by Kat Turner
“And if you’re spirit.” Eve touched the inked hoop marking the other woman’s volume. “It makes me think there are three others.” One doesn’t go through life with magic without knowing the symbols of the five elements, the fifth being spirit, or ether.
“Didn’t you say the lady you met in Peru was using water as part of the ritual you two did?” Squinting at something as she read, Helen flipped pages.
“Yeah. But she didn’t have a book. At least not that I saw or she told me about.” Eve closed Helen’s tome. Their Minneapolis host’s abilities, she’d learned from their chat, involved things like remote viewing and astral travel. Helen could also move and direct unseen energetic forces and enter trance states. Such things both made sense, as aspects of spirit powers that aided her in her profession of teaching yoga and meditation.
“What are you smiling about?” The tone of her voice melodious with good-natured teasing, Helen nudged Eve with the clawed toe of her Godzilla-foot slipper. She set her book on the lush throw rug cushioning their bodies against a wooden floor.
“I like how both of us leverage our magic as an asset to our careers.”
“Witches are smart. The ultimate businesswomen. We always have been.” Helen narrowed her eyes and rubbed her hands together in a comic mime of entrepreneurial shrewdness.
“Ha. Fair. So what do you suppose happens when we find our fire, air, and water sisters?”
“Beats me. Form a coven and be witchy and awesome I guess. You have any way to get in touch with Peruvian water lady?”
Eve pulled her phone out of her purse. “Yeah. She’s on social media. They’re secretive about the exact location of their camp and make a big show out of being covert, but other than that, it’s not exactly a blackout of info.”
Helen scooted close, leaning in as Eve pulled up Taylor’s page. Her profile picture showed her reclined in a big bed, red cedar log walls behind her. Glowing, Taylor cradled two swaddled newborns. Pink faces gazed upon their mother, tiny mouths open and eyes wide in awe.
Her panorama cover photo displayed the majestic, foliage-flanked river bathed in a bleeding magenta sunset. The networking site listed her location as the city of Iquitos, Peru.
Eve typed out a congratulations accompanied by a couple of emojis, adding to the dozens already plastering Taylor’s wall. She typed a short private message asking Taylor if she knew anything about the elemental spell books or owned one herself. Before sending, Eve wrote that the matter was one of some urgency.
A wave of moving dots popped up in a reply box, indicating that Taylor was typing. But she replied with a dismissal: can’t discuss.
“That’s that I guess.” Eve closed the message window.
“It’s fine. At least we put something on her radar.”
Eve liked how Helen had referred to them as “we.” All her life she’d felt unlike other girls in the worst of ways, weird and skewed and hopelessly flawed, looking in from the outside as cliques formed and broke and formed again without her. In high school, she would have cut out a tooth to get invited to parties, to jump into a car with the popular crowd and go for tacos after the final bell rang.
To be part of the chummy, feminine “we” that forever eluded her.
But now, in the course of a week, she’d met two women with whom she had some pretty significant things in common. Helen’s offhand mention of the coven idea continued to swirl through her mind in an amorphous pink sparkle of unspecific crystal fantasies and childhood impressions.
“I agree. We wait.” Of course, Eve added nothing to the conversation and she knew it. She’d repeated the “we” to say it, to feel it. She pretended to read the book in front of her, sneaking a glance at Helen and hoping the woman didn’t judge her as a complete and total moron.
Helen smiled knowingly, the whole-face grin of a sister, a friend. “Exactly.”
“Knock knock.” Brian spoke from the doorway, knocking on the open door as he talked.
“Hey, babe. We’re talking witchy things. Turns out sister books came to each of us separately. Talk about a synchronicity, right?”
Unbidden, the smallest of happy dances animated Eve’s shoulders. Must have been the “sister” comment.
“Absolutely.” Helen’s husband leaned against the jamb. “And I think it’s time we debrief. I’ve got a nice whiskey to pour into that cider.”
Standing in a nook of a room overflowing with plants and decorated with pewter statues of Hindu gods, Eve petted a weeping fern overflowing from its painted clay pot. The silent home grooved with understated energy.
