Shadows Fall (17 page)

I closed my eyes and imagined it—a world in which silence was possible, in which I was able to walk down the street or go to a movie without blasting music in my ears. My fingers curled into fists as if I could grab on to that reality and pull it to me, to make it so. But then I remembered the boy who haunted me. I remembered the pretty African girl, the child, Violet Eyes, and the teenaged girl. All of them were waiting for me to
see
.

“What if…” I took a deep breath, unable to believe I was about to ask the question. “What if I really need to hear certain voices? There’ve been a few… I feel like there’s something I need to know about them.”

Hester nodded as if it were all part of the course. Maybe it was for a shaman raised in the Tradition. She reached down and hauled up her old-fashioned leather suitcase—the thing had probably been made in 1965—and unfastened the buckles. Folding the top back, she pulled out a black velveteen pouch.

She dumped the contents of the pouch onto the butcher block. It was a necklace. Part leather and part chain, the long necklace had several metal charms hanging from it, some of them circles with holes cut in them and some of them hexagrams. They all had tiny runic symbols carved into them. The largest pendant was something I recognized, however; it was an image of the goddess Shakti.

As a rule, the Rom weren’t superstitious or religious—those were oftentimes regarded as one and the same—because most considered the race and religion to be equal. The Rom was the religion and vice versa. However, in a long, undiluted line of
chovihani
, our roots could be traced back to ancient Hindu and Shaktiism. I, of course, thought it was complete hokum, but I respected the old ways.

“Wear this, and you hear them like you do now. Only good for short bits of time.”

She slid the necklace across to me and then pulled a heavy plastic bag out of the suitcase. She started taking things out of the bag, one by one—gauze, alcohol pads, witch hazel, ink, needles…
Needles?

“What are you doing?” My voice rose an embarrassing octave.

She frowned at me, as if she was genuinely confused by my question. “Giving you the
sapaśaṭāzho
, no?”

“What,
here? You?
I’m sure I can find a nice tattoo parlor if I just look it up online.”

Hester shook her head vigorously. “Must be done by another
chovihano
or it means nothing.”

I swallowed hard. There was a reason why I had no tattoos. I hated pain. But if this could bring me the promised clarity, it was worth it in the end. “Fine.”

Nodding, Hester prepared her supplies as she continued talking to me about the sigil. “After you receive it, you must charge it with power—picture what you want, meditate, chant, or pray to Mother Goddess… or pleasure yourself—before you go to a space without warding.”

“I’m
sorry
?” Of course I knew that masturbation was often used in magickal ritual; sexual release can be a powerful generator of energy to use toward a spell. I just never thought of using it for that personally… and I never thought I’d hear my grandmother tell me to. It seemed like I was suddenly in the
Twilight Zone
.

Hester shrugged and gave me a stern look, as if to tell me to act like an adult. She chose to ignore my question in favor of snapping on some latex gloves and swabbing the inside of my forearm with alcohol. The tools she had pulled out weren’t any kind of electric guns that the pros had. Nope, these were four inch, five-pronged, hollow needles made for tattooing the old-fashioned way—by hand.

She spread out a plastic drape over the butcher block—I guess I should’ve been grateful she’d had the forethought not to get blood all over my kitchen—and then poured some ink from the inkwell into a shallow dish.

“This will hurt,” Hester said. “You cannot move. You ready?”

Christ
. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. “I guess.”

It was all I could do not to jump the first time she jabbed me with the inked needle. The process was painstaking and pain
ful.
I likened the pain to somewhere between a bee sting and a jellyfish sting—only over and over again. My body shook with the effort it took to keep still. I was terrified to move even a micrometer out of fear that I would fuck up the sigil. Then not only would I be plagued by the spirits, but I’d have a shitty tattoo as well.

Eventually I sort of floated out of my body, the pain receding into the background, a dull ache. I finally chanced opening first one eye and then the other. Hester had made the outer circle and the inner circle already and how she managed to free-draw the perfectly round shapes, I’d never know—but I was grateful for her steady hand.

Next came the arrows. When she saw me looking, Hester began to explain the different parts of the sigil. “The arrows are the crossroads rune. It represents change and mastery over self.”

Then came a symbol that looked like squiggly lines to me, but when I stared harder, it began to look like the outline of some flocking birds.

“The flight rune,” she murmured without taking her eyes off her work. “It means overcoming obstacles and gaining higher knowledge.”

The way she was reciting the meanings, with more proficiency than she normally showed for the English language, made it almost seem like she was channeling someone else, like some ancient shaman had taken possession of her. I hoped that was a good sign.

After what seemed like hours, she moved on to another quadrant of the circle. More squiggling lines, this time little spirals around a large spiral. “The waves rune… for purity.”

Her needle hit a particularly sensitive part of my skin, a nerve maybe. I sucked in a breath and just barely kept myself from wincing.

“Hold still!” she said, sounding like herself again.

“Trying,” I said through clenched teeth. The symbol she drew next was something the likes of which I’d never seen. It was an asymmetrical shape that was almost Middle-Eastern with the style of script in which it was drawn, with seemingly random dots placed around it.

“A sigil from the
Grimorium Verum,
for banishing bad spirits. This will protect you from black magic.”

The
Grimorium Verum
was an ancient book of ceremonial magic. She’d showed it to me when I was small, but I paid little attention; it was back when I couldn’t fathom ever having to deal with black magic. “Well, that’s comforting.”

Hester paused to glare at my sarcasm.

I sighed. “Please, let’s just finish. My arm is going numb.”

“Pfft,” came Hester’s usual scoff. “Men are weak.”

I wanted to protest, but
damn
my arm hurt. I was determined to get through it without crying.

