She stood and held out a hand to help him up. “Of course. You should try to eat and drink a little something first. Let’s go downstairs.”
Kyle accepted her help and rose from the chair. His fatigue made the trip downstairs seem like part of a dream. He was famished, but only managed to swallow a few bites before his head was nodding over his plate. Lucille and Amanda helped him to his room, and the last thing he remembered that night was falling onto the bed.
Chapter 15
The Totem
Kyle woke up the next morning feeling rested, although a mild headache reminded him of the prior evening’s failure. Hunger pangs gnawed at his stomach, encouraged by the aroma of coffee and cooking food filtering into his room through the door.
He levered himself out of bed and put on the shoes that someone had been kind enough to remove for him. He was still wearing his clothes from the previous day, but decided not to worry about that until after he’d investigated the inviting smells.
As soon as he appeared at the kitchen doorway, Amanda poured him a cup of coffee and put it into his hands. She looked over her shoulder at Lucille. “You were right. As soon as you started making breakfast, he appeared like magic.”
Lucille flipped a couple of pancakes out of the pan and onto a plate and then winked at Amanda. “Most men respond positively to regular feeding.”
Kyle sat at the kitchen table with a sigh and sipped his coffee. Amanda brought two plates of pancakes to the table and set one down in front of him. Taking a seat in the opposite chair, she joined Kyle in spreading butter on the cakes and taking turns with the syrup.
Kyle started feeling better as soon as he had consumed a few heaping forkfuls. He stopped only long enough to thank Lucille and compliment her cooking. He was eating the last bites of the first three pancakes when Lucille came by with another stack on her spatula. Kyle dug in, thanking her again.
Amanda accepted one additional pancake and told Lucille she’d take care of the cleanup.
Lucille took off her apron and washed her hands. “Thanks, dear. I should get down to the shop. I’m expecting deliveries today.”
After Lucille left the kitchen, Kyle and Amanda ate in silence. Amanda finished first and sat with her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. Her gaze landed everywhere except on Kyle. For his part, Kyle focused on his plate until he had mopped up the last bit of syrup with his final forkful of pancake.
Kyle sat back and patted his stomach. He took a gulp of his coffee, now lukewarm, and stared at Amanda over the rim of his cup. Her eyes met his and then dropped.
“So what’s next?” he asked.
Amanda eyes were sorrowful when they met his. “I don’t know. My bag of tricks is empty. All that research and preparation was apparently for nothing.”
Kyle kept his voice even. “So you’re giving up?”
Her voice took on an annoyed edge. “Is it giving up to stop when you’ve done all you can and have no way to move forward?”
He couldn’t deny that she had been working hard on the project. But she’d had to do everything by herself. Maybe she needed an outsider’s perspective.
“I want to help.”
Amanda’s gaze softened. “Kyle, you keep telling me that you know nothing about what I do.”
“That’s true. Maybe you need to go over everything with someone who will ask stupid questions. Someone who will make you challenge your assumptions. Maybe you know too much about this stuff and your knowledge is creating blind spots.”
Amanda didn’t look like she was buying his suggestion. She rotated her cup in her hands.
Kyle decided to press his argument. “Amanda, when the demon took over last night, it pushed me into a place I never want to visit again. I’m not being melodramatic when I say I’d rather die. Please let me help you figure out what went wrong so we can try again.”
Amanda stared at Kyle, her eyes wide. “Reggie has been in that place for nearly two years.”
Kyle shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows if the same thing happens at First Moon.” He hated to say his next words, but she needed to understand what was at stake. “I don’t think I could remain sane if I stayed in that limbo for any length of time.”
Amanda blinked away tears and pressed the heels of her hands to her face. She sniffed and took a deep breath. Tipping her cup to check the contents, she drained the last bit of coffee and set the cup down with a thump of finality.
“Okay, why not? If we don’t come up with anything, we’ll be in no worse shape than we are now.”
It wasn’t quite the enthusiastic response Kyle was hoping for, but it would have to do. He finished his coffee and then helped Amanda straighten up the kitchen.
Later that afternoon, Amanda and Kyle were at a small square table in one corner of her office. She had laid out all of the materials she’d collected relating to lycanthropy and the legendary ritual that cured it.
They had disappointingly little to work with.
Amanda worked at her computer while Kyle read the account of the Navajo medicine man’s ritual. It took a while to work through the odd phrasing and spelling common to the period. It was obvious from the start that the ritual described by the observer was substantially different from what Amanda had done. When he asked her about that, she said she couldn’t duplicate the medicine man’s ritual because she didn’t have his exact wording and the ceremony was based upon his own belief system. In a sense, she’d had to re-write the recipe using her own ingredients. Unfortunately, her recipe hadn’t been close enough to produce the same outcome.
He glanced at her as Amanda started typing a message. “I can move to the porch if you need to get some work done,” he offered.
“No, that’s okay. I took the week off, and I’m just making sure no emergencies or questions have come up. I have a couple of messages to send and I’ll be done.”
He was humbled by how generous she was being with her time. “I’m grateful for the sacrifice you’re making. I hope I’m not making your life difficult financially.”
