by C. E. Murphy
I almost laughed. It hadn’t been that long ago when I thought forty was pretty old, too, and I wasn’t sure exactly when the idea that it wasn’t had settled in my mind. Or when eighteen-year-olds started looking like kids, for that matter. “Late thirties, anyway.”
“Old,” Faye agreed, nodding. “Too bad.”
“Why? Is he your type?”
“Ew!” She leaned back, stretching her mouth in horror. “I was thinking you could date him, jeez.”
“Me? He’s my boss, Faye.”
“So? Like people don’t have work relationships?”
“I don’t,” I said firmly. Then, hoping to sidetrack her, I asked, “Where’s Garth?”
“I don’t know where he is.” For the first time, I saw Faye look a little uncertain. Then it cleared, replaced by the sunny look. “But he’ll be here. He’s never let us down. Tonight we give the spirits body. He won’t want to miss that.”
“All those things we let loose last night? Body like real physical body? So there’ll be monsters tromping around?”
“Magic,” Faye corrected me, happily. “Magic, finally returned to the world.”
“Only Seattle, for the moment,” Marcia said above me. I looked up, watching her colors inverse. I was getting used to it. I almost couldn’t tell what was the right color and what wasn’t anymore, except I was pretty sure the frosted ends of Marcia’s hair hadn’t glowed purple when I first met her.
“Only Seattle?”
“We still give the spirits their strength in roaming this world,” Marcia said. “We’re still their link, and so for now they can’t travel far from us. When Virissong himself has crossed back into our realm, then they’ll be free and the world will share what Seattle has already come to know. That’s tomorrow night, the final binding of the spirits to their bodies. That’ll bring Virissong to us in his whole and complete form. And it may take some time,” she admitted. “Even when we’ve brought him across, it’ll take a while for him to regain his full strength. He’s been away from this world a long time.”
“Yeah.” I suddenly felt much better. Seattle was a tangible scale. Knowing the light show and the spirits were confined to the immediate area was surprisingly reassuring. The coven held enough power to clean up any messes that went wrong, in a Seattle-sized scale. Hell, I held enough power, if it came down to it, although I didn’t like thinking that way. It made goose bumps run up and down my arms, and made my stomach queasy. Still, I thought it was true.
And no matter how I tried, I didn’t truly believe Virissong was up to no good. He was tremendously powerful, but I’d spoken with him and shared memories with him, and his desire to help his people three thousand years ago had been a genuine one. Tangled with ambition, maybe, but there wasn’t anything wrong with a little ambition. Without it, he wouldn’t still want to try to save this world, the one I lived in now. The one I’d screwed up.
I stood up, abruptly bubbling with energy. The oppressive heat seemed to fade away a little. “All right,” I said. The enthusiasm in my voice wasn’t forced, and it surprised not just me, but several others of the coven, who all looked toward me as if I’d sprouted wings. “Let’s go ahead and shake this city around a little. Do we need a fire like we did last night? We can get that started so it’ll be ready when Garth gets here.”
My ears began to burn and itch in the silence that followed. Faye and Marcia glanced at each other, then at everyone else, then at the trees—everywhere, in fact, but at me.
“What? What’d I say?”
Faye cleared her throat delicately. “We need a fire, but it isn’t the same kind of ritual.”
“Well, then, what is it? Do we all get naked and dance around trees and yodel to the moon this time? This is all new to me, guys. I don’t know wh—” It took that long for the slight smiles to register in my mind. The smiles that had started with “get naked.” “Uh,” I said, very loudly in the faintly grinning silence. “Uh. Guys?”
“It’s a ritual of body.” Faye’s eyes were very, very wide. So wide, in fact, that I suspected she was holding them that way deliberately, to keep herself from laughing. “It’s a, um…”
“Sexual ritual,” Marcia said dryly. Faye blushed. I backed up so fast I fell over.
“What? A what? A what?”
