I sighed and turned to face him, admiring his beautiful features for—possibly—the last time. “I’ve been in contact with Aaron for a few days,” I said, “I saw him in the street the other day and he looked… terrible. Homeless.”
“Okay, so how does this hooded man connect you to Aaron?” Damien asked.
“He was here today, before you showed up. I asked him to come. He thought some dark entity was trying to possess him.”
“Possess him?” Frank’s face lit up like he had just seen a piece of Carrot Cake—his favorite. “Now there’s something you don’t hear every day.”
“Wait, Aaron was here?” Damien asked.
I could see it on his face. When Damien arrived I was in a towel, my hair was wet, and my cheeks were flushed from the heat of the shower. A shower I had taken to, maybe, wipe the smell of man from off my body. And then, to make matters worse, I rejected him when he made a move on me. Shit, the rejection. How must that have looked now in light of what I had just told him?
“Damien, it wasn’t like that,” I said, but his eyes were narrow and defensive. If Frank hadn’t been there, we would have been fighting.
“I’m sure Damien can swallow his ill-founded suspicions for a moment,” Frank said, “Amber, continue.”
I hesitated, but did as Frank asked. “I thought he may have been wrong,” I said, “His life was in shambles, his health was poor, and he told me he’d been having trouble sleeping, too. But none of what I saw made me think some kind of dark entity was riding him… until today.”
“What do you mean?” Frank asked.
“I… touched it.” There was that sick feeling again. I wasn’t supposed to touch it. I knew that now.
Frank’s face went serious. “You… touched… it?” he asked, “Then what happened?”
“I wanted to throw up. Aaron left and I spent a while in the shower trying to shake the feeling, to clean it off. That’s when Damien showed up.”
“So that’s—”
“Yes,” I said to Damien before he could finish. “That’s why. I felt sick, Damien. So, so sick.”
Damien took my hand and squeezed it, and a ton of pressure fluttered off my shoulders. With that single gesture I knew his suspicions were gone. I knew he believed me. But none of that helped the sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Frank tapped his chin as the gears and cogs worked hard in his brain. “I know a bit about what you’ve described,” Frank said.
“You do?” Damien asked.
“I’ve been known to dabble in the black arts now and again. It could explain why my life turned out to be such a fucking train-wreck, but the experience has given me knowledge beyond my years.”
“What do you think is going on?” I asked.
Frank paused. “I’ve also reached into the Nether and felt something foul and disgusting before. It was during a séance a few years ago. Young drunk and stupid, a bunch of us tried to conjure a demon to ask it questions. We wanted to conjure one, as if it were no big thing. Like calling up directory enquiries.”
“What do you mean by ask it questions?” Damien asked.
“Demons can see the future better than any Witch can. They know things no one else does; secrets about you, me and the world. They’re experts at talking about things that haven’t happened. That’s where their use is.”
“Use? You talk about them as if they’re tools,” Damien said.
“They are to some. To others they’re foot-soldiers in a war. Other people keep them as sort of pets.”
“Pets?” I asked. “I’ve studied Demons before and I’ve never heard about anyone keeping one as a pet.”
“You can only learn so much from books. The underbelly of any metropolis can teach you way more than a dusty old tome ever could. When you’re down on your luck and all you have is the ability to use Magick, you’ll turn to anyone and anything to try and get ahead.”
“Do you think the guy who just came to my house…. owns the Demon? That maybe this is the connection I’m feeling?” I asked.
“The thing is, even the people who claim to own Demons don’t actually own Demons,” Frank said, “You strike bargains with them, if you know how to play their game. Most people just wind up being possessed. These wretched, fucked up things live in a state of constant agony and pain. A human host alleviates that pain, that’s why they’re always possessing folks who let them in.”
“And you think Aaron, somehow, let one in?” Damien asked. He wanted to say more. I knew he did. I could see it on his face. How could a simpleton like Aaron get mixed up with a Demon? He didn’t need to say the words for me to hear them.
