by David Risen
“The body is that of a little girl who died of cancer. The witches healed the cancer posthumously, and then bound your daughter’s soul to it.”
Rider looked down at his suede-hiking boots.
“You’re just sayin that.”
She shook her head slowly. “You can ask the queen bitch herself.”
Rider batted the other tear away, sniffed, and gave her a blanched look.
Amelia squared herself before him.
“Virtue is the difference between badness and goodness. If you wish to control the scope of your own fury, you have to tether yourself to something immobile.”
“So she’s really...?”
Amelia nodded.
His face steeled with resolve.
“We have to get her somewhere safe.”
“We will. I’ve already taken care of that. But we should get this over with first.”
“Do it.”
Amelia slid the key into the lock of the boot, opened the hatch, and revealed the woman within still bundled in her white, ceremonial robes.
Rider’s eyes widened to the size of golf balls at the sight of her.
“Mom?” he shuddered.
A hulking, late model, black Suburban ground to a halt on the dirt road a half mile behind the subjects.
One by one, the women within piled out of the car dressed in black cloaks.
Lauren Fields-Rider was the last to leave the relative safety of the car. The gravel crunched beneath their feet.
Lauren took in a deep breath full of the hot, South Georgia air.
“We have to hurry,” the Rome High Priestess urged. “They won’t be here long, and if they make it to her next car, they’ll be a lot harder to find.”
Lauren nodded.
“Let’s summon the first of the trial spirits, and put an end to this.”
The seer reached back inside the Suburban, opened the glove box, and brought out a black sheet from within. She passed it to Rome’s first counselor who held it out before Lauren folded like a bed sheet.
Lauren blessed the cloth in a Celtic language that only a handful of people in the world would recognize and an even smaller number would know how to speak, and then she drew a pentagram in the air over it.
The High Priestess of Rome, Georgia and her first and second counselors methodically unfolded the cloth revealing a silver pentacle within, and then they walked the tapestry over to the nose of the SUV and stretched it gently out on the dirt road by the light of the Suburban’s headlamps.
The Arch Priestess of the Georgia Stake brought five bowls that they obtained from the Savannah Ward and placed one at each point of the star.
“Is the sacrifice ready?” Lauren said.
The Arch Priestess nodded and led her around to the back of the Suburban, and then she opened the back gate to reveal its contents.
The newly re-formed Delilah Powers lay hog-tied and gagged on the slate gray carpet – her new body perfect in every regard.
Long, straight blond hair.
Fair skin without even a mole.
Deep blue eyes.
They already stripped her and cleaned her in preparation for the ritual.
As soon as she saw them her eyes bulged and she whimpered and begged through her gag.
“Shhh,” the High Priestess said. “In a few moments, this entire life will be nothing more than a bad dream, and you will begin again in the Spirit World where you can make yourself anew. And you, above all others know that this is for the highest of causes.”
“She can’t speak,” Amelia said. “I’ll fix that.”
Amelia extended her hand to remove part of the curse, but then she withdrew it.
“Remember, if you cooperate with us, I will remove the curse, change your body so no one will recognize you, and set you free. If you defy me, this will be your last night alive.
Polly Rider blinked in response.
Amelia extended her hand and touched Polly’s forehead.
Polly’s eyes bulged with fear.
“Rider, help me! This woman is fucking crazy. She kidnapped me, zapped me with something, and dragged me all over the state!”
“We’re not getting off to a good start,” Amelia warned.
“Rider, do something!”
Rider looked at Amelia.
“What the fuck is this?”
Amelia gave him a sheepish look. “She’s not really your mother. For most of your life, she’s been your handler. Now she’s the Grand Arch Sorceress of The Sisters of Divinity.”
Rider leaned toward her ever so slightly.
“Are you sure?”
Amelia held up her index finger and then she touched Polly’s head again. The woman shuddered convulsively.
“What you’re feeling right now,” she explained “is the effects of a large dose of venom from the Australian Funnel Web Spider. With the dose I administered, you have about thirty minutes. Tell him the truth, and I’ll make it go away.”
“You’re not my son,” she blurted.
Rider winced.
“They brought you to me as a baby. I raised you, and I steered you away from anything that might bring you to danger.
Amelia sneered at her.
“And what is your title with The Sisters of Divinity?”
She licked her lips and looked at Rider.
“Before you came, I was the High Priestess of Bridgeton, but when you arrived they decided to take the ward off me. After you went off to college, they promoted me to Arch Priestess of the Georgia Stake, and then I became Arch Sorceress of the United States after we contained you. The Grand Arch Sorceress retired, and I got the big job in the Vatican.”
Amelia waved her hand over Polly’s face and removed the venom.
Rider shook his head slowly.
“So, what you’re sayin is that no one in this world has ever really loved me.”
“No Rider,” Amelia interjected. “Don’t lose control.”
Rider felt himself crumbling again.
He turned away and started down the road away from the car with his hands pressed against his temples.
“I can’t do this,” he muttered.
