The Sword of Michael

by Marcus Wynne

  The War.

  The Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. The followers of the Law of One against the followers of Belial.

  . . . and now I returned . . .

  “Marius?” Dillon said. “Marius?”

  I stood at the lip of an open grave.

  “Did I just walk over that?” I said.

  “Nice,” Dillon said. “You okay? What you got?”

  I looked up at the night sky. Clear. A thousand stars gleaming above the city lights. An endless eternity of night. Somewhere out there, beyond space as we mere mortals called it, something pressed against the fabric of our reality and slouched towards us, ready to rend its way out of its dark womb.

  “Long story, bro,” I said.

  “Have a smoke long, or get the hell out of here and go have coffee long?”

  “Coffee long.”

  “Then let’s do like the cowboys and Indians and get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Something I need to do . . .”

  I pulled a half-full Advil bottle out of my pocket and rattled it. Dillon opened his mouth, then closed it. I chanted the opening words of a Lakota power song gifted to me by First In Front as I closed my eyes and called in the Light to illuminate and clear this space of the lingering essence of evil that had been perpetrated here. I continued to rattle and felt the Light bring its brilliance into me, and felt the Darkness lifting from the roots of the grass and from the disturbed earth of the grave. When it was gone, I pulled out my tobacco pouch and offered a pinch to the spirits here, and closed with a simple prayer of, “Thank you, Creator God.”

  I took a deep breath. “Now we can go.”

  Dillon looked around, scanned the graveyard.

  “Dude,” he said. “Can’t you afford a real rattle?”

  * * *

  Gigi’s Coffee Shop on 36th is one of my fave coffee hangs in a town full of excellent coffee hangs. It’s open and airy with Ikea tables that are the right height to work at or lean on, the food is extraordinary and cheap, the coffee excellent, and the service is committed to creating an open, welcoming atmosphere. It feels like home.

  Dillon and I sat at a back table, hunched over big mugs of the house French Roast. Outside, people walked their dogs, bought newspapers, enjoyed the night air; cars flowed by.

  “The story?” Dillon prompted.

  “How’s your belief system tonight?”

  He actually considered that. “That changed forever the day you worked on me. I don’t waste time arguing with my own experience. You know, you told me something that day. You remember? You said, ‘Dillon, you might not believe in Spirit, but Spirit believes in you.’”

  He grinned and tilted his coffee mug at me. “So what I believe is kind of irrelevant.”

  “Your belief is never irrelevant, Dillon.”

  “There you go getting all shamanic on me, dude. What I’m trying to say in a fancy way is that whether I know it or believe it, if you’ve seen it, it’s good enough for me. Does that work?”

  Dillon’s trust is not given lightly. A man with his background didn’t live as long as he had by being naive or overly trusting.

  “Thank you, Dillon.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “This humble shaman guy thing wastes time, you know? I get it. Cut to the chase and tell me the story.”

  Dillon is grounded and solid, the man I trust to watch my back. But after all these years, I’m still cautious about opening up the door to the other realities to those who didn’t work with them everyday. A shaman’s job is to cross over into those realms and bring back information, rescue souls and soul fragments, carry the dead into the Light, do battle with Dark Forces when necessary, undo sorcery, depossess and extract. I did all those things. And a big part of the job was to journey and return with information and share it.

  So I needed to tell the story.

  “You know about Atlantis?” I said.

  “I read the comic book.”

  “There’s an Atlantis comic book?”

  “Lots of ’em. Get on with the story.”

