Chapter 5: Ilicon
"Eva, what the heck are these things?"
I returned home after dropping Amelia off at the Marriott, to find Wynn elbows deep in my grandmother's box of knick-knacks. This is just what I need right now.
"Stuff from Granny's." I resisted the impulse to rush over and grab the box away from her.
Wynn pulled out a giant geode filled with the jagged edges of a milky blue stone.
"I thought it might make a good book-end," I said, defensively.
"These are cool." Wynn held up a small glass ball filled with a sachet of dried grass, a red ribbon, and a smattering of dried red flower petals. "I wonder how they get the little flowers in there." She held it over her nose, staring underneath it.
"Are you staying here tonight or are you going over to Robin's?" I asked, sitting down on the opposite end of the sofa and tucking my legs up.
"Heading to Robin's. You should have Cal over." Setting the ornament back in the box, Wynn looked up, slyly. "Or maybe Sinclair Ash?" Her tone was innocent. Her look was suggestive.
Is the universe out to get me? "Most girls wouldn't encourage their friends to two-time," I said, rubbing at my eyes, tiredly. It had been a long day. Between the strain of trying to act normal for Amelia, the anger over my treatment in the witches' shops, the betrayal I felt over Cal, and the fear that I was having a harder and harder time compartmentalizing... I was fine curling up in bed all day Sunday and dealing with the world again on Monday.
"Yes, well," said Wynn, not sounding at all apologetic. "I'll use any tool at my disposal to get Sinclair Ash to agree to a photo shoot..."
"Did you just call me a tool?"
"...Plus, it's not two-timing unless you and Cal are an item. Are you?"
"Definitely not," I said.
Wynn's mouth rounded in surprise. "Oh dear, I sense anger. Remember Eva, anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear..."
"You've got it backwards, Yoda," I snapped.
"Do I? Darn." Wynn stood, flicking her curtain of black hair over her shoulders. "I gotta run, or I'm going to be late for dinner. You still owe me that story about Ash. And apparently there's one about Cal I have to hear, too. Lunch date sometime this week?"
I waved a hand at her dismissively. "Sure," I muttered.
Wynn left, and I waited five minutes in the silence before willing myself to stand. Then I went around setting up Gran's spells, taping them to doors and windows, the places I remember them hanging in her house.
I reheated some leftover pizza for dinner and tried to sit down with Diana for the New World. I'm not a big reader, and the book was dense. When I got to the section about the importance of ritual, I set the book down in disgust. Boring. It was all about telling the difference between European plants and American plants, how to make substitutions and alter the rituals based on shifts in time zones. And the whole section about rituals was just confusing. The book didn't say anything about why you had to place certain types of stones in certain patterns, just that you had to do it.
I also had this whisper of doubt that was getting gradually louder. Maybe all these glass ornaments and stuff were just Granny's aesthetic. Maybe the books were part of her academic research.
I tried to think back to my childhood, to whether or not I'd ever seen Granny actually perform any magic. To my knowledge, I hadn't. Nor had I seen her with any gaggle of friends that might resemble a witch's coven. She was close to a few colleagues at work. But whenever they came over, they held card games, not séances.
Oh! Who knew if I even had that right. I was just assuming that witches performed in Covens because that's what pop culture said.
And yet... There were always fresh plants and vines in the windowsills. And the windowsill had always been full of strange objects. Had that been her altar? She'd had a pantry-full of herb-laden, unlabeled mason jars, and I'd rarely seen her use any of those ingredients to cook. I'd asked her about them once, and she'd held one up and said it was marjoram, and that she used to use it in mushroom soup. But since I didn't like mushrooms, she never made mushroom soup, and didn't need to use marjoram.
Why had I never pried harder? Probably because next to Mom's weirdness, Granny had seemed normal. I'd thrown all those herbs away.
The emotionally exhausting day coupled with the bad night's sleep the night before, meant that by eight o'clock, I was exhausted. I left the kitchen light on, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.