Lauren Fields-Rider approached the back cloth where Delilah Powers, who only a month ago, was a vibrant, up and coming force inside the American territory, lay powerless and sobbing – naked as the day she was born – in the center of a pentacle with her head, arms, and legs held in place in the points of a pentagram by the force of her fellow sisters’ will.
Lauren felt sorry for her. Everything the Matron did to conceal her was perfect, but she hadn’t counted on the sisters being wise to her plans to leave the order.
Delilah rented the storage unit where she kept her car off Blount Road in Darien with Dena Carcer’s Debit Card and through the security cameras; they saw her deposit the Ford Focus she planned to use as her escape vehicle.
All of it may have worked anyway if she were not already under suspicion for similar behavior in Sacramento, California.
Lauren put all of that out of her mind, tilted her head toward the heavens, and called out.
“With the blood of this sister, I call upon the great protector of the hereafter, the spirit Christendom calls Belial, to exit the Spirit World through the open portal created in the wake of this Sister’s soul and join us in mortality to put down this threat to creation.”
The other sisters began chanting repeatedly in Gaelic.
Loosely translated, they said.
“We five sisters of Spirit, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air – faithful keepers of our divine covenants call for aid of the Spirit World. We invoke thee. We invoke thee. We invoke thee.”
Lauren produced her Athame – a ceremonial dagger – from a sheath on the outside of her white cloak, straddled Delilah, and raised the knife high above her head.
Delilah cast fearful eyes on the cold gleaming steel. She begged swiftly and unintelligibly like a crying toddler.
Lauren closed her eyes and shut the noise out of her mind.
She gnashed her teeth, and launched the knife fast and hard for the heart of the sacrifice.
Delilah shrieked. Her scream drowned as the dagger tore through her chest.
Lauren opened her eyes, wiped the tears away, stood, and backed away from the body and the dagger protruding from just above her left breast.
The Athame sprang from her chest as if something pushed it out from the inside of her body. A fissure tore open from the bleeding wound and a white light exuded from within.
A bubble of multi-colored light arose from inside her body that looked like a giant, luminescent soap bubble, and it hovered for a moment. Something about its presence made Lauren’s skin crawl. She felt its judgement searching her every orifice – weighing her like a jeweler assessing gold,
Then, as quickly as it appeared, it shot down the road with dizzying speed to face its quest.
Lauren exhaled.
The High Priestess of Rome, Georgia passed her a pack of baby wipes to clean the blood from her hands.
Lauren looked at the package for a moment as if she didn’t know what it was, and then she took it, snapped open the plastic top, and pulled a wet, scented sheet from within.
“It’s done,” she sighed halfway to herself.
She eyed the High Priestess of Rome, Georgia.
“Now we’ll see what the Conciliator Matron is really made of.”
“Rider, I need you here,” Amelia said from the back of the Avenger.
Rider stood a few feet down the dirt road with his fingers splayed on the top of his head trying to contain his emotions.
He didn’t want his mother to have the satisfaction.
“Rider!” she repeated.
He dropped his hands, batted the tears away from his eyes, wiped his nose, spun around, and crunched his way back up the dirt road to the car.
“Let’s get this shit over with and kick this evil bitch to the curb.”
He glowered.
“Tell me about Aurora,” he growled.
Polly Rider smirked.
“That’s the best question your tiny, little jock mind can come up with? That’s like asking the President of the United States why the IRS audited your taxes.”
Rider raised his hand to strike her but thought better of it. He ground his teeth.
“Who is she?”
Polly grinned with satisfaction.
“You remember Alyssa, don’t you? We bound her soul to that body.”
Rider sighed, nodded, and looked away.
Amelia grasped Polly’s face by the jaw and turned her head toward her.
“Tell me what we’re going to find in Skitts Mountain, Tennessee.”
Polly flashed a bitter smile.
“So you really can’t read all my thoughts. I suppose there are still some wards that you can’t break.”
Amelia extended her hand toward Polly’s face.
“Funnel Web venom, it is.”
“We sealed it off magically,” she blurted. “Only one can enter.”
Polly cracked a naughty grin like she was about to recite the punchline of a dirty joke.
“And you stripped her of her powers.”
Amelia nodded.
“Claire Jacobs.”
Polly nodded.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll never survive the coming trials.”
Rider took a step toward her.
“Drop the attitude, and tell us what you’re talking about.”
A bright flash of light slammed into Amelia’s back and dragged her screaming through the air and into the woods.
“Amelia,” Rider cried.
Rider looked at Polly.
“What the fuck was that?” he screamed.
Polly gave him a shrewd look.
“The end of the road. Did you really think that you, a dumb jock who scraped through college on a football scholarship could erase four-thousand years of human history and put down The Sisters of Divinity?”
“You’re a cunt. You’ve always been a cunt. Everything you’ve ever done for me served your own selfish purposes.”
She laughed bitterly.
