I saw my arm then. The patterns that Dionne had drawn on me in oil were now livid on my skin, thin red lines like burns or scratches. I lifted my shirt enough to see them on my belly too. They were everywhere. “I made it.” I didn’t quite believe it. “I’m kind of fucked up, but I made it.”
I told them what had happened. What I’d seen, how there had been so many bogeys, how I’d thought the channeling would tear me apart. I told them about Charlie and the others. I told them about Rosa Vermelha’s intervention. I saw my friends’ faces change as it all sank in.
“Holy shit.” Dionne rubbed her face.
“Soul retrieval,” said Tamar. “You’re going to need to find someone who can do that for you. That’s how you get those pieces back.”
“We knew when it happened,” said Cherry. “The sigil on your forehead was visible, sort of, and then it wasn’t, and you started chanting the words of the incantation, and this, this light ran all over the lines on your body. It was like watching a line of gunpowder burn. It left marks. You were making noise and writhing and your eyes rolled up, and then you pulled on the thread, and Tamar got us to try to pull you out, but for a little while you just lay there. You were quiet and breathing but you couldn’t hear us and we were afraid to try to take you out of it.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I needed that time, seems like.”
“God, you scared us,” murmured Joe. I squeezed his hand.
We all fell silent for a long time.
“How long until the burn?” I asked as it hit me that I had no idea what time it was.
Tamar checked her watch. “About seven hours. Not a lot of time.”
“What does that mean, about the true name?” said Sara. “About it being hidden near him?”
“Maybe a true name is like a soul?” said Cherry. “There’s some old folk tales where the bad guy is immortal because he puts his soul inside something and hides that thing and the hero has to find the soul in order to kill the bad guy.”
Tamar gave her a proud look and Cherry beamed. “Could be, sure. It could be a sound, an object, a symbol. Whatever it is, it ain’t gonna be sitting around out here in one of the Morph art pieces, that’s for sure.”
“Unless anyone’s got a hot lead on it, we gotta focus on tonight,” said Dionne. “It sounds like there’s a whole shitstorm brewing in his joint. Defense tonight, offense tomorrow. Right?”
“Right,” said Sara. “But lunch first. We all need some grounding.”
I had to be helped to my feet, and I staggered when I stood up. I felt lightheaded and queasy. But then I thought of Vivi and was flooded with determination to pull myself together and be ready for whatever we would face.
Sara put a plate in my hand. “Still with us, Mari?”
“What?” I shook myself and blinked. “Oh. Yeah. Just--zoned for a minute.”
“You need food. Good, you finished your water. I’ll get you more.”
“Thanks, Mom.” I was almost too tired to smile.
She ran her fingertips down the side of my face and her eyes glittered, sly. “That’s right, you just do whatever Mama says.”
Everyone else was settling in around me in the patch of shade we’d staked out, tucking into thick sandwiches and bags of snacks like we’d never eaten. Once again I offered up silent thanks for the Radicals’ abundant food and willingness to share it.
Dionne cleared her throat. “We got a problem.”
“A problem?” Joe shot her a look.
“Fine. A new problem. Mari, how many of them bogeys you think were in that place?”
In my mind, I saw them all reaching and slithering and climbing toward me. I shuddered. “I don’t know. Lots. Dozens definitely--maybe even hundreds?”
“Right. He’s raising a small army. I’ll bet anything he’s the one gonna start the fight tonight. Maybe them other fae will fight, maybe they’re just gonna wait till the land spirits get pulled out to fight and then they’re gonna sneak into Faerie behind them. Either way, that many bogeys means a lot of damage.”
“But only if they’re getting powered by something, right?” I said. “Last night, you said the ones that attacked me and Vivi couldn’t last on their own.”
Dionne shook her head. “They don’t gotta be physical. Long as they’re strong enough to move around camp for a bit, all they need is a host. Then they pilot that person around to break shit.”
