Sorrow's Edge

by Danielle DeVor

  ###

  When I came out, Lucy was playing with Isaac, and Tabby was sitting on the bed. Doc was gone.

  "Where'd he go?" I asked. I still wasn’t completely sold on him. He wasn’t doing anything to hurt us, but there was always a chance he could accidentally leave us open to something.

  Tabby looked up. "Said something about going to look for some information." She shrugged.

  Interesting. Maybe Doc wanted to help after all. "What time is it?"

  "A little after three."

  I sat down beside her on the bed. The weight of everything was getting to me. I needed to stop thinking so much. And I needed to stop blindly trusting in people. Not everyone was going to give me the same respect I gave them. It was a lesson I should have learned by now, but I guess my tendency to see the good in people got the better of me. "I should have known."

  She put her hand on my shoulder. "It's okay. You just expected more from them than you were able to get. That's all."

  "It's just…why are people such assholes?"

  "I'd say that would be something to ask your boss about, but it seems kind of disrespectful."

  I laughed. I knew there was a reason I loved this girl. "I wonder how happy he is with the way the Order is being run?"

  "Hard to say,” Tabby said. “I imagine that if they at least get the job done, he can deal with it."

  I could just imagine God shaking his head.

  Tabby got up and stretched her back.

  "So, why make me a marker?” I asked. “I didn't like the Church before…"

  "Maybe he wants you to change things."

  I thought about that for a minute. Well, I wasn’t exactly the sanest guy around. I usually chalked it up to being a product of my environment, but maybe there was more to it.

  Tabby walked over to the TV and turned it off. Guess she was tired of the background noise. Lucy looked at her, shrugged, then sat down in the chair by the table that Doc had vacated.

  It was kind of funny that me, a defrocked priest, was suddenly chosen to help God claim souls. Maybe it had more to do with having a good heart than status. I don't know. And now, it seemed like there were politics in play that I didn’t know about. I swear, if I lost Lucy because of some bigwig’s political move, they wouldn’t like me very much. The whole thing just left a sour taste in my mouth.

  "Stop dwelling," Tabby said.

  I chuckled. She knew me too well. "What should I do instead?"

  She shook her head at me. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?” I had something in mind that we could do if Doc could take Lucy somewhere for awhile. I wiggled my eyebrows at her.

  She rolled her eyes. “Focus, you idiot.” She threw me a wicked grin.

  “Yes, ma’am.” It was time for me to behave. Heh.

  "First, we'll see what Doc finds,” she said. “Then, we'll head out and see if any of the stores I found in Tucson will be able to help us."

  "So, we're not staying here tonight?"

  Tabby stared at me. "It's three-o-clock, Jimmy, we're staying here. Tucson is tomorrow."

  "Oh, right." I did need to focus, but sometimes she did make me feel like an idiot. Of course, it would probably help if I thought things through. My brain didn’t work like that though. I was more of a doer. "So, what now?" I asked.

  "We relax. Eventually get dinner and hope Doc finds something that will help us."

  She said it so matter-of-factly. I still didn’t understand how all of this could be so easy for her to put together, and here I was, freaking the fuck out over every little change.

  "Looks like we'll be starting an exorcism soon, huh?" I asked.

  She nodded. "It isn't like there's much else we can do."

  I slouched over onto my knees. I had made the mistake of thinking I was never going to have to do this again. I knew what had happened last time, how Tabby had gotten hurt. If I had anything to do with it, there would not be a repeat performance. "I don't like doing this."

  Lucy wandered over and put her head in my lap. I felt nothing, but it was sweet nonetheless. She turned her eyes up at me and gave me the ole’ puppy dog look. "We need you," Lucy said.

  I reached to pat her head, but my hand went right through her. Was it really too much to ask to be able to comfort the kid? Jesus. "I know. It's just hard."

  Lucy raised her head and looked at me. "He knows."

  ###

  After dinner, Tabby and I sat around waiting for Doc to show. I hoped he was able to figure something out. Lucy was looking at the pamphlets Tabby had found about Doc. Isaac was snoring.

  “This is going to be a long night,” Tabby said.

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s bored.” It wasn’t exactly easy waiting for the thing you wanted most. “There’s only so much you can do in a hotel after awhile,” I said.

  “It doesn’t help that this is a small town that doesn’t have much of a nightlife,” Tabby replied.

  “Except for ghost tours.” As soon as it came out of my mouth, I regretted it. I closed my eyes.

  “What are those? You talked about them before.” Lucy said.

  Well, actually, we had a hell of a donnybrook about one, but that was beside the point. It was so easy to forget that Lucy was only six. She seemed much older at times like this. The sad part was I didn’t even know what month her birthday was in. I had no way of knowing when she would get older. I guess I could ask, but I didn’t want to remind her of her family more than I had to.

  “Places that are supposed to be haunted by ghosts, well, some people decide to make money off it,” Tabby said. “So, they take people on a tour of the haunted places.”

  Lucy’s started squinting her eyes just slightly. “How do they do that?”

  “They walk you through a place and tell you about the people that died there, hoping that a ghost will appear,” Tabby said.

