by Gina Whitney
As I hallucinated that he was nibbling on my lower lip, my hand continued acting as a substitute for him. My index finger went down…all the way down. It made its way through a full bush of pubic hair. The thickness of my hair felt good to me. It grew rambunctiously, yet was fine, silky, and shiny like raven’s feathers.
Even though my eyes looked straight at the ceiling, in my fantasy they were squarely on the face of my lover. I imagined him entering me, gyrating with perfect rhythm and pace. I rubbed myself, headed toward ecstasy. My fingertips became slick as the strokes became longer, deeper, harder. I thought the friction was warming up my palm, so I didn’t pay too much attention to its growing warmer, then hotter. But when the heat became uncomfortable, I jerked my hand out of my panties and saw it was glowing red.
I ran to the bathroom and turned on the light. I stood in front of the old, scratched-up porcelain sink with the rusty drain hole. The fuzzy lightbulb above me dimmed and gave a jaundiced haze to the small space.
My hand felt like I had dipped it in a vat of acid. A ghostly, white-hot knife blade sliced through the skin, etching something on my palm. I closed my hand, afraid to look at it directly. I held it up to the medicine cabinet mirror instead, and opened it up. The shining fleur-de-lis reflected back, illuminating the bathroom with an eerie, red hue.
Unbeknownst to me, at that same moment, witches from all over felt that the world had shifted somehow. To some this revelation was subtle, like the soft buzz of a mosquito around the ear. However, others had a more visceral, disturbing effect.
Chapter Fourteen
Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Catherine paid no mind to the distant clamor of New York City’s rush-hour traffic. Instead she sat motionless in her sunken, concrete tub inlaid with intricate, blue and black mosaic tiles. The water had been perfectly transparent, but as Catherine’s dead cells sloughed off, it turned a sickening yellow.
She looked at her bony body. It resembled a Sphynx cat’s— wrinkled, leathery, thin-skinned. And she was like an alien within it. The body was a foreign entity to her, an inconvenient vessel she inhabited for the time being. Otherwise she was just numb, devoid of any real feeling, trying to remember emotions like the ones she’d had before the Ancient spirit had become a coresident in her body.
That stoic attitude abruptly changed when a feeling of odd portent caused Catherine to sit straight up. A dreadful, prickly sensation bristled under her skin. Bulging, blue welts rose to the skin’s surface. Her blood temperature rapidly dropped way past normal unnatural low. The blood became so cold, it started to form the tiniest shards of ice right in her veins, causing minute cuts as the blood pulsed through her body. Catherine’s body involuntarily seized up on her, and she slipped under the water.
As she struggled to regain her bodily control, she saw a vision of Grace. The girl held up her hand, blazing with the fleur-de-lis symbol. The vision cut to a future event—Grace and Catherine engaged in a battle to the death, throwing magic rays at each other. They both let go of their final rays knowing one of them would die. However, the vision ended before the winner was revealed.
Catherine bounded to the water’s surface, gasping for air. She got out of the tub, her body heavy like she had just stepped back on land after being in the ocean all day. She lumbered over to a black hutch and rummaged through its multitudinous drawers, and found a small, red sachet. It contained the herb agrimony, used to reverse hexes and curses. She untied the bag and dumped its contents straight into her mouth. She gagged on the dry, twiggy concoction as it scratched its way down her throat.
“Chetan!” she yelled, coughing up bits of agrimony. Chetan rushed in as fast as he could, knowing there would be hell to pay if he made Catherine Bolingbroke wait.
“Yes, Catherine?” he asked, caught off guard by her panicked expression.
“Get the car. Grace has awakened, and I need more backup.”
“Where are we going?” Chetan said, trying not to look at Catherine’s crinkled, naked body.
“Jersey, you fool.”
Chetan drove the black Mercedes GL550 through Elizabeth, New Jersey. Catherine sat quietly in the backseat, glaring with superior repugnance at the city’s denizens. To her that place was nothing more than a filthy wasteland of 7-Elevens and Dunkin’ Donuts. However, Catherine also believed the best hunting grounds for protégés were in places like this.
