by P. W. Child
It had taken her a countless different spreads and failed attempts before she managed to draw the Boy card to get Radu to be pushed toward her and her party by fate. Greta knew that the failed attempts were detrimental to all those who would be involved in the great secret war, but a few déjà vus because of misplaced fate recovering itself was harmless. All she needed now was to locate Sam Cleave and take care of him and the evidence he had. With the help of her son, Igor, it would be a quick detour to using Radu to find the rest of the cards.
Finding the evidence against her and her mercenary hellhounds for the murder of the expedition team would be a great weight off her shoulders. Igor could not be burdened with Sam Cleave’s murder, because she needed him to remain nice and snug inside Petra Kulich’s inner sanctum. So it was up to her to kill Sam to tie up the loose ends on that matter. Then she had to find the Black Tarot. Incomplete, the maleficent suits could not link in and represent the full scope of existence, therefore using just a few restricted her from truly harnessing its black magic. After all, she could not expect to build a mansion with only eight bricks.
Her thoughts dwelled. She strayed a while through a million trivial thoughts before settling on Heinz. His face and his essence hit her out of nowhere and startled her. She could still hear him calling in the house, roaming the hallways to find her before he went in the study. Then her palms ached from the recollection of the writhing woman bleeding all over her while she had muffled her desperate squeals. Greta had never killed one of her own staff before. It almost disturbed her, but it had been necessary.
Heinz would be fine, she convinced herself. She did love him tremendously; there was no doubt about that. But her priorities were favored by power, not love. After all, being married was easily accomplished; even being loved was ridiculously easy to swing for a woman like Greta – but the power of infamy, of martyrdom, that was eternal. The world would always be a fool for a sacrificial hero.
‘It worked for Christ, did it not?’ she smiled to herself. The only difference was that she would die on her own terms, on a throne with the Black Sun sigil above her head like a raven halo and in her hand she would hold the Black Tarot like a scepter.
‘Heinz-Karl Heller. Love of my life. You will understand, won’t you? Of all people, you fathom the importance of a good name, of a strong legacy. You of all people know what it is like to serve the interests of your idols and mentors. You are a hard man, my darling. You are resilient and damn near invincible, my powerful Heinz. No woman is worth your relentless fighting spirit and your lion heart. Not even me….especially not me.’
Greta drank one drink after the other until she felt nauseous and light headed – more than usual. The fatigue was crippling her and she had to yield to the thrall of sleep, thankful that it would momentarily numb the excruciating pain that had grown beyond the point her pain meds were able to control. With only a an hour or two to go before landing in Romania, Greta decided to let the oblivion of sleep embrace her. She would have to be sharp when she reached Ground Zero of her rapidly approaching glory and a few hours of rest was imperative.
From the other side of the narrow luxury cabin Radu peeked, his eyelids barely apart and hidden by his long black lashes. He waited for Greta to fall asleep, pretending to be far sicker than he really was to have her leave him alone. He could not bear her controlling tyranny anymore. Who knew how far she would take this card game she constantly forced upon him? It pained the boy to abandon such luxury, not to mention the privileges bestowed on him as a member of the Heller household, but this woman was bat shit crazy. From what he had seen and endured while with her was simply not worth the spoils he was given.
The flight attendant came in briefly. When she saw that both the passengers were asleep she lowered the lights considerably to allow them the sleep peacefully for the remainder of the trip. The aircraft slid through the night sky over the earth sleeping quietly below the clouds that made a cotton wool barrier in between.
Too afraid to move at first, the boy waited a few minutes in the serene murmur of the jet.
Across from him the drunken adoptive mother from hell had passed out, her arms falling limply to her sides. Radu found her amusing now that she was a harmless cadaver with a pulse. Protruding between her lips was the tip of her tongue, vibrating every time her breath passed over and forced through under her heavy top lip. It made a fart noise that Radu could not ignore, as most kids could not, and he fought to keep his hearty laughter as quiet as he could.