  “Some of them even do fake stuff to make a place look haunted when it actually isn’t,” I said.

  “That’s not nice,” Lucy said.

  “No, it isn’t.” I couldn’t argue with her. Especially now that we knew a ghost and, well, Lucy wasn’t all that far removed from one. If God hadn’t figured out what would happen to her before I died, who knew where her soul would go then. Maybe being a soul and being a ghost were more closely related than I thought.

  ###

  So, a ghost tour was out. Lucy spent a good bit of time ranting about how people shouldn’t be mean to Doc. I’d thought the start of the conversation had been so calm, but I hadn’t expected Lucy’s temper. After awhile, I couldn’t even understand her anymore. What worried me was that, in her eyes, Doc had seemingly replaced her family. Being this attached to him wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It wasn’t like I didn’t like Doc, it was just that he didn’t belong in Virginia. Plus, he’d kept himself here for a reason. I was going to go with it.

  Tabby finally got Lucy distracted by showing her some of her witchy stuff. For some reason, Lucy was fascinated with Tabby’s bag of rune stones. They were made of chunks of amethyst. At first, I thought it was the purple stone that had her fascinated, but then I paid better attention. Lucy kept stroking the painted gold letters on the stones. She understood so much, yet she never spoke about it. I had to believe she experienced a sort of hell while the demon had her possessed.

  I just hoped she wouldn’t turn into another Annelise Michel. That poor girl with her insanity making her believe she was possessed when she wasn’t and that God wanted her to be a saint so she starved herself to death. At least with me being the exorcist, I knew that her parents weren’t playing along and that Lucy had been possessed. But I had to wonder. What would happen when Lucy got her own body back? Could she put all of this behind her and be a normal girl? More and more I was realizing that probably wasn’t going to happen. She needed therapy now, and I had no way to find a therapist for a ghost. Not a charlatan anyway.

  Guess I better be cracking the psychology books. At
least I had done some marriage counseling, but I knew, with all my heart, I wasn’t good enough. The best I could do, probably, was keep her alive. It hurt to know that.

  She seemed to know what Tabby’s runes were for. I just hoped she wouldn’t try to read them herself. Last thing we needed was for her to be told that she was going to die. That was something even I didn’t want to think about. But still, the witchy stuff did get her off her rant about Doc. The funny thing was, I wasn’t sure if she even realized that Doc was capable of taking care of himself. That was kind of sweet, really.

  Suddenly, I had a horrid thought. I looked over and an old dusty book was on the ground near the table. “What the hell?”

  I heard a pop as Doc appeared in the chair. “Howdy.”

  I jumped. “You are going to be the death of me.”

  He laughed. “Nah. Sources say you’re gonna live a mighty long time.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Besides, long could mean a lot of things to a spirit as old as Doc. My asshole got tight.

  “So, what’s with the book?” I asked.

  “It might be of some help. I got it from Vespa’s grave.”

  I blinked. It took me a minute, and then I realized he was talking about the original Vespa, the one who’d stuck him on this plane. I got that creepy feeling dancing along my spine.

  “Is it a grimoire?” Tabby asked.

  I swallowed, but the spit was stuck in my throat. My brain was stuck in first gear, and I couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing on the floor.

  Doc looked at her. “A grim-what?”

  I shook myself out of my daze. “Never mind,” I said. “Do you know what this book is?”

  Doc’s eyes suddenly turned red. “You calling me stupid, boy?”

  Oh shit. Now I’d done it. I jerked back. “No, sir.”

  His eyes went back to normal. “That’s better. What kind of fool-hardy question is that? Of course I know what the book is. I never would have brought some random book to you.”

  He had a point. But then, I wasn’t exactly known for my astute grasp of knowledge either. Sue me for asking a dumb question. I looked over at Tabby. It was probably a good thing Doc couldn’t read my mind.

  “So, what is it?” Tabby asked.

  “A demon manual, near as I can tell,” Doc said. “Might not tell ya everything, but it sure can’t hurt.”

  “Thanks,” I said to him. And I meant it. The Order might not be willing to help, but I had Doc. At least he was doing something. I might be weirded out by the creepy book, but it was something tangible I could place some hope in. He was proving to be a hell of a lot of help.

  Tabby walked around the bed and picked up the book. “It’s heavy.” She flipped through the pages. “And it’s in Latin.”

  I shrugged. I had been a priest. Latin was part of my education. This was doable. “It’s been awhile, but I can’t be that rusty.”

  Doc laughed. “If ya talk nicely to me, I might help you.”

  I grinned.

  “You can read Latin?” Tabby asked.

  “I was a doctor, ma’am.”

  I looked back and forth between them. Tabby, somehow, wasn’t getting it.

  “So, how do you know Latin?” she asked.

  Doc looked at her, confused.

  It was time for me to clear this up. With Mom’s obsession with everything Doc Holliday, I actually knew the answer for once. “In Doc’s time, you had to be fluent in Latin to read a lot of the medical textbooks,” I said.

  Doc grunted. “Don’t doctors learn it now?”

  I shook my head. “The only people who learn Latin now are those who are studying religion and other scholars.”