Environments like law practices, venture-capital firms, and Wall Street would seem to contain an unlimited pool of protégé candidates. The problem was those people embraced their demons and used them to get what they wanted with no remorse. Therefore Catherine had nothing to tap into. That was why she found the so-called innocuous environments to be the best places for finding protégés. In these safe havens, wickedness abounded. It was simply obscured, masked by the veneer of civility. It festered beneath the surface, where it took on a delightful malignancy. Wickedness grew exponentially with the effort it took to keep it down. Therefore, in most of these “good” people there were powerful alter egos that somehow always managed to express themselves in road rage, gossip, passive aggressiveness…the list went on and on.
The Mercedes arrived at the pickup loop of a popular outlet mall. Catherine carefully examined herself in a compact mirror. She had performed a beauty spell for the occasion. The spell had cloaked her body in an illusion of adorableness. Her craggy skin was now dewy, youthful, all peaches and cream. Her scraggly hair appeared voluminous, with a slight wave. The scent of her flesh was a bit soapy, with hints of citrus and vanilla.
Chetan turned toward her. She could see he wanted to ask her something, but was afraid to annoy her. He bravely asked anyway.
“Pardon me for my ignorance. But why don’t you just recruit other witches? Why use humans for such a dangerous endeavor?” Chetan crouched as if he were expecting a frying pan to come flying over the seat.
“It is impossible to turn another witch into a protégé— especially one who’s already inhabited by an Ancient. Only humans can be used for that purpose. But not just any human. The protégé must have something in them…a certain ruthlessness, immorality, selfishness that goes beyond the norm. Most humans don’t qualify for the job, as being a typical asshole is not enough. The ones I seek are truly extraordinary beings. Much more extraordinary than you even.”
Catherine smirked, knowing Chetan was irked by her insult and could do nothing about it. He got out of the Mercedes and tried to keep a straight face, making sure his expression didn’t betray him. He did not want to give Catherine any reason to cut him from what he considered a prestigious position as her helper. And, most importantly, he didn’t want to rile her up, thereby causing his own demise.
“Would you like me to accompany you?” he asked after he opened Catherine’s door and offered her his hand.
“No. This task I must do alone.”
Catherine refused to touch the escalator railing, which was sticky from candy, snot, and other unidentifiable fluids. As the escalator ascended, mall patrons on all levels focused in on her—the obvious fish out of water. The pot-bellied shoppers wore the standard suburban uniform of cargo shorts, unflattering graphic tees, and tired sneakers and sandals. Catherine sported a tailored pencil skirt, a taupe silk shirt, and six-inch stilettos.
She arrived on the second floor, next to one of those clothing stores that Pied Piper-ed teenagers in with their pedophilic advertising. She decided to stroll in the middle of the walkway, against the flow of pedestrian traffic. This allowed her to casually bump into people, skimming their skin to pick up on their auras. Within five minutes, Catherine reckoned, she had touched about ten people. She picked up on someone who had just cheated on the SAT, another who had shoplifted a scarf, and still another who let a cashier undercharge him at the GAP. But no one with the special gifts.
Catherine wound up in the food court, which was littered wi
th chain restaurants offering up a gross hodgepodge of MSG-laden, lard-infested chemical cocktails they called food. As she passed a server handing out samples of syrupy Chinese food on toothpicks, she suddenly sucked in a breath—a signal that her protégé was somewhere in the vicinity. It was now just a matter of finding them. Catherine quickly made her way around the perimeter of the food court, rapidly bumping into people getting a sense of who they were.
First she bumped into a teenage girl who just wasn’t having it. The girl wore a belly shirt that showed off her spray tan and Daisy Dukes that showed off everything else.
“What, stupid bitch? You don’t see me standing here?” she barked before taking a bite of her greasy pizza.
