Sacred Fire

by Tanai Walker

  I glanced up, past her, to the mirror beyond the open stall door. I saw my face, long and gaunt, my hair a bushy red mane. Seven short, crooked black horns protruded from my forehead, temples, and crown.

  “My God,” Sandra whispered. “What are you?”

  Was it not obvious to her? I was a monster, something she should run from, call some sort of authorities to come and put me out of my misery. It was one of my biggest fears, beasting out and running amok around the city. The whole scenario ended with me being shot down in the street like a rabid dog.

  The pains came again, and the edges of my vision blurred. I felt my body tilt over, my head hit the stall wall with a thunk. I felt Sandra’s arms around me, lifting me back into a sitting position. I opened my eyes to see her looking at me.

  “You’re back,” she said softly.

  I groaned in reply.

  “Jesus. Do you need to go to the hospital or something?” she asked.

  “Certainly not,” I managed, my voice a tortured whisper.

  She straightened. “What the hell was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sandra frowned. “It didn’t look like nothing. You changed.”

  I rolled my eyes and tried to sit up on my own. A wave of dizziness kept me slumped on the toilet. “You were not supposed to see that.”

  A pounding on the outer door startled us. A male voice inquired about me.

  “She’s fine,” Sandra said, her eyes on me. “Low blood sugar.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. She leaned forward. “You’re going to tell me everything—”

  “Or else what?” I countered. “You’re going to tell everyone my secret?”

  She let out a sarcastic chuckle. “I just might.”

  I felt my lips pull into a trembling smile.

  Sandra disappeared from my view, and I could hear the paper towel dispenser going. She reappeared at the sink with a wad of paper, which she carefully wet in the sink. She returned to me and carefully dampened my face. After a few minutes, she leaned back, inspecting me.

  “Not a mark,” she said, brushing my forehead with her fingers. I grabbed her hand and pulled it away.

  “You should forget what you saw.”

  She shook her head. “Not in a million years.”

  I slipped my shoes on, and she helped me to my feet. We walked slowly out of the ladies’ room to my office. I collapsed in my chair behind my desk and watched Sandra pace my office, texting someone. When she was finished, she looked over at me and waved a manicured hand.

  “Is that why you couldn’t see me Friday night?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that explains a whole lot.”

  “Like what?” I asked, though I knew what she was talking about.

  “Why you’re so damned unavailable, why you have your walls up so high.” She sat across from me. “So how long has this been happening? What is it exactly?” She leaned over the desk. “Are you a werewolf?”

  I chuckled, despite myself, at all the questions. “No. I’m not a werewolf.”

  She leaned forward. “So? Tell me.”

  “Sandra, I shouldn’t involve you in this. It could be dangerous for you, especially now. Things are stranger than usual for me.”

  “What do you mean stranger than usual?” she asked.

  I sighed in defeat. “I only change for seven days, every seven years on the seventh day of the seventh month.” I looked at her pointedly. “Never a minute sooner.”

  She straightened. “Wow. What do you do for those seven days?”

  “I hole up in my house. I have a special room I lock myself in.”

  “And then?” she asked. “You just prowl around in there? Are you conscious of yourself? I mean, does your mind change?” I messaged my temples. “I remain somewhat conscious, like when you’re dreaming and you know it. Yes. It’s like a very long, troubling sleep.”

  She winced sympathetically as she stood. She walked around the desk and behind my chair. Her hands landed on my shoulders and she began to rub them, her thumbs playing alongside my spine. Sandra’s proximity made me nervous, and I looked to see if the door was closed. It was.

  “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “You’re not well, so I’m helping you.”

  I scoffed. “By giving me a backrub?”

  She shushed me.

  So I did. After a few minutes under her attentions, I felt my aches and pain fade in the wake of a pleasant tingle in my ribs, a total opposite feeling of the agony of the change.

  “You know if anyone sees this, it will ruin your rep,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll say I forced you.”

  I wondered why she hadn’t run, why she wasn’t afraid. The tenderness brought tears to my eyes, and I quickly blinked them away.

  “Thank you,” I managed to say. “I feel much better now.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “No,” I said. “I have that liver model to work on.”

  She stepped around the chair to face me. “Take it easy, then. If you feel weird—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She smiled. “We’re having dinner tonight, so don’t try to get out of it. You owe me a hell of a story.”

  I sighed. “As long as we stay in.”

  She grinned wryly. “Your place or mine?”

  I narrowed me eyes. “Mine. You bring the dinner.”

  “One massage and you’re ordering me around?” She sauntered to the door, opened it, and paused to look over her shoulder at me.

  “Take it easy.”

  When she was gone, I slumped in my seat. It seemed every bone in my body protested at even the slightest move. Perhaps as I got older, the change would take more of a toll on me. It made sense. Sandra’s touch had been like a balm.

  She certainly had a way about her. When she first arrived in Houston, I found her pretentious and abrasive, yet attractive and witty, a breath of fresh air after working for years with the same stale white men. Then there was the Dallas trip to finalize the acquisition of Zidonis. Sandra and I started drinking at the bar in the hotel where we were staying.