She supposed the presence she sensed came from some trace of spirit, the imprints left behind by those who passed through. This element of her gift appeared when she was around ten and started hearing faint, indecipherable babble emanating from the box air conditioner in her room.
She was lucky to have spiritually inclined parents who believed her.
Eve allowed the subtle wave of blurred gibberish, the whispers that ran together, to wash over her as she sat in a firm chair and enjoyed the feel of its linen upholstery. Spell book open to the page she’d memorized, she closed her eyes and concentrated on teasing apart the threads. Her breath became oceanic, an elemental rise and fall powerful enough to pull the moon.
Staying with the yogic breathing pattern Helen had taught her, Eve catalogued the whispers. First, she did away with the inconsequential ones, people of little import who’d passed through Helen and Brian’s home. His musician friends, her yoga friends, Tilly’s study buddies.
The superficial layer shed, she dug deeper. Her heart hammered. Warmth rose from her feet to her face, making her sweat in the mild air.
“Good,” Eve assured herself as vibrations hummed through her body and buzzed in her head. She’d put herself under hypnosis. An ideal state for contacting the spirits of the turbulent dead, those who’d died without peace.
Reach the Unpeaceful, not Banish Intruders, was the spell she needed to make and sustain meaningful contact with the malcontent spirit who’d taken up residence in her head.
As directed by her book, Eve visualized herself walking down a staircase. Into a basement, into her subconscious. She pictured the staircase carpeted in evergreen, its steps soft beneath her bare feet.
She held an ornate banister carved in dark wood as she descended the staircase into the recesses of her mind, where Lacey dwelled. Where she’d demand answers—answers she’d use as ammunition to defeat the skulking dead girl and her scheming, reckless family. Answers she’d use to protect Jonnie from any harmful effects of her secret.
If she was going to have a spirit knocking around in her head, she’d meet it on her own terms.
The staircase ended in Brian and Helen’s kitchen. She wandered the chic space, stroking cool white marble kissed in moonlight. Their chrome stove gleamed, shiny even in darkness. A pleasant humming filled her head. Her movements were slow and thick, languid.
“Are you without peace, love?” Jonnie’s distinctive, smooth voice emerged behind her.
Pulses of energy massaging her, she turned around to see him standing in the doorway, long and lean in the black silk pajama pants he’d worn to bed. A slight downward tilt made his hair shield his face. Both hands rested on the top of the door frame, like he wanted to do a pull-up.
The gestalt of his pose was sexy-dangerous, the brooding bad boy. His shadow self, his alter ego was out to romp.
“Yes. I’m possessed.” She walked to him, affecting a roll of her hips, a swing of her arms. Heat gathered in her center.
He stalked to her and backed her into a wall, caging her with planted hands. Spears of erect fangs showed behind parted lips.
“What is this place?” Jonnie growled his whisper, head cocked as he studied her neck.
“The other place.” She matched his tone. “Of possibility. Where our kind roam.” For much of her adult life, Eve held her insomnia in impotent, rage-filled disdain. It was a burden, an ailment to be medicated, a plight t
o be cursed with pre-dawn tears of exhausted frustration.
She laughed, free at last. How wrong she’d been. All those years, she hadn’t gotten it. Eve hadn’t needed some pill or relaxation technique to help her lie in bed and fall into typical dreamland.
She’d needed a spell to give her a passport to travel.
He moved with unnatural speed, ripping at her clothes. Shocking sounds of shredding fabric filled her ears as her chest heaved up and down, breasts swelling beneath his touch.
Good God, he acted with efficiency, his movements shot through with brutal precision. How he hoisted her leg, her back warming cold tile, thrilled her with the vibe of repressed brutishness unleashed. Jonnie wasn’t like this, except when he was.
Locking his devilish eyes, lost in the rapture of emerald irises and vertical pupils, she curled a hand into his elastic and yanked the smooth material of his pants down just past his groin. His sac was tight, a gathered ball dense with need. His dick, rigid as a poker and bracketed by the inked lines raking down his front, jutted from his body in an upward arc.
In a swift and fluid motion, he lifted her off the ground, impaled her on his cock, and started thrusting. The first stab of penetration, exquisite, annihilated her with pleasure.