"Do you want to hear the story about Silas Dyre and the Woman in Black?"
"I want to hear about how you met Dad."
Mama goes still next to me. "That's not a very good story."
"But I know the one about Silas. I don't know the one about Dad." Dad called the house this afternoon. I know, because my dad's name is William, and Mama called the man on the phone Bill. There's a boy in my class whose name is Billy, but his real name is William.
I have one memory of Dad. He took me to the petting zoo, and we fed the goats together. I remember when the goat slobbered all over my hand, Dad had pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped off the slobber. I remember he'd left me alone for a few minutes, and when he came back, he picked me up and took me quickly to the car. I'd cried. I wanted to keep playing with the goats. He'd dropped me off at home, and I hadn't seen him again.
"You know," says Mama, eyes darting from ornament to ornament. They swing gently, as if pushed by an unseen breeze. Though they're made of metal, they glint with darkness and starlight. I love looking at them, too. "I've always wondered who the woman in black was. And what word she whispered into Silas' ear to make him risk summoning ghosts."
I don't like this story. It's one of Mama's favorites. She likes telling the parts where Silas chants and chants, and a ghost takes shape from his fire's smoke. The ghost passes through Silas, numbing his arm. And days later, Silas Dyer still hasn't regained its use.
"He took a dozen lives with that dead arm," Mama says, her arm falling heavily across my lap. "He would be talking to someone, a friend, or a colleague, and would reach out, all of a sudden, wrapping his hand around their throat. And the life would drain from their eyes, their death creating enormous bursts of energy. But where did all that delicious death energy go? Certainly it never went to Silas."
I bite my lip, hoping she won't tell the part of the story where Silas kills his son, and then himself.
"Who was that woman in black?" Mama murmurs. "Do you think it was the Goddess Hecate, herself?"
"You said you don't believe in gods," I remind her.
"That's not true, Terrible One. I don't believe the people we call gods are gods," my mother corrects me. "But that doesn't mean gods don't exist. What if Hecate is real? What if she's not a god at all, but a particularly strong elemental? Or a sorceress who's learned the secret of immortality?"
I know if I bring my father up again, she'll get angry, but I want to know what he said to her.
As if sensing my intention to ask her again, my mother goes still beside me. A small smile curls her lips. "Uh oh, Terrible One," she says. She looks down at me; her eyes unfocused. "It's time to wake up."
I woke with a start. I didn't need to check the clock to know it was midnight. "The itches" again.
No.
It wasn't the itches. It wasn't my usual midnight need to wander. I didn't feel the same restlessness, the same untamed energy. I felt dread. Fear flooded my body, filling every cell and pore with thick terror. I wasn't alone. Something was inside my apartment.
My heart in my throat, my mind began to race. I had no weapons. Even my phone was in the living room.
Breathe, Eva. Maybe it's not what you think. Why be afraid when you should be feared, remember?
But I couldn't remember. And about being feared, I had no idea why my mother said those things to me. But I couldn't just sit in my room. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's just your imagination.
And how foolish would I be, climbing out my own window when it was just Wynn, coming back early after fighting with Robin?
I stood up, my knees quaking slightly, and I yanked down one of my grandmother's orbs from where I'd hung it near my door.
Fighting past the dread, I entered my hallway. Nothing will be out there, I chanted inwardly. You can get your phone and call Cal. Or call Wynn. Or call the police.
The first thing I noticed when I entered the hall, was that the kitchen light was no longer on. The living room was so dark that my eyes could barely penetrate the gloom. I reached out and switched on a light.
For a moment, the light was so bright, I couldn't see. Then my vision cleared. My heart skipped a beat, and cold spread through my veins like cracks in a windshield.
Standing at the mouth to my kitchen, leaning casually against the frame, was the demon-sorcerer I'd encountered last night. In his hand was one of my grandmother's ornaments.
