Conspiracy of Ravens

by Chrystal Vaughan

  “Damien,” I whispered. Another memory of Damien danced outside my conscious mind, teasing.

  “Wasn’t he pretty?” Catherine’s black stare somehow felt the same as it had that day in the cafeteria, long ago.

  “What did you do to him?” I demanded.

  “Back then? Nothing. I tried to give myself to him actually, but he rejected me! He said he wasn’t ready and I shouldn’t be either. That we should save ourselves for love! Can you believe that? I told him he would be sorry one day that we were finished, and he should watch his back!

  “He said he felt sorry for me because I had no parents and my grandparents didn’t pay attention to me. I said he could take his pity and shove it up his ass! After the day he refused to touch me, I vowed no man would ever touch me. When Damien rejected me, I focused all my energy on pleasing the Goddess. It still wasn’t enough. Never enough! She feels that fertility is important and had no use for a woman who vowed to remain a pure vessel! What did she know, anyway? I had so much more power when I came to the dark lord because I abstained from using my energy on breeding. He deemed that, from then on, he would be my only lover and I have never regretted it once.”

  “Not even once, Catherine? What about the beautiful boy you ran over with his own car?”

  She sat back in her chair, cocky and at ease for the first time in a while. She didn’t acknowledge my comment, or her moment of weakness. “I found Damien a couple of years ago on the Internet,” she said instead. “He turned out to be an architect, which surprised me. All I ever heard was football but of course, that was a long time ago. I’d wanted to get even for a long time too, so I started planning. Finally, around the first week of September, right after the blond bimbo, I contacted him via email to see if he wanted to get together for dinner sometime. He seemed really pleased to hear from me, and we exchanged phone numbers. I set up a meeting for dinner on September 22nd for about eight p.m. and it was Damien who suggested we meet at the Tower Room restaurant in Harrisburg. I took that as a good omen, the name of the place. Have you been there?”

  “Oh my God, the Tower Room,” I breathed. I remembered where else I had heard Damien’s name before. Damien Edwards, age twenty nine, had been found on the crumpled hood of a parked Prius on the street below the Tower Room restaurant on September 22nd, 2012. At the time I’d read about the incident, the name nagged at me but I had been unable to place it. Damien was older, and the memory of his kindness had faded along with his name over time.

  “The police never figured out if he had jumped or been pushed,” I recalled the details of the story. “The other diners and the wait staff reported he was there with a woman, but no one could agree on any details, like hair color or clothing. The police were toying with the idea that the entire restaurant had been drugged somehow, to make up for the lack of cohesive eyewitness testimony.”

  Catherine grinned. “Pays to have an edge. Don’t you think?”

  “Did you push him out the window?”

  “No, I didn’t. Those windows didn’t open, they were fixed. I am not strong enough to shove a strapping fellow like Damien out through the glass with my puny little girl arms.” She held up her arms, encased in the blue prison uniform, for emphasis. Her handcuffs rattled and clinked. “Besides he paid for his mistake in scorning me so what’s the difference how he ended up as a hood ornament?”

  “But...what about the ritual? How does his death count as the Tower card if you didn’t sacrifice him correctly?”

  “Very good!” she said approvingly. “We may teach you yet! You’re right. It wouldn’t have counted but he was late getting to the restaurant and I specifically requested a table near the window in a secluded area, hinting how we needed an intimate setting. Wink wink. I cast the circle around the table after the waiter brought me our waters, just before Damien showed up, handsome as ever. I had to draw the raven in my blood on his chair, making sure to cut myself somewhere discreet where he wouldn’t notice. Not optimal, as the symbol should really be drawn on the sacrifice’s chest but it was the best I could do. My blood was technically on him, which was good enough. I made sure I was a sufficient distraction and he was so busy looking at me he never noticed his bloody chair before he sat down. As for how he got through that window…well, I think I’ll keep some secrets for myself.