“And you are a pussy. It doesn’t matter how well I raised you or how much good advice we’ve given you, you want to sit in your own dirty diaper and whine about no one coming to change your stinking ass.
“You killed your daughter because you’re impulsive and stupid. You got addicted to booze and drugs because you couldn’t stand your own smell, but we cleaned all that up for you because we knew that if we didn’t, you would burn the world down around you. But here we are, because you’re too stupid to move on.”
Rider stabbed his index finger in her direction.
“Shut the fuck up.”
Her cruel mouth contorted.
“It was you who pussed out of writing tough articles, and you thought you were so wonderful that your employer would just let it go. When they didn’t, you showed your true colors and beat your boss half to death.”
“I don’t need a goddamn lecture from you.”
“The next thing all of us heard from wah-wah-wah! I can’t get a job, and my probation officer’s gonna kill me. Please save my impotent, infantile ass.”
“You bitches made sure I got addicted to pain meds.”
She sneered. “But you did the booze and Xanax thing all by yourself.”
“I’m not the first drunk in this fucked up family.”
She squinted. “Oh, boo-hoo. You’re thirty-two. It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with you at eighteen, you’ve bought it. Face it; you’ve made bad choice after bad choice – always looking for someone to bail you out of it. You’re a stupid jock. If you had any sense, you would have made a life with Dena, but you had to poke it with a stick. My guess is that in three weeks, if you survive your own stupidity, you’ll be drunk and stoned in some dive. In three months, you’ll be dead or in prison. You really are abysmal.”
Rider roared and charged her. He lunged on top of her and belted her across the face.
An unseen force hurled him off her.
He sailed through the air, and his back slammed into the trunk of a tree so hard it knocked the breath from him.
He hovered – suspended three feet from the ground with his arms and legs immobile against the tree trunk.
Two women wearing black ceremonial cloaks dashed over to the open boot of the Dodge Avenger and inspected Polly.
“Is she alive?” a familiar voice said.
The woman to the left of Polly stood up straight and turned to face the direction of the voice somewhere far beyond Rider’s left side.
The woman had olive skin and dark hair with loose curls – very Mediterranean.
“She no die. She just sleeping. But she hava no power.”
The woman on the left dressed in a red ceremonial cloak looked in the direction of the voice.
“We can still use her. Most of the ideas that kept the shards in check this long came from her.”
The voice behind him sounded again.
“Without our former Matriarch holding her in check, she’s useless. The reason we’re in this situation is that she wanted to play bull-in-the-china-house with powers that we can’t control.”
“What do you want to do with her?” the woman in the red cloak said.
“Bring her with us. We’ll let the council of Sorceresses decide.”
The Mediterranean woman who had bent back over Polly Rider stood again and looked back in the direction of the voice. Her face contorted in a look of concern.
“There’s a niña, little in the back seat.”
The woman behind the voice crept into view. She wore a white ceremonial robe stained with blood around the right sleeve.
Shoulder-length blond hair.
Squinty plastic framed glasses with thick sides.
Lauren.
Rider’s heart sank.
“Alyssa?” she said pressing her hand against her chest.
The Mediterranean woman nodded.
/> “She comes with us,” Lauren said.
“You leave my daughter alone, you goddamn bitch,” Rider barked.
Lauren turned slowly and met him with an icy stare.
“And what kind of life are you supposed to offer her? Even if you were to make it out of this, which you won’t, you’re on a collision course with total destruction. I can offer her the best of everything.”
“Never mind that you’re a fucking whore who spreads eagle and if your Bordeaux Madam commands it. And what the fuck is on your sleeve, catsup?”
She looked down at her right sleeve and then she stared a hole through him.
“I really regret this situation, Rider. At one point, the world was your oyster, but if I were to meet you today, I wouldn’t even speak to you.”
Rider snarled. “You and your uber-cunt friends have wasted half my life. The one good thing that came from it was Alyssa. I’ll be goddamn if I’m gonna let you turn her into a skank like you.”
Lauren grimaced and looked down at the ground.
“But you don’t have a choice, Rider. You have no power, and we are the Sisters of Divinity, the most powerful women in the world.”
The spherical orb of multicolored light, dropped Amelia like a load of garbage deep in the woods.
Amelia rolled like a log at least ten feet before finally crashing into the trunk of an Elm tree.
She lay with the small of her back resting against the tree trunk moaning – trying to suck the air back in her lungs.
“Would you like to come out and play?” the thing said in a smooth, baritone voice.
Amelia slowly climbed to her feet and looked in the direction of the voice.
She gasped.
The man standing just down the hill with his legs spread shoulder-width apart should not have been.
He was tall – at least 6’3”.
Broad shoulders the length of a linebacker.
Dark black skin.
And he still wore the same brown and tan tweed slacks she last saw him in in 1968.
She had always respected her anatomy professor, Dr. Tanner. The man had an elegance to him – a mesmerizing rhythm to his speech, and he was all about second chances.
“Dr. Tanner?” she said with disbelief.
He shook his head slowly.