“On a night when most of the people here are gonna be wide open.” Tamar put down her sandwich and ran her fingers into her hair, tugging it like it could help her think. “The big burn tonight, it’s sacrificing a huge work of art we’ve all been interacting with all weekend. It’s the central symbol of this whole thing, it’s got years of tradition and passion and love and power. And with drums and music and dancing and all kinds of craziness, and a lot of folks high or drunk or tripping on their own brain chemicals, I gotta agree with Dionne. Those are the same things people do when they’re trying to go deep into trance. And a lot of the folks here who’ll get into that wide-open head space, they won’t have any clue what to do if something tries to hitch a ride.”
“So this demon, these fae guys, they’re gonna get themselves a human army tonight.” Dionne looked grim.
“But why?” said Cherry. “I still don’t get what’s in it for him, now that we took Vivi off the board as a victim. Why should he care?”
“You ever been to a battlefield and it just feels wrong?” said Dionne. “Haunted, sure, but like it’s stuck? Like all that pain and hurt and rage just soaked into the dirt and never left?”
“I mean, I live right outside D.C. and northern Virginia. The Civil War never ended, spiritually speaking.” Cherry reached for the pickle jar and fished out another.
Dionne pointed at her. “Right. So you know what I’m talking about. What happens is, you have a battle someplace where there’s no one, no gods or spirits or even good spooky folks, to clean up afterward and make sure everyone gets sent on their way, it makes a wound. The land is wounded. It’s raw and open.”
“The genius loci, the soul of the place, it could get killed or weakened or corrupted,” Tamar put in. “Oh, shit. Yeah. And if that wound is fresh? If the land’s already poisoned with a curse? It’s ripe for something to come along and claim it, take control of the genius loci and make that place a source of evil power. A foothold in our physical world for someone who ain’t already got one, or wants more power here.”
“So wait,” said Joe. “This might be a territory divide? The exiled fae get to go back to Faerie and start whatever they’re planning inside there, and Mur--and he gets this property? Could this Hungry Man take over as the new spirit of the place?”
“One Who Hungers.” Cherry poked him, grinning.
“Dammit.” He glared at her.
“But that means people would have died here tonight.” Sara put down her plate.
“It would.” Dionne nodded.
“Think about it,” said Tamar. “Dozens or hundreds of people, possessed by demons to go fight a bunch of fae who are coming in loaded for bear, it’s at least mass chaos and injuries and more than likely death.”
“And that would be the end of Morph, here if not for good.” My brain was whirling. “So much grief, from everyone who’s loved it for years. For the friends who fall.”
“Here’s the point,” said Dionne. “We don’t know for sure that’s what he’s after. Or exactly what these fae are gonna get up to. Right now, maybe that don’t even matter that much. We don’t have time to dig up any more of their plans. We just gotta work with what we got and what we know is a big danger. I don’t give a shit why a bunch of unseelie fae want to throw down over this land or even why this demon’s helping them, right now. All I know is people could get hurt or killed tonight and I’m not good with that.”
“Which leaves us with one thing we can c
ontrol,” said Tamar. “Sort of.”
“Right. The people here.” Dionne leaned forward, crossing her arms on her knees and sweeping her gaze around at all of us. “We gotta protect them best we can.”
I almost didn’t say it, but I didn’t want it to be on me if I should have but stayed quiet. “Last night. Vivi suggested we could call in a bomb scare or do something to get the land evacuated. That would protect everyone.”
“But Vivi would die and we wouldn’t be able to help her,” said Sara.
“I know. So does she. I don’t want to do it but I’m having trouble justifying why not.” My sandwich wasn’t sitting easy in my stomach, even though I needed it.
“Because,” said Joe. “If she dies and we haven’t broken that curse, she’ll become Patient Zero in a supernatural plague that could hurt a lot more people than there are here.”