  “I set my sights for home after that. I took Damien’s keys to his black Mercedes and hightailed it. I knew the cops would be busy extracting him from the roof of the Prius he’d demolished. I figured I’d ditch the Merc after a visit to the old homestead, where dear old granny, my Cadillac, and another little taste of payback waited for me.”

  “Your grandmother is still alive?” I asked, surprised.

  Again, I was awarded that mischievous smile I knew so well. “Well, not anymore.”

  17-The Star

  “My granny was young when she whelped my mother,” the witch explained. “So the old bird was about eighty-nine when I finally came back home. I wish I could say she was happy to see me, but...”

  “Did she know? Did she feel responsible for unleashing you on the world? Or was she completely clueless as to what you were?”

  “Oh she knew. Granny Meara was about as Irish as they come, more Irish than that sexy cop you’re banging. Just as Catholic as your grandmother was, too. No sense of pagan and Catholic overlap in my life, though, unlike yours. Grandpa was pretty superstitious but he always got smacked every time he made the evil eye at me. She’d whack him with her wooden stirring spoon and say, ‘Blasphemer!’ with that fire and brimstone look in her eye.

  One time, after my parents died in a ‘horrible fire’,” Catherine mocked, making quotation marks in the air with her bound hands, “my granny got it into her head that I’d barbecued them. She called in her priest, who she worshipped like he was Jesus himself, and tried to exorcise my demons. And guess what?”

  “What?” I asked, sickened.

  The deep, booming voice erupted from her delicate throat again, roaring, “It didn’t work!” She/it laughed, a sound that echoed through the prison like thunder.

  Brad’s radio crackled with urgent voices. I heard the word ‘riot’ and Brad shouting orders to contain it. He turned to his two officers, pointing into the cell and shouting, “Don’t leave them alone!” and took off down the hall at a run with the other officer at his heels.

  I turned back to Catherine, who was wearing her Mona Lisa cat smile again, eyes as black as ink pools.

  In her normal voice she said, “I drowned granny in the bathtub. She pulled the Star card. Fitting, for someone who was so pious. I enjoyed listening to her recite the Lord’s Prayer over and over while I cast the circle around the bathtub and drew the raven on her wrinkly chest. She was light as a raven too, as if her bones were hollow. It didn’t take her long to die. I was almost disappointed but I guess she would be the best sacrifice I could make for the Star card. She did die in fear, one of its meanings, but I’d hoped for something a bit more spectacular. Maybe a showdown between good and evil or something. The dark lord said nothing, for once, about my sacrifice to him. But like they say, no news is good news so I went ahead with it.”

  “You are a monster, you really are. How can you talk about killing your family so easily, without feeling?”

  Her black eyes gleamed. “What did they ever do for me? NOTHING! Except DIE so I could honor the one being who ever TRULY CARED!” she shouted, the cords in her neck standing out in stark relief beneath the single light bulb.

  I shouted back. “You’re so predictable, spouting about that dark lord shit, and woe is me nobody ever loved me. It’s all BULLSHIT! Let me guess...next you loaded up the Caddy and hauled ass off to your next killing ground, right? There is NOTHING to back up what you are saying Catherine. I think you are LYING!”

  She was immediately calm, another flip of the switch. “Of course you don’t. And not exactly, no, I did not just head for my next killing ground. I spent a few months in Philly, researching you. The ravens l
ove you, you know.”

  I was sickened. “You followed me?”

  “Oh yes! I needed to get to know you. I never bothered when we were kids but then I read your article, on the same day I found Damien as a matter of fact. I was fascinated so I decided to come find you. To my surprise you turned out to be quite interesting.”

  “Interesting now?”

  “Well, you tell stories for a living, for one thing. And your power! It’s rough, really raw, but so plentiful. I only touched you for a moment yesterday, but siphoned off enough of your power so that not only have you not noticed its lack but I’m still completely overcharged. You’re like...a witch battery! How I wish we were on the same side,” she lamented.

  “I will never be as fucked up as you are, Catherine, no matter what your ‘dark lord’ mutters in that sick brain of yours.”