“I don’t know how he’s involved in this,” Frank said, “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Demons need permission to fuck with someone’s life, but sometimes that permission doesn’t need to be spoken out in plain language. He could’ve opened the door to one in a moment of intense emotion or pain and not even known it.”
I fell into the sofa and ran my hands through my still drying hair.
Damien sighed. The whole situation was a puzzle with missing pieces. “There are no coincidences,” Damien said, “This guy shows up in town at the same time that Aaron’s being possessed by the devil? There has to be a link.”
“There’s only one way to find out what’s really going on,” Frank said.
“You mean go after him into the woods?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“But we don’t have any idea where he’s gone.”
“You said you’d been seeing ruins in your dreams, right?”
I had. I never saw them clearly, but I always got the impression of old buildings. Caves. Ruins. “Yeah, kinda.”
“So? How many ruins or old building sites can there seriously be around here?”
CHAPTER 18
I was beginning to learn that Frank had lived through some pretty dark times, and that his spooky visage wasn’t only an aesthetic choice but a mirror into his occult predilections; and maybe even his soul. Raven’s Glen had kept me wrapped in a cocoon my entire life, but Frank had dragged me out of that cocoon and shown me things I never would have known. And I was grateful.
All told, nothing ever happened in Raven’s Glen. Well, besides the odd murder. The town was quiet and sleepy. Everybody knew everybody else and—almost as a bi-product of that familiarity—folks tended to behave, meaning that the sort of people who lived in town were good, clean, honest people. But Frank was like a walking reminder that the world was much bigger than the misty woods surrounding our little town, and that maybe I was missing out on the kinds of lessons other Witches just wouldn’t learn by their propensity to stay away from big cities and live in small rural towns.
Even though the way he told it, there were just as many—if not more—Witches in big cities as there were in little towns.
None of us made much conversation in the short time it took to narrow our search down and locate a little historical information about Raven’s Glen that may hint at the location of some ruined buildings. Damien’s deftness with a search engine, however, allowed us to pinpoint an area of the woods about three miles due east which seemed like a candidate for the hooded man’s destination. In the 1960’s, an archaeologist’s discovery of a few peculiar items led to a small-scale excavation project that revealed a series of old structures buried underground.
The buildings went as far back as the 1700’s, though no one was able to figure out exactly why they had been abandoned or why they were found almost a foot under the earth. Though the officials who studied the site later went on to decide that the collapse of a silver mine located directly beneath the area was responsible for the event, it didn’t account for the fact that the buildings were found perfectly upright and in relatively great condition.
Some folks who were interviewed about it said there was never any silver mine out there, but rather an extensive labyrinth of sacred caves belonging to the Native Americans, and that the old mine town had b
een swallowed by vengeful old spirits. Others said it had been buried in an avalanche… an avalanche in California.
Whatever had gone on, it seemed to us that the old village of Missington was a clear lead, so we didn’t waste any time in making tracks for it. As we drove, familiar suburbs gave way to trees, the warm orange glow of civilization faded into the night mist, and soon the street-lights disappeared too until we were the only car on the quiet road out of town.
The journey wasn’t a long one, but the silence gave me time to despite the fact that, these days, I didn’t at all enjoy being alone with my thoughts. The cabaret of questions resumed its number and bombarded me unsolvable riddles, one after the other, until I felt the car come to a screeching halt and the dancers went tumbling to the floor.
A “ROAD CLOSED” sign, with its flashing amber lights, glared back at us from the road. Behind it, the remnants of a huge, fallen tree was blocking the road.
“Typical,” Frank said.
But something didn’t feel right.
“How far away are we?” I asked.
“About a quarter mile,” Damien said. “We can walk that far.”
