by E J Frost
“Uh, by contemporary do you mean now? I think it was written at the time.”
“Really? An original source document? I’d love to see it. Look, I have class in twenty minutes, but if you could—”
No way I’m taking another train in the rain today, not anywhere but home. “Er, I’m afraid not. I have appointments for the rest of the day—”
“What’s your schedule like tomorrow?”
Same as today, really. “A little hectic. Look, could I scan it and email it to you?” I silently bless our office scanner.
“Sure, yes, that would be great.” He gives me his email address which I copy down carefully.
“Okay. Well, um, thank you very much for your time.”
“My pleasure, Miss, uh, sorry, I’m terrible with names.”
“It’s okay. So am I.” I smile for the first time during this conversation. “Please just call me Tsara.”
“Tsara. Call me Peter. I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow after my ten o’clock class, if that’s okay.”
“Thanks, that would be great.”
“I’ll, uh, need your number.”
My number. I give a mental shrug. It’s just my office number. I give it to him.
He repeats it back to me. “So I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Sounds like a promise. Which would be kind of nice if he wasn’t calling about an inferiarcus. And if he wasn’t Rowena’s ex. “Okay, thanks.”
After I hang up, I glance at the clock on my desk. Still fifteen minutes before my next appointment. Enough time to battle it out with the office scanner. Resigned, I pick up the English file.
Chapter 6
I wake in a sweat. Shaking. I hug myself tightly, fingers digging into the soft cotton of my t-shirt, and wait for my night terrors to pass.
When they don’t, and the bile spurting into the back of my throat gets the better of me, I climb out of the bed, run across the hall, and throw up in the toilet.
My grandmother’s ghost swims up through my reflection in the bathroom mirror while I’m washing out my mouth.
“The nightmare again, beti?”
I spray a mouthful of water across the mirror. “Dala, would you not do that!”
She winks out of the mirror and appears beside me. “Sorry, beti.”
I brace myself against the sink, scrub my hand over my face. “It’s bad enough waking up from that.”
She pats me on the back, the way she used to do when I was a kid. Only now her touch sends a cold chill up my spine and leaves a glisten of ectoplasm on my shoulder. “Was it the same dream?”
“Yes.” It’s been the same dream since I was twelve and my talent began to manifest. Walking along a path through the woods. Crows calling. Dappled sun and shade. The smell of wild garlic. Ahead, the path turns, and at the edge of shadow, a man’s silhouette. Standing tall. Standing still. Waiting for me.
Nothing more than that. Except the absolute sickening certainty that that man is going to destroy me. Not just kill me, destroy me. Cut me, beat me, choke me, rape me until there’s nothing left. Not even death with dignity. I’ll go begging, crying, groveling, pleading for him to stop. But he won’t. There’s nothing I can do to stop him. And that’s when I wake up. Knowing he’s out there. Waiting for me.
I pick up my toothbrush, glob some toothpaste on it and begin brushing my teeth.
“Have you talked to your friend Doctor Jill lately?”
“She’s not my friend. She’s a therapist.” I say around a mouthful of foam. “And I’m not paying her two hundred an hour to tell me what I already know.”
My grandmother’s ghost sighs heavily. “Beti, you make things harder than they have to be.”
Because I don’t want to end up trapped in Limbo like half of my relatives. “Is Uncle Billygoat around?”
“Of course.” She rolls up and a moment later, the ghost of my uncle perches on the rim of the tub, stretching out his legs and clamping the stub of a cigarette between his teeth.
“Those things will give you cancer, old Goat,” I say.
He winks at me. His left eye, which in life was glass and in death is an empty black socket. “What’cha want, káulochírilo?”
He’s using my family nickname, Blackbird, which means he’s in a good mood. I’d never met a grumpy ancestral ghost until my uncle passed over.
“I had the dream again.”
He takes a long drag on the cigarette, filling my bathroom with ghostly smoke. “Another visit from the beng, huh?”
I spit, rinse my mouth out. “I don’t believe in the devil.” Demons I believe in. But not the Devil. Except when he’s played by Al Pacino.