"Quaint" he said, and his voice was even more terrible than it had been last night. Tonight, it bubbled and hissed like acid eating through iron. He tossed the orb up into the air and let it fall. It smashed into the ground, glass flying across the floor, a few shards landing at my feet. I didn't dare look away from him. "Did you think these were going to stop me?"
I felt the air about me ripple, felt my fingers pried open by an unseen force. The ornament in my hand tumbled to the ground. It, too, shattered.
"They're not bad little pieces of magic," said the thing. "But those spells wouldn't have worked on me."
In the light, he was even more frightening than he'd been in the alley. His teeth were tinged black, his pupils taking up almost his entire eye. Where his eyes weren't black, they were red. With those terrible eyes, and that macabre shadow hovering beneath his skin, it was as if something was wearing the man like a translucent, well-tailored suit. Sin had said demons don't possess sorcerers, that sorcerers summon and control demons. But I was certain this creature standing before me was more demon than man. With those terrible, inhuman eyes he studied me, grinning.
"It's interesting," he said, grabbing up another ornament. "These aren't spells to keep a demon away. They're spells to protect the castor from harm. And you didn't cast these."
He tossed the ornament over its shoulder. It hit the wall and splintered into a thousand pieces. "But someone cast them for protection. Someone, who feared the wroth of an angry little girl with too much power, cast protection spells all over her house to make sure she would not be harmed. Oh yes, Eva Mallory. I know what you are." He leered at me, taking two steps closer. I tried to back away, but it wasn't fear holding me motionless. Once more, I was at the thing's mercy. And this time, I was going to die.
I didn't want to see my death. I wanted to close my eyes, but I was frozen. I could barely work my lungs to draw in breath.
"Your dead Gran filled her house with magic to protect her against you."
Lies. He was lying. Can't trust the witches. Can't trust the demons.
"Am I? Am I lying?" He laughed. At least I think it was a laugh, it sounded as if he were choking on molten ore. Then a fierce burning filled my head - as if someone grabbed onto my mind with hot tongs.
"Eva! Stop! Stop this!"
Suddenly, I was no longer in my living room; I was in Granny's office.
"Eva! Stop!" The room was chaos incarnate. A veritable tornado ripped through it, wind battering the walls, whipping around and around, tearing books from the shelves, tearing pages from the books.
"You have no idea what you are! You have no idea the damage you can do. You must stop!" Granny's eyes were wild with panic. Her right arm hung, useless, from her shoulder, her left arm was aloft, imploring me to end the destruction, to calm down.
But there was no calm in me. I was fury, I was violence, and darkness, and force. I was power incarnate. And she would never tell me what to do again.
"Eva please! Please calm down! If you love me, Eva!" Granny screamed, ducking as a thick tome flew at her head...
"Am I lying?" The demon's voice filled my memory, but Granny's house was fading and pain flooded my head as if the memory had been ripped from its roots.
Yes! I wanted to shout. You're lying! But I knew he wasn't. I knew that memory. Terrible One. Monster.
"I had no idea, when I summoned up the darkness, that you would answer the call." He grinned, his mouth an abyss of black. "All that power, unspent. Pent up in you like steam in a pressure cooker, beating against your skin, and building with the waxing of the moon." It licked its lips, smearing black across its chin. "I'm going to split you open like a peach. And I'm going to take my time. Fear is tricky. It can fuel power, or it can stymie it, shrivel it up at it source. The trick is pain. Put you in so much pain that you forget your fear. And then all that magic is mine."
He reached behind him and pulled out that terrible looking knife. "Do you know what I'm going to do, Eva Mallory? I'm going to flay you alive. I'm going to gather every drop of power you expend. I'm going to carve you open and all that pain, all that power, all that untapped and unspoilt potential is going to feed my spell."
He moved closer, and my fear spiked. He seemed to sense it and stopped, closing his eyes and inhaling it as if it were perfume. "Did you know," he said, "I was going to have to kill at least six more people before Samhain to have enough power to break The Order. But you've enough power in your veins to work three of these spells in succession." He shook his head. "It's a shame, really, that I have to kill you. You'd be valuable alive, as well."
