“I need your assistance.” I started to take my coat off and, for just a brief second, exposed my limp wing, which hung off my shoulder.
“Not here!” Marta crossed herself and mumbled a prayer under her breath. Christian signs in a pagan store? “Just stand there and don’t move.”
She disappeared the way we had come and spoke low to the young man, telling him to look after the store a bit longer. I was a special customer that she would be working with in the back. There was a smile in his eager response to help out, his words sending shivers all over my arms.
Within seconds, she reappeared and grabbed me again by the arm, moving the broken wing. This time I yelped at the twinge of pain. She glared back at me with disgust.
She took me through beaded curtains that hung behind the cash counter and partitioned off the storefront from her offices in the back. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in this portion of Marta’s store, but it was definitely the only occurrence when I’d been there during store hours. Marta stomped off through a hallway with me in tow. I imagined seeing little puffs of smoke coming out of her ears she was so angry.
She took me into the back room, which had an entire wall filled with an assortment of jars and vials containing all kinds of potions and ingredients. After pushing me onto the fainting couch, Marta sat at her desk with a furrowed brow. Her gaze was so fierce I felt it necessary to sit very still. Her lip curled at one corner as she seethed.
“Marta, I need your help. I’m wounded and a…” I struggled with the next word. Who was the girl in my apartment? “Friend.” What else was I supposed to call her?
Ignoring Marta’s ire and her glares, I removed my trench coat, exposing my naked upper torso and the damaged, lifeless wing.
She still fumed at me.
“Honestly, Marta, what the Hell? I need help, and you have to…”
“You promised! You promised me you’d stay away from him! You promised you’d never go anywhere near Alyx!”
And then it hit me, and I understood why Marta was so pissed off. The young man, that undeniably gorgeous creature with the vibrant phosphorescent aura and stunning eyes, was Marta’s son. I hadn’t seen him in many years—at least fifteen or so.
“That’s your son? Marta, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize your boy. It has been many years since I saw him.” Except now he was a man. But I didn’t say that, and the minute I had uttered the apology, Marta relaxed, visibly, and exhaled.
“Ugh, tsk,” Marta chastised me, then twisted up her nose after she took full stock of my blood-streaked dirt-ground clothes and my body odour, having sweated so badly from carrying the girl halfway across the city. She grabbed a shawl that was draped over a desk chair and spread it on the settee she used to treat patients.
“Here, lie down, face-first,” Marta said. She was familiar with all my body parts: wings, tail, bone spurs, hairy chest, busted nose. You name it, she had put her hands on it and healed it; there was no room for modesty.
She grabbed my busted wing as I flipped over and placed my face down on the fainting couch. I crinkled my nose, as it smelled wretched. Marta stretched the wing out so that she could examine it. She ran her hands along the main bone, and I flinched as she reached the spot just before the break.
“It is broken, and the tissue inside is ripped. This will be difficult.” Marta pulled her chair closer to me and brought the busted wing very carefully into her lap. She placed a hand on the crushed bone on top of the wing, and the other in the same spot under the wing. She closed her eyes and murmured, but I couldn’t make out what she said. I’m not sure I really cared. The minute she started, warmth bloomed in the area of the break, and the heat radiated out and grew in strength, and I swayed with the magic.
I was dizzy and sleepy, and around me, white light shimmered and pulsated. The light was pearlescent and beautiful and warm.
Just as I fell asleep, Marta spoke. “What have you been up to, beast? There are some things I cannot heal.”
But I was comforted, warm, safe, and utterly exhausted.
“And stay away from Alyx,” she reminded me.
“I promised to stay away from the boy, and I will,” I mumbled softly as I stifled a smirk, thinking of the fully grown man I had just met. The demon in me does come out to play once in a while. I would definitely be finding a way to see Marta’s grown son again.
Meditation
ALYX
Mom dragged what had appeared to be a homeless man into her consultation office. I couldn’t help but think that after a good scrub-down, the homeless guy would have been pretty hot. It was close to the end of my shift, but I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d had a chance to interrogate Mom on the arrival of her sudden “guest.” And those eyes! I’d heard of people with two different-coloured irises, but I’d never seen it in person.
After selecting an old clothbound book from the pagan gods section, I plopped myself on the stool behind the cash register and read several chapters. The book wasn’t that intriguing, so being a little bored, I walked around the store, tidying up, and glanced out the shop’s window to see if anything interesting was happening out front. The streets of downtown always had something going on. Except now.
I waited some more, then glanced at the time on my phone, gave up, and read a few more sections of the book.
What on earth could she have been doing for so long in the back with…whoever that man was?
The shop had been extremely quiet since the appearance of the stranger. I was flipping through the pages of my chosen book when Mom startled me with a touch to my cheek. I glanced up at her and smiled.
“You were in there forever,” I said, dog-earring the tome. I jumped off the stool and scratched at my cheeks, digging through the beard. That always felt good.
“A complicated issue,” Marta said. “But never mind now. It is done.”
“Who was that, Mom? I’ve never seen him in here before.”
“Never you mind. You forget you saw him.”
At this point, the topic was over. Mom could be stubborn at times.