“Performed specifically by the Mother and the Father,” Marcia went on. I shot one horrified look at the Father—I couldn’t even remember his name—and was offended to see that he looked just as dismayed, if less surprised, as I felt. Then I remembered I didn’t care if he didn’t want to have sex with me, because, “I am not having sex with him!” Pause. “No offense.”
He waved his hand in an understanding gesture, his expression bordering on strangled. I scrambled to my feet and put my hands on my hips. “No way, no how, no way—”
“But you must,” Marcia protested.
I overrode her, my voice getting louder and louder as I repeated, “No way, no how, no WAY—!” It wasn’t the most eloquent argument I’d ever made, but it was right up there in the running for most heartfelt.
Garth pulled into the parking lot before we went through another iteration. We all broke off to watch him park. He tumbled out of the car nearly before the ignition was off, taking a dozen long steps to me.
I had never actually been swept off my feet before. Garth, who didn’t have the height advantage, managed it. He lifted me off my feet and spun me around in such a tremendous hug that my back popped. I staggered when he put me down, and he grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me. I gaped while the coven members laughed and broke into applause. “The part of the Father will be played by Garth tonight,” someone said in a dry, amused tone. Garth picked me up and spun me around again.
“They say they’ve never seen anything like it.” His grip on my shoulders hurt, when he put me down the second time. He shook me, a little vibration that felt like it wanted to explode into enthusiastic violence. “It’s like all his healthy cells finally noticed the cancer and are all like, ‘What’s this bullshit going on?’ They’re tearing it apart, Joanne. He’s getting better!”
More applause erupted around us. The coven moved in like a swarm of bees, hugging and back-patting and cheering, getting close and making contact despite the sticky heat. I stood there staring at Garth, feeling a slow, crooked smile start to work its way across my face. “Seriously?” I asked beneath the coven’s happy babble. Garth nodded so hard I thought his head might pop off.
“You should see him, Joanne. You’ve got to come see him as soon as we’re done here tonight. You won’t recognize him.”
“I will,” I promised. “I will, as soon as—I am not having sex with him!”
Garth’s jaw dropped in horrified astonishment, eyes going round. “Not Colin,” I said impatiently. “—the Father.” Crap. I still couldn’t remember his name.
“Duane,” he offered.
“Duane! I am not having sex with Duane!”
“Joanne, can’t we discuss this reasonably? It’s an act of sharing and—” Marcia honestly sounded like she expected to get her own way. I set my jaw and dug my heels into the ground.
“No. No, we can’t. I appreciate that there’s power in sex, okay? I even appreciate that we’re trying to save the world, here. And you know what? I can even appreciate that maybe Cassandra was willing to go through with this, but I’m guessing she knew Duane here. How long’d she been with the coven?”
The corners of Marcia’s mouth pulled down. “Two years.”
“And Duane?”
“We only brought this coven together a year ago,” Duane said. “I used to work with an all-male coven. Still, you’re right. We’d discussed this ritual pretty thoroughly and had worked out our discomfort. Marcia, you know it’s not going to work with unwilling participants anyway. I’m not any more comfortable with this than Joanne is. No offense,” he said back to me, and I waved it off just like he had.
“Nothing else has the required power.” Marcia kept fro
wning. “Have we come this far to turn back now?”
“I am not,” I said adamantly, “having sex with Duane. I’m sorry if I’m screwing up your ritual, but there are limits. We’re going to have to find another way.”
“There is another way.” Faye’s voice was deep and hollow. We all turned to stare at her, alarmed sounds erupting from everyone’s throats. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, glowing bright black in my frustrating vision. “He guides me.” She sounded like her tongue had fallen back into her throat, making her words thick and glottal. “We have to hurry.”
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance or something?” I asked nervously. No one paid me any heed. Marcia and Garth stepped forward to take Faye’s elbow, leading her around a parking bumper and toward the woods. The rest of the coven flowed around them, hurrying forward until I was the only one left in the parking lot. At the last moment Duane turned back, expression curious. “Aren’t you coming?”
I flung my hands up. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. Wait up.” I jogged over asphalt and caught up with him, walking into the woods with everyone else.