Eventually Hester moved on to the fourth quadrant of the circle. In it, she drew a much simpler shape. It looked like two giant V’s reflected along a horizontal axis so that they intersected at two points. Then a horizontal line was drawn perpendicular to the V’s, bisecting them at the intersection points. The ends of each line were punctuated with small circles.

“Last, the seal of Saturn… for protection against psychic attack.”

It was ridiculous, but I swear I felt a cold breeze pass through me, and I shivered. This was turning into something much more serious than I’d anticipated—way more so than the cleansing and warding of my properties.

It seemed as though we were on the home stretch as Hester moved on to the last symbol, the one inside the center circle. This one was even stranger than the others. It looked like a wide ‘M’ and on the end of one leg was a tiny ‘B,’ while on the end of the other, longer leg was an ‘N.’ It wasn’t surprising; I knew sigils were often made up of stylized, graphically rendered letters that represented the desired effect.

This one was peculiar in its relative simplicity. I couldn’t imagine how something so scant could be as powerful as Hester proposed it was.

“This is the
sapaśaṭāzho
rune, created by ancient
chovihani
just for this purpose, for the plight of the death-talkers. All of these will come together to shroud you from the
mule
.”

My skin burned like a thousand fires, as I’d come back into myself and could feel everything by then. I hissed when she swiped the area with witch hazel to aid in healing, and I swear she rolled her eyes at me.

While waiting for the antiseptic to dry, Hester went about rummaging through our fridge. She grunted when she found what she was looking for—which was apparently a pack of bacon—and then looked through all the cabinets until she found a cast iron frying pan.

At a loss as to what to do and having no idea what Hester was trying to accomplish, I cleaned up the tattoo supplies and disposed of all the hazmat as best as I could with one arm. I heard a hissing sound and turned around to see my grandmother frying up bacon on our ceramic range.
What the…

I gave up and sat back down. Hester was going to do what Hester was going to do. Once the bacon was fried to her satisfaction, she used her fingers, which were apparently so calloused they were impervious to heat, to pluck the bacon strips out of the pan and lay them on a plate. She bustled over and put the plate down in front of me on the butcher block.

“Might as well eat them, otherwise they’ll go to waste. Need your strength to charge the sigil anyway.”

“Okay…” I said. Then I thought, what the hell, and started munching on the crispy, slightly overcooked bacon—just how I liked it. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Hester grab a dishrag from the rack and soak it in the bacon grease from the pan until it was saturated. Then she rummaged around for some cling wrap, and brought it all back over to me. She gestured for me to hold out my arm.

“Um…” I had nothing, no idea what bacon grease, cling wrap, and my freshly tattooed arm had to do with one another. I should have known.

Hester slapped the greasy rag onto my tattoo and I squealed from the pain. It was more from the impact than from the actual bacon grease, but that didn’t feel great either. She
tsked
me, but she was gentler with me after that. Holding the rag with one hand, she wrapped my arm in the plastic wrap with the other, until the rag was held tightly to my skin and was completely sealed inside the plastic.

“Granny, why did you poultice my arm with bacon grease?”

She popped me on the back of my head, and that was more like the Hester I knew. “Don’t question me, boy. Is powerful healing magic. Tomorrow we take the poultice off and bury it in the backyard. It’ll heal faster. More powerful if you eat the bacon,” she explained, shoving the plate closer to me.

“Whatever you say.” I sniffed at my arm and recoiled at the porcine smell emanating from the poultice. Somehow it was less appetizing than that of the fresh cooked bacon. “Gross,” I muttered.

Hester washed her hands and dried them on her jeans before turning back to me. “I leave you alone to charge the sigil. Remember to imagine what you want to happen while you do whatever it is that you do.”

Suddenly I was infused with panic. What if it didn’t work? What if it did? “Hey Granny, you’ll hang around for a spell, right? We have to make sure it works.”

“I’ll be around,” she answered without inflection. For Hester, any words that weren’t laced with disdain were a good sign.

“See you in the morning, then… Thanks,” I added, knowing the tremendous personal risk she’d taken by defying the
Rom Baro
and coming to help me. She may have acted like she hated me, was disgusted by me, but she’d come when I needed her.

* * * *

The phone rang five times and I almost hung up. I’d tried meditating, yoga, chanting, prayer—all things that were supposed to help charge the sigil—but I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t know if I was supposed to. Only one method was left.

“Hello?”

Charlie’s sleep roughened voice came over the line, and I was instantly hard. I couldn’t help it, he was like catnip.

“Hey, there. Did I wake you?” I was worried because it was the middle of the afternoon, so he shouldn’t have been in bed.

He huffed into the phone, and groaned like he was stretching. I lazily stroked my dick, already turned on by the everyday sounds he made.

“S’okay. Was just catching a nap before my shift. I got the… Brandon Meyers’ autopsy this afternoon.”

Well, if that wasn’t a dick-shriveler, I didn’t know what was. “I don’t want to talk about that now. What are you wearing?”

“Titus, are you flirting with me?”

My chuckle morphed into a whimper as my palm grazed the already sensitized head of my dick. “If you have to ask, I’m not doing it right. Now answer me… what are you wearing?”

I heard the bedclothes rustle as he moved around. My cock and balls throbbed with the same rhythm as the pulse in my sore arm, and my heart. It sped up when I heard his answer.

“Uh, nothing. Usually don’t when I’m sleeping.”

“Oh, god,” I breathed. I used my free hand to squeeze and roll my balls inside their sac, and alternated pressing on my perineum. I could clearly imagine my big, burly Charlie, lying naked in his bed. I gave my cock another slow, teasing stroke and my breath caught.