Amanda laughed. “Don’t worry about it. My expenses are low and I’ve got plenty of savings. I haven’t had a vacation in too long anyway.”
Kyle harrumphed. “Some vacation.”
Amanda stopped typing and sat back in her chair. She looked at Kyle through serious eyes. “If we succeed, it will be the best vacation ever.”
Kyle smiled and patted the pages in front of him. “Working on it.”
Amanda returned his smile and went back to typing.
To eliminate the mental translation he had to perform every time he read the Navajo ritual, Kyle started rewriting a translation in his own words. The process turned out to be more valuable than he’d anticipated because it helped him highlight parts of the account that were vague or confusing. He reasoned that if something was wrong with Amanda’s ritual, it was most likely to be in one of the parts that was poorly described.
He was finishing up his translation when Amanda joined him at the table. He handed the original documents and his translation to her. “What do you think? Did I get it right?”
Amanda went through the pages. About half-way through, she looked up at him with respect. “This was a good idea. I wish I’d thought of it earlier. I was too focused on formulating my own ritual.”
“It may not make any difference,” Kyle said. “But I got tired of the convoluted language. The narrator seemed to back up a couple of times, so I rearranged everything to put it in the right order.”
Amanda handed the pages back to him. “Looks good to me. What’s next?”
Kyle was approaching the problem similar to the way he solved programming challenges. After all, they were essentially debugging Amanda’s exorcism ritual. The Navajo ritual was like an old program that had to be rewritten in a new language, and they had to be careful to support all of the operating assumptions that were inherent in the old code.
Kyle gave Amanda an apologetic glance. “Just so you know, this could take a while an
d it may try your patience.” He paused and Amanda nodded for him to go on. “I now know what the medicine man did, but I need to understand why he did it. I want to go through every step of his ritual and have you explain what it means. Then we can review what you came up with and see how it matches up.”
The look Amanda gave him was dubious. “How will you be able to criticize my work without a background in what I do?”
Kyle was used to hearing that question. Many of the subject-matter experts he’d worked with in the past didn’t understand that he only needed them to explain their process, not justify it. Kyle’s job as the programmer was to make their job easier by automating the parts that were the most tedious, repetitive, and prone to error.
“I’m not going to criticize your work, I’m going to question it. You’ll have to handle all the critique yourself. This will be the dumb-question phase of the analysis that I warned you about earlier.”
Amanda chuckled and nodded. “Okay, that actually sounds useful.”
Kyle shifted his chair next to Amanda’s and they went through the Navajo ritual one step at a time. Kyle kept notes as they went along, and he started to appreciate how much time she had already spent researching Navajo symbolism and mysticism. They found only a couple of places where she’d had to make a questionable judgment call, and that was mostly due to a deficiency in the narration.
At first, Kyle was disturbed that some guesswork was involved.
Amanda reassured him. “These rituals aren’t as rigid as you might expect. Two different medicine men, even from the same nation, might approach it differently. The main thing we need to do is understand the mechanisms they used to achieve the purpose of the ritual. Every belief system wraps its own ‘noise level’ of symbolism around that fundamental purpose. Like you said, why is more important than how, particularly when we are trying to separate the noise from the core elements.”
That made sense. Analyzing any process often revealed aspects that were irrelevant or had become obsolete over time. Calling it noise level was a good analogy.
By the time they were done, Kyle felt like he had a good understanding of the medicine man’s ritual. The core elements were surprisingly logical, and the Navajo mysticism that enveloped it added an elegance that inspired awe.
“It’s like some kind of performance art,” Kyle observed.
“It is!” Amanda agreed. “When I perform a ritual, it’s almost like a dance with the spirits. The more focused and engaged I am, the smoother it becomes and the better it feels. A ritual that goes perfectly can leave me feeling euphoric for hours.”
Kyle took her hand in his and looked into her eyes, smiling at the excitement he saw there. “That’s so cool.” His breath caught as he stared into the depths of her pretty hazel eyes. The two of them were practically shoulder to shoulder, so their faces were only inches apart. Amanda returned his stare, her head tilting slightly in a quizzical way. His eyes went to her lips, and he wondered what it would be like to kiss her. He turned away and released her hand. “Sorry.”
She patted his hand. “That’s okay. Maybe we can continue that conversation when this is over and the demon is gone.”
Kyle gave her a lopsided grin. “I’d like that. Particularly the ‘demon is gone’ part.”
“Then let’s get busy. We still have to go over my interpretation.”
They spent the next hour going over Amanda’s version of the ritual. Kyle was able to follow Amanda’s rationale for every decision she had made to translate the Navajo exorcism to her own. All of the core elements seemed to be present.
“It should have worked,” Kyle concluded.
Amanda rested her forehead on her hand and didn’t bother responding.
“What exactly did the demon say when it … took over?” Kyle asked.
Amanda gave him an incredulous look. “You think the demon would have given me a clue for improving the ritual?”
“Not intentionally. Tell me what it said.”
