“You Morgana?”
She cracks a smile and nods slowly. “Come on in, cutie,” she purrs, tilting her head toward the entrance of her apartment. “Those scrapes on your face look pretty nasty.” She says as she walks in.
“And you haven’t seen the rest of me yet.” I say, thinking about the burns on my arm. I follow her in.
Her apartment is nothing like the rest of the building. The walls are painted red and black, and the chairs and couches are either covered in red or white velvet. The curtains are shut tight over the windows, but at least there are windows, in case I need to jump out and escape if things go haywire, and they very well could.
But here’s hoping that it won’t come to that.
Three kids, all of them around Henrick’s age, are sitting on the floor on top of an elaborate golden rug with Indian designs on it. They’re drinking beers and sharing a bong.
“Seems like fun,” I mumble nervously, pointing at the kids. “I’d join them if I weren’t running for my life.” Morgana narrows her eyes at me, looking like a lioness ready to pounce on her prey. I gulp. “It was a joke,” I add nervously.
“I know.” She says, sitting down on the red velvety couch and patting the spot next to her. I sit down, and she crosses her legs, props her shoulder on the top of the couch and leans her head on her hand.
“So tell me, handsome,” she says, flashing me a very white smile, “why are you here?”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat. One of the boys on the rug exhales a long string of smoke.
“Oh, don’t mind them,” Morgana says nonchalantly. “They’re all high as a kite. I bet they haven’t even noticed you’re here.”
“Beatrice sent me here,” I say, a little chilled. “She said you could help me.”
Morgana puts a finger to her lips and narrows her eyes. “Yes, I remember Beatrice called me three days ago and told me about a certain David or Daniel or something like that.” She muses, her eyes looking up at the ceiling as if trying to recall something.
“She told me…” I stop and lower my voice, “that you specialized in ritual magic and that you could offer me protection.”
“Is that what my dear Beatrice calls it now?” she says, an edge to her voice. “Ritual magic?” She stares at her fingernails for a second before continuing. “How quaint. Anyway, what kind of protection are you seeking, Daniel Maze?”
I take a deep breath before speaking. “I’m being followed by my kind, by The Children of the Sun. Maybe also by the Immortals, who knows.” I say. “How do both of these tribes know things, Morgana? What allows them to track me down?”
“No need for rhetorical questions.” Her lips part in a small smile. “You want to shield yourself from the vision of witches so you can run someplace far away and live in peace.”
I nod. “Can you help me?”
She cocks her head to one side and looks at me curiously. “You’re not wasting any time. You must be in an awful rush. Whatever did you do for your own kind to be chasing after you?”
I look away.
“So we have secrets, don’t we?” She laughs out loud and the hairs on my arms stand up. “Relax, honey. I don’t really care.” She says, scooting closer towards me. “I’ll help you.”
I sigh in relief and put my face in my hands, feeling a hundred pounds lighter. I might make it out of this mess alive after all.
“But I’ll need something in return.”
And there it is. I should’ve seen it coming… witches don’t do favors. They make bargains, instead. She chuckles at what I assume is my defeated expression and leans in toward me. “I know why you’ve run away,” she says, her breath tickling my ear. “You’re evolving.”
In an instant, my whole body goes into alert-mode, adrenaline rushing through my veins. My gaze flickers toward the window for the tiniest of seconds. It’s not too late to jump. “And how do you know that?” I ask her as calmly as I can.
“I can see it in your eyes,” she whispers, pulling away from me slowly, her gaze filled with an unnamed lust.
I swallow, ignoring all the alarm bells going off in my head that are screaming at me to run away.
I stay.
I have no choice.
I sit up and cross my arms. “What do you want?”
She leans back and looks at her fingernails again. “There is nothing that you have that I’m interested in.” She says, and I feel my stomach drop. “You’re still nothing and nobody.” She continues. Her eyes flicker, and I can sense dangerous thoughts lurking in her mind, even if I have no idea what they’re about.