  “Here’s the comic book version, then,” I said. “Before Atlantis fell, there was a war. A revolution. It was led by the followers of the Law of One, the Sons and Daughters of Light, against the followers of Belial. It was a war between the Power of Light and the Power of Darkness. It was a war like any war: battles, heroic stands, bitter betrayal, horrifying defeats—and magic. Atlantis’s spiritual leadership communed directly with the Creator’s Light. There was a giant crystal in the central Temple of Light that channeled the Light of the Creator directly to those who spoke with the Creator—the Priests and Priestesses. The Light powered everything—airships, homes—it moved stones and parted the water at the direction of the Light Keepers. The Sons of Belial tried to turn the power of the Great Crystal against the Sons of Light, and that conflict shattered the island’s foundation and changed the energetic grid of the Earth itself. The survivors of the Sons of Light escaped from the harbors; behind them, in the Temple of Light, the Priestesses of Light who had the closest connection with Mother Earth drew on all their power to hold back the tide—but their power couldn’t hold it. The wave fell, and shattered the land, and scattered the escaping boats of the few far and wide.”

  I saw that great wave shattering the towers, the brave few who’d returned to rescue the Priestesses crushed in the wave, the boats propelled away by the power of magic and the wind, just ahead of the huge wave of destruction.

  “What happened, as a result of the Fall, was that certain Powers were released and set loose in the world,” I said. “Key players from the Other Realms, here in the Middle World, some of them energetic, some of them in the flesh. And the battle continues. There was never any resolution. It’s the Dark against the Light. If you’re a Warrior of the Light, a Light Worker, if you go that way, you’re a magnet for your counterparts, the Dark Workers . . .”

  “So that’s you. I get that. But how does the zombie thing play?” Dillon said.

  “Someone who knew me before, someone with a grudge, has come through. Or is coming through. They’re working through proxies. They may be ready to cross into the flesh . . . or they might be here already.”

  “Can you journey on it? Find out who they are? Give us a target?”

  I grinned at my friend, leaning forward in his chair, the fire and love of battle in his eyes.

  “I intend to,” I said.

  Dillon drained the last of his coffee. “Sucks to be you, dude. Just saying.”

  “There’s always an upside, Dillon.”

  Sometimes it’s best not to burden your friends with unpleasant truths.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hawks don’t flock. Neither do shaman.

  In the indigenous shamanic tradition, there may be more than one shaman in a community. Each one would be known for a specialty. Often there was competition, but shamanism is measured by actual results, not advertising, despite the best attempt of the new generation shamanic practitioners, often products of expensive training programs, to run their spiritual practices like modern day businesses complete with ads like “Shamanic healing done here! Soul retrievals done! One-month shaman course, with certificate!”

  Native American medicine culture, especially the outspoken Lakota with whom I felt affinity, condemned the modern practices and coined the term “plastic shaman” or “plastic medicine man.”

  The old rules still apply. You shall know a shaman by his work, not by his words. It’s up to the community to evaluate his work and measure the results; shamanic practice is as pragmatic and practical as a plumber’s—and should be evaluated the same way.

  There is a very loose-flung network of practitioners, both in Spirit and through the modern mediums of phone, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, that attempts to organize and consolidate contact information and referrals. Most of us have our own private network, a shamanic list of friends and practitioners we call on when we need work done on ourselves, backup, or questions answered
.

  I called one of my favorites.

  Sabrina Murphy is a badass biker chick. She’s drop-dead gorgeous: killer violet eyes, a body bursting out of ragged jeans and wife-beater tops like a teenage boy’s midnight fantasy, pale skin covered with tattoos and more than a few scars from barroom brawls. She’s Cherokee and one of the most powerful shamanic healers, with a particular gift for divination journeys into the Other Realms. I called her my shamanic CIA. Nothing was hidden from her for long. She’d come to the attention of the government’s military psychics, like most of us do. What they called remote viewing, we called Middle World journeying. When they came round offering her big bucks, she told them to fuck off and went back to her work. They tried to teach her a lesson with their technologically enhanced remote influencing; she kicked their asses in the Other Realms and, rumor had it, left several of them injured when their machines backfired on them.

  My kind of woman, all the way around.

  Her voice, still sleepy at this time of day, was colored with a whiskey and cigarette rasp. “What did you get, dude?”

  “It’s mixed, sister.”

  “Cabal?”

  “Could be. There’s that whole Atlantean connection.”