  We talked of work and the music we liked. She told me she thought I was talented, and sexy. I didn’t have much to say after that and followed her, docile as a lamb, to her room, where more cocktails were consumed.

  During the course of the evening, I became aware of several things: she had nice legs, even nicer skin, and she was moving closer and closer to me. I did nothing to widen the space between us. Desire hung in the air, the moment when two people come to the unspoken agreement that they’re going to spend the night together. We kissed and she moved away, taking off her clothes and revealing a body more tantalizing than the black-and-white Golden Goddess I had gazed at for so many years. She returned to me, warm and alive. We made love and she slept in my arms.

  I sighed at the memory, as I had during the two weeks since our first encounter. I had tried to avoid Sandra like the plague. Now she knew my secret. She hadn’t run away screaming. She had stayed and given me a shoulder rub.

  *

  Sandra arrived at my place by seven. By then, I had showered, napped, and re-groomed. I opened my gate with the remote and waited for Sandra’s car to enter. Through her windshield, I could see that she was making an exaggerated face of surprise.

  “This is your house?” she asked as she exited the car with two large brown paper bags.

  I went to help with her burdens.

  “It’s a fortress,” she said as she squinted up at the peaked roof, below the crest. A cross of lighter-colored brick contrasted with the darker brick of the rest of the house.

  “I planned it myself,” I told her.

  I led her to the front door for the grand tour.

  Sandra looked at the high wooden eaves over the foyer, then at me, as if she saw me in a different light. “This is fucking unbelievable.”

  “It spoke to me.”

  “I never imagined you living in an old church,”
she said as we moved to the kitchen. She began to unpack her bags of savory-smelling plastic-covered foil containers.

  “I brought mole,” she said.

  At my questioning look, she opened one of the containers to reveal various chicken parts smothered in a thick, dark sauce. In the others were rice, beans swimming in broth, and corn tortillas.

  I had a bottle of sangria on hand. I opened it while she set the table. The scene of domesticity was not lost on me. Would it be so bad to have someone by my side who shared my secret?

  I turned to her. “This is a lot, Sandra. What I have to tell you.”

  She sighed. “I figured that, Tinsley, and I’ve heard some crazy stories in my time. I’ve lived some of them myself.”

  I frowned. “Nothing like this.”

  “You’re afraid to tell me,” she said. “You don’t want to let me in, even though I saw you in beast mode this morning.”

  “So?” I asked. “What if I’m in league with the devil or something?”

  She winced. “I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t see you as being one of the devil’s minions. Are you? Because my people are staunch Catholics. They might disown me.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’re making fun.”

  She laughed and we sat and dug into the sweet-spicy meal, at least I did. I polished off three pieces of chicken down to glistening bone in what must have been record time. I caught Sandra watching me and slowed down a bit.

  “So where should I start?” I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Try the beginning.”

  I laughed. “Okay. About three hundred years ago, my ancestor, Alexandrine D’Orleans, started a secret cult of women based on Greco-Roman mystery cults. The center of their worship was something called Sacred Fire.”

  My mind flashed to that summer in 1983 and the Great Pyre, burning as tall as the Southern manor behind it. I saw Juliette, dancing the Dance of Seven Veils, her silhouette wreathed in glimmering flames.

  Sandra took my hand, and for the second time that day, I was grateful for her comfort, still wary, but grateful nonetheless.

  “I saw it one time, the Sacred Fire,” I explained. “It looked like any bonfire, but there were faces in it, and instead of the crackle and roar of a fire, there were whispers.”

  Sandra shivered visibly. “What happened?”

  “My aunt, Quinn Tinsley, initiated me when I was fourteen. My mother took me to Galveston, her family’s home Salacia, just miles from the spot where Alexandrine landed, bringing her cult to the New World.”

  I poured myself another glass of sangria, remembering as I told the story for the first time since I testified against my aunt and the Sisterhood in court.

  “They told me it was a secret society that had survived the ages, that there was a great power in my blood. The first ritual was the tattoo.”

  Sandra looked shocked, her eyes drifting to the area just above my right breast. The first night we slept together, I had lied and told her I got it during college. When she asked if it hurt, I told her no.

  “It’s more of a brand,” I said. “Every seven years, the Sisterhood lights the Great Pyre to bring the Sacred Fire. They save the last fire’s embers in a special box. They burned the seven-sided star into my skin using the embers.”

  “The fuck.” Sandra stood. “Are you telling me that it’s not a normal ink tattoo?”

  “No. It’s not.” I downed my sangria. I was going to need something stronger. I went to the refrigerator where I keep a bottle of Old Raj gin.

  “So what was the next ritual?”

  “Oh,” I said, preoccupied with fixing myself an after-dinner martini. “They put the mask on me. I saw terrible things.”

  “Do you have it?” Sandra asked.

  The bottle of gin slipped out of my hand. I managed to catch it between my hip and the cabinet. I looked up at Sandra once it was secured.

  “Hell no. I do not have the mask. I never want to lay eyes on that thing again.”