His scrawny body shook under the giggle fit he developed with every fart she exhaled, but he managed to keep it in control. Besides, she was too drunk to even feel a backhand across the face right now.
Radu got up quietly and tiptoed through the warm, comfortable cabin and found Greta’s luggage. This time he chose to pass on her purse, because she would know if something was missing. But she was unlikely to check her luggage immediately. With a vigilant eye he watched her constantly as he unzipped the first suitcase.
Chapter 27 – The Devil’s Eyes
Nina felt a peculiar tremor in her stomach, even though she had not moved an inch since they came to the edge of the circle. The strange tingle only began a few moments ago without warning or reason. She looked behind her, but all she could see were the phantoms of dancing mist, disturbed by something moving between the trees. Quickly she turned and faced the circle with a gasp.
“Just stand still while I try and figure this out,” Sam said right next to her. She found great solace in the warmth of his body and the soft scratch of his sweater against her face when she leaned against him.
“Do you feel that too?” she asked Sam in a shaky whisper that was quite unlike Nina’s usual defiance of anything challenging.
“Feel what?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the small glowing green and black LED screen. He kept panning from side to side with his lens, making sure that he covered the whole area in front of them to prevent someone – or something – from stalking them.
“There is like, a deep sound wave of something making my insides vibrate,” she winced, holding her stomach.
“Aye, I feel that too. It is like an energy field that is moving, or rotating all about this clearing. What bothers me about it is that it fucks with my emotions,” he mentioned, looking at Nina for the first time. “Or is that just my emotions fucking with me?”
Sam looked eerie in the dim light that was keeping the dark hell at bay at the mercy of a waning battery. But Nina was not afraid of him. His contours looked wraithlike in the green glow and for a moment she imagined that Sam was an angel, if such ludicrous creatures even existed. There was not one instance in her entire existence that she could remember being this scared, but his presence was her salvation
“I think this place is at the core of an energy field, that’s all,” she replied nonchalantly, hoping Sam would fall for her charade. Nina Gould chose to use scientific explanations to invalidate things that terrified her, whether her theories were founded or not. It helped just to sound confident in an attempt to convince herself that her disbelief was repellant enough.
“Nina,” he said, “I have never come across any electromagnetic force that aggravated my feelings before. Fine, the punch in the gut could very well be infrasound or unusual magnetic activity, but how do you explain the fact that this whirly power makes you feel like the devil himself is sticking his hand up your ass? I don’t know about you, but I am fucking petrified right now.”
That was precisely what Nina hoped Sam would not admit, especially when she refused to.
“You know, Sam Cleave, sometimes I really do not like your raw honesty. My god, can you not just lie once, for the sake of my feelings?” she whined out loud, standing back with her hand in her hip to address him face to face. Sam was relieved to see there was still some of the old bitchy Nina left and he found it a very helpful to distract him from the gradually mounting terror that gripped him in his tracks.
“Sorry,” he replied, applyin
g himself to her rather than his surroundings. She was a wonderful distraction he wished he could spend more time indulging in, but he had to find a way back for them before the centrifugal force of the dead circle drew them in. Once more he raised his camera to the woods behind them to find signs of a pathway between in the twisted trunks. Sam could feel the petite beauty by his side latch her arms tightly around his free arm and it soothed him.
The wind howled through the trees, but as soon as it reached the two of them, it lost its voice completely and became a numbing stillness that would shake a demon to doubt. Which was worse? A haunted forest where day became night within an instant and people vanished into thin air by taking a step forward - or a flat stretch where nothing ever grew, that served as a stove plate for fear, sucking in any screaming thing with emotion and breath to feed its power?
In the square little screen Sam saw something behind the fog. One, then two, they came into view from behind the trees farther back. He straightened up to concentrate.
“What, Sam?” Nina asked from against his bicep.
“Hang on,” he said quickly. “Shhh, let me just make sure of what is going on.”