Alive! My mind screamed. Keep me alive! I'm valuable alive!
But if the demon-thing could read my mind before, he was ignoring me now. He unbuttoned his shirt, slowly, revealing a chest full of strange swirling symbols and tattoos that seemed to beat red in time with his heart. But more terrifying was the enormous stone that hung upon a golden chain. It was black, blacker than onyx, blacker than the dark. My eyes fastened on it. I'd seen it before. Somewhere.
Then the demon-thing began to chant. And the stone ceased to matter.
I can't begin to try and write out the sounds that emerged from his mouth, words in a language that had no vowels. Consonants split the air and almost materialized before me. Pressure began to build both in the room, and beneath my skin. Electricity crackled, arcing overhead. I heard glass shatter, my grandmother's orbs caving to a force that threatened to split the room in half.
A tingling pain began to build beneath my skin, light at first, but then harder, deeper, until I wanted to scream with it, writhe against it. But my body was not my own to control. I could do nothing but stare, unblinkingly at the demon-thing's pupil-less eyes, at its black mouth gaping, tongue flicking syllables into the air.
He held the knife up, continuing to chant, and I watched as a terrible blue fire arced down the flat of the blade.
I tried desperately to remember something useful. I'd destroyed Granny's office. I'd broken her arm. But how had I done it? I tried to summon the mind-clearing breeze, but I wasn't calm enough. I couldn't calm down. I tried mentally shouting a dozen strange names and words half-remembered from dreams.
The demon-thing was walking now, shuffling forward, in time with his chanting. He came close enough for me to feel the heat from his blade.
Whack.
Then door slammed open with all the force of a wrecking ball, deadbolt snapped clear off. The man who stood in the entrance was a stranger: Black, medium height, and lean, with eyes that, I swear, flashed violet as he took in the scene.
Caught up in his spell, the demon-thing didn't even turn around, but his face tightened. He shouted another word, and I tried to scream as power seared along my skin, bringing with it so much pain, I thought I might lose consciousness.
Then it released me. All the pain, all the pressure, gone. I fell to the ground, slamming into the hardwood floor with a force I felt in my teeth.
Something flew over my head and slammed into the far wall. I looked up to see the newcomer's hands outstretched, fingers curling inward. It must have been the demon-thing that hit the wall, because he launched himself over me with all the speed of a bullet train, only to halt, mid air, and crash against the ceiling. He gasped, and coughed out a large glob of black goo. For a second, his hands scrabbled at his throat, then he opened his mouth and spat out another of those terrible, vowel-less words.
The room blew apart. I was thrown backwards and slammed against the wall with enough force to knock the air from me. I dropped to the floor and curled into a ball.
My rescuer was at least three feet off the ground, pinned to the wall by an invisible power. Stunned, I could only watch as the demon-thing bore down on him.
But the man was laughing. His eyes fastened on the demon-thing, his face curled into a sneer. Then he opened his mouth and spat out a word in that same, terrible language the demon-thing had used.
The creature halted his progress forward, staggering back as if against his will. My rescuer dropped from the wall, landing on his feet. His hands came up again and the demon-thing raised his in response.
Then he vanished. I didn't see him leave. One second he was before me, the next he wasn't, and I heard the kitchen window shatter.
The stranger swore fluidly and tore into my kitchen where another brutal, creative string of curses followed.
Then nothing. Silence.
Slowly, very slowly, I unwound from the fetal position I'd tucked myself into. My limbs were trembling. My body tingled with aftershocks of pain, and I looked down, expecting to see half my skin gone. Surprisingly, mercifully, it was unmarred.
"Hey. Lady. You okay?"
The stranger had re-entered the living room and stood amidst the wreckage like construction foreman at a blast sight: he crossed his arms, and he eyed me with something that looked a lot like disappointment.
Was I okay?