She uncrosses her legs and scoots closer to me. “What do you say, Sun-Child?” Her mouth is just inches from mine, and I can smell her breath on my mouth. It smells of roses.
“To what?”
“To being indebted to me.” She says. “As payment for your protection.”
I raise an eyebrow. “So you can cash in on my part of the bargain whenever it’s convenient for you.”
“Handsome and smart.” She says. “I like you more and more.”
I sigh. This is wrong, not to mention perilous. But I want to survive, and this is my only chance. “All right,” I finally say, straightening up. “I’ll be indebted to you if you give me the protection I’m asking for.”
She beams, clapping her hands. “Marvelous. Now let’s get things ready for our little… ritual.” She gets up, but I grab her arm before she walks away. “No one… and I mean no one… can ever find me.”
She narrows her eyes at me and pulls her arm away. “Save it, boy.” She says, turning up her nose at me. “My magic is fullproof.”
She walks toward the kids, turning her back on me. I don’t know what I’m getting myself into, and I really don’t want to be indebted to someone like Morgana, but anything is better than being dead, right?
Right?
“Everybody out!” Morgana shouts, kicking a few kids on the back. They grunt and whine.
“But you said you’d let us stay the week,” a pasty-faced boy with dreadlocks says.
“Out, I said! Out, out, out!” She opens the door for them, and they reluctantly get up and leave. She grabs the last kid in line by the collar of her shirt and holds her back before closing the door in the other kid’s faces. She’s a small, thin girl with jet-black hair and bags under her eyes. She couldn’t be older than fifteen.
“You stay,” Morgana says, her voice saccarine sweet. The girl doesn’t respond. Her eyes are glazed over, and she seems completely oblivious to her surroundings. In other words, this is one stoned chick.
“Wait, what are you going to do with her?” I say, suddenly worried.
“Squeamish, are you?”
“I don’t want anything to happen to her.” I say, voice hard. The hell am I going to be responsible for the death of another innocent person.
Morgana rolls her eyes. “Don’t worry, she’ll live. All we need is a witness. You know, for the magic to work properly.” She closes the door and pushes the girl toward the center of the rug. I raise an eyebrow. “Witch stuff.” She says, shrugging. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“What’s going on?” the girl says, slurring her words. A hint of lucidity crosses her eyes.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Morgana says sweetly at the same time she pushes the girl to the floor. She falls to her knees and then sits down, cross-legged, feeling the rug with her hands absentmindedly. “We just need you to watch, okay, honey?” The girl’s eyes glaze over again, and she smiles stupidly.
At this point, I don’t know how much of that is because of the drugs, or because of Morgana’s influence on her.
“You too,” she orders me, pointing to the spot in the middle of the rug. I do as she tells me and sit beside the girl, feeling awkward and nervous and strangely curious all at the same time.
“There’s one thing I need you to understand before we proceed,” Morgana says. She walks around me in circles. I follow her with my eyes, not daring to blink.
<
br /> “This isn’t ritual magic, Sun-Child,” she says. “What we are about to do is Blood Magic. Black magic.”
My heart thumps in my chest. I expected something like this. But expecting it and being told flat out are two very different things.
“But there’s one thing I can guarantee.” She flashes her two perfect rows of bleach-white teeth at me. “It’s effective.”
The air in the room becomes dense all of a sudden. It is heavy and constricting and hot. I feel myself begin to suffocate, and I open my mouth to gasp for oxygen, but none enters my lungs. Cold sweat runs down my temples, and I clutch my legs, my nails burrowing into my jeans.
“What’s… happening…?” I manage to say. The words burn in my throat.
“Try to relax.” She looks down at me with an expression of delight in her face, like she’s having fun or something. “It’ll be over in a minute.”
What the fuck did I get myself into?