Abruptly, both Sam and Nina could feel the ice cold breeze cease. Stirring their hair before, it now simply died, leaving their hair still and their skins untouched by its caress. But now there was a different kind of cold around the two friends. Dead cold. The chill of a dead place, like the cold store of an slaughterhouse where only dead things hanged around and reeked up the place under the hold of frigid steel hooks. Yes, they both felt it – the grip of impending menace where they dangled like carcasses, awaiting the butcher’s knife.
“Sam, I am fucking scared shitless. I swear to God, I am going to sit down in a huddled heap and just not move,” she whispered in a sharp rasp that sounded a lot like defeat and fury.
“Stand still,” he whispered without moving. It did not make her feel at all safer. When Sam focused on something, it was never a false alarm.
He saw it move slowly from left to right, drawing ever nearer to where they were standing. Behind them the empty circle, the heart of Hoia Baciu, hummed like an air conditioner on a quiet summer night. With it came a mild tremor, a slight pulsation of varying strengths in its current. The force pulled them, inviting them to step away from the perilous woods to meet another kind of hazard.
“What are you looking at?” Nina said out loud.
“Nina!” he snapped with a frown. She wanted an answer and she would defy him for it.
“Tell me!”
“Look!” he said impatiently, and pointed ahead of them, slightly to the left where the two flashlights pierced the darkness. Nina leaned forward and saw the two lights bobbing between the trees.
“Maybe its Petra and Mihail,” she gasped, slapping him lightly on the arm to spur him on.
“Wait. What is it not them? What if it is a bunch of poachers or something? They’ll kill us just for being here. This is Romania, Nina. These lads are superstitious and tough,” he reminded her.
“Poachers,” she repeated. “Poaching what? Dead wood? There can’t be any game in this forest. Nothing lives here. It is quiet and barren all over,” she argued.
“Still, I don’t trust anyone or anything I cannot see,” he insisted.
“Well, in that case, we are in the epicenter of distrust, pal,” she said with an attitude, folding her arms. Her trademark fierceness served her well, because her fighting fire kept her warm and strong when the cold pressed her. In fact, Nina momentarily forgot that she was scared, but only until she saw the lights change color.
“Umm…” she grasped Sam’s arm again.
“I saw that,” he whispered rapidly, panting from his own apprehension. Sam hunkered down, pulling Nina with him so they could hide their presence behind the ample rocks and brush between them and the leave-strewn path where the lights hovered closer.
The two lights progressed with shaky motion, just as they would if they were held by people walking on uneven terrain.
“I don’t know what I’d rather have,” Sam said softly against her ear, “Bad guys with criminal tendencies or wraiths from another dimension.”
Nina gave him a sharp look and he knew he said something wrong again.
“What did I say?” he asked innocently.
“Wraiths. Don’t say shit like that until I am in a hotel room in a big city with a six pack and a fag,” she sneered. Sam could not help but smile.
“Yeah, I’d kill for a smoke now too,” he smiled and ran his hand over her head playfully. Nina shook her head and chuckled. Why was it that the two of them were mostly alone when they had to focus on other things? Why could he not touch her when they are not in life threatening danger, but in a secluded monastery where they had time for each other?
By now the lights had almost reached them, yet the curling mist obscured everything else. Her fingers tightened around his arm as they drew nearer, now a sharp orange color. It was only when they came within a stone’s throw that it became clear what was going on. Sam held his hand instinctively over Nina’s mouth, because he knew she would whimper in fear at the sight of the balls of fire that burned with a kind of restraint that defied science. The tongues of fire did not lash upward as they were supposed to, but remained contained in a spherical motion that gyrated around whatever core held them fixed. Nina’s eyes stretched as the blazing orbs passed above them without a noise. The fiery lights were mute, as if Sam and Nina observed them from the other side of a window.
Nina shivered uncontrollably under Sam’s hand, but he dared not speak a word now.
