the countertop behind her. A frog in one and what I think is a bald shrew in the other. “What have you been doing?”
She eyes me carefully, wiping her hands on a towel and glancing at the cages. “I had to have something to test the spells on. I woke up around two this morning—thank you for the blanket by the way—and it was like the stars aligned and the ancestors had blessed me! I had this idea to use lemongrass, toadstool, and mallow root. So,” she waves her arms around, “I started mixing in different consistencies. Drying out the toadstool in the oven, soaking the lemongrass, crushing the mallow root. Tried it all! Finally, I roasted all three ingredients in the pan over the stove until they were slightly charred before broiling them for just a few moments until they were completely dried. This allowed me to crush them into a fine powder. At that point, I had a bunch of trials to test. So, I needed subjects.”
“That explains the animals,” I mutter, folding my arms.
“Yes!” she looks at me with excited, wild eyes. “The frogs are all around the lake, so that was easy. Had to do a bit of digging for the shrew, but with a little fried bacon and a little magical prompting on my part, I lured one out.”
“And shaved it?” I ask, staring at the creepy, fat little rodent that resembles something you’d expect to crawl out of a toxic waste dump.
“I had to.”
I scrunch my eyebrows and rub my hand over my tired face. “That makes absolutely no sense. But, okay. How were you able to test on them?” I ask.
“What’s going on?” Alaric’s rough voice calls from the top of the stairs.
“Come down!” Angie pipes up. “Any way,” she turns to me with a tentative sigh, “I had to perfect the actuve.”
“The body possession spell?”
“I know, it’s outlawed, but I had to know for sure.”
Normally, I’d probably speak out about how wrong that is, but the truth is, I want to make sure Coll’s who he actually says he is. At this point, I don’t care what rules we have to break.
“You keep saying it’s outlawed. Who enforces that, anyway?”
“Oh,” Angie smiles. “No one really. There used to be a governing body of council members from each clan. Three from each. But as we continued to disappear, so did the council. Now, the hexen world acts as a governing body. So, technically, you and your father should be the ones enforcing the law and keeping me from using it. But I assume you have no qualms?”
“Surprisingly . . . no.” I lift my eyebrows and nod toward the cages. “You tried performing the actuve on them?”
This time Angie’s smile deepens just as Alaric comes clomping down the stairs. “You did what?” he asks.
“She attempted to swap the animals’ bodies,” I repeat, looking at him as he makes his appearance. His face is shocked, incredulous, and a bit accusatory as he looks at me, as if I should have stopped her.
“What? You think I would be the one to tell her it’s a bad idea? When have I been able to argue with her and win?” I ask.
Alaric rolls his eyes and nods in understanding. “So, what did you find?”
“Not everything we need, but everything we need right now. You see, I did more than just attempt a body possession.”
She motions toward the cages and my dad and I both step forward to look at them. For the first time, I realize that something . . . is wrong with the animals. And then, I realize why. The shrew, an animal more like a slightly larger mouse with a weird long nose, sits oddly in its little corner, and suddenly it jumps. The rodent that’s not a rabbit, not a kangaroo, nor a grasshopper jumps. About three inches into the air. Flying around the inside of the little glass cage is a fly that the shrew keeps attempting to catch by sticking out its small, pink tongue. The frog, on the other hand, sits numb in the center of its glass cage. Alive, but hardly moving.
“You did it, didn’t you?” I gasp, finally understanding that she wasn’t just attempting the actuve, she’d actually succeeded.
“Watch this.” Angie picks up a dead fly on the counter among the many that she’s obviously collected and sprinkles some grey dust on top of it before setting it into the cage of the shrew. The rodent turns, hops once, hops twice, and sticks its tongue out again. This time within reach of the dead fly. Unlike the abilities of a frog, the fly doesn’t quite stick to the shrew’s tongue like I’m sure it hoped. So, it bends over to try again. Enough of the powder must have been ingested by the shrew because I start to see a change in its appearance. Without the fur on its body, the veins along the shrew’s skin are more easily visible. Especially when they turn a sickly black color.
“What’s happening?” Alaric glances over my shoulder.
“The ‘alarm,’ so to speak, is going off,” she explains. “The veins of the possessed animal turn black. Temporarily.”
Sure enough, after a few minutes, their color returns to normal.
“How long would it take for a larger creature? For instance . . . a hexen man?” I ask.
Angie shrugs. “For Coll, I don’t know. It could take the same amount of time. It could take longer. I wish I had a firm answer for you. Possessed hexen test subjects are difficult to come by these days.”
I give her an annoyed look. “I was just curious.”
“What happens if a regular animal ingests the powder?” Alaric asks.
