by A. L. Tyler
“Your sister.”
They were the only words he could manage as he took me down the sparkling moonlit streets of his own personal hell. We stopped in front of another building just long enough for him to hassle the heavy wood door open, and then we went in.
The smell was awful. As I fought my gag reflex and brought my arm up to shield my nose, the question was answered before it was asked when Charlie threw open a set of cupboard doors.
Human hair of every color and texture and degree of cleanliness was stored inside. He rifled through the collections with an angry glare until he grabbed the sample he had been seeking and turned to stare at me with a disgusted sniffle.
“Lyssa has managed to botch a simple banishment, and it leaves me with very few options, Thorn.”
I looked from the red-blond lock in his hand to his desperate eyes.
“I don’t have the energy. I can take you back, or this hair,” he said frantically. “It’s Kendra’s, and it will make the finding spell easier. This is all I have is one trip back, and I can only take one of you, and it’s going to be you, Thorn, so you have to hold on to this hair like lives depend on it. Because they do. And it won’t be easy.”
“I… What?” I looked from the hair back to Charlie. His hand was shaking and he licked his lips.
“We’re out of time, Thorn!”
He came at me and I instinctively turned to run. Shoving the hair in my hand, he hissed in my ear.
“Don’t let it go!”
And strand by strand, I felt it slip from my grasp as we flew through time and space and whatever else back to Earth, until we stood there, in the clean and clinical hallway of a hospital wing, and I looked down to see only four tiny wisps of hair left in my palm.
And once again, Charlie was nowhere to be seen.
I looked left and right down the hallway, hoping that he would appear and tell me what to do. But he was gone, and I was alone, and I had no idea where I was.
I walked until I found a nurses’ station, and I pulled out a tissue to wrap the hairs in and stick them in my pocket. Picking up a pamphlet, I sucked air through my teeth. I was at West Suburban.
This was the hospital where Jennifer was staying.
I looked up just as a nurse sat down at the computer console on the opposite side of the counter.
“Excuse me, could you tell me where…?”
But just then, I saw them. The man that had rushed to Jennifer’s aid in her living room when she started to choke, and an older woman, maybe in her late sixties, and a man in a dark coat holding a Bible.
“…Never mind.” I didn’t even look at the nurse as I followed them down a hall. They didn’t speak to each other, and it wasn’t until we turned the last corner that I got too close and had to hold back and pretend I was looking for a different room number.
The priest followed Mr. Wilmot and the old woman into her room, and I knew it was time. Everything was silent until I heard the quiet crying, and I knew that Jessica was in that room.
“I can’t save them both.”
I turned my head a little, surprised to find Charlie standing behind me. He wasn’t groomed and charming, the way I was used to seeing him, but instead haggard and weak. The dark circles under his eyes were nearly overlooked because of the bloodshot and broken vessels in his eyes, and his lips were dry and chapped. He was holding himself against the wall, using it as a crutch as he wheezed small, difficult breaths.
“You want me to watch her die?” I said with a lump in my throat.
“No…” Charlie pulled himself up and stared me in the eye. “I don’t. I’m telling you I intended to undo this, and I always intended to undo it, but I don’t have the energy to undo it all, Thorn. If Lyssa managed a banishment powerful enough to net us both, then she can undo the curse on Rosie. I’m certain of it. She’s her blood. Gates and Jennifer are a different matter, and I can’t undo them both after the injury she’s done me and the strain of getting you back to Earth. You have to choose one.”
I stared at him, wondering if it was a trick, but knowing that it wasn’t. I pulled the gently wrapped strands of Kendra’s hair from my pocket and Charlie looked down at them. He took a breath and brought a hand to his face, as though he believed they were already lost, and spoke through his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The spell will take too long, Thorn. This is now or never.”
“That’s not fair,” I whispered. He knew me too well. That’s why we were at the hospital. Gates’ parents thought that she was in Europe, and even though she was my friend, Europe was a place one could come back from. Where Jennifer was going, well…
I nodded, wondering what I was going to tell Gates to make it okay. “Alright. Do Jennifer.”
Nothing happened. The crying from the room continued, and I turned my gaze blankly up at Charlie. He shook his head. Even tired and sorry as they were, his eyes held fast to a hard determination.
“You know what I want,” he said hoarsely. “And it’s not hair, Thorn.”
My jaw fell open a little. I was at a loss for words.
“They’re taking her off the ventilator now.” His words came softly, more like an apology than a threat, and that was how I knew he was serious. I hadn’t known Charlie for long, but the pitiful creature that stood before me now wasn’t the same one that had gloated as he turned Gates into a cat.
Closing my eyes, I felt my knuckles strain as I tightened a fist around Kendra’s hair and thought of my father. I thought about Lyssa and Josh and Rosie, and Jennifer. I thought about how I was going to fix everything for everyone, even if it took me all of eternity… because that’s how long I would have.
Eternity. It was a long time to learn everything I had to learn, or else I would be the martyr so that the rest wouldn’t have to.