“It said I was wasting my time. It said it could not be exorcised, and better mortals than me had tried and failed. I argued that a mortal had succeeded before and that I would do it again. It laughed at me and said I didn’t have what it takes.”
Kyle thought for a minute. Maybe the demon had given them a clue. An idea began to form, but before he pursued it, he needed more context.
“When did you first feel like things were getting out of control?”
Amanda got a distant look while she considered his question. “I hate to say it, but as soon as I started on the exorcism itself, something was off.” She put her finger down on the first page documenting the steps of her ritual. “All of the stuff up to here is common to nearly every spell I cast. The exorcism itself happens from here to right before I release the spirits.”
Her answer didn’t help much from a diagnostic perspective. It was like a program throwing a general error message. But it showed they were missing something fundamental.
“When did the demon start talking?”
Amanda flipped through the pages of her ritual. She pointed to a step on the third page and said, “Right here. The moment I called it forth to draw it out of you, it manifested in your body and spoke to me instead.”
Kyle shuddered at the memory of what that moment had been like for him. He quickly turned his attention back to what Amanda had experienced.
An idea continued to tickle the back of his mind. They were missing something fundamental. Sometimes programs failed in strange ways because of a problem in their environment. Like when they lost their connection to a database or were missing a configuration file. The program could be perfectly fine, but if it wasn’t installed correctly, it would fail, and often with confusing or even misleading side effects.
Amanda was watching him think. When he glanced at her, she raised an eyebrow in query.
“What do you suppose the demon meant by, ‘You don’t have what it takes’?”
Amanda shrugged. “It was an insult. The demon thinks I’m incapable of performing the exorcism.”
Kyle picked up the pages he had written documenting the Navajo ritual. Not seeing what he wanted, he went back to the original text.
“The medicine man walked forward and put his hands over the wolf-man’s head. Gripping the wolf skull, he called forth the demon. He then raised his hands high and cast the demon into the abyss.”
Amanda had been reading along with him. Her voice took on an edge of impatience. “Okay. We have that part. That’s where I called forth the demon. And it came forth. Like I explained before, I don’t need to physically touch you for a ritual involving spirits. All that would do is put me at risk of possession.”
“What if we’ve been reading this wrong? We assumed he gripped the skull of the wolf-man. What if he literally had a wolf skull in his hands instead?”
Amanda frowned and sifted through the original account. “I don’t see any other mention of a wolf skull.”
“True, but everywhere else, the narrator calls the victim the wolf-man. This is the only unqualified use of the term ‘wolf’ in the whole account of the ritual.”
Amanda sat back in her chair, looking thoughtful.
Kyle thought they might be on to something, but didn’t want to get his hopes up yet. “Does such a thing even make sense in this context?”
Amanda nodded. “Many Navajo rituals make use of a totem. They can be powerful tools. The medicine man might have used the wolf skull as some kind of spirit trap.”
Kyle leaned forward, unable to hide his excitement. “That would fit the narration, wouldn’t it? The medicine man drew the demon into the wolf skull and then cast it away.”
Amanda pursed her lips, but the excitement in her eyes gave away her growing interest. “Let me look into this. We don’t have time to create a talisman like that from scratch, but I might be able to find a substitute somewhere nearby.”
Kyle tried to hold back his enthusiasm. There was no way to know if he had interpreted th
e passage correctly. They could be following a dead-end path. “Do you really think I might be right about this?”
Amanda looked him in the eye with a serious expression. “I really do. I should have expected the medicine man to use a totem for this ritual.”
Kyle exhaled in relief. “Don’t be hard on yourself. It’s easy to focus on what’s in front of you and never realize when something is missing.”
Kyle volunteered to make lunch while Amanda started her search for a totem or some other talisman they could use for another try at the exorcism. He hoped she would find something nearby, but it was a good bet they wouldn’t be able to try again that evening. That left only three more nights until First Moon.
Tuesday morning, Kyle and Amanda cruised south on Highway 95 in her Toyota RAV4. Kyle could hardly contain his excitement. Late Monday afternoon, Amanda had located a totem that might turn out to be exactly what they needed.
Through her connections in the Order, Amanda had found a collector of American Indian artifacts near Coeur d’Alene, about a forty-five-minute drive south of the farm. Derek Bell, the collector, welcomed Amanda’s interest in his hobby and invited her to come and see it. He was willing to loan items from his collection if the borrower paid a fee and signed a contract that spelled out the terms of the loan and the penalties for loss or damage.
During the first part of their journey, Amanda didn’t say much. She was still annoyed by Kyle’s insistence on accompanying her. She had wanted him to stay at the farm, but he didn’t trust the Pack to honor the refuge with Amanda gone and Lucille at her shop in town. He argued that he would be safer with her, and he needed to feel like he was contributing somehow.
Kyle would have lost the argument if luck hadn’t intervened. When Jonathan called to check in with Amanda, he suggested that he follow them down and back; he had an errand to run that he could take care of while they visited with Mr. Bell. The last time Kyle had checked, Jonathan’s green Sequoia was a couple of cars behind them.
First Moon (The Ternion Order Book 1) Page 19