I feel dizzy. The room darkens, and everything starts to spin. I see dark shadows flitting across the room, descending upon me like hawks, even pecking me, making me flinch in pain before they pull away. I swat at them, but they always seem out of reach.
“Don’t do that,” Morgana scolds me. “Hold still.”
I do, even though the shadows continue to come closer and closer, painfully eating away at me little by little. When I’m about to pass out, I feel something tug at me from the inside. Something familiar.
My power.
I close my eyes, feeling it surge within me. But it’s different this time. I don’t feel the need to heal or kill. It’s almost as if the power just wants to exist… just wants to be.
“Open your eyes,” Morgana’s cold, shrill voice commands. It comes from far away.
I’m drowning in a sea of golden, warm light. It protects me from the shadows. I can still see them, but they’re not drawing any nearer. The golden light acts as a barrier between me and them. It protects me from everything.
The power hugs me from the inside out, tightening itself around me like a lover’s embrace. I cherish it, love it, become one with it, and slowly start to breathe again, the air returning to my lungs. The power saves me.
Then something pulls at it, something dark and unknown, and no matter how hard I try to hold on, the golden light fades, crawling back to the deepest place inside myself, where I can’t reach. I am left in absolute darkness.
“Open your eyes,” Morgana says again, or is it the first time she says this?
I open them and look up at her. Everything is extremely colorful. Reality looks more… tangible. My senses are heightened, like an owl’s or panther’s or another animal of prey. And then I realize that’s what I am.
I’m an animal of prey.
Morgana holds a sword, a long and heavy-looking sword with dragon figures carved on the handle. The sharpened blade gleams in the dark.
“Take off your shirt and turn around.”
I stand up, unable to disobey. I take off my sweaty, grimy shirt and drop it to the floor, next to the vacant-eyed girl who is staring off into the distance, completely oblivious to everything.
“Kneel,” Morgana tells me.
I kneel.
“Listen very carefully to what I’m going to say, Sun-Child, and repeat after me.” Her voice slows, and the room spins around me again. But there are no more shadows in the apartment. The only beings left are Morgana, the stoned chick, and me. What a merry bunch of fuck-ups… I think to myself before losing my balance and almost falling to the floor.
I put a hand to the rug to steady myself. Focus, Daniel. You have to focus.
“In this dark hour, I ask of thee…”
I repeat what she says, my voice clear.
“To cast a shadow over me.”
I feel the tip of the sword at the base of my neck. It cuts through my skin, and hot pain shoots across all the nerve-endings in my body. But I don’t move, and my voice doesn’t falter, even as the sword cuts deeply through my skin, deep enough to leave scars. I feel the blood roll off my back in thick streams.
“May night protect me, a Sun-God’s Child, may my plight be heard, may the moon accept my offering, and drink from the wells of my soul.”
I repeat everything she says through gritted teeth even though I don’t understand or even remember any of it after. I sweat and shiver at the same time, and all I can do not to lose consciousness is focus on how the hot blood feels as it runs down my back.
“I, Daniel Maze, ask for protection in my hour of need. Grant it, oh moon, and hereafter until the end of my life, I will be indebted to thee.”
We repeat the last verse three times before Morgana finally pulls her sword away.
“It is done,” she whispers, dropping her sword. It clangs on the floor, the only sound in a world of silence.
A breeze comes over us. Even though all the windows are shut, I think I hear a faraway voice whisper in my ear. I don’t understand what it’s saying, but it sounds…comforting. A moment later, my senses diminish to their usual focus, and the breeze is gone, along with whatever it was whispering to me. Morgana falls to her knees beside me, letting out a big breath of air. I try to get up, but every time I move, a fresh wave of pain envelops my entire body. I groan.
“Try not to move,” she says, sounding tired. “I’ll get the salve.” She gets up and walks away. I hear the sound of rusty door hinges opening and closing and manage to turn around and sit down, my back still stinging. The sword lies on the floor, its tip bloodied. It gleams dangerously. There are pieces of flesh in it. My flesh. I look away quickly, feeling sick. The girl is still dope-eyed and completely out of it.