But mostly, I thought about Jessica, and what I was going to give back to her. Before. There was nothing I wouldn’t have given to go back to before, but nothing and no one could turn back the clock. Not even a demon. But in this moment, staring down the face of death and everything dark in that girl’s future because her sister died, I could.
This was something I had done. I had to fix it.
She wasn’t going to remember the shoes she wore today and the sound they made on the hospital linoleum, because today wasn’t the day it happened. She wasn’t going to stare at this date on the calendar forever, and know that the few weeks before and after would always be hard for her parents. The same with Jennifer’s birthday, and holidays, and family gatherings. She wasn’t going to think about the aunt her first child should have had, or the cousins.
Because by doing this, that future was washed away.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, Charlie, I’ll be your bridge. Do it. Save her.”
He didn’t smile. With the gravest of nods, he raised his hands, snapped his fingers, and disappeared in a shower of lavender sparks.
And in the next room, I heard it when someone took a sharp breath in.
“Jenny!” the man said. I didn’t know if it was her father, or the priest, or a nurse. It didn’t matter. “Jenny, hold on—we’re all right here, just hold on!”
Chapter 10
I went home that night to tell my friend that she was going to be a cat forever. I thought about lying, and saying that Charlie had broken his end of the deal, but I couldn’t take the guilt.
That was my problem. Guilt. But then, if guilt hadn’t been a problem for me, I wouldn’t have had anything to explain to Gates.
If I hadn’t felt guilty, I wouldn’t have had any trouble letting my enemy die to save my friend… but it was my fault that Jennifer Wilmot had ended up lying in a hospital bed. I had asked a demon to curse her. And my guilt had compelled me to fix it at an extremely high cost to Gates.
“Lyssa banished him, but she accidentally got me, too,” I said, feeling like the words would strangle me under the intense stare of Gates’ sharp, green, feline eyes. “It hurt Charlie, pretty bad, and he used up mos
t of his energy getting me back out of the Other Side. He said it was now or never, and even if I agreed to be his bridge, he could only do one of you, and…”
I trailed off. It was hard to look at the loser of that decision and tell her that she had lost. Her parents thought she was in Europe, but she had stopped sending emails and calling days before. I’d heard her brother say that her mom had called the police to get them to track her calls. I had no idea if they could do such a thing, and the internet didn’t know definitively either, so she had stopped.
Her status as a runaway was about to become a status as a missing person.
She swore at me. There was nothing else to say after all of the promises I had made that I was going to fix it, so I sat there and took it. When I finally broke down in tears, Gates told me to open the window so that she could leave.
I opened the window. She left.
By the fourth day, I was out of school sick because I hadn’t eaten since she left. I thought my best friend had become roadkill or a coyote snack. I still left my window open, even in the rain.
When she finally came back, she only said one word. “Food.”
She spent days being angry, and then sad, and then she threw herself into helping me learn as much magic as I could. She grew despondent over my natural lack of talent, and finally given up around graduation.
Her mother had gone through a very similar pattern of emotions in the same time as the days passed without communication. The last thing Gates had told her parents was that she had hitchhiked to Hungary, and in Eastern Europe, any number of things could go wrong for a young woman traveling alone. According to certain horror movies, she was already dead and her various organs consumed or dumped in an unmarked grave aside a pig sty.
But her mother and one of her younger brothers still wore shirts with her picture printed on the front, and it was a constant reminder of what had happened to me. To us, really, because Gates had nowhere else to go.
Lyssa had freaked out for the first week, apologizing to me over and over for the unintended consequences of her banishment spell. She had doubled the dracaena in her mix to make sure that Charlie would be kicked back to the Other Side, and had accidentally kicked us both back.
But she had eventually found the right brew to remove the invisibility curse that Charlie had lain on Rosie, just in time to attend my graduation party.
Gates wasn’t there. People were walking on eggshells around me where she was concerned. She was my best friend, and she was missing, and after one extremely exhausted evening when my dad had tried to tell me he was sure she would be okay, I had burst into tears. If he only knew… I had spent that entire day trying to find the right spell to help her while she ignored me in a corner of my room.
No one brought up Gates around me anymore.
Just as Charlie had promised me, my dad introduced me to his new girlfriend, Janet, and she had helped me pick out my new apartment halfway between home and college. It was on a side road, and on the ground level, just behind a sandwich shop. I told everyone that I adopted a cat and named her after my missing friend, and then I signed up for classes. When I turned eighteen and the trust fund that had been set up with my mom’s life insurance opened to me, I bought my text books and paid my first month’s rent.
I kept working at the greenhouse with Lyssa, and she tried as hard as she could to help me find a cure for Gates, but we never did. Gates seemed pretty resigned to the situation, moving from the greenhouse to my apartment for a little extra freedom.