* * * *
It took absurdly little time for the fire to build up. It was as if the branches sucked the heat right out of the air and turned it into flame. Well, it was like that except the air certainly didn’t get any cooler, and the fire’s dry crackle didn’t seem to wipe any of the mugginess from the air. I felt like somebody’d wrapped my head in a wet wool blanket and put me down to roast.
Faye was still functioning with her eyes rolled back in her head, bright blackness tracking like she could see. I was the only one who seemed disturbed by it, which struck me as wrong. How did people get used to weirdness being an ordinary part of their everyday lives?
By accepting. I puffed out my cheeks until air squeaked through my lips, and sat down on a log to wait out the preparations.
Five of the coven members, including Garth, had finished drawing a tremendously large circle around the fire. Where trees intersected the circle, they’d stopped and spoken with the tree before doing what looked like drawing a thread through a needle, where the tree was the needle and the circle, the thread. It was extremely polite. I had the peculiar feeling I could feel the trees’ pleasure at being asked to take part in the ritual. I wondered if anybody’d asked the branches in the fire if they’d like to be burned. Probably.
They stood at five points. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they were the points of a pentagram. I worried my bottom lip, thought of heeding my teacher and accepting and honoring, and tried to see. Rather: to See.
I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t know if it was my own reluctance, or if it was that they practiced a different kind of magic, or if it was something else entirely. If I stared at the fire and unfocused my eyes, I could almost see the lines of power misting up like gray fog between the five points of the pentagram. They came up one at a time, from Garth to Roxie, behind my left shoulder, then to Sam the underwear model off in front of my right shoulder. Five lines, all of them nearly touching the fire, making it the pentagram’s heart. The five creators murmured a binding spell—I assumed it was a binding spell, and tried not to wonder where that particular bit of knowledge had swum up from—and then stepped away from their points in the circle, the pentagram completed.
The circle itself shimmered very faintly, just like the air had been doing all day with heat. It had a sense of purpose to it: the intent to disguise, although not to hide entirely. To an outsider, it would look like more trees and grass, as if the circle were reflecting the natural state around it. I knew if I left the circle now, I’d be able to see them, because I knew they were there, but random passersby wouldn’t see any more than I had last night. No wonder the coven preferred to meet outdoors. The illusion wouldn’t work nearly as well inside.
“We’re ready.”
I startled out of my contemplation of the circle and got to my feet. The rest of the six stood together, Faye pointed in slightly the wrong direction, her rolled-back eyes wide. I fought off a shudder and shoved my hands in my pockets. “Okay, so what do we do?”
Marcia frowned at me. She was good at that. Very imposing. I hunched my shoulders and felt a little smaller. “Do you agree to partake in this ritual willingly, Joanne?” Beside her, the Elder asked Duane the same question. He said yes. I squinted.
“There’s no sex, right?”
Everyone but Faye looked exasperated at me. Faye looked exasperated at something over my left shoulder. I stuck my jaw out, stubborn. I wanted a guarantee on this one before I went through with it. Marcia sighed rather dramatically.
“There is no sex.”
“Okay. I agree, then. But no sex.”
“Give me your hand.”
I eyed Duane, who put his own hand out to the Elder without a fuss. I shrugged and put my hand out, too. “Okay.”
Marcia sliced her fingernails against my palm and laid the flesh open to the bone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I stared at the blood welling up with an astounded sense of deja vu. It would hurt. Pretty soon it was going to hurt a lot. The bone was already gone, hidden by pooling blood. Yep. Any second now, it was going to hurt a whole lot. But right now, pure astonishment was keeping the pain at bay. It was very interesting. I blinked up at Marcia, wondering if she would suddenly reveal herself to actually be my teacher.
She didn’t. She looked just like herself. “Blood binds us to this earth,” she said sonorously. “Put your hand together with Duane’s.”
“That seems like a bad idea.” One of the things I got to learn at police academy was how diseases like hepatitis were spread. Smearing bloody hands with somebody else wasn’t the best way to avoid that sort of thing.