  “Piss off some sorcerers lately?”

  “Daily.”

  She laughed a deep and throaty and hot-as-hell laugh. If it wasn’t for Jolene—who loved this Wild Woman—I might take my life in my hands and dally with her.

  Truth is, I probably wouldn’t survive it.

  “You got that right, Marius,” she said. “You got that whole ‘fuck you and the world’ thing going on. I thought you were kinder and gentler now that you’ve reached the age of wisdom.”

  “I’m not getting any wiser, darling.”

  “Born dumb, huh? That’s all right, baby. I love you anyway.”

  “Thank the Creator for that.”

  “I thank him every day,” she said.

  A long thoughtful draw on her cigarette, audible through the phone.

  “So,” she said. “I’ll look at this today. Get back to you. I’ll tell you my first hit right now . . . old curse, Marius. Past life, not ancestral, but someone . . . or something . . . from before. I get Cabal, too. You got to watch out for the psychotronics and those convenient accidents they’re fond of.”

  “No lie, GI.”

  “Yeah. Watch yourself. I’ll get back to you later . . . cell phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should get you a prepay burner, baby. Cabal likes to . . .”

  “I know.”

  “’Kay, baby. Watch yourself.”

  She hung up.

  I powered down my cell phone and took the battery out. Cabal. That really complicates things. The Cabal is where top-secret technology, hard-core sorcery, and the amoral direction of nonhuman entities and willing humans intersect. It’s cloaked in government secrecy, funded with black budget dollars and put to the service of the hidden bureaucrats who ruled from behind the puppets they slipped into place every election.

  Not a pretty picture.

  The Dark Forces manifest here in Middle World in all sorts of ways—the thoughtless cruelty of one human towards another, the efficient predation of a serial killer, the ruthless exploitation of Mother Earth—to hold humans in thrall through the machinery of governance, all to quash the greatest gift of the Creator: Free Will.

  Freedom.

  Made me want to go watch a Mel Gibson movie.

  * * *

  I had no clients today. That happens. My practice isn’t one that lent itself to a lot of return customers. Depossession is like surgery. You go in and get the work done, help them through their recovery, and move onto the next. That’s why I keep a list of practitioners to refer clients to; I’m problem-oriented and once I’ve done the work I’m supposed to do, I’m glad to hand the client onto those better able to further facilitate their recovery.

  Right now I was working for myself, which meant I was working pro bono.

  For the public good.

  Lovely.

  I checked my bank balances, which were bottomed out. I had to make a withdrawal from my backup stash in a lockbox I kept in the closet of my bedroom. There was a few hundred in there which left me good for right now. I took a handful of twenties and tucked them into my empty wallet, then set off for a longish walk down to Lake Harriet and then back over to Gigi’s for some coffee and head-clearing. It’s a nice long walk, though circuitous: from my place off Nicollet down the greenway along Minnehaha Creek, around Harriet, then over to Bryant.

  And I like to walk.

  I was only just down the greenway when I heard my guides whisper, “Good time to be aware, Marius,” and then I saw First In Front just off to my right and felt a nudge against my lower leg. My white tiger was with me.

  I touched my elbow to my side and hissed when it pressed against meat instead of the comforting plastic of my Glock 19. I’d left it at home, under the bed, an oversight I was guilty of more than once when preoccupied with Other Realms’ work, and an oversight Dillon had chastised me about more than once.

  I took a quick look around.

  Nothing . . .

  Maybe.

  One of the things a hunter knows is how to think like the hunted. When your practice involves the hunting of dark things, you learn that sometimes, maybe all the time, you get looked at. The more you see, the more you are seen. The Dark Forces work through humans as well as directly. I bore scars from some of the encounters with them I’d had. Protection and caution is all part of my game.

  I pay attention to “maybe.”

  Like the man slouched down in an idling car studiously not looking at me. Waiting for somebody?

  Maybe.

  Maybe for me.