Jennifer Wilmot recovered and graduated, and I licked my wounds and recovered in private. The last thing I saw before I drove away from graduation was her, standing between her mom and her sister in her cap and gown and taking a picture. I wanted to smile, but I couldn’t. Gates’ parents were at home that day, thinking about what their plans for that day had been, and wondering where their daughter was. It was a feeling I was never able to let go of, because doing the right thing felt terrible.
All the way from May until the end of June, my life went on. And the entire time, Charlie never came back.
~~~~~~~~~
Sorcerers & Sumac
Hawthorn Witches Novella #2
Copyright 2015 A.L. Tyler
Story © A.L. Tyler 2015. All rights reserved. http://addisynltyler.blogspot.com/
Copyright: domenicogelermo / 123RF Stock Photo
Edited by Sarah Read.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination and used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
It was late on a Tuesday night. I was settling down onto the blue couch that Janet had found for me at a local church garage sale with a large mug of berry tea, and Gates had taken the seat next to me. Between us sat a large sub sandwich from the place behind the apartment, and old family show reruns were on the screen.
“I love this one,” Gates said, nosing at the sandwich wrapper.
I set my tea down on the wood television tray I was using as an end table, and then reached over and offered Gates her half of the sandwich, quickly picking off the few stray greens that crossed the border from my half.
She gave a quick and involuntary purr that momentarily quieted. “Jesus, look at those sweaters…what the hell were we thinking in the eighties?”
I smiled and took a bite of my sandwich. Neither of us commented on her purr, the same way that neither of us commented on the litter box. It was just something that happened occasionally; a brief highlight of weirdness between a girl and her talking best friend of a cat.
She still got angry about it sometimes. I still got sad. But at the end of the day, someone had to scoop the box, and we both knew who that was.
We were two weeks into July, and that meant I had been spending long hours at the greenhouse to accommodate the seasonal high in customers, coming home covered in sweat and smelling like fertilizer and moist soil. I would shower off, walk to the sandwich place to pick up dinner, and then watch television with Gates while we basked in the blasting air conditioning. I had brought Gates home with me for the Fourth of July weekend, and she came with us to the park to watch the fireworks.
We ran into her mother, who had given me a hug and said it was nice that I was remembering Gates, and let the cat sit in her lap through the fireworks. Then she had said that the cat seemed too obedient to bear her daughter’s name, and we had shared a quiet smile.
To her credit, Gates had managed to hold her tongue.
“And what the hell is up with the hair?” Gates mumbled, struggling to rip her meat into manageable bites. I had cut it up for her the first few nights, but she said it made her feel like a toddler, so I stopped. “Between the sweaters and the hair spray, that era is so flammable it isn’t even funny.”
I chuckled. When I finished my half of the sandwich, and Gates moved on to critiquing shoes and comparing the level of crazy to current pop singers, I went to my bedroom and pulled out my notebook and a stack of Kendra’s journals.
Gates mostly ignored my efforts now, but for the longest time she had only been upset when I pulled out the journals. Kendra had split them up and written all of the spells so scattered that they were nearly useless. I had been going through them a little at a time for months, making notes and placing stickies, and slowly rewriting them into a college-ruled spiral to build my own grimoire. I knew that Lyssa had her own set, and she had let me see them enough times that I knew she didn’t have all of Kendra’s spells.
The answer had to be in there somewhere. She had just hidden it too well.
It was hard work, because Kendra had basically left off writing on one and moved to the next without rhyme or reason. Most of my efforts were focused on carefully matching the moods of her h
andwriting from one spell and day to the next, and subtle differences in the pens and pencils she had used while writing. I don’t know how she managed to navigate them for herself.
Of course, I knew that magic was trouble. The one spell in her books that had worked was the easiest one, and the one that had irreparably damaged our lives forever: how to summon a demon.
We had debated whether or not trying to summon Charlie again was a good idea. I had come to believe that he wanted to help, but Gates was firmly set on the opinion that he had taken his pound of flesh and left. If we called him again, it would only end the same way.
The thought that I had agreed to be his bridge and hadn’t seen him since kept me up late some nights. I didn’t know if he was dead or biding his time. Maybe he was so weak that he was trapped in the Other Side.
I opened the notebook and paged back through five journals, carefully connecting and reconstructing a spell to conjure fire. It took me more than an hour, sorting and shifting through a lot of notes and pages while Gates made cracks about shoulder pads and phones the size of shoe boxes. When I was done, it was after eleven, and I set my work aside to go to bed.
Gates took her spot on a memory foam pet bed in the corner, and I brushed my teeth and pulled back my hair. I washed my face, closed the window, checked my alarm clock, and then pulled back the sheets and slid between the cool layers to close my eyes. The lights from the cars on the street outside flashed a calming, repetitive pattern on the wall, and it was beginning to become familiar enough to lull me to sleep as the cars beat a smooth rhythm on the pavement as they approached and retreated.
I closed my eyes, slowly drifting off, and one last glance toward Gates, now soundly asleep in the corner, made me sit bolt upright, wide awake.