The Amber Lee Boxed Set

by Katerina Martinez

  “So, why the bookstore?” Frank asked. We hadn’t opened the main shutters covering the display window so as not to draw attention to our presence, so the store was dark until I turned on the lights.

  “I have books here I need to look up,” I said.

  “No shit. What books?”

  “Old books. The kind you can’t find in stores.”

  It didn’t make sense to him. He checked me with a puzzled face but I headed into the back room, ignoring his doubts. There, in the back, I dug behind piles of boxes full of unpriced books and retrieved a dusty old chest so heavy I had to drag it out of the back room.

  Frank approached, curious. “What’s in the box?” he asked.

  “I told you. Books.” I opened the chest and carefully looked through dust jackets and spines to find texts with the right subject matter, laying them down on the counter whenever one struck my fancy. “These are the books that aren’t for sale,” I said.

  “I gathered,” Frank said, picking one up from the table. “Did you rob the library of Alexandria for them? They look ancient.”

  “That’s because they are ancient,” I said. “James, the owner of the bookstore, is like a collector. He hops from country to country, from city to city, locating old books and trinkets. Some of the things he finds he sends here for safe keeping.”

  “Safe keeping? In a bookstore? Is there a vault back there or something?”

  “Have you ever heard of anyone robbing a bookstore?”

  Frank couldn’t answer my question with a yes. “Wow. It’s genius.”

  “Isn’t it? Now, start digging.”

  No one book would have the answer I needed, so I would have to go deep. Lucky for me I worked best under pressure, but I feared that Damien may creep into my mind at any moment and—shit. I stopped in my tracks as the thought of my cheating coward of an ex-boyfriend clouded my thoughts and sent me free-falling into the depths of my emotions. No, no! All I could hear were Natalie’s words in my mind. I wondered if they had fought after I left. Did she even suspect me?

  No.

  Why would she?

  I didn’t suspect. Damien was a great liar. After all, he had everybody fooled; me, Natalie, Eliza and even Frank. Oh Frank, great reader of people. How couldn’t he have seen this coming?

  A hand reached for me through the roiling storm of thoughts and, like a lifeline, pulled me back into the bookstore. It wasn’t his real hand, though; but rather a hand shaped in the form of an odd question. “So, how’s Aaron?” Frank asked.

  I looked up at him. His face was buried in a book he had picked up, flipping through pages as if he were reading them at a superhuman speed. Or maybe he was just skimming them.

  “Aaron is… fine,” I said. I hoped.

  “You talked about him,” Frank said. “In your sleep.”

  “You heard me sleep talk? Wait… I sleep talked?”

  “You sang like a canary,” Frank said, “And now I’m curious.”

  “What did I say?” I almost dared not ask.

  “You said a bunch of things. One of which I suspect is what we’re looking for in this comprehensive book on Latin words, the other was Aaron. You got a picture of him somewhere?”

  Since when did I sleep talk? And what the fuck else have I said?

  “I think so,” I said. Although the truth was that Aaron and I never took selfies together, nor did we engage in ‘couple’ activities. For a moment I kind of wished we had. It would have been easier to show Frank who Aaron was. But it would’ve also given a name whatever it was that Aaron and I had shared those months ago. So, using my phone, I went onto his social media profile and found a picture of him, but a pang twisted my stomach when I saw it. I remembered the day he uploaded it. Despite being the jackass that he was, he was very handsome. He had eyes like a clear blue summer sky, hair the color of gold straight out of the earth, and a rock-hard body you could sink your teeth into.

  Frank snapped the phone up from my hand and wolf-whistled. “How could you have been sitting on this and not shown me what he looked like?”

  “Sitting on this? That’s your choice of words?”

  “Witch, if this was my man I’d be sitting on him all day.”

  I suspected Frank was digging for more pictures. He had put the book down, now, and his pale face was illuminated by the glow of my phone. I blushed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “Aaron and I were never really…”

  “What?”

