“So what did she promise them?”
“What?”
“Your grandmother? How did she get the wisps to cooperate?”
“Oh, imphood.”
“I remember being an imp. I don’t remember anything before. Maybe I started as a wisp, too. I don’t remember how long I was an imp. I remember being a familiar a few times, though.”
“A few times? So you’ve been to the material plane before?”
He nods. “The first time was 1250…no 1280. Pope Nicholas the Third had just died. Yes, 1280. We were in Sicily. My master was an ambitious man in the employ of Charles the First. He was always scheming. It was impressive, really, how he managed to keep all of his schemes organized considering how many people he was planning on stabbing in the back.”
“Who was he?”
“I...I don’t recall. I don’t even remember his name. I remember his face. He had a face like a discus with these beady eyes set back too far in his head. Big, bulbous nose that was always redder than the rest of his face. He was actually a funny looking fellow. I’m sure people would have laughed at him if not for his voice. He had a…terrifying voice. He spoke very little, but when he did his words were like a thousand razors. I only ever called him Master, though. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember his name?”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I just remember the link breaking and being sent back violently. I suspect he met the same end most ambitious men of that age did. Either a poisoner’s elixir or an assassin’s dagger. I can’t say I miss him.”
“I imagine you don’t. Look, Lee…”
“The second time was 1595. Him I remember. He was the Archmage of London’s Hawthworth Academy. He was a great fan of Shakespeare. We went to a lot of the performances. Is Hawthworth still there?”
“It was destroyed during the Great Fire in 1666.”
Lee chuckles nervously. “1666. Appropriate. I suppose. And ironic.”
“Lee…”
“I’ve only been a lemure for about a century. I don’t remember when I changed exactly. But…”
“Stop.” He drops his head to avoid eye contact. “Lee, you’re shaking.”
“I can’t help it. Still working on controlling the involuntary body actions. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize for it. But you keep talking over me. I’m trying to ask you a question and you keep talking over me.”
“I know what the question is.” He starts gently rocking back and forth in the chair. “I know what the question is. And the answer is yes. I could have killed you. I made a decision not to.”
“Why?”
“Justicars. Area seems to be crawling with them. Houston had already tagged me, so it wasn’t like I could hide forever. The tag wouldn't disappear if he died. The one was already camped in front of my parent’s house just waiting for a chance. When Houston told me, it was easy enough to manipulate the deal. I guess that time as a familiar wasn’t wasted after all.”
“Thanks for picking up lunch,” I say. “I have to get back to work.”
“Nancy…”
“You should probably get going. You’ll be late to your appointment.”
“Don’t be mad at me. I…don’t like people being mad at me. It…it doesn’t feel right.” He takes several quick breaths, like he’s having trouble breathing. His complexion has grown pale.
“I’m not mad, Lee,” I say. I walk around the desk to check on him. He’s starting to sweat. “Not at you. I’m mad at myself and at Houston. You just did what it’s in your nature to do. Can no more be mad at you than I can at a spider for catching a bug in a web.”
“Is that what I am to you?”
“Lee, you don’t look well.”
“Don’t send me away, please. I don’t want to leave you upset.” He takes my hand in his. “And I should be with you, to protect you. In case something happens. In case you need me.”
Houston comes bursting into my office. “What the hell is going on in here? What did you do to him?”
“I didn’t do anything to him!”
“Don’t argue. Please. I’m sorry.”
“Lee, it’s alright. You didn’t do anything!”
“What’s happening to him?”
“I’m not sure. Call your uncle. Tell him Lee is sick.”
“I’m sorry, Mistress. I’m so sorry.”
* * *
“Is he going to be OK?” asks Houston as he comes into the kitchen.
“He’s sleeping, now,” I reply as I pour a glass of wine. “He should be fine. I called him mother. Told her he was staying over for dinner. I didn’t want to worry her. Not even sure what I could have told her.”
“I never felt anything like that before. So much…I don’t even know what was.”
“It was a panic attack.”
“A demonic panic attack? I take it from the books on the table that shouldn’t have happened?”
“Yes and no. Demons are prone to panic attacks when cut off from their energy source. They’re very primal creatures. That’s why they tend to feed on the baser emotions of humans. Lust. Greed. Anger. What you were feeling back at the shop was a defensive mechanism. Like a pheromone that is supposed to trigger the desired base emotion.”
“Well, all I felt was sorry for him. It was like he was in pain.”
“He was.”
“What exactly happened back there?”
“I asked him about what happened in the barn. He confirmed what I had suspected. The only reason he didn’t kill us was because he didn’t think he could escape the Justicars in the area.”
“Damnit. I’m so stupid.”
I walk out of the kitchen and into the dining room. I’ve already pulled out some of my old primers and back issues of Demonology Today. I sit down at the table and start flipping through various sections on vices. Being anchored to the material plane is useless if the demon can’t feed its vice. Without a means to feed its vice, it will eventually starve and its material plane form will die. The ability to cut off a demon from its means of feeding, via a binding circle, is a warlock’s primary weapon. A binding circle does more than just keep a demon in place. If that was all it did, the demon could just outwait the warlock. What are two or three decades to a demon, after all? It’s the inability to feed that drives a demon to finally agree to a bargain.