“How can I not see you? You’re bright orange,” Catherine came back, all the while scanning the food court for the protégé. Tan Girl put her pizza down and whipped her dishwater-blonde hair into a ponytail. She pumped her fists at Catherine.
“Aw, Uptown wants to fight. Let’s go,” the girl said.
And Catherine did want to go. On a different day, she would have used her powers to grab the girl, toss her in the air, and send her careening over the crowd. But Catherine needed to conserve her energy to capture her protégé, and settled on a more moderate retaliation. She winked one eye, causing Tan Girl to trip and land face first in the custodian’s bucket of dirty water.
As that section of the food court burst into riotous laughter, a hand brushed across Catherine’s. Her senses went into overdrive, as if she were a plug being stuck into a socket. She didn’t even have to look at the human to know this was her protégé.
“She got what she deserved, talking to such a gorgeous woman like that,” said a nebbish voice.
Catherine had to stretch her neck to look up at the man staring down at her. “Oh, I’m okay. I just let petty things like that roll off me,” she said, doing her best impersonation of coy.
The stranger’s towering height was his only attractive attribute. His voice was whiny and high-pitched. Catherine unconsciously put her finger to her ear, doing a suctioning motion. She figured he had just gotten off from some lame office job, considering he was dressed in a cheap sports jacket and khaki pants. She fought to not focus on the smudge of mayonnaise he had neglected to wipe off his chin.
“Italian?” asked the man, squinting in a failed attempt to give his eyes a bedroom look.
“Yes, I’ve been in this country for…well, let’s say a very, very long time. Do you speak Italian?”
“Uh, yeah,” the man said, fiddling to take off his wedding ring behind his back.
“Ho intenzione di uccidere e mangiare le interiora con salsa picante,” said Catherine, testing him.
“Hey, yeah, sounds good to me.”
She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the right one. How many people would agree to let someone kill them and then eat their entrails with hot sauce—as she had just asked him to do?
“I’m Catherine,” she said, holding out her hand for a shake.
“Nick,” the man responded, lying about his name. He kissed Catherine’s hand instead of shaking it, and left behind some of the mayonnaise from his chin. Catherine quickly drew it back as she painfully smiled with clenched teeth.
Catherine invited the potential protégé back to her penthouse. She was pleased with her selection, and with how easy he had been to acquire.
However, Catherine understood that one of the conditions for making a protégé was that the intended had to be in complete compliance with his transformation. In other words he had to decide with his own free will to be subjected to the whims of his future master. From past experience Catherine knew most humans would not agree to such a hideous fate, so a witch had to use a certain amount of subterfuge. This usually entailed romantic gestures if the potential protégé was a woman, and the promise of sex if it was a man.
On the ride to the penthouse, Catherine cock-teased Nick to the point where he was willing to do just about anything to get her on her back. Yes, it was entrapment, but it worked every time.
Upon their arrival Chetan made himself scarce, and Catherine took Nick to the purple room.
“Would you like a drink?” she purred.
Nick looked around, wondering where in the penthouse Catherine kept the bed. “Sure, anything you got.”
Catherine was more than satisfied with that answer. It gave her permission to serve him up a magical mixture of Jack Daniels and Grey Goose spiked with a dash of a potion she had spent years developing. The potion contained a unique blend of micronized herbs and Haitian zombie powder derived from puffer-fish toxin. With the sleep-inducing drink in hand, she swayed over to Nick, who was loosening up his tie and kicking off his shoes.
He took the drink and guzzled it down. He immediately started feeling the effects, and his few inhibitions disappeared. “Damn, you are smokin’ hot. I’m going to fuck the shit out of you tonight.” He patted the couch. “My fucking wife never wants it. Oops… I wasn’t supposed to mention her. My bad.”
Catherine sat down next to Nick. “Oh, you big romantic, you,” she said, allowing him to slobber on her neck—his poor excuse for kissing. She could see why his wife rejected him, with his pitiful, amateur technique. Catherine barely wrapped her arms around him, knowing the more excited he got, the quicker the toxin worked. She looked past him at her watch. The drink typically took no more than five minutes to kick in. It was already minute two.