Cherry was nodding. “Anything we could do to evacuate the camp means police. You think that wouldn’t turn into a raid on the hippie camp? I bet the po-po would love to toss all the tents and camps for the drugs they absolutely would find. I bet they’d decide half the art pieces here were weapons. I don’t know about you, but I feel better about my chances of protecting someone from getting possessed by a demon than I do about protecting them from getting shot by a Rambo wannabe.”
“You think we can do it?” I looked to Dionne and Tamar.
“Listen,” said Dionne. “We’re gonna put up wards around this whole space. That’s first priority. But this is a big space, and it makes it tricky. It means we gotta put the physical parts in place while we got daylight, and quiet, so they won’t be disturbed, and then turn them all on at once tonight right before the burn so we get maximum juice from them. Lotta things can go wrong, even just a wild animal messing with them. And if the bogey army’s big enough, they could tear through anyway. So that can’t be all we do.”
Tamar reached over and ran a fingertip over Teo’s patterns on my bare calf. “I think I got an idea. Someone drew this on you?”
I nodded. “Guy in the camp next to mine.” Who probably still thought I was a big flaky loser. I shoved aside the angry shame.
“That’s it then. We gotta come up with a sigil to help protect people, and then draw it on as many of them as we can.”
Dionne squinted at her. “And if they tell us to fuck off with our spooky nonsense?”
“We aren’t going to tell them what it does.”
“Whoah! Did I hear right? Did I just hear Ms. Occult Ethics Lawyer suggest we drop some mojo on folks without their explicit consent? Please, say that again. I wanna savor it.” Dionne cupped a hand to her ear and leaned forward.
“You got an argument with that?” Tamar’s glare held a challenge.
Dionne held up her hands. “Hell no. If you’re in charge of a movie theater, and you find out there’s a bomb scare, do you tell a crowded theater that there might be a bomb in one of their seats, or do you tell folks the projector’s broken and they should come out to the lobby for free popcorn?”
“Okay, so what is this sigil going to do to them?” said Cherry.
Tamar was thinking as she spoke. “It’ll be like those spikes in the road, where you can drive one direction fine, but anyone tries to get in who shouldn’t, their tires get shredded. So everyone can still have their high energy and their trance state and have a great time, but anything that tries to use that to get inside them will get a hurt on them. There’s only two problems. One is that it has to be drawn on a person the right way in order to do them any good. And the other is that they have to speak a few words of power to activate it.”
“And we do this without anyone knowing what we’re doing, how?” Joe looked skeptical.
“We use Cherry’s idea from yesterday,” I said, as Tamar’s inspiration sank in. “We turn it into some kind of camp stunt, tell people it’s for an art thing. Do we want them to activate it right away, or tonight?”
“Tonight is better,” said Dionne. “It’ll break down after a while, so it’s gotta be full strength when there’s the most danger.”
“Okay,” I said. “I have an idea about that. But that’s going to be a lot of people to cover. If Vivi can help, that’s seven of us. For two thousand people. Assuming we can locate everyone and don’t miss anybody.”
“And what if someone says no?” Sara pointed out.
“Most people won’t,” said Cherry. “A few, but if we make up a good story about what the symbol means, most people will go with it.”
“A handful of people at risk, we can handle,” said Tamar. “And some folks won’t even go to the fire or get trancey. Dionne and I, we can force out parasites here and there. But that’s much different than having several hundred wide-open heads milling around. It’ll sure hurt any plans for a big battle.”
We decided to turn it into a game. We’d tell everyone that we were competing to tag the most people in order to prove who would be the best recruiter for a brand-new, secret theme camp that’d be revealed at the next Morph. That way, if anyone was just a little reluctant, we could say that we were falling behind and we’d consider it a favor if they’d let us tag them.
“Right,” said Dionne. “We got some work to do before we can start drawing, and today’s gonna go fast. Let’s get cracking.”