“He kept begging me not to be mad at him,” I mutter. “Even after he confessed to thinking about killing me. He was very worried about me being mad. Even when you came in the room, he didn’t want us to argue.”
“That’s rather undemon-like, right?”
“On the surface, yeah. All demons have their preferred vice. The one that serves as their primary source of sustenance. But they generally won’t turn down other strong emotions. It’s like having someone put a bowl of popcorn in front of you even if you aren’t hungry. You’ll still pick at it.”
Houston sits next to me at the table. “Well, Lee’s vice I think we figured out was envy?”
“The two times he was on earth as a familiar, his masters were both men of ambition. They coveted power.”
“Then at some point he became a lemure and ends up in the body of a drug addict who didn’t have any ambition.”
“Lack of ambition doesn’t mean he wasn’t envious. He still coveted something. Need to figure out what.”
“So what are we not seeing?”
“I don’t know.” I get up from the table to check on dinner in the oven. When I come back into the dining room, Houston has my copy of Physiology of the Infernal open to a chapter on Gatekeepers.
“So what is Gatekeeper’s vice?” he asks.
“Wrath. So I wouldn’t try to sneak across that fence if I were you.”
“WOW, he must love when you visit. Feed for a week on your temper tantrums.”
“Hey!”
“Demons don’t have to feed off of just negative emotions, do they? Wouldn’t any strong emotions do?”
>
“We don’t really think about them in terms of negative or positive emotions. Primal emotions are based on the needs of the individual. We call them vices because, when they become the primary focus of an individual, the individual becomes a threat to society. Putting the needs of the self ahead of the needs of the whole. There is nothing inherently wrong with lust so long as all parties involved are willing and nobody is being hurt. But when that lust is so all-consuming that you don’t care who is hurt, then it becomes a problem.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Why do I even try to have serious conversations with you?”
“You are the one lusting again. I didn’t bring it up.”
“Anyway, what we call virtues are those emotions that are viewed as being helpful toward society. Charity, humility, kindness, and such. These actions help facilitate the growth of society. They also create their own energies, but they aren’t as powerful in the short term. They are sustained forms of energy.”
“Gotcha, like the difference between protein and carbs.”
“That’s…not a bad comparison actually. It’s also why a possessed body usually breaks down quickly. Primal emotions are kind of like junk food. Not a healthy diet.”
“So maybe Lee is trying to eat healthy. Couldn’t a demon make an effort to change their diet, just like a human?”
“That’s it! You’re brilliant!”
“I am? I mean, yeah. I’m awesome!”
“He covets love. He wants people to love him. When he talked about waking up in the hospital and his parents were there. They were so relieved that he was alive that they just became overwhelmed with love for their son. They had suppressed it for so long; it must have been like someone opening the floodgates. And he just soaked it in. Became, addicted to it. That’s why he bends over backwards to make them happy. He’s not trying to lower their guard. He’s trying to maintain the love for sustenance.”
“That’s good, right?”
“No, I mean, I’m not sure. Like I said about the line between love and obsession. The world is full of toxic relationships built on unhealthy love. Particularly when we’re dealing with a demon that doesn’t actually have empathy as we understand it. He’s acting in response to other people to try to trigger a specific reaction, but he doesn’t have a full empathic understanding of what those reactions mean. He just knows he likes the feeling it gives him.”
“That explains why he doesn’t want you mad at him. And the movie dates. And the flowers.”
“He wants me to love him.”
“Eh, you could do worse.”
I slap Houston’s arm.
* * *
“Do you want me to do the dishes?” asks Lee.
“That’s Houston’s job. You just relax.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“My job, huh? Am I on the clock?”
“Do I charge you rent?”
“I’ll clear the table.”
Lee and I go into the living room. He sits on the sofa and picks up a copy of Demonology Today from the pile of books we had moved from the table. “Don’t you guys have like three thousand years of research on demons? What do they possibly fill a monthly magazine with?”
“Mostly ads. The Dear Gladys column is pretty funny, though.”
Lee opens up the issue and flips through the pages. “’Dear Gladys. My succubus girlfriend’…did I just read that right?” I just hold up my hands. He continues reading the column to himself. His lips are moving, but he’s not vocalizing the words. He stops mid-paragraph. “Things sure have changed a lot since my time as a familiar.”
“Now you know how they fill a monthly magazine.”
“Thank you for dinner.”
“You’re welcome. Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry if I startled you. I don’t know what happened.”
“You had a panic attack. It’s not the first one I’ve seen in my life. We were worried.”
“Really? I don’t want you to worry, but I’m glad you care.”
“I know. I understand now.”
He looks up at me and turns pale pink. “What do you mean, you understand?”