Lucky her.
The door opens again, and Morgana walks toward me. She’s holding a transparent round plastic container with a green, disgusting-looking liquid inside. She helps me stand up and turns me around. I try to keep my arms still as much as I can, because every time I move them, darts of pain erupt all over my skin.
“This will sting a bit…”
I laugh. “Can’t get any worse than this.”
She opens the container and digs two fingers into the oozy stuff, taking out a very generous amount and spreading it gently over my back. The first moment her fingers touch my cuts, my skin sears with fire. I inhale sharply and hold up a fist to my mouth to keep me from crying out loud.
Then the pain subsides, and cool waves of relief penetrate into my skin. My cuts still throb, but the pain isn’t sharp and intolerable anymore. She also takes a little bit of the salve and rubs it in the scrapes on my face and hands, as well as on the burn on my arm. Her touch is gentle, completely different from the hand that held the sword that incised itself through my back a moment ago.
“Thanks,” I say, sighing in relief. “That’s much better.”
“I’m glad it works.” She gives me a small smile. She has dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before, and her skin looks pale and gaunt. She hands me an envelope.
“Here are your documents.” She says as I take it. “Fake license, social security number, even passport, among other things. Everything you could possibly need.”
So she was expecting me.
I open the envelope and stare at the name on the documents. “Daniel Mabe? Seriously?”
She shrugs. “I don’t get paid to be creative.”
“I can see that.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Come, I’ll show you the symbol of protection the sword drew on you.” She takes my arm and leads me to the bathroom, turning on the fluorescent lights. They contrast vividly with the heavy, musky darkness of the rest of her place, and I squint my eyes until I get adjusted to it.
“What do you mean, the sword?” I ask, perplexed.
“I was in a trance when I drew it on your back,” she explains. “Witches won’t be able to see where you are or what you’re doing as long as you carry the symbol on you at all times. Luckily for you”—one side of her mouth curls up—“the sword drew de
ep. Your scars will remain with you forever.”
“Oh, lucky me.”
“You are.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Your power is strong within you. You should be thankful it loves you so much.” Before I can ask her what in the world she means, she turns me around so my back faces the mirror.
“Look…” she whispers, her expression smug. “I half-expected it, anyway.”
I turn my head and look at the mirror. In the reflection, I see the image of a large, bloodied sun carved deep into my back.
PART II
“No one here gets out alive.”
Jim Morrison
Rickshaw
It’s a still and sleepless night. I lie down on my mattress and stare at the ceiling, my mind wandering aimlessly. I’ve been in the small, dull town of Rickshaw, Montana, for a little less than four months now. Rickshaw, population 5,000 is a small enough town that I’m sure none of my kind will stumble upon me by accident, but big enough that I don’t slit my veins out of absolute boredom. Still, my life is mostly a blur of uneventful days and lonely nights.
I have no friends, unless you count my boss as a friend, which I don’t, even if the occasional pleasantries we exchange are the only type of human interaction I have on a daily basis. Oh, I work at a sports shop now.
Yay for me.
What can I say? I need the money, and I also need something to do lest I go insane.
I tried living in Minneapolis for a while, but I didn’t relate to the city. So I wandered for a few months from place to place until my money ran out. I was in Rickshaw when it did. I decided to get a job, thinking I could save up some and continue living in cheap motels across the country for as long as I needed to. Truth was, I didn’t feel like settling down. No place felt right, not without her.
But then Rickshaw grew on me. It was a peaceful place. I stopped living in motels and rented a more permanent place with my new income. At first, I was sort of happy. I tried making friends by chatting up people at the park and stuff, but then I realized I could never let anyone in my life. I’d have to lie to them about my past, and I didn’t have the energy for that. So I stopped trying.
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