“Okay,” I lied a little. “Do you need me to do anything else? Lydia has tickets to a play for later tonight. I need to run home and get ready to go out.”
“You go. Have fun.” She patted my cheek and then frowned. “And shave this off.”
“Never, no way.” I had grown the beard so that I didn’t look like I was twelve years old, and besides, it was a great beard. Just twenty and my facial fur was thick—much fuller than any of the other guys. And it got me dates and stares from both guys and girls.
I was particularly interested in the stare from the guy who had gone back with Mom. His eyes were crazy cool, one icy blue, the other a steely grey. The clothes he wore were trash, but I could tell he was muscular. His coat was tight around the arms. His scruff was almost as thick as mine. And those shoulders, man, he reminded me of a linebacker. And the way he stared back at me…. Wow. If he wasn’t as into me as I was to him, then I had no idea how to pick the gay guys out.
Even though Mom had said I should forget about him, that was the last thing I planned to do. I had to find this guy again.
I WAS LATE getting home, much later than I had wanted to be. It was supposed to be a fun evening with friends from my Religions of Antiquity class, but my mind had been completely absorbed with the dark-haired man who had visited the bookstore earlier in the day, the guy with peculiar eyes and goofy smile. Just before the play started, Lydia asked what was going on with me. I told her briefly about the stranger.
There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. He was handsome, but that wasn’t the right word. Maybe striking, or enigmatic? None of those words seemed to do justice to how I felt whenever I thought of him. Even when we stopped at an underground bar for drinks and my friends started discussing their favourite parts of the play, my mind kept wandering back to him.
That’s when I spotted him, on the other side of the bar near the dance floor. I left our
table midconversation and crossed the room in hopes of saying hello, but as I forced my way through the throngs of dancers who were gyrating to the bass-filled music, I bumped into a drunk Goth girl who flailed about out of time with the music. By the time I untangled myself from her and turned back to where he had been standing, he had disappeared.
Lydia came up to me.
“What are you doing? Why did you leave us?”
“He was standing right here,” I shouted over the music.
“Who was?” she asked, squinting at me like I’d lost my mind.
“The guy I was telling you about, he was here.”
“Really? What does he look like? Maybe we can find him.” Lydia was always too helpful and a little too eager to see the guys I dated. But despite her enthusiasm, neither of us spotted the stranger with tousled hair and strange eyes.
It was more than just a simple physical attraction. There was this electrical energy that seemed to well up from inside of me and threaten to burst out whenever I thought of him. I felt nervous. Never had I been uneasy around other guys, so why this one?
And what was even worse, I had no really good way of finding him. It’s not like Mom kept computer records at the store for sales and services; she still did everything by pen and paper. Totally old-world. But despite what Mom had said, I would find him.
There had been a couple of ways I had thought of, each a desperate hope of potentially reliving the chance meeting from this morning. I mean, I could have waited until the guy came back to the store. But in all the years I’ve been helping Mom out, this was the first time Mr. Blue-eye-muscle-man had entered the store on my shift. Mom obviously knew who he was. He had been in before, and I had missed it, so I was likely to miss him again.
I could try to pry information out of Mom, but I’d attempted that strategy in the past with other things, to absolutely no avail. She was horrifically stubborn when she wanted to be.
That really only left one other way, and from the get-go, it was the least reliable idea I could come up with.
Magic.
After all, I had been working in a pagan witch store for years. Surely all those books I’d read and all the hours that had been spent doing spells, incantations, and meditations had given me an extra boost!
Mom was a Healer and had abilities, like lighting candles with no matches when she thought I wasn’t watching, and I would swear it never rained on us when we went outside—for anything. We never had a need for Band-Aids in the house. As a kid, scraped knees only lasted until I got home to Mom. But special abilities must have skipped a generation, because anything I’d tried was never successful. Except for the last few meditations, those had finally proven fruitful after years of practice.
In the last two months, I had finally managed to create my safe place: a beautiful lush and temperate woodland forest glen. Not only did I believe I was physically there, but I could smell and hear the babbling creek, feel the moss between my fingers, and see the bright greens and mottled browns, which were too vibrant and alive to be anything but real.
And then there was the appearance of the Satyr, which had been unexpected to say the least. He was much taller than I, powerful and animalistic, covered from the waist down with tawny goat fur and jet-black hooves instead of feet. The bridge of his nose was flattened, his cheekbones were high and scruffy with whiskers, and his eyes glimmered violet. Massive curved horns grew out from the corners of his forehead and swooped back. The animal had been very friendly.
Maybe, just maybe, I could glean some help, a clue or a hint as to where I could find the handsome stranger, in a meditation. There were numerous spell books for finding lost items and making love potions, but after racking my brain all night long, I couldn’t remember any spells or incantations that would find an unknown person.
I could improvise, though.
I stuck around with my friends long enough to have concocted a new spell, and then I made my excuses so I could head home.
Tiptoeing down the hall past Mom’s bedroom, I bypassed several floorboards that always creaked when anyone stepped on them. I made my way as silently as the old house would allow. It was entirely possible that Mom had heard everything, but it had been a couple of years since she bounced out of bed when I came home late. After all, I was twenty and an adult.