  I don’t like giving the initiative away, though sometimes the counterpunch is best. I crossed the street and headed straight for the car. The driver pulled away, not meeting my eyes. Newish Ford sedan, dealer’s temporary plates.

  Hmmm.

  I felt the gentle nudge of my invisible—to anyone else’s eyes—white tiger.

  First In Front appeared in full war-fighter regalia: leather overshirt and breeches, a simple headband with coup feathers, a tomahawk and long knife in his hands.

  “It’s like that, huh?” I said.

  He nodded, a sharp bob of the head.

  Lovely.

  I kept walking and cut across the parking lot behind the Soi Capitale Bank. A Jeep Cherokee slammed to a stop and the doors opened. The driver was familiar—square head, pale skin, close-cropped black hair, deep-sunk dark eyes that darted away when I looked at him. Three others got out. Big old farm boys by the look of them, moving with the jerky lock step of the possessed or influenced, in battered Carhart jackets with feed caps pulled low over their eyes.

  My cell phone rang.

  No time for that. I hurried across the parking lot. The three meat puppets turned to follow me. Dillon taught me the first rule of street fighting a long time ago: You won’t be in one if you’re not there. But if you have to be there, make them come to you on ground you choose, not them.

  In laymen’s terms, run like hell. Or in this instance, like Hell was after you.

  Running and looking back is never a good idea; either run, or look back. If you do both, then you’re likely to run full tilt into a parked Ford F-150 and knock yourself on your ass—like I did. That gave the shambling meat puppets a chance to gain on me.

  It also gave me a moment to gather my energy, shift my consciousness and call my spirit allies. In my mind’s eye, I saw a whirling shape, like a conch shell in motion, twisting and then opening like a tunnel and through it came some help . . .

  The first meat puppet flailed his arms and clawed at his eyes as a crow that only he (and I) could see flew into his face, turning him; a white tiger bounded into the second, batting him down with her massive paws; the last closed on me as I scrambled to my feet. I ducked between his wild swings and I saw the look of terr
or and violation on his face, the look of the remotely controlled or possessed, and that sheer human terror held me back, for just an instant, till my self-preservation instincts drove me to stomp the outside of his leg and put him down.

  Remotely controlled.

  Demonic Dark Forces or the Cabal? Or both? Either way, the controller would be nearby. I looked at the black-haired blockhead sitting in his Jeep.

  First In Front appeared in front of me and grinned back over his shoulder. “Follow me . . .”

  “Okay, Infantry . . .” I said.

  And I did. When in doubt, attack head-on. Hoka hey!

  I ran right at the Jeep. The controller, if that’s what he was, widened his eyes and slammed the Jeep into gear. He hit the gas, peeling backwards away from me. First In Front flew at him, then stopped as though he’d hit a pane of glass. The Jeep backed into traffic and then roared away. First In Front looked at me.

  “No,” I said. A vehicle in the hands of a panicked pawn was as dangerous as a firearm in a crowd. The three farmhands were sitting up, looking around with the confused look of accident victims.

  “It’s lifted,” First In Front said. “It went with the controlling one.”

  “That’s no sorcerer,” I said.

  “No,” Tigre said. She sat and licked one paw. Burt circled and landed in a flurry of black feathers.

  “We should go,” the crow said. “You hurt that one, and he’s going to get his head clear quick.”

  “Who’s controlling?” I said.

  “Hidden,” the three said.

  I nodded. “Let’s go find him.”

  I jogged away, First In Front and Tigre bounding along with me, Burt flying overwatch, leaving the dazed meat puppets behind.

  My cell phone beeped from an unanswered call. It was from Sabrina.

  CHAPTER 8

  I squeezed into a back table at Gigi’s, where I could see the front entrance and still duck out the back exit. First In Front lounged at an empty table across from me, invisible to all but me, still as a tree. On the sidewalk in front, Tigre sat, her back to the window, an invisible guardian; Burt circled overhead—I felt his watchful presence circling.