“Sure. The shadow man’s just an archetype of your unconscious.”
“An archetype of the collective unconscious,” I correct him. But I’ve stopped believing in my ex-therapist’s Jungian crap, too. All her talk didn’t help. Didn’t stop the nightmares. Neither did the Prozac.
“Whatever.” He picks a piece of tobacco off his tongue, flicks it into my bathtub, where it fades back into the ether. “Sounds like beng to me.”
“Uh-huh. I need a favor, old Goat.”
“Lemme guess. You want me to guard the dream door?”
I nod. There’s no other way I’m getting back to sleep.
He exhales another cloud of blue smoke. “Yeah, I guess I can do that.”
Like he has so much else to do, being dead and all. “Thanks.”
Instead of rolling up or fading, which my family ghosts particularly like to do, usually leaving some part of themselves to vanish last, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, he follows me back into my bedroom. He watches while I stir the pots of dried lavender and chamomile on my bedside table and climb in between the chilly sheets.
He perches on the foot of my bed and blows smoke rings at the ceiling. “You don’t think the dream comin’ back has anything to do with this thing you’re looking for, do you, chavi?
I pull my Dala’s wedding-ring quilt up around my neck, clutch the soft, worn warmth of it close to me. “Of course it does.”
“Then tell the gorgio to find his own ring.”
“Manny Goldberg’s a friend. I owe him.”
My uncle’s ghost blows one smoke ring through another. A trick he got from watching the animated version of The Hobbit too many times, I think. I’ve never seen any member of my family get excited about modern technology, except the Billigoat when he discovered the VCR. “It was an accident, chavi. Everyone makes mistakes.”
Yes, but not everyone gets tanked up after breaking up with loser number four and gets behind the wheel of a car.
“Tell that to Freddy Weiss,” I say. Freddy Weiss who will never walk again, never drive again, never pick up his kids again. All because of my mistake. And my inability to fix it.
“Go to sleep, káulochírilo. Uncle Billygoat’ll watch over you.”
I believe him. But it still takes me a long time to get back to sleep.
Chapter 7
I rise from behind my desk to shake the hand of my last appointment of the day. Michelle Palladino. Recently widowed. Desperate to have her dead husband’s child. He had a heart condition; they were careful and had his sperm frozen. She had I.V.F. after his death, only to discover that the fertilized eggs wouldn’t implant. Nothing medically wrong, no tumors or uterine synechia. But no babies, either.
She’s so desperate, she tells me, she’s considering going to India to see if she can hire a surrogate.
“So you’ll start with Dr. Hua on Thursday,” I say. “Two sessions with Dr. Hua and then we’ll get you going on the herbal therapy as well.”
Her eyes are wet as she shakes my hand. “And you’re sure this will—”
I smile gently, both at her and at the balding ghost that hovers behind her. “I’m sure we can help.”
She smiles back, a tremulous smile. But a hopeful one.
When she leaves, I sit down to dictate a note for Lin. Mrs. Palladino’s problem is only partly physical. P
robably genetic. Failure of the progesterone receptors or something. The magic milk should fix that. But the other part is that Mrs. Palladino is still grieving, still carrying her dead husband’s ghost around with her. She needs to lay the dead before she can bear the living. And that’s something that a few sessions with Lin’s needles might be able to fix.
My phone rings as I pick up the Dictaphone.
I glance at it. It’s well past five; Evonne will have gone home, and our night answering service should be picking up. With a shrug, I pick it up. Maybe Evonne’s working late.
“Hello?”
Dead air. I’m about to put the phone down when I hear a whisper.
“Please . . .”
The small hairs on the back of my neck rise. “Hello? Hello, is someone there?”
Another whisper, even fainter. “Please . . . make it stop . . .”
“Hello?”
A click and then a male voice. “Hi, Tsara, it’s Peter. Peter Buselli. Do you remember? We, uh, spoke the other day.”
And he was supposed to call back after his ten o’clock class but didn’t. I blink at the phone several times before I find my voice. “Oh, yes. Hi, Peter. How are you?”