  The wind howled through the tiny cell again, whistling in the high ceiling and swirling around the two of us. That was my only warning before she launched herself over the table at me, hands curved into claws, reaching for my throat. The officer at the door leaped in front of me a split second before she got to me, his reflexes much better than my own. It was very brave and also the last thing he ever did.

  18-The Moon

  She ripped his throat out with her fingers and flung bits of gore and flesh to the ground. As if they were strings, Catherine broke her handcuffs apart and raised her arms to the ceiling, laughing. She touched the shackles on her legs and they fell away, the smoking and melted metal sending charred ozone smells into the air.

  “Well, there goes number sixteen,” she boomed in her demon’s voice. “I was hoping to have your sexy cop instead, but I guess one dead pig is as tasty as the next.”

  I was tied fast in my chair by invisible ropes of her power, unable to move or flee from her approaching form. She stood before me, ink black eyes blazing evil into my soul. Her flame colored hair twisted around her head like snakes in the wind, lazy and aimless. She grinned at me, drool leaking from the corner of her mouth and dribbling onto the floor as she grabbed the dead officer by his legs and pulled him to the corner of the room neare the cot.

  “I call upon the guardians in the North, guided by Air;

  I call upon the guardians in the South, guided by Fire;

  I call upon the guardians in the West, guided by Water;

  I call upon the guardians in the East, guided by Earth.

  I enter the circle in the name of the Horned God,

  And I come to do his bidding!”

  At the end of her incantation, a crimson light flashed in a circle around her and the officer’s body, glowing with otherworldly power. It mesmerized me with its glow, so unlike anything I’d ever seen before. She brought her right wrist to her lips and tore the flesh with her teeth, blood oozing over the edges of her ripped skin to drip in quick patterns on the cement floor. She tore open the officer’s uniform shirt and with deft motions, drew the raven on his still warm body. She made a cutting motion in the portion of the glowing circle nearest to me, and the light faded, went out.

  Her attention turned back to me, and she whispered a singsong chant as she came nearer, weaving back and forth in a strange, snakelike dance. Her face had changed, the teeth elongated and features harsh, more pointed; her eyes were still inky pools of darkness but with a crimson glow beneath them, like an eclipsed pair of suns leaking from her eye sockets. As I watched, they bubbled over, black slime oozing from her eye sockets as though they had been filled with metal, now molten and flowing down her face like lava. Black feathers sprouted from her flesh, tearing through her prison uniform in sprays of blood, springing from her scalp to mingle with her flame hair. Talons tore from her fingers, curving and flexing in the air as she reveled in her transformation. She opened her mouth to scream her triumph and what emerged was not the booming demonic voice of before, nor her musical siren’s voice, but rather the harsh caw of a raven, magnified a hundredfold.

  I screamed in fear, in rage, in loathing and she laughed her insane asylum howling at me.

  Brad hurtled himself into the cell, gun blazing as he fired round after round at the thing that was Catherine. The bullets pierced her, the impact flinging her against the concrete wall of the cell, but she didn’t stop. Instead, she kept coming forward, only now her attention was on Brad instead of me, and she reached him fast, so fast, driving her taloned fingers into his stomach and lifting him up into the air. She flung him with inhuman strength against the opposite cell wall. As he lay there, stunned and bleeding, she pointed a clawed hand at him and levitated him into the air, some elemental force or power rocketing through her and at the man I loved, hurling him against the concrete again and again before she grew tired and let him slide down its slick surface, trailing blood in thick swatches, until he finally came to rest in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  19-The Sun

  It was as though all of the sunlight was sucked from my life and narrowed down to that one instant, where my eyes met Brad’s through a haze of blood and pain. I saw him mouth the words, “I love you,” before the light dimmed from his eyes and he saw me no more.