I'd been attacked in my own home, powerless, as a sociopathic creature tried to spell the skin off my body. I'd been thrown around like a rag-doll and now this intruder was staring at me as if I'd somehow let him down... The fear that had held me so captive disappeared, and in its wake came a tidal wave of hot, volatile anger. Rage rose up with tsunami force.
The look of surprise on the stranger's face was almost worth the chaos that erupted from me without warning. The room exploded.
Furniture blew apart at the seams, pictures tore from their frames, frames tore from their nails, floorboards ripped up at the studs.
The destruction was incredible, the electricity, the pure power that exploded from my eyes, my ears, my nails, my skin...
The stranger threw his hands up, his eyes wide, teeth gritted as he shouted words I couldn't hear. I was a hurricane. I was a fucking tornado. I was force and fury and...
I saw my Granny, her eyes wide and frightened as her books flew off her shelves, the pages ripped from them by an uncontrollable wind... "Eva stop! You must stop!"
The anger left as quickly as it had come on, the power evaporating from my body as if it had never been. I fell to my knees with a bone-jarring thud. The last things I saw were the stranger's eyes, wide with shock.
"...was I to know she could do that?"
"I don't care how much you pay me. Next time you send me somewhere without all the information I need..."
"Careful, Lamont. It sounds like you're admitting you couldn't handle it."
"Oh, I handled it..."
I opened my eyes and was rewarded with a sharp searing pain in my head. I groaned.
"Ah. She wakes."
I was going to throw up. I took a deep breath. Then another. Then another. And when the pain finally abated, I opened my eyes again.
The first thing I saw were shoes. One set was expensive, shiny black leather. The other set were blue suede with white laces. Then I saw the chaos. My apartment had been reduced to matchsticks. Oh God! What was I going to say to Wynn?
I sat up, gingerly, and stared into the irritated grey-green eyes of Sinclair Ash.
"What happened?" My voice sounded ruined, and it hurt coming out.
"What happened, she asks. As if she wasn't here to witness it." Sin's tone was cold. "My associate saved you. And in return for his efforts, you destroyed your apartment and nearly destroyed him."
I closed my eyes as images of the fight assaulted me: The demon-sorcerer disappearing through my window, my rescuer's eyes, wide with shock, teeth grit in an effort to protect himself from the chaos I'd unleashed. But even more vividly than the shock on the man's face, I saw my grandmother begging, pleading with a furious, distraught eight-year-old who was throwing a tantrum over the word No. But my tantrum had been accompanied by gale force winds, by a thick, surging power and violent destruction.
I'd broken Gran's arm that day.
I stared around at the mess that had once been my apartment. "Can you fix this?" I asked Sin.
He gave me an incredulous look. I noticed, belatedly, that he was wearing a tuxedo. When had he arrived here? For how long had I been unconscious?
"You've been out about an hour," Sin's associate supplied, as if reading my mind. He flashed me a smile that seemed at odds with the scene of destruction around us. "Which is impressive, given the amount of raw power you just unleashed. I'd be out for a whole week myself..."
Sin's movement captured both of our attentions. He took his jacket off and unbuttoned his cufflinks with all the flourish of a stage-performer. Pocketing them, he rolled up his sleeves, lifted his hands and said, acerbically. "Abracadabra."
For a moment, nothing happened, and I thought that he was being unnecessarily mocking. But then the wreckage started to right itself: Pieces of wood floated off the floor, and swirled around like something out of Disney's The Sword and the Stone. I had the sudden image of a cartoon Merlin dancing around my apartment, waving his magic wand (hockety pockety wockety wack, odds and ends and brick a brac...)
I started to laugh.
And I couldn't stop. Like the magic, the emotion came on swiftly. I laughed, and laughed and laughed.
The man with the deep brown skin and the blue suede shoes, bent down. Catching my eyes, he placed his hand on my shoulder, an unexpectedly warm and comforting gesture. I met his eyes, helpless as my emotions stormed through me, as my laughter turned into sobs.