“Well, you know, it’s funny you should ask. I’m starving. And I’m standing outside your office, and there’s a really great looking pizza place down the street . . .”
I roll my eyes, but twist to peer through the blinds to see if he really is outside. A man in jeans and a padded vest is standing in front of the clinic, talking into his cell phone and leaning on a battered Toyota. “I thought you wanted to avoid another blind date,” I say.
“Is that you peeking out through the blinds?”
“Um-hum. Is that you stalking me?”
He laughs, that nice masculine laugh. “Ro gave me your address. Look, I brought this huge pile of notes.” He reaches through the Toyota’s open window and pulls out a thick binder that he brandishes. “We can go through it while we eat.”
“I thought it was Ro you owed dinner.”
“I didn’t say I was picking up the tab.” He chuckles. “But if you bring the original of that letter you sent me, I’ll go halvsies.”
“Is that a bribe?”
Another laugh. “Whatever works.”
“Okay. Give me a minute.”
I hang up and go make my excuses to Lin.
Peter Buselli isn’t anything I expect. My college professors were uniformly middle-aged, balding, paunchy academics. Peter’s in his early thirties. August-sky blue eyes peep out from under a dark wave of hair that he’s constantly pushing back from his forehead. It’s an affected gesture, but on him, it’s endearing and entirely forgivable. He has me laughing all through a large pizza with the works and two beers. Where was he when I was in college?
And his behind looks great in his jeans. Really great. When he goes to the counter for the second round of beers, I have to tear my eyes away forcibly. Omigod. I can see why Rowena had a thing with him. The question is, how much of a thing. And is it still a thing on Peter’s end?
When we finish the pizza, he reaches into the pocket of his vest and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Can I?” he asks sheepishly. “It’s my one vice.”
God, he’s cute. Even for a smoker.
“Sure.” I’ll scrub my lungs out with some ma huang later.
“Thanks. You get so many militant anti-smokers these days.” He lights up and, considerately, blows his smoke towards the ceiling. “So, you want to talk about this ring?”
“Okay.” But I’m reluctant to turn to business. Peter’s funny and sexy with those blue eyes and little-boy charm and it would be so much nicer to forget why he came and just pretend this is a date. A real date. With no messiness and no complications. Just two people enjoying each other’s company and the tummy-tickling spark of initial attraction.
But Manny Goldberg’s counting on me. And this isn’t a real date. And everything in my life is messy and complicated.
I sigh and reach for the binder he’s set on the edge of the table.
“Oh, no, let me. I wouldn’t want you to have to decipher my chicken scratch.” He grins and long dimples appear.
I squirm in my seat.
He opens the binder and flips a few pages of handwritten notes to a Xerox. He turns the binder around so I can see.
“There. That’s the best picture of it I could find.”
In the middle of the page is a line drawing of a huge ring. The top of the ring is set with a black stone, engraved with two interlocking triangles. A hexagram. Tiny symbols fill the interstices. They look Arabic. More of the same characters circle the edge of the signet stone and decorate the band.
I lift an eyebrow. “Given what you can find on the Internet these days—”
Peter nods. “I know. I expected something more dramatic, too. A Totenkopfring or King Tut’s missing signet. This looks like something the goths in my freshman U.S. History class would wear. But I think this is the genuine article, or pretty close to it.” He flips a few more pages. “There was a surprising amount of information on it. It’s called ‘King Solomon’s Seal,’ for one thing—”
“That’s an herb,” I say. A very potent one. Particularly good for wounds. Happily, I haven’t had much call to use it since the local shifter clans declared Mass. General a safe harbor. “Lily family.”
“Yeah, I read that.” He flips a few more pages and shows me a Xerox from a book I have on the bookshelf in my hearth room, The Encyclopedia of North American Herbs. He’s thorough, I’ll give him that. “Where the leaves fall off, they leave a mark that looks like Solomon’s Seal.”
It’s the flowers, but I don’t correct him. I’m too impressed by all the research he’s done to nit-pick.