“You like it when people are happy around you. You like people being happy because of you.”
“That’s good, though. Right? Making people happy, I mean. I want to make you happy.”
“I know. I believe you. But listen to me. I want you to promise me something.”
“I am bound to obey you, Mistress.”
“No, this isn’t an order as your Mistress. This isn’t a compulsion. It’s for your own good. This panic attack you had today, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Things may happen that are no fault of your own that will cause people to get upset at you, even if it isn’t with you specifically. I want you to promise me that you’ll work on trying to keep it under control. And I know that is hard. Demons aren’t renowned for delayed gratification. But sometimes trying too hard to make people around you happy can have the opposite effect. I’ve seen too many marriages where one spouse puts in all the effort and it’s never enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you are going to live in a human body you need to think about human interactions beyond your immediate needs. And it’s going to be hard. But there may be times when making one person happy will make another person mad. Or times when making someone happy at the moment could put them in danger. Think about your nieces. When you were playing in the pool with them.”
“They’re so happy. They love swimming in the pool.”
“Yeah, I saw that when I was there. But what would you do if one of them wanted to take the swimmies off and they got upset when their mom said ‘no.’?”
“Karen said they were too young to be in the pool without the swimmies.”
“Right. What would happen if they took the swimmies off?”
“They could get hurt.”
“You see what I’m saying, now?”
“I don’t want them to get hurt. Then they wouldn’t be happy anymore. Karen wouldn’t be happy. This is gonna be hard, isn’t it?”
“Being human is.”
In the Cards
August 29th
“I think I killed someone!”
That is really not what I want to hear coming out of the mouth of an employee as I walk in the door.
“Annie, you didn’t kill anyone,” says Houston. “She was an old lady.”
“But it was in the cards. I saw it, but I didn’t tell her about it but I should have and maybe she would have been more careful and now she’s dead!”
Gods help me. The damn tarot cards.
Anastasia recently acquired a tarot card deck. With everything else going on, I didn’t give it much thought at the time. She wouldn’t be the first teen wannabe witch to buy a tarot card deck at the mall. She got this bright idea to start offering free tarot card readings on Monday nights to customers who purchase $25 or more worth of stuff. Some marketing gimmick she learned out of her mother’s business books.
I didn’t supervise the readings, but with all of the laughing and giggling going on during the sessions I didn’t think anything of it. Customers were happy. Business is up. I had paperwork to do.
Houston hugs Anastasia and pats her on the back. “It’s fine.” He shakes his head at me and rolls his eyes. “Everything’s OK.”
“Honey, why don’t you go lay down in the office for a little bit.” She continues to sob as she stumbles into my office and closes the door. I turn my attention to Houston. “What happened?”
“Everything was fine. Then she got a phone call from one of her girlfriends that told her a lady she gave a tarot card reading to had died. And then you saw from there. Vera Martins I think?”
“Oh, Mrs. Martins. That’s a shame. But she’s been sick for a while now. Her hip replacement didn’t go well and it was giving her trouble.”
“Well, Anastasia thinks she killed her.”
“By th
e gods. I should go talk to her.”
I go into the office to find her curled up in a ball on the couch. I pull a chair over to her and sit down. “Anastasia,” she doesn’t respond. “Margaret.” She looks up at me when I say her real name. “Mrs. Martins was already very sick from her surgery. You didn’t have anything to do with her death.”
“But I saw it in the cards!”
“Even if that is true, there is nothing you could have done for her. You aren’t a doctor. It would have just distressed her.”
“That’s what I figured when I saw it, but I wasn’t sure if I should say it or not because what if I was wrong or something and she got upset and she wasn’t supposed to die, right? But I was right and now she’s dead and I keep thinking if I had warned her she could have done something. Like not tried to walk down her basement steps with a bad hip.”
“You know, just because the Death card appears doesn’t mean death.”
“I know that. I totally did all the research and studied it first because I didn’t want to freak someone out telling them they would die or anything. I’ve been really good with my readings too they have been so accurate.”
I chuckle. “I’m sure they have been very accurate. You take your work seriously.”
“Yeah, I have to because I don’t like want to rip people off if they bought enough stuff to qualify for the free reading and then think I wasn’t taking it serious because I totally do.”
“I know you do.”
“Like I told Mrs. Welleby she was going to have a baby and she was like ‘No I’m not, the doctor said I can’t have kids’ and I was like ‘No, really the cards completely say you are going to have a baby’ and like the other day she told me she was pregnant and I was all ‘see, I told you so!’ And then my friend Tina, I did her reading and told her that her Dad was coming home from Afghanistan and she was all ‘but my mom said his tour isn’t up until the end of the year’ and then BAM! He hurt his foot in the field and they sent him home.”
“Those are very precise reading, Anastasia.”
“I studied really hard.”
“Where did you get the deck, anyway? I don’t think you showed it to me.”
nancy werlock's diary s01 - episodes 1-7 Page 23