“Nothing.” She pulls out a third cage. One I hadn’t seen before. This one has a second frog. This time, Angie does the same thing and drops a dead fly seasoned with the powder mixture into the frog’s cage. The frog hops over, pauses for a moment, and then its long sticky tongue shoots out and eats the fly. Moments pass as . . . nothing. Nothing happens at all. The frog makes a groaning ribbit noise a few times and
, that’s that.
“So, how do you put the shrew right? How does the frog over here,” I point to the first frog, “get back into his own body?”
“That’s the part I haven’t figured out. It’s the part that I’m not even sure I can do. The actuve wasn’t used much by honorable hexens. We didn’t even want to mess with it. So, I’ll have to do some more digging before I can figure that out. In the meantime, at least we have a way of testing Coll.”
“Let’s hope he’s like the second frog,” Alaric says under his breath, smiling at me. I want to return the smile, but something in my gut tells me that’s just wishful thinking.
* * *
“So, how does this work?” I ask, fingering the small vial of powder Angie handed me. “How do we get Coll to ingest this?”
“That’s where I was thinking you would come in.” Alaric answers instead. He folds his arms, looking uncomfortable. “Angie and I have been talking about it, and while we could try and get Sera to give it to him, we can’t take any chances.”
“Me?” I ask, tapping the vial on the table. “What can I do that Sera can’t?”
“Get him alone,” Angie jumps in. “Coll’s smart, but he’s also cocky.”
“Angie, I don’t want to be the one to say this, again, but I have to. That man we met the other day wasn’t Coll.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” she says, leaning against the counter.
“I do,” I say darkly, looking out the window over her shoulder. The wind outside has picked up, and rain begins to splatter against the glass.
This just makes her sigh. My dad sits down in the seat next to me, trying to get me to look at him. “You need to ask him out. Something tells me he won’t say no.”
“Of course, he won’t. The Geri brothers—Frec or Ruhmactír—would kill to get me alone. Their sole focus for millennia has been Craniarann. Which I just so happen to have stored within my hand. And you want me to meet with them on purpose.”
“You can handle the Geris,” Alaric responds, his voice calm. Certain.
“I said that once too. And both of you disagreed with me. What changed? How do you know I’m capable of doing this right?” I ask, finally looking at him.
“I saw you walk on water yesterday,” my dad blurts out. Angie shifts, obviously not in the loop when it comes to that information, but she doesn’t say anything. “No one else I know can do that.”
I clear my throat. “Obviously you’ve never studied Christianity. Mom could tell you a good bit of history about that.”
Alaric’s lips draw up, revealing a dimple. “I know that one. I think everyone in the world knows that one.” He takes a short breath, then hands me my cell phone. “You can do this, Bug.”
Glaring at Alaric, and then down at my phone, I set the vial on the table.
“You had my cell phone?”
“I didn’t want you to be distracted. Your first priority needed to be training. Not checking in on work, not chatting with your mom, none of that.”
“Does Mom know I’m okay?”
He looks at my phone and nods. “I’ve talked with her every night.”
“You’ve been talking with Mom?” It’s all so weird. Alaric, alive, talking with my mom who mourned him for years.
“She’s not really happy about it, but she understood you needed time to focus.”
I breathe in and blow the air out through my puckered lips. “So, I suppose the next thing to do is call him.”
Angie shifts, making me look up at her. She doesn’t say anything. Just lifts her eyebrows in encouragement and brushes a strand of her half gray, half maroon hair out of her face.
“Am I doing this with both of you in the room?” I ask.
“Taran, you can do this with us here,” Alaric starts, but Angie quickly cuts him off.
“No, she’s right. We’ll leave again.” She pushes up off the counter and grabs at Alaric’s arm, pulling him out of his chair. “When you’re done, we’ll be upstairs.”
I nod in appreciation and wait until they’re gone, although I’m a bit irritated with Alaric as he eyed me the whole way up the stairs.
Left alone, again, I chew on my lip. This time, I’m nervous for an entirely different reason than I was before. The twitterpation has mostly disappeared, the anxiety of wondering how Coll will handle hearing me. All of that isn’t even a measurable factor anymore. No, I’m calling a 3,000-year-old hexen with a vendetta against my family line, who just so happens to be living in the body of the man I—
“Oh, just get it over with,” I whisper to myself. I press my finger on the phone’s fingerprint scanner and a second later, the phone wakes up. After a few different pushes of my finger to the touch screen, Coll’s number starts to ring. Not surprisingly, but still jarring, he answers after one single ring.
“I was wonderin’ when yeh’d call.”
“If I remember correctly, I told you to call me.” I finger the vial.