“Here.” He flips a few more pages, to a thick Xerox that starts with the title, The Secret History of Solomon’s Temple and the Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons.
“Freemasons?” I raise an eyebrow. I flip through a few pages. It looks like he’s copied the entire book. “Isn’t that copyright infringement?”
Peter laughs. “If you won’t tell, I won’t. It turns out that freemasonry may have started with the building of Solomon’s Temple. But the interesting thing for our purposes is that there’s some good historical evidence that Solomon’s Seal was real. It may not have done all the things it was reputed to do. Summon angels, banish demons—”
Or maybe it did.
“—but it does seem to be a real ring that was inscribed with this sign. A Star of David.”
“Hexagram,” I say. “Let’s not get all mythological.”
A startled flash of those deep blue eyes. “I, uh, thought a friend of Ro’s—”
“I’m a practical friend of Ro’s. Mostly I just want to find this thing.”
Peter’s face falls. “Well, I can’t really help you with that.”
I put my hand over his where it rests on the edge of the binder. “You already have.”
Later, I sit with the binder open on my bed and look through the pages Peter’s copied for me. There’s a red sticker on the bottom of each page that reads, ‘For educational purposes only.’ It makes me smile. I can’t see Peter carefully stickering each page. He probably had some eager undergrad do the copying.
I flip through the pages, not really reading, remembering his good-bye, which was awkward and sweet at the same time. Not quite a kiss and not quite a hug. He clearly wanted it to be more. So did I, but thoughts of Saul, and of Ro, kept me stiff in his arms. I’m not sure what the etiquette of dating your ex-best-friend’s ex-boyfriend is, but I’m pretty sure that clearing it with your ex-best-friend is a prerequisite to kissing. Maybe even a prerequisite to hugging. Especially if it’s that delicious hugging where the guy’s trying to imprint the shape of your breasts onto his chest.
I squirm a little on the bed, take a sip of my ma huang tea, and turn a page.
A loud knock on the front door makes me spill my tea.
“Shit.”
I climb off the wet quilt, pulling my dressing gown around me, and wonder who is knocking on my door at this time of night. It better not be Shah.
I pad down the stairs, peering through the stained glass lites. All I can see is the top of a dark head.
“Shah, if you’ve locked yourself out again, you can sleep on the porch,” I call.
“Tsara, it’s me. It’s Peter.”
My heart begins thumping hard in my chest. Scenes from cheesy Sandra Bullock movies fill my head. Did he come back to sweep me off my feet and carry me to bed? If so, wow, that sounds good. To hell with clearing it with Ro first.
I shed my fuzzy cotton dressing gown and run my fingers through my hair. Wish I had some of Ro’s lingerie. The old t-shirt I was going to sleep in will have to do. At least I’ve taken my bra off. One of those chest-crushing hugs will be all kinds of exciting.
I open the door smiling.
Peter’s standing there, blinking in the porch light. He doesn’t look enticing or sexy or anything like that. He looks scared. And he’s not even looking at me. He’s staring in the direction of my porch swing.
“Peter, what’s—”
“There’s a dog or something over there . . . only, it’s crying.”
A shifter. I push past Peter and rush to the swing. The odor of wet dog, and blood, hits me so hard I gag. Clapping my hand to my mouth, I sink down beside the pile of fur and torn flesh huddled in my porch swing.
“It’s okay,” I say soothingly. Run my hands lightly over the wet fur. Shifters need the comfort of touch, particularly when they’re hurt. “What did this to you?”
“H-ska,” the shifter says brokenly.
Trying to talk with a muzzle is hard.
“Hisaka clan.” Snake-shifters. Very nasty, and usually venomous. “Okay, I need to get you inside. Can you walk?”
The pile of fur stirs, unfolds. It’s amazing what small balls shifters can curl themselves into. Standing, he’s over six feet tall. But he’s all angular arms and legs and bushy tail. When I get an arm around him, there’s nothing to him.
Blood immediately soaks through my tee, hot through the cloth. The snake-shifter’s taken a chunk out of him.