Nick went for his zipper, and put Catherine’s hand into his pants. “Oh, yeah, you like that, don’t you, baby?” he panted as he pawed at her breast. Catherine could only think how pathetic it was that his hard-on was about three inches long. She looked at her watch again and began counting down in her mind. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. At zero Nick conked out.
Nick woke up naked, with his arms and legs staked to a pentagram on the floor. He struggled to release his wrists from the tight shackles that cut off his circulation. He tried to scream, but he was gagged with a terrycloth rag. He saw an open door at the back of the room. Catherine entered, dressed only in a priestess robe and the same six-inch stilettos she’d had on earlier. She crossed the room holding a large Book of Shadows to her chest.
The walls resonated with the desperate, muted sounds of the backs of Nick’s feet banging the floor. His throaty, muffled screams were barely audible through the gag. Then his eyes widened as Catherine pulled out a sharp, heavy-bladed knife from the pages of the book.
“Do you know why you’re here, Nick? And no, it’s not to fuck,” she said as she removed the gag from his mouth.
Nick coughed hard. His larynx was inflamed from his frenzied screaming. He could only release a faint, hoarse wail. He started to weep. “I don’t know. Is this some sort of weird sex game? What do you want?” He watched Catherine put the book on the floor and pull a feather out of it.
She said, “I’m not an authority on what is good or what is bad. I only know what is useful to me. You have very special attributes that can serve me well. Yes, you are a liar and a cheat. But what you have kept hidden from everyone is that you have killed… A young woman in college who didn’t find you so sexually desirable. You took not only her virginity but her life. Poor girl. Her undiscovered remains are still in those woods.”
“How did you know about that?” Nick asked. He was shaking, thinking that all of these theatrics were part of some elaborate plot to set him up for blackmail. “What do you want? Cash? Stocks? Just tell me.”
“Nick, you barely have two nickels to rub together. Besides, look around you. Does it look like I need money? I just want you to agree to do my bidding.” Catherine held the knife in one hand and the feather in the other.
“Whatever, whatever! Omigod!” Nick said through his sobs.
“Great. I have your full cooperation. Now I have to measure your heart against this feather.” Catherine straddled Nick’s thighs and laid the feather on his navel. She raised the knife over her head and said, “This is going to hurt…a l
ot.”
Nick saw the knife come down and go straight through his ribcage. Catherine cut him from clavicle to sternum. He then felt her powerful hands separating his ribcage and ripping his still-beating heart out of his chest cavity.
Catherine only had four minutes to perform a speedy Weighing of the Heart ritual before Nick would be clinically brain dead, and she needed him to be alive for the ceremony. She took his heart in one hand and the feather in the other. Her hands moved up and down like a justice balance. She determined that his heart was heavier than the feather—that he was a bad boy indeed.
“You and I are going to do great things together,” she said, wiping Nick’s blood off her hands on his stomach.
Nick felt his life exit his body. His last moments consisted of perfect fear and the knowledge that Catherine had done this to him. This knowledge would bind him to her forever.
Catherine opened her Book of Shadows and recited a necromancy spell over Nick, capturing his soul before it left him. His body twitched as it came back to life with horrific agony. The muscles contracted and relaxed in a rapid fashion, and he nearly bit off his tongue. His body was undergoing some sort of metamorphosis. The facial bones rearranged themselves into a hideous caricature of the former Nick. His gnarly fingers grew longer and clawed at the empty space.
Nick’s eyes had turned a dead gray color and were full of abject terror. He looked at Catherine, his gaze pleading with her to help him. But she just stood there taking utter delight in watching a new protégé being born.
Nick was now powerful enough to yank up the stakes that bound him to the floor. However, he could see that Catherine was not intimidated by him in the least. He accepted his fate, then his rational mind shut down its own will and forced him to become a servant to her.
Chapter Fifteen
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.