“Yeah, but we both knew yeh wouldn’t be able to contain yourself for long.”
I close my eyes, lost in the tone of his voice. Coll’s voice. Ruhmactír’s words. I bite down on my tongue. “Keep going, Donovan, and I’ll hang up right now.”
He chuckles so softly on the other end, it’s irritating. Saccharine and sickening. Although, under the right circumstances it’d be downright alluring. “Yeh haven’t changed.”
“It’s only been three months. How much can a person change in three months?” I taunt him.
“Yeh’d be surprised,” he answers.
I’m sure I wouldn’t, I think to myself. Especially when you possess the body of your grandson.
“Taran, look. I know I’ve been a bastard, but I’d like to make it up to yeh. Can I take yeh out tomorra’ night? I’ll even pay.”
“Is there a stipulation in this offer?”
“Of course. After all, didn’t yeh want to compare memories or some shite like that?”
I nod, looking up Angie’s stairs where I know she and Alaric are listening anyway. “‘Or some shit like that.’ I guess you’re right.” After a deep breath, I finally answer his question. “I suppose having dinner with you wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Best case scenario, I get a free meal and maybe some answers to what happened that day in Bryden. Worst case scenario, you make a feeble attempt to get into my pants, I hex your balls off, and go home with a smile on my face.”
“That’s the spirit,” he chuckles again. “How ‘bout I pick you up—”
“No,” I counter, interrupting him. The last place I want him is standing on Angie’s doorstep with my father in the house. I’m not putting the two of them in danger. “We meet. Café Marguerite. Where Sera works. I’ve been dying to try it out ever since I first met her.”
“Ah . . . yeah. That day in my flat.”
My heart pounds. Adrian was in the flat that day too. Ruhmactír. Of course, Adrian could have told Michael. It could still be either of them swimming around there inside Coll.
“You remember.”
“‘Course I do. Yeh couldn’t take your eyes off me.”
“It’s because you had a booger hanging from your nose. Don’t get too excited.”
Though it’s not possible, I swear I can sense him actually smiling on the other end of the line. “Fine. It’s a deal. Eight o’clock tomorra’. Marguerite’s.”
“I’ll be there.”
Without a goodbye, Coll’s line cuts off. I pull the phone away from my ear and look at the screen as it flashes once with his name and then reverts to my home screen. Somewhere inside me, I feel something shift. Like a vase knocked off a shelf, falling in slow motion and headed for a loud, destructive crash.
Ten
I look at myself in the mirror, tousling the curls in my hair again. I snap my fingers to apply my makeup, then stand back and adjust my dress. A dress I summoned from my apartment back home. It was one I ran out and purchased last year after Prince Harry and Megan were married. I kind of got wrap
ped up in watching her style for a few months and may have made a splurge purchase on the $400 midi-length Black Halo dress. The form-fitting style hugs my long semi-curves and cinches in at the waist with a leather belt. A cowl neckline acts like a little frame for my collarbones.
“He doesn’t stand a chance,” Alaric says from the bathroom doorway.
My face flushes and I give him a nervous smile. “You know, Coll and I never actually went on a date?”
“Do you regret that?”
“I regret a lot of things regarding Coll Donovan,” I whisper. For a while, I stand there in silence, staring at myself in the mirror. I keep thinking about what I want to say to him. What I wish I’d said months ago. With a brisk brush of my hand down my dress to remove any lingering lint, I straighten my shoulders. “Isn’t it ironic that the first time we actually go to dinner it’s not him?”
“You don’t know that,” my dad says, folding his arms across his navy t-shirt.
“I do, though.”
Alaric purses his lips. For a while, he doesn’t say anything, so I reach for my little perfume roller and add a dab to my wrists and neckline.
“You really liked him, didn’t you?” Alaric finally asks.
I quickly clear my throat and put the roller back. “I don’t know if I’d say that.”
“Taran,” he digs.
“Please stay,” I can almost hear my own voice whispering in my head.
“No, yeh don’t want that. Trust me.”
The feel of his hand in mine. The drag of my fingers up his arm, pulling him toward me.
“Stay,” I remember my plea.
His kiss against my temple before he said, “I’m here.”
“Taran.”
“What?” I ask, feeling my ears burning, my hands wanting to reach out and feel Coll. The real Coll.
“Are you going to be able to do this?”
I nod, drawing my lips down in thought. “Sure.”
“Okay. Well, before you go, I want to give you something.” I turn to look at him and he lifts his hand. Dropping from the center of his palm, as if from nowhere, is a pendant on a gold chain. Small, round. With a glittering black center stone, I can’t quite make out.