I closed the bedroom door, peeled off my clothes, and searched for the comfy baggy sweatpants I wore around the house. They were hiding in the corner of the room, near my bed.
Pulling on the worn-out fleecy garment, I noticed how thin and hairy my legs were. I wouldn’t have called them chicken legs, but I bet that Mr. Blue-eye-muscle-man had thick stocky legs.
The old sweats, which had holes in the knees and a rather revealing rip in the crotch, felt comfortable once they were on. Many people who practiced magic did so skyclad. I just couldn’t get comfortable enough to do it, and without being comfortable, meditations always failed. With these on, as grungy and old as they were, I had a sense of home and comfort that enabled me to go further than the couple of times I had tried it naked.
But I was quite comfortable bare-chested and barefoot. I cleared out a sizeable area in front of the bed. Once the spot was ready, and the laundry hamper was stuffed full of discarded clothes from the floor, I stepped towards the dresser. In a couple of the oversized drawers, I had, over the years, accumulated a large amount of paraphernalia from Mom’s store. As I rummaged through the unsorted items, memories came flooding back while seeing specific objects. All of them good recollections, usually times spent with Mom in the shop. But there were certain items I was pretty sure would help me get what I was after, and it was those objects I was searching for.
In my head, I constructed a list of items for my improvised spell. I grabbed a light-blue candle for the meditation work, a minty-green candle for good luck, some charcoal, the little bronze cauldron, a piece of parchment, a silver marker, the wand, some incense, and some extra candles. That should do it…maybe. I honestly wasn’t sure.
I lit the incense, its smoke beginning an upside-down cascade towards the ceiling. The cardamom gave off a smoky, earthy aroma, calming me as the scent enveloped my bedroom and washed around my head. I lit each of the candles and thought intently of their purpose as the wicks caught the flame. Four candles were aligned with the compass points, the light-blue and minty-green ones in the middle of the space, just next to the cauldron. Then I set the charcoal to burn and placed that into the brass pot that sat in the very center of the work area. I waited for what seemed to be an eternity until the charcoal was red hot, and then I began.
Picking up the wand, which was an old gnarled piece of hemlock with Norse runes etched into the shaft, I pointed it towards the north candle. While chanting, I moved clockwise in a circular motion and passed each of the compass points that were lit up by candles until I came back to the northern one.
“I call upon you, gods of old, to come to my safe space and lend me a helping hand. I call upon you Guardians of the East, come to me with your gifts of intellect, knowledge, and wisdom, guided through the air.” A little gust of air made the eastern candle flame flicker and sway.
“I call upon you, Guardians of the South, come to me with your gifts of power, light, and burning energy, guided through fire.” The charcoal in the cauldron hissed.
“I call upon you, Guardians of the West, come to me with your gifts of emotion, dreams, and passion, guided by water, and I call upon you Guardians of the North, come to me with your gifts of fertility, growth, and grounding, guided by earth. I call to each of you, be with me, assist me, as I am your child, a child of magic.”
I placed the wand in the middle, near the cauldron with the red-hot charcoal. Sitting cross-legged in the circle, I reached for the piece of parchment and the silver marker. I held both items in my hands and closed my eyes. Visualizing Mr. Blue-eye-muscle-man, complete with the black trench coat that fitted him just a little too tightly and his scruffy bearded face, I recreated the scene from e
arlier that afternoon when he had appeared in the bookstore.
I took the marker and wrote on the paper: The handsome man who saw my mom at the store today: Help me find him.
I folded the paper in half, and then again, and one last time. I held it tight in my right hand and pictured walking down the street, bumping into this enigmatic stranger who I desperately wanted to find. I pictured myself working in the bookstore, turning around suddenly to be face-to-face with the unearthly eyes of the stranger. I pictured myself naked and held tight by those thick muscled arms, with my body pressing against his, enveloped in a quilted blanket.
Okay, that last thought maybe shouldn’t have crept in there.
I was done. I had visualized this to death, and was afraid of what else my mind would come up with, although I was pretty sure I already knew that it would have been wildly inappropriate.
I dropped the paper onto the hot coal in the cauldron, and as it started to turn black and burn away at the edges, I whispered softly, “Come to me.”
I sat back and closed my eyes again. The smell of the incense, still heavy and thick, and the twinkling light from the candles all around me made my head feel weighty.
Let me go to my safe place.
I sat there for several minutes breathing deeply, calming every muscle in my body, relaxing my mind. No random thoughts, no strange images. I just wanted blackness and then falling into the blackness, with no reservations or fears, eager to begin the journey to the forest glen.
Drifting, I swayed, falling into thin air and then through dense clouds, and finally coming to rest on my feet. A swirling fog enveloped me. As I took a step through it, the mist dissipated.
I walked for several feet, and in my mind’s eye, shapes began to appear: a small pine tree, a bush, a tall tree with winding and snaky roots that exposed themselves by twisting out of the ground. Moss-covered trunks and stones. It was damp there, deep in the forest, and the smell was rich and overpowering with the scent of rotting leaves. It was natural and soothing.
Daimonion (The Apocalypse Book 1) Page 5