"It's the aftereffects of the magic," said the man, holding my shoulder as I sobbed. "You'll get used to it, and it will be easier to control." I shook my head. I didn't want to get used to it. This was terrible.
As my apartment put itself back together, piece at a time, until all that remained were the glass shards and herbal debris from my grandmother's broken spells, I struggled to swallow the last of the sobs. My rescuer lifted his hand from my shoulder and wandered over to the glass debris.
"Witch's spell?" he asked Sin.
Sin was rolling his sleeves back down and placing his cuff links back into his cuffs. "Since my spell had no effect on them, it would appear so."
"Is it true?" I asked, my voice catching on a hiccup.
"Probably," said Sin, picking up his tuxedo jacket and sliding his arms through it. "But since I don't know to which 'it' you are referring, I can't answer intelligently."
His associate roll his eyes.
"Is it true that my grandmother made those spells to protect her from...from...me?"
"Your grandmother made these?" asked the other man, startled. He shot a glance at Sin. "Well isn't that an interesting complication?"
Sin frowned and bent into a crouch. He poked his finger into the debris, shifting some of the glass around. Then he shrugged. "I'm not positive. When the orb breaks, so does the magic. But witches use a lot of symbolic magic in their spells. If these were spells to protect the castor from a force outside the house, they'd have grain in them. These don't have grain, they have some loosestrife, which is used in pacifying spells. So, yes, these spells may have been worked to protect the caster from harm that would occur inside the home. So unless there were others who lived with you..."
I don't know what I expected to feel: betrayal, or sadness, or something. But I felt nothing. I was exhausted to the bone.
Sin cleared his throat. "If you two will excuse me, I have places to be." He crossed his arms over his chest and pinned me with an intent stare. "Three time's the charm, Eva. I don't think you can afford to keep playing the ostrich. And I don't know how many more times I can save your life."
Don't be frightened Terrible One, you're the worst monster of us all.
I wiped at my eyes. Though the sobs had stopped, tears still seemed to be falling. I bit back the urge to tell him that it wasn't he who'd saved me this time. Why did I feel so antagonistic toward him? Instead I said, "I went to Salem with my friend today, and one of the witches said that they wouldn't serve 'my kind.'" I had to know. "What is my kind? Am I like...like you?"
The two men glanced at each other, and I realized that I desperately wanted them to say yes. Yes. You're like us. Because they didn't seem like monsters. The thing in my apartment – that had been a monster. These men had helped me.
"Perhaps," said Sin, finally. "You vibrate with the repressed power of a sorcerer. But you're something else besides, or Vehendi wouldn't be so hell-bent on securing your death."
"Vehendi?" The sorcerer's name. Sin had mentioned it last night, too.
"The sorcerer name, once, before he had the demon inside him. Listen," said Sin. "I don't have time for this. All these questions can be answered if you make the decision to pick your head up out of the sand. You need to learn to use magic. Training a sorcerer at your age is incredibly unorthodox, since most ilicon come into their magic as children, and are taught accordingly. But I can train you. I can teach you to use magic to protect yourself. And since Vehendi escaped a second time..." He shot an accusatory look at the other man who shrugged. "...it would be prudent to teach you defense magic. I can't keep wasting my resources on you."
What are ilicon? We are.
My mother had hidden nothing from me. She'd told me everything, and then she'd disappeared. And Granny? Granny, who was a witch, yet who had turned all my mother's truths into fairy tales, who'd denied the world I was now being thrust into? Why had she done it? Why had my mother left?
"Well?" Sin demanded.
I didn't want to learn to use this power. Whatever I was, I was dangerous, that much was clear. And whatever I was, my Granny had dedicated her life to suppressing it.
I had a million questions burning in my brain, Sin was waiting impatiently. My questions weren't going to be answered today. Maybe not even tomorrow. But I knew one thing with certainty: I needed to be alive in order to ask those questions, and if I didn't learn how to defend myself, I wasn't going to be alive much longer.
"Okay." I said. "Okay. Teach me."