Cherry and I made our slow way around the perimeter of the camp as the midday sun blazed over us. Our job was to start building the physical structure of the wards. Tamar and Dionne would do the same at the opposite of our starting point once they’d finished working out the sigil and its charm, so we could get done faster. There was no time to waste.
Joe was risking one more trip out to the fairy circle to pass our intel on to the land fae and work out a plan to defend their land that didn’t shut down the circle or bring the battle out into the main part of camp. Sara was checking on Vivi. Dionne had loaded them both up with a sack of blue bottles and instructions to hang them around camp on trees in areas that were vulnerable, like the tree line that led to the fairy circle, the path that led to the hungry grass, and the big field where the burn was planned. “Evil spirits can’t resist them,” Dionne had explained. “Don’t know why, not gonna argue. It works. Once they’re in there, they’re trapped. Anything that thins the ranks, right?”
Maybe I was sapped from two big occult workings in such short order, but the sun was baking me alive and it was harder to keep going with every ward we built. Cherry, on the other hand, was flushed and sweaty but full of energy. She crouched down and cleared a small patch of ground from debris, then carved a symbol into the earth with a slender silver blade.
“How are you so cheerful? I’m ready to die and you’re humming.” I poured corn meal into the furrows she’d carved.
“Because I’m doing something.” She pinned an owl feather to the center of the sigil with a wooden skewer and leaned a small round mirror ornament against the shaft, facing outward from camp. “Something that matters. It’s about time.”
“What does that mean?” I crouched beside her and my quads screamed.
She shrugged and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Just that, Tamar’s kind of overprotective. I’ve been studying a long time. I know what I’m doing. Man, Dionne really brought it with the magical supplies, huh? She’s not playing around.”
I circled the whole of our creation with an unbroken line of red brick dust mixed with cayenne pepper, and drew an arrow with it off one side of the circle pointing in the direction we were headed next. It was no coincidence that the circle that completed the ward’s structure formed the symbol of Mars, but Dionne had explained that when the ward was activated, the arrow would also direct a stream of energy toward the next ward, connecting them like chains and reinforcing each other in turn. “Like fuses,” she’d said.
“So what’s going on with that whole thing? With Dionne and Tamar? Do they hate each other or what?”
; “They don’t hate each other.” We covered the whole of the ward loosely with grasses and sticks, both to hide it and to keep the wind from disturbing it. Cherry squatted on her haunches, elbows pressed into her knees, fingers laced. “They just have--history.”
“That much, I figured out.” I dropped onto my butt and stretched my aching legs. “Look, I just want to know if there’s anything to worry about. We’re going to be in the trenches together tonight.”
I could see her thinking about what to say. “So, they apprenticed to the same esoteric school a long time ago. Like classic, formal, high ritual stuff. Tamar’s a real nerd at heart, so she liked all the scholarly bits--alchemy and astronomy, the art of manifestation, magical experiments, lore-keeping, all that. Dionne’s a doer. All about the practical applications, going out and using magic and knowledge in the world to fix problems and help people. Back then, they were great friends. They even taught together for a while.”
“So what happened?”
“Me.” Her voice for the first time since I’d met her was tiny. “Or, I guess I was the last straw. Do you know about theurgy and thaumaturgy?”
“...No?”
“Short form, theurgy is magic that works on the magician. Transformation, higher consciousness. Thaumaturgy is magic that works on the world around the magician. Practical magic. So Tamar was deep into theurgy and Dionne was more thaumaturgy. I guess they liked arguing about it. But Dionne also got real into goetia, which is all the demonic stuff.”
“Wait, Dionne did demon magic?” My stomach fluttered with nerves. Who were we trusting here?
“No, no, she wasn’t doing evil magic or anything. She felt like it was important to know how it all worked and who the players were if she was going to be any good at protecting people. She has a lot of opinions about otherworldly creatures and how they’re always trying to horn in on our world. Anyway, Tamar thought it was dangerous and reckless and arguing turned into fighting.”
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 31