  I thought of the mask, an off-white plaster monstrosity with curled holes for the eyes and a smattering of seven horns. I shivered, suddenly cold and in even more desperate need of a drink.

  Sandra came close, took my trembling hands in her own, and kissed them.

  “When I put it on, I saw hell, souls in agony, and they knew I was watching and they all surged like beggars.” I shivered. “That is something no child should see.”

  Sandra took my drink away and placed it on the counter behind me. She leaned in even closer and kissed my lips. She drew me out of the kitchen, leaving my poor martini to fend for itself. We went to the living room and sat on the couch.

  “Tell me the rest of your story,” she said.

  “The beast was in the mask,” I told her. “Once they put it on me, the beast entered my body. The first night I transformed in front of the Great Pyre, it hurt so much that I thought I was dying.”

  I closed my eyes and saw Juliette standing before me, her arm bandaged, her face as well. When I asked her what happened, she wouldn’t say. Finally, my aunt told me that after I transformed, the beast attacked Juliette before it could be restrained.

  “I woke seven days later, locked in a room,” I told Sandra. “The Sisterhood robbed me of my life. They continue to light the Sacred Fire every seven years. They invoke the beast and I change for seven days. Alone.”

  Sandra reached over and ran her fingers through my hair.

  “Someone very dear to me had been mauled by the beast.”

  “Who?”

  “A girl. Juliette. My first lover. I—the beast scarred her for life.”

  Sandra gasped. “What happened?”

  “When I came back to myself, I ran away to Houston. I was clever enough to tell my father a believable version of the truth. I showed my father the mark. There were several stories circulating at the time about ritual abuse. The story made the news.”

  “It all sounds very crazy,” Sandra said sympathetically.

  I touched my chest, absentmindedly covering the star above my breast.

  Sandra’s hand covered mine.

  “The Sisterhood disappeared. Juliette too,” I said. “Every seven years, I went back to Salacia to lock myself up, and then I built my own place.”

  “So what is the beast exactly?” Sandra asked.

  I shook my head. “I remember my aunt calling it a familiar.”

  “Like a witch’s familiar?” Sandra asked.

  I shrugged. “I suppose it’s the Sisterhood’s familiar. They draw some kind of power from the Sacred Fire. The beast is part of it.”

  “And they’ve never tried to contact you?”

  “I would have them all arrested if they did.”

  Sandra scoffed. “For what, exactly?”

  “For making me into a monster,” I said, pulling away and moving toward the kitchen. “They stole my childhood. My life.”

  I reclaimed my martini and took a swig. Sandra entered the kitchen behind me. I didn’t turn around and listened to her tidy things.

  “I can’t begin to try to understand what happened to you, Tinsley,” she said. “You don’t have to do this alone anymore.”

  I turned. “I haven’t been with anyone since Juliette.”

  She froze. “You were fourteen—”

  “And I ended up hurting her,” I said. “So I decided I would never get close enough to hurt anyone again.”

  “You won’t,” she insisted.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m a little psychic,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked incredulously.

  She left the kitchen and went for her handbag, which she had left by the front door. She returned cradling a colorful scarf in her hands and sat at the kitchen table.

  “Fix me one of those martinis.”

  I brought the ingredients to the table and watched her unwrap a deck of what looked to be tarot cards. She looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye. She motioned for me to sit down.
<
br />   I watched her stack the cards into a neat deck in between us. They were gilded, and the backs were printed with a textile-like red and white pattern.

  “My family has been doing this for generations, the women at least. The story about how it all started is muddled, but my mother taught me, as her mother did and hers before her. It’s like our own made-up tarot.”

  “You don’t actually believe you can tell the future with a deck of cards?” I asked.

  Sandra smiled smugly. “No, just like I don’t believe women can turn into beasts.”

  “Touché.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “these don’t tell the future. They give insight into the present.”

  “Now that we have that cleared up,” I said sarcastically.

  Sandra quieted me with a wave of her hand. She split the deck in three piles.

  “Now stack those into one, in any order you choose.”

  I moved to pick up the cards but paused when Sandra spoke.

  “Concentrate.”

  I wiped away my grin and tried to be serious, though I was a little south of tipsy from the alcohol consumption. I picked up the middle stack, placed it on top of the left, and then placed the remaining cards on top.

  Sandra raised her eyebrows. She picked up the top half of the deck and put it aside. “I’m going to do what my grandmother called the star draw. It’s your present and near future.”

  She removed cards from the bottom of the deck and arranged them in a circle face down. Sandra flipped the first card over. It showed two fish swimming in opposite directions. I peered down at the stylization, rendered in a vector program.

  “Did you design these?”

  “From the old ones that belonged to my grandmother,” Sandra said. “I wanted to keep it in the same tradition, but a little less crude in the rendering.”

  “I wondered if you actually had any talent. These are wonderful.”

  Sandra winked. “Dos Peces, the two fish. Lately, your emotions have been in a state of change, moving in unpredictable tides, in floods. You flow shallow sometimes, narrow in your thinking.”

  She flipped a second card with a broken heart surrounded by flames.

  “Another emotional card. Sorrow has been a part of your life for a long time.”