  Doc tsked. “Seems like they made medicine worse, not better.”

  “In some ways, I’d agree with you,” Tabby said. She was still flipping through the pages of the book.

  I held out my hand, and she passed the book to me. It would have helped if I had a Latin dictionary, but I wasn’t about to ask Doc to fetch one for me from somewhere. He wasn’t my servant.

  I opened the book to the first chapter. It was time to see what the elder Vespa knew. I hoped there would be something in there that would help us with the exorcism. If the exorcism flat-out didn’t work, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. But I had a sinking suspicion that this wasn’t going to be as easy as the Order thought it was going to be.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DIE WITH ME

  One thing, reading Latin wasn’t exactly easy, especially when you hadn’t read it in awhile. I was a hell of a lot rustier than I thought I’d be. In fact, the last time I’d done anything with Latin was when Lucy was possessed and the demon was speaking through her. Speaking wasn’t even using the same skill set as reading. The last time I’d read Latin? Back in seminary.

  Still, I had enough knowledge that I was able to make a few things out. Too bad it wasn’t enough to know exactly what the book said. And, with my limited knowledge, it was going to take me awhile to work through the book. I was hoping it was the late hour that was keeping me from fully understanding what I was trying to read.

  “Do you know what chapter we need?” I asked Doc. It didn’t hurt to ask. He was more of an expert on the language than I was, and he had to have read part of it to know what book he’d been looking for in the first place.

  “Depending on what you’re wanting,” he replied.

  I swallowed my pride. It would be quicker to get honest help than to try to stumble through it myself. “Rules regarding exorcism, contracts with willing parties, stuff like that.”

  Doc motioned for me to put the book on the table. I complied. The pages of the book shifted on their own, almost as if someone was flipping through them. If I hadn’t been used to all this weirdness by now, I’d be seriously freaked out. But it wasn’t any different from Lucy doing the things she could do. And in comparison to what I’d seen demons do, seeing pages in a book turn themselves was nothing.

  I looked over at Tabby. She was scratching something down on a piece of paper.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Trying to figure out what types of herbs I’m going to need for the duration of this.”

  I nodded. “Might not hurt to recharge my ring,” I said.

  She looked at my hand and almost seemed surprised that I still wore the ring she’d bought me. I wasn’t that stupid. For me, the ring meant a couple of things. One: that I was special enough to her that she was willing to do a spell to help me out, not a light thing. And two: it was a ring. Rings were about promises in our culture. She could have chosen anything, but she chose a ring. No way was I going to mess that up. I’d done enough the first time.

  She scribbled some more on the paper.

  “While we’re up there, might as well get the vodka and stuff for the holy water,” I said.

  “Right.” She scribbled that down too. “Thank God you have that credit card. This is getting expensive.”

  I hoped the Order wasn’t going to look at every single purchase. I mean, I could explain them all, but I didn’t like being a bug under a microscope either. “At least we don’t have to worry about video cameras this time.”

  “Do you really think that’s wise? What do you think got you off the hook with Lucy?”

  She had a good point. If the exorcism hadn’t been recorded, I probably would have been charged with attempted murder at the very least. Lucy’s injury not being fake had something to do with it too. But I hadn’t had any backing before either. I’m sure the Order had lawyers. Besides, there was always the possibility that this exorcism would go off without a hitch. If it didn’t, well, I could chalk it up to being my own stupid fault.

  “Okay, I’ll think about the video camera. Part of the reason we had it was Lucy was a kid,” I said. Well, that and I didn’t want to be accused of molesting her. I was a defrocked priest after all. I knew what people assumed that meant.

  “Yeah. And if anyone dies, there is
going to be an investigation.”

  “That’s what the Order is for,” I said. Yeah, I was probably being an idiot, but whatever. When you looked at it closely, it was all out of my hands. I looked over at Doc. “Find anything?”

  “How do you ever get anything done?” he asked Tabby.

  Tabby laughed. “What can I say? I’m used to him.”

  Doc grunted. “Give me some paper and a pen. I’ll try to jot this down so that he can stop being so impatient.”

  Tabby set her notepad and pen on the table.

  “I’m not that bad, am I?” I asked her.

  She raised her eyebrow at me.

  ###

  I must have fallen asleep. I didn’t remember anything after Doc agreeing to translate passages. If I were a more suspicious guy, I’d swear they figured out a way to knock me out, but since I didn’t feel weird, I knew that wasn’t possible. I looked around the room. Isaac and Tabby were curled up together under the covers. Doc was gone. On the table was a stack of paper. Lucy was sitting in front of the TV.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked her as quietly as I could. I didn’t want to wake Tabby.

  Lucy looked back at me. “I think so.”

  “Okay, just checking,” I said.

  She went back to watching whatever TV show her eyes were glued to. Who knew a kid would still get fascinated by a talking horse, even though the horse was in black and white? It was a lot better than the horror films she usually watched. I could handle normal old TV.

  I got out of bed, went and used the bathroom, and when I came back, I sat down at the table. There was just enough light from the TV that I could read Doc’s spidery handwriting. It was legible, but some of the letters definitely did not look like how they taught them today. The S’s and F’s looked very similar.