We pulled the car to the side of the road and disembarked into the cold night air without giving it much more thoughts. Out here the woods were blanketed white; black trees rose out of the snow, their crooked black branches like crone fingers jutting skyward, the night was crisp, and lazy snowflakes collected on my hair and face. It was also silent. Not even a breeze. Soon, the only sounds we would hear would be our own feet crunching on powdered snow and wet leaves.
Careful not to fall over, we navigated the dark woods choosing to walk parallel to the road. I wanted to concentrate on what was about to happen, on what we may encounter at the ruins, and whether or not the other Witch could see us feeling our way between the withered old trees. But my mind insisted on circling back to how cool Damien had been about my speaking to Aaron. Well, at least once he learned I hadn’t had sex with my ex.
But… he had been cool with it even before I said that, hadn’t he?
I mean, we’re talking about the guy who had fought with Damien on the street and gotten him arrested. The same guy who later professed to… well, if not loving me, then at least caring about me enough to want to have a relationship with me. Did Damien not see Aaron as a threat, or did he trust me implicitly? I wasn’t sure how I felt about the former, but the latter did give me some comfort. I hadn’t given Damien a reason not to trust me, after all. And I did trust him.
Damien had been sweet to me over the last few months and offered me nothing but attention and affection. We learned Magick together and even practiced together. We were both happy to have Frank in our lives, complimented each other’s personalities, and hardly fought about stupid things. And whenever we did fight we would make up fast and wind up in bed together for more attention and affection.
We gave each other plenty of space, too, which fit my personality perfectly because a stifling relationship would have sent me running for the hills. Being with Damien didn’t only feel convenient, it felt right. So why was I all bent out of shape about how easily he had accepted my hanging out with Aaron?
Then I felt something crawl up my arm—a kind of coldness that seemed to have penetrated my clothes and touched my very skin.
“She’s here with the others.” The voice was a whisper, but I heard it as if it had been said next to me.
I stopped in my tracks and checked my surroundings.
“She must come alone.” The voice came again, though it was different. Female, maybe. The cold travelled to my ribs and caused them to ache.
“G-guys,” I said.
They stopped and turned.
“What is it?” Damien asked.
“I don’t know. I think I just heard someone speak to me.”
Damien and Frank put their backs to each other and looked around. Nothing was moving in the quiet woods, not even the trees, but something was out there. I could feel it, and now they could too. Shapes in the mist, footsteps on the snow, voices in the wind.
Damien spun around hard, wide-eyed with fear.
“Damien?” I said.
“I heard it too!” He closed his palm into a fist and a shimmer of light birthed into existence between his fingertips. I could feel his Magick, pulsing outwards from his body in like ripples in a pond. Push, push, push. It was strong and white and pure, and the feeling I got from it fought back the cold cutting into my flesh. But if we were dealing with Witches then it meant… oh no!
“They know,” said the voice, “Kill the men.”
A hooded man materialized from behind a tree and dashed toward Damien with a brandished blade glinting against the moonlight. I screamed. Damien turned just in time to duck out of the blade’s path but he lost his footing and landed in the snow. I honed in on the assailant’s weapon, grabbed it with my mind, and sent it hurtling into a nearby tree.
Damien kicked the man’s knee but it had no effect. He may as well have kicked a boulder! The man grabbed Damien by the neck and lifted him three clear feet above the snow but Frank, who was already on his way, grabbed hold of the man’s hood, and pulled it back, and planted his fingers on the attacker’s cheek from behind.
I didn’t know what I expected to see beneath the hood; maybe some kind of Zombie or a Vampire—to explain how he was super strong and fast—but he was just a man… and after only moments of contact with Frank, he was a man beside himself with terror. The wail that escaped his mouth exploded into the dark woods, sending a murder of crows scattering into the air, cawing and flapping their black wings.
Damien fell to the ground and scrambled to get back on his feet, standing upright only a few paces away. Frank had by now forced the hooded man to his knees with the power of whatever dark Magick he was wielding, but as much as Frank demanded answers, the man didn’t speak; he could only breathe short, panicked breaths.