He groaned into her neck. She moaned into his ear. Soon, Eve lost herself to sensation. The smell of their excited bodies, his punching hips plunging glorious length inside of her, took over.
When they came at the same time, voices a blur of hoarse cries and panted moans, Jonnie stabbed his fangs deep into her neck and sucked. She wailed, coming apart in those perfect, mind-erasing quakes of release made complex by exquisite invasions of pain.
He pulled away as they finished, gasping for air. She stumbled, woozy, stars littering her vision. Jonnie’s warm hand gripped her above the elbow, catching her before she fell to the floor. He bit his own wrist and held it high.
A warm ruby trickle splashed her chin and nose. The first drops hit her parted lips and outstretched tongue, their flavor as addictively sweet as a raspberry snow cone at a hot summer carnival. Eve caught every bit of the ambrosia as she could as blood splattered her mouth.
“My blood is your mask,” Jonnie murmured as he lowered his arm and pressed the heel of his hand into the wound. With his free fingers, he pulled up his pants.
In a daze of bliss, she connected, albeit in the vaguest and most amorphous way, with his words. Eve smeared his thick offering over her cheeks and forehead and nose, covering herself with a protective film of sticky residue.
Jonnie nodded once and walked away in the direction from which he’d come, a hint of a post-coital swagger in the sway of his hips, the square of his shoulders. A rock star gait if there ever was one.
The perfume of him heavy in her nostrils, Eve resumed her now-nude walk. She ducked through a doorway and entered a room full of doors. Helen floated in the corner, arms outstretched like a statue of Christ as she hovered near the ceiling.
White cue balls of eyes regarded Eve. Helen grinned, the effect uncanny when set against her blank orbs. “Where our kind roam.”
“Fire.” The voice of an invisible feminine stranger drawled.
“Air.” A different mystery woman’s whisper.
“Chaos,” hissed another. “Squares the circle.”
“They’re here.” Helen’s words shot out in breath of hushed excitement. “They’re here, they’re here, they’re here.”
Evie’s bite wound buzzed, throbbing without pain. The coating on her face, combined with her nakedness, intoxicated her with a foreign, erotic feeling. Heightened, fleshy, alive with pungent realness.
She chose a red door whose hue matched the blood on her face, ducking to clear the doorway as the dimensions shrank. A cast iron staircase twisted into a claustrophobic coil as Eve wove down, down, down. It morphed into industrial metal, rusted and urban, as she wound her way into an unfurnished basement with a cavernous quality.
Naked except for the dried vampire blood painting her face, Eve stood on a hard-packed dirt floor.
“Stuck in death, appear to me. Rise from your grave so you may be free.”
After Eve spoke the opening words of Reach the Unpeaceful, the crown of a head, its blonde hair thinning and mussed, rose from the dirt. Lacey came up, decomposing beneath her burial dress. She was a little more worse for wear than she’d been in Peru, more sunken and blotched, her decayed face twice as angry.
Beside her, the squirrel-thing wrested gray flesh from one of her toes. Eve tried not to look, locking the spirit’s dead eyes instead as she opened conversation. “So what you want is to come back to life as a blood-slave for your mom’s fucked up pets? For real?”
Lacey sneered. “Yeah, right. You bring me back and your boyfriend makes me into a vamp. You think I’m going to sit back and relax while my dumbass mom uses me as a blood bank? Puh-lease?”
The corpse girl stepped closer, stretching the gaping pit of her mouth into a blackened maw. “Bring me back now, witch. Raise me from the bowels of the earth. I command you.” Lacey’s mouth, frozen in its terrible death gape, didn’t move as she spoke.
Eve stood her ground as she faced down Lacey’s encroachment. The smell of Jonnie’s blood ensconced her in positivity. Protected her, she bet, from Lacey’s attempt to block her incantation with some type of counter spell.
“I command you, witch. You are my necromancer. You are my sage, my guide along the path to return to my earthly station. Bring me forth, necromancer.”
“Sorry sweetie, but I’m going to have to pass. I’m sure another necromancer will feel differently and snap you right up.” Eve recited more lines of her Reach the Unpeaceful spell.