Slowly the orbs descended towards the terrified observers, leaving them with no option but to keep dead still in their trapped state. Sam could feel the vibration of Nina’s scream against his palm as the balls of swirling fire illuminated their horrified faces. Closing her eyes, Nina wondered how it would feel at the moment of contact. Would it hurt much? Would it be cold and quick or would it singe her hair from her scalp? She wished she had told Sam how she felt once and for all – just come out and said it. One solace was dying in the grip of her best friend. That, she could use to deal with whatever came next.
Sam closed his eyes as the flames touched his skin, yet he could feel no sensation from them. There was no heat, no cold, no odor or sound. His fear subsided, like a splash of water in a lake. Opening his eyes, Sam beheld the most unbelievable thing his skeptical eyes had ever seen in all his life. The fire spilled over his face and blinded him, so that he had to use his hand as a visor over his eyes. He looked at Nina beside him and she was doing the same, shielding her face against the sharp light.
“What the fuck?” she gasped out. Her voice trembled with shock and disbelief. “What the fuck just happened, Sam?” Now she was bordering on hysterical and he pulled her against him to calm her. Three twisting shadows blocked out the sun above them, allowing Nina and Sam to open their eyes properly.
Chapter 28 – A Night of Fire
“What on earth are you doing on the ground, my friends?” Stefan asked. Their guide was amused. He reached out to pull them up, but the journalist and the historian sat confounded in the shade cast by their companions.
“You know you can go blind looking into the sun like that,” Mihail warned as he extinguished his crooked blunt in the soil of the path. He looked absolutely exhausted. Dark circles stained his eyes and his hands were shaking. Behind him stood Professor Kulich, looking grave and upset, but she helped Nina to her feet and kept her upright while she dusted off her clothing.
“Are you alright, Nina?” she asked under her breath, not because of some secrecy, but because she was just too tired to perk up.
“Petra,” Nina sighed, “you will never believe what Sam and I experienced. The stories are true about this place.”
“Well, you must tell me all about your experience, but first we have to get back to Cluj before dark,” she told Nina. Sam turned and looked at the professor with a perplexed frown.
; “What do you mean, before it gets dark?” he asked.
“You don’t want us to be caught here during the night, my friend,” Stefan chipped in while he focused on cleaning his nails with his pocket knife.
“No, I know that! It’s just that I thought it was…” Sam’s scowl grew deeper, darker as his words grew tardy - and he looked at Nina, whose face was just as twisted in astonishment, “…I thought…” he forced, but nothing more came out.
“…it was tomorrow,” Nina added in the same trance-like realization.
The sun had begun to dip behind the branches of the eerie tree tops and dusk was fast approaching. Abruptly, the wind picked up and they all heard the voices of a few locals passing through the canopy over the wide path where Sam and Nina found the circle last night – or tonight? Two men and three women walked and spoke loud Romanian as they returned on their way back to the parking area.
“They said devil’s eyes are out tonight,” Stefan told the foreigners in his company.
“Oh, then, let’s get out of here before he sees us,” Nina suggested sarcastically.
“Again.”
Sam spoke very softly out of turn, but they all heard him.
“Again?” Petra asked.
“The devil’s eyes,” Sam slurred slightly, “I think we saw them last night.”
“Tonight,” Mihail remarked indifferently as if the topsy-turvy physics were run of the mill around here. “You were here tonight.”
Petra frowned, becoming increasingly intolerant of everyone speaking in some kind of clandestine code. She felt like the only one who did not get anything she had come for, while they all had some sort of ordeal or revelation.
“What are you all talking about?” she barked. “I want to know right now. My assistant is missing. My two friends from Scotland disappear into thin air for ten minutes and they think it is tomorrow. I know nothing more than the name of the woman who killed a thief who stole from my family and still, I have no idea where to start looking for the deck. Now, for fuck’s sake, someone tell me something or I fire all of you right now!”