Terrified breaths.
I clenched my fists and the Power buzzed within me, energizing my body and heightening my senses.
“Where are the others?” I yelled.
“Others?” Damien asked.
“I heard more of them!”
Damien looked around but his eyes then settled upon me again and I saw the blood drain from his face. “Amber, look out!” he said.
But it was too late. A fist curled around my hair and yanked so hard I fell to the ground on my back. The person who had grabbed me started to pull me along the snow, the pain in my scalp burning like fire. Damien yelled and gave chase, but my attacker was fast. Real fast. I felt like was flying over the snow like a sled pulled by dogs!
Concentrating was difficult, but I steadied myself by grabbing a hold of the man’s arm and called to the Watchtower of the South in my mind. Straight away the clouds began to churn. Thunder roared and lightning cracked. A ghastly wind whistled through the trees and I knew that the Goddess had heard me.
But something was wrong.
My floating mind hit a kind of static wall, and my connection to the Watchtower felt somehow barred. It was an alien energy that I couldn’t identify. I knew the tower’s light was there, waiting for me to reach it, but I couldn’t reach any further and the Magick started to slip from my grasp.
The churning, rumbling clouds and whipping lightning remained, but without me to guide the Magick, all the power of the South was harmless: a wolf without teeth, a knife with no edge, or a gun with no bullets. But the man let go of my hair and I was, somehow, free again. So I pushed myself to my feet and turned around to find my attacker backing away, his eyes trailing on me. Only he wasn’t alone. Behind him was a set of half-buried buildings I had never seen before; and other hooded people.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The man before me spoke in Latin, and though I couldn’t understand the string of words he had lain at my feet, it felt like an invitation into a pit of snakes and I was.
“Chosen?” I said. I understood only that word. “Chosen for w
hat?”
“Nuptis profanum,” the man said, smirking beneath his hood.
Nuptis… what?
I couldn’t feel The Power within me anymore. My calls to the Watchtower went unanswered, replaced instead by a kind of hiss. The cold air turned hot and stifling in seconds, and the cadre of hooded people started their slow march toward me. Ten, twenty, or fifty, I couldn’t tell how many there were; but I wasn’t about to stick around to find out.
I turned around and ran as fast as I could, following the trail my body had made as it was dragged through the woods. Behind me I could hear the rustling of footsteps and the shuffling of bodies and another bout of déjà vu came to me. I had been here before, chased by larger, more powerful legs in woods I didn’t know. History was repeating itself all over again, only this time the people chasing me were Witches.
Through the trees I caught sight of Damien running through the woods. By the sight of his panting breaths, his flushed cheeks, and the grunts he was making as he ran I knew that he had been playing catch up all this time. Frank wasn’t far behind, and he too was panting hard. How far had I been carried?
“Damien!” I screamed. “They’re after me!”
“Who?”
“Them!”
He saw them when he looked over my shoulder, but when I ran past him he didn’t move.
“Damien?” I said, “We have to go!”
But he didn’t listen. As the horde of hooded people approached, Damien clasped his palms together in the shape of a bowl, whispered, and released hundreds of silver orbs into the sky. The slivers of light burned with the radiance of the moon, bathing the forest in beautiful, entrancing silver sparkles. Only this time the light show didn’t repel—or even so much as faze—the incoming crowd. The lights fell, limp into the snow, and a cold dread gripped my heart.
There was no stopping them.
“Run!” Frank grabbed my hand and pulled us away.
I didn’t hesitate. The three of us ran together as fast as we could through the forest, our feet beating down on slush and sleet until we reached the road—and the car. I couldn’t understand why those men, at least one of which I knew was faster than a bolt of lightning, hadn’t caught up to us. Nor could I understand how we had reached the car so quickly and without stopping to check our bearings. But I didn’t question any of it.
The Rule of Three Page 10