  “Close.”

  “I would be close to him whenever he asked for it.”

  I could see him practically foaming at the mouth. “Can you give me the phone back now?”

  “Just a minute, I’m sending myself a picture of him.”

  “What? No!” I snatched the phone out of Frank’s hand.

  “Remind me to send him a friend request,” he said, grinning.

  “Can we get back on topic here, please?” I said. “Aaron is off-limits.”

  “I can’t promise you that, honey. You better get to him before I do. We’re friends and everything, but that there’s man-candy and I’ve been deprived for far too long.”

  I shook my head and took to the books again, but inside I was smiling.

  “Alright, so, this Nuptis Profanum business,” Frank said, returning to the issue.

  I turned to him and gaped. “How did you know that?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? You sleep talk, and you said that a few times; keep up, witch. Anyway, quite literally, it means, profane nuptials—a blasphemous wedding.”

  I shuddered, as if a ghostly hand had just slapped me across the face. “A blasphemous wedding?” I asked.

  “Yeah, haven’t you heard about them? They’re legal in a few states now,” Frank said.

  “They’re, wait… what?”

  Frank raised both his eyebrows and smirked. “Blasphemous weddings? Gay weddings? I was making a topical joke.”

  “Oh…”

  “God-dammit. See? It’s not funny if you have to explain the joke.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Just pick up the book and let’s get this bit over with.”

  It took us a while, but we did manage to find a few references to blasphemous, or unholy, weddings in one of the books in James’ collection. There wasn’t much to go on, though. Only that the topic of these profane nuptials was clumped in together with Black Masses and generally linked to devilry and devil worship.

  Devil worship.

  This entire situation was starting to look similar to what I had already been through once before at the Ever Dark Mesa. In my mind an image was forming; a snapshot, of a demonic pentacle drawn into a rocky ground and the ram’s head at its center. I was certain the man who tried to kill me wasn’t into devil worship, but for a nonbeliever he sure did know the elements of a ritual circle.

  “Says here, some cults go beyond just worshiping the Devil; they marry it,” Frank said.

  “Marry it? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not exactly reading a how-to guide here, you know. There’s a lot of text to go through, but the gist of it is that an unholy wedding requires a man and a woman, and the devil. But I’m thinking any old demon will do.”

  “So, a three-way wedding?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. Demons don’t get married, only people do. The book keeps referring to the unholy wedding as the total union of a demon and a host, and a kind of defiling of the soul; in most cases I’m guessing the innocent’s.”

  “Innocent?”

  “Whoever isn’t possessed by the demon at the time of the marriage.”

  Then, like a flash of lightning, an answer came to me. It was only one answer in a sea of questions, but it was something. “Holy shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What is it?” Frank asked, leaning on the edge of his seat.

  “It’s Aaron. They sent a demon after Aaron and they’re gonna marry him to me. This is how he’s linked to the hooded men! He’s the hos
t, Frank!”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Frank said. “I’m not reading verbatim here, only making my guesses based on what I know about demons. Vast though my knowledge may be, we have to think about this rationally.”

  “I am thinking rationally.” I said. “Aaron has been experiencing all the signs of a demonic oppression. First he loses sleep so his mind begins to suffer, then he gets sick so his body suffers, and slowly but surely the people in his life begin to turn their back on him, severing his ties to anyone who could help him.”

  “And that makes him ripe for possession…” Frank said, finishing my trail of thought.

  The thread of our conversation stopped spinning as we considered the facts in unison, and in silence.

  “You need to get to Aaron,” Frank said, “You have to get to him, and make sure this thing doesn’t try and possess him.”

  “I… don’t know how to do that.”

  “Relax, I’ll give you a crash course. Just text Aaron and let him know you’re coming to him.”

  I was already writing the message by the time Frank finished his sentence. “Done. What are you going to do in the mean time?”