  In that instant, I became my destiny. There was no god, gods, or goddesses to help me against the Raven Witch. There was only me. I closed my eyes on the sight of her reaching for Brad’s body, no doubt intending to cast her circle and desecrate his flesh with her polluted blood. I reached deep inside of myself and found that thing, that gift or power or whatever it should be named, and I pulled it forth to examine it more closely. I saw how my oath of love to Brad had been fulfilled, and part of me rejoiced while the other part mourned his loss. I shoved all that aside and concentrated on finding what would defeat her. I found it, swirling in the center of all emotion, the one pure thing, the one true thing, even she could not deny.

  I opened my eyes and found her looming over me. Whatever she saw gave her a pause, the feathers on her shoulders ruffling uneasily, just as a bird’s does when they settle their feathers into place. “What are you doing, Sophia?” her harsh voice cawed.

  Now my voice held all the music in the world when I replied, “I see you Catherine. I see the real you, all your tricks and spells are ripped away. I embrace my power for what it is. I know who and what I am now. All life is just energy and yours is wasted on you.”

  I thrust my power into her, no need to touch her foul flesh with my own, and her raven’s body writhed in agony. The feathers were stripped from her as though a giant hand grasped them and ripped them away, pulling her disguise off like one sheds their clothes at the end of the day. She screamed in fury, now just a beautiful woman with rotting insides.

  “You can only be what you truly are,” I told her. I slowed time around me, playing with it as though it were a new toy, mine to command. She resisted my power, using her own powers to fling bolts of energy at me, but I absorbed them with ease, ramping up my own power until I was all but humming with it. For her last trick, she produced the Sun card like a magician, flinging it at my face where it opened a cut beneath my cheek. She turned from me and fled from the cell, her first taste of freedom in many days. She ran down the hall as I walked behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to see how close I was, and hit the hub with a bolt of power and electricity, opening the gates while the guards reacted in slow motion thanks to my time manipulation. I followed her relentlessly, my walking pace as fast as her running could carry her, my power carrying me forward of its own accord, and she hit the front doors hard, spinning out into the sunlight of the newly risen morning.

  She lifted her face, the beautiful face with the newly restored blue-green splotched eyes, to the sun. I believe Catherine could have been a good witch, if she had chosen to follow the path of the light rather than the sickening sweet whisper of a false god. Her hair shone in the morning sun like a newly minted copper penny. I watched to see what she would do, protected from her by the bulletproof glass doors and my own heady power.

  She turned to the front gates, where seventeen
ravens now waited for her. Seventeen, one for each person she killed. I knew there was one for the officer who had saved me, and one for the man I loved who had done the same, but I couldn’t think of that now. I had judgment to pass.

  The guards at the front gates were slowed by my time manipulation, but they saw her smile at the birds and move toward the gates. The largest of them let loose a coughing caw sound, spurring the others to beat the air with their wings. I did not hear them, but saw the guards cover their ears with their time slowed hands, guns forgotten in the immediacy of their pained expressions.

  Catherine passed through the gates unimpeded, sparing no further glance for her feathery host. From far and wide, animals of every sort could be seen gathering around the edges of the prison, from small creatures like birds, mice, and squirrels to larger animals like foxes, deer, and even a pair of wolves from who knew where. The other guards later said they saw nothing but the pit, though I saw the animals and thought it fitting.

  She stepped through the wrought iron gates and turned back to smile at me for the last time. It held so much promise that smile. It spoke of triumph and gloating, but also sadness and apology. I had reached my verdict, however.

  I raised my hand and made a circular motion, gathering all the forces I possessed. Like stirring a pot of stew, I circled over and over, eyes closed in concentration, so that I felt, rather than saw, the earth beneath Catherine’s feet swirl like the tornado of water, like the water spout that forms when a drain is pulled in a bathtub. My mind’s eye saw her terror and her relief as judgment was passed on her by the only peer she recognized. The earth took her, swallowed her up like a delectable treat. Only when I felt her die, when I felt her energy absorbed by the very earth that created her, did I open my eyes to view the destruction I’d wrought. I saw, in a daze, the Sun tarot card floating lazily downward to land at my feet, sent from who knows where. The Sun...meant to symbolize happiness. That was when the tears finally came.