“For pity’s sake, Joanne! Must everything be difficult with you? Get a bowl,” Marcia snapped to someone else. I cupped my left hand beneath my right, catching blood that was now flowing over and between my fingers. It still didn’t hurt. For the moment, I was grateful.
“I’m not trying to be difficult.” I really wasn’t. If I was trying, I’d have gone tearing off to an emergency room, at the very least. “Just, you know. AIDS, hepatitis, all that sort of thing. We didn’t exactly exchange blood tests, you know?” I thought I was being very reasonable, for somebody who was dripping her own blood all over the place. It probably helped that it didn’t hurt yet. Neither, I remembered, had the cut on my face that had left the thin scar on my cheek. I nearly lifted my hand to touch the scar, but Marcia grabbed my wrist with a painful grip. “Ow!”
Then my palm started to hurt. It was worse, shockingly, than having a sword stuffed into my lung. That had just been going to kill me. This was crippling. I could conceivably be unable to use my left hand again. The line of pain burned up my arm and all the way down into my stomach, making me heave. If Marcia hadn’t had an iron grip on my wrist I’d have fallen. I wasn’t particularly grateful for the prevention. I wanted to scream, but my teeth were clenched together and my throat was locked up, so I just stood there staring at my bleeding hand. The edges of the wound pulsed with my heartbeat, blood popping up in little bursts with each thud. My stomach rolled again, cold sweat sticking my tank top along my spine.
Someone pushed an earthenware bowl beneath my hand and Marcia turned it palm down. My fingers curled over my palm all on their own, which gave me hope that the tendons were all right. Blood splooshed into the bowl, then began dripping down my hand like macabre finger-paint. After a moment Duane’s hand joined mine above the bowl, his blood pooling down into it as well. I could feel it when it mingled with mine, tiny electric shocks snapping back up into my hand like drops of blood reversing their fall. It stung all the way up into the nerve in my elbow, and made my stomach twist again. I felt cooler for the first time in days, like all the sunburned heat was running out of my body through the cut in my palm.
I looked up to see Duane’s face as white as mine felt, his nose pinched and strong lines standing out around his mouth. “Well, cr
ap,” I whispered. My voice sounded like it came from far away, possibly another planet entirely. “Next time, let’s go for sex.”
His laugh cracked over me like a whip, a sharp sound of surprise that made us both wince. Then we were leaning on each other for support, shrieking with laughter that was mixed with tears. Marcia and the Elder kept the bowl beneath our outstretched hands, but the rest of the coven stood back nervously, dismayed by our howls of laughter. I couldn’t have explained it to them if I’d tried, but Duane and I got it. We kept leaning on each other, giggling, until my knees went out and I hit the ground in a silent rush.
When I woke up my hand was bandaged. Duane was sitting up a few feet away from me, cradling his own hand, swathed in bandages as well. He looked as sick as I still felt, all the desperate humor gone from his eyes. My palm throbbed so badly I could feel it in the back of my throat and in my stomach. If I made it through the rest of the night without puking, it would be just shy of a miracle.
I rolled to hands and knees, or more accurately, hand and knees, my left hand curled up against my chest, and hitched over to Duane. “Give me your hand.”
He looked wary. “No offense, but last time somebody said that.”
A bubble of laughter popped through the nausea, making me feel better for about two-thirds of a second. I managed a smile. “No more bleeding. Promise.” I didn’t know what was going on around us. Marcia said, “She’s awake,” but no one came to check on us. Duane, who looked too tired to argue, gave me his hand. I cupped it in my right, afraid to even try touching anything with the left. “Do you believe in magic, Duane?” All things considered, it was a ridiculous question.
He half smiled and shrugged. “Yes, I do.”
“S’good. Close your eyes.” I closed mine, partly because I was too tired to keep them open. The heat had come back while I wasn’t paying attention. I felt it bearing down into the cut on my hand as if it were trying to get in. I didn’t have the energy to keep it out.
My heartbeat, thick and slow, matching the throb in my hand, was enough of a drumbeat to put me under. The heat probably helped, too, and maybe the blood loss.