Lacey doubled over and screamed, pulling what was left of her hair out in clumps as she freaked out. The squirrel started and leapt in the air. “Give me my life back, or in one night my pet kills everyone you love. Take my soul forever. I don’t even care.”
Eve shook her head. The nights from Lacey’s initial threat had come and gone, triggering in Eve skepticism about the range of the squirrel’s ability. And right now the messed-up rodent was focused on freeing Lacey’s toenail from her big toe, not stealing anyone’s life.
“I’m not buying this. I don’t think your familiar is nearly as strong as you claim it is. You’re bluffing. And I don’t accept souls as payment for magic. So let’s get down to business and take stock. Your mom is an insane idiot who is so far out of her depth, she’s lost at sea. You’re sick of being dead and buried and want to come back to life as a vampire. I want you and the thing chewing on your foot to leave me and the people I love alone for good. I also want your mom to not end the world with her asinine scheming. So instead of pretending you can defeat me with the roadkill currently snacking on you, I propose we look for a compromise.”
Lacey crossed her arms and scoffed, shaking the opportunistic eater off her with a jerk of her leg. It chittered and ran back to its place at her heel. She pursed her pallid lips and scratched a sore above her eyebrow with a broken yellow nail. “Fine. You win.”
“If not out of loyalty to your mom, why do you want to be a vampire?”
“Uh, duh. Power, immortality, eternal life. They were supposed to bring me back right away. I wanted to be an actress, and they said this way I’d stay young and beautiful and loved forever.” Lacey stuck out her lower lip, girly pout garish against the gruesome appearance of her rotted face and body.
Empathy for the frustrated zombie overcame Eve. The world was a rough place for a young woman as it was, and she couldn’t imagine how trying to make it in the entertainment industry compounded those natural feelings of insecurity and self-consciousness. And desperate, insecure girls agreed to lots of exploitative things.
Lacey had reached for some shiny bauble Hollywood types dangled before her with all the starry-eyed optimism natural for a beautiful, ambitious woman at the height of her physical prime. Instead of reaping the spoils of her Faustian bargain, she’d gotten screwed. No fame
, adoration, or ticket to eternal youth for Lacey. She’d ended up an agitated member of the walking dead, stalking a necromancer and vampire while a gross squirrel-thing pecked at her flesh. Poor dear.
“Who are they?” Eve asked. “Who did this to you?”
Lacey unfurled her arms, undead face transitioning from fury to sagging defeat. “Secret society people. They called themselves the Gatekeepers of Sirius. I didn’t take it seriously at first, assumed it was more ridiculous Hollywood occult nonsense. I mean, I saw posers everywhere out there, you know? Starlets who blathered about worshipping Satan and wore pyramids with eyes in them on their shirts. Movie directors who said they could summon demons to brainwash celebrities and do CIA mind-control tricks to give people multiple personalities they could activate through programming. I assumed it was bullshit for attention, you know? Stupid conspiracy theory crap they threw around in LA to look edgy.” Lacey put air quotes around edgy.
Eve smiled, nodding. They were making solid progress.
“So when some producer said the Gatekeepers needed to initiate me before I could get A-list roles, I was okay with it. At least I didn’t have to suck any old-man dick or pose for sleazy pictures, you know?”
Eve nodded. “Right.” She teemed with anticipation. The meat of the issue was about to emerge.
“I get an invitation to a party called Silver Phase. Long story short, this dude comes to my condo and leads me to an SUV. There were like ten other girls in there. The car drives us to this mansion. They made us put plastic baggies over our high heels, so we didn’t scratch up the big shot’s marble flooring. Weird, the details you remember.” Lacey tilted her head to the side, prompting acknowledgement.
“In strange situations our awareness has a way of shrinking. Maybe it’s a survival mechanism.” The beat-up rodent wrested a scrap of Lacey’s mottled skin free, holding it in its little paws and eating while Eve forced down the urge to puke. She pointed at the scavenger. “Can I, uh, do anything to help you with that?”
Lacey rolled her cloudy eyes. “I’m used to it. So anywho, some other guy leads all of us girls into this basement with a black and white checkerboard floor. There were mirrors all over the walls and pentagrams and this chair.” The girl shuddered.