  “I’m going to talk to Damien, and then you’re going to speak to him.”

  “What? Why is that necessary?” I would rather let the devil possess me over talking to Damien right now.

  “Because, witch, like it or not, he’s our Coven—and we’re going to need him.”

  Well isn’t that just dandy?

  Chapter Twenty Two

  They wanted to defile my soul.

  My soul.

  This was the thing that lent me my power, the one thing in the entire span of creation that was unique to me. Thinking about how someone would ever want to rob another person of his essence made me feel small and hopeless. This was a whole different kind of violation. Is this what the Sheriff was leading up to?

  No.

  He just wanted to kill me, he said so himself. The other two girls, Lily and Joanna, were victims just like I was going to be; another notch on a deranged madman’s belt. Maybe none of this had anything to do with the Sheriff. The only thing linking him to the hooded men was the connection to devilry, and I was sure—judging by what he had told me himself—that the scenery was an aesthetic choice on part of the Sheriff; a tableau on which my death would be displayed, like Joanna’s and Lily’s before me.

  So why were these guys after me now? Had I inadvertently pissed off some Satanist group a while back and not known about it? Paranoia was starting to seep through the cracks in my reasoning and I didn’t like it. Hooded men, devil rituals, and the sudden appearance of certain people at the worst possible times; was Damien’s girlfriend somehow involved?

  I couldn’t tell at this point because nothing seemed to make sense. In my heart of hearts I knew there was way more going on than I could see with my own eyes—that some mysterious puppeteer was pulling invisible strings which not even my Magick could detect—but who was the mastermind behind all this, what did they have in store for me, and was the puppeteer that same person I had spoken to on the phone just after my bloody encounter with the Sheriff?

  These questions revolved around my mind like bags at a luggage reclaim. I was sure that, somewhere, in the recesses of my head, a bag existed that was full of answers to my questions. But as the same suitcases rolled past more than once, I started to feel like my answer bag had been put on another flight.

  I came to a halt at the foot of Aaron’s apartment building downtown a short while after leaving Frank alone at the bookstore. The high-street hustle and bustle reminded me that I was, at least for now, in a normal place surrounded by normal people. The thought was comforting enough to allow me a moment to ground my thoughts in the mundane; that is, my status with Damien and Aaron.

  I didn’t consider myself a woman with a weakness for guys. Not in the slightest. I had always been independent, always carved my own way in the world—tooth and nail, sometimes—and only sometimes backed down from an argument even when I knew I was talking out of my ass and/ or totally wrong.

  But that didn’t stop me from believing, at least for the moment, where I stood in regards to Aaron and Damien. For a while my life had been all about Damien. But in one fell swoop, he had popped that bubble and now all that was left was… nothing. I should have seen it coming. I mean, he cheated on his girlfriend with me. How could I have thought he would be loyal to me? Once a liar always liar, right? It was Kyle all over again, only this time I had the sense not to put a hex on the guy.

  But Aaron; I couldn’t say I hadn’t thought about him in the months that followed our abrupt separation, although he didn’t cross my mind in a romantic sense. Aaron and I were never really romantic, were we? I didn’t think so, anyway. He was a jerk who wore sports jackets sometimes and hung out with assholes. He called me a ‘freak’ more times than I liked. And yet, I had thought about him. I may have even missed him.

  Or maybe this was just the heartbreak talking.

  It had been insecurity that threw me into Aaron’s arms the first time, and it was insecurity that led me into Damien’s when he seemed to be the perfect guy for me; the one who would fix all my problems and rid me of my loneliness. Now I had to contend with insecurity and with heartbreak. I felt like a gladiator who had just defeated a lion, only to find that another lion had been allowed into the arena and that some asshole in the crowd had just resurrected the first lion!

  I took a deep breath, composed myself, and rang the buzzer. No one came, so I rang it again. This time I heard footsteps, and after a moment of waiting Aaron opened up for me. I was about to smile, but then I saw the color—or lack thereof—in his face. He was pale. Deathly pale. And sick.

  “Aaron,” I said, wide-eyed with surprise, “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah,” he said, coolly, but his voice was hoarse and strained. “Come in.”

  The coming out of Aaron’s apartment was harsh, so hot and thick it was like a threshold I had to cross in order to get into the apartment. Sweat. Sick. Man. It was the kind of scent similar to what I imagined a hospital would smell like if the staff wasn’t constantly hitting every possible surface with powerful disinfectant.

  “You don’t look so good,” I said.

  Aaron turned to look at me from the door. He was still tall and buff, but I saw a weakness about him now. His shoulders slumped, he dragged his feet when he walked, and his hands were almost perpetually curled into fists as if he were fighting through some kind of inner pain imperceptible to anyone but him.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have brought you some pills or something.”

  “No pills,” he said, hot and angry.

  A wave of heat washed through me at the sound of his stern voice. For a moment he sounded like his old self, but then he was weak again.

  “We have to do something about you, Aaron. You can’t live like this.”

  “I don’t need you to be my nurse,” he said. He moved to the kitchen counter and propped himself against it. “Your text said you had something you wanted to tell me.”

  “Well… yes, but you’re hardly in—”

  Aaron interrupted what I was about to say by breaking out into a coughing fit. I wanted to approach, to rub his chest and his back, to make him better. But I was… fearful. I got the feeling that, if I was to approach and touch him, he would turn to me and growl like some wild, angry wolf.

  “Then tell me,” he said, choking the words out.

  “Aaron, no. Let me help you first.”

  “How are you going to help?”

  “By running you a bath, first. Then getting you some food.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” I said, approaching cautiously, “I’ve never known you to turn down food. Don’t start now.” Aaron didn’t reply, a gesture I took it as consent for me to approach. “Aaron. Let me get you to the bath. I have something to tell you, but I can�
�t bear the sight of you like this. It hurts me.”

  For a moment I wasn’t sure what he was about to say, but he nodded, and that caught me off guard. Totally off guard. But I took his warm, sweaty hand and led him to the bathroom where I left him while I picked out a fresh towel from his linen closet and a pair of boxers from his drawer. I didn’t feel odd doing this. In fact, I kind of enjoyed taking care of someone like him. He was always untouchable, strong, and fierce. And now he was laid bare, weak, and vulnerable.

  Wanting to give him some privacy, I waited on the other side of the door while Aaron stepped into the hot bath. While he was in there I took stock of his living room and let my invisible senses reach the Nether to feel out for that thing I had felt in my apartment the other day. But all was quiet in both the physical world and the Nether.

  What I did notice was the fact that the windows were closed, and I immediately blamed them for the air being so thick. So I went for the window and opened it. I half-expected to be assaulted by a demonic force as soon as I attempted to bring some positive energy into the room, but was met with no such resistance. December came rushing in and touched me with cold fingers, replacing the stuffy heat and allowing me to breathe through my nose again.

  I also noticed that the windowpane was a little scuffed, as were some of the walls—chipped corners and such. I thought the scratches could have been the kinds of tell-tale signs Inhuman Demonic Spirits left around wherever they went, but they didn’t seem consistent with what I knew of these entities.

  They leave their marks in threes.

  Of all the rooms in the house, though, the most foreboding was the bedroom. I hadn’t had to go in there to retrieve Aaron’s boxers since the room wasn’t big enough for his dresser, which he kept in the living room, but I was being drawn to it now. Pulled by an impulse I was sure wasn’t my own.

  The bedroom was dark, cramped, and the air inside was thick. Stepping across the threshold into the room caused my hackles to rise and my skin to break out into goose flesh. The bedroom was still, empty, and quiet, and yet I got the impression that the room was somehow full of activity. As if there were creatures, blacker than even the shadows, dancing around in the darkness.