HEX

by Stacy Charasidis

  “Dean” she whispered against his mouth, “don’t stop,” she said as she lost herself to pleasure. Dean slid inside her a few more times before he shuddered and groaned, his hips slamming against her. They made out wildly, tongues tangling together.

  “I could eat you,” she said, kissing him again. “I love sex,” Nathalie breathed. “Why did we wait so long?”

  Dean laughed against her mouth before getting up to get dressed. He pulled on his shorts and shirt and watched as she lay there, pouting, her naked limbs pale against the sheets.

  The bed felt cold without the warmth of his body. “Stay,” she said softly.

  He smiled as he looked at her. His best friend. His lover. His goddess. Nathalie…the girl he’d loved his whole life. He knelt beside her and took her hands in his. He kissed them feverishly. “I love you Nathalie Parker. Thank you for sharing yourself with me. It has been an incredible pleasure to be with you. Now get some sleep!” He stood, and with a gallant bow, the idea stolen from his little brothers, he snuck out of her room. He had to leave now or Mr. Parker would be loading his gun.

  “What a god,” Nathalie thought. She stretched luxuriously and fell into a deep sleep, all thoughts of the demon forgotten.

  Instead, she dreamt of a windmill. Barrington’s windmill, the historical construct protected from destruction by Barrington County law…innocuous in it’s ordinariness as it waited in a field…now alive and spinning…warning the townsfolk to beware…warning them that they were in grave peril.

  Nathalie woke up sweating.

  Monday, August 12

  Barrington Library

  The four met at the library late in the afternoon. They clustered together in Liz’s small office. Sadie had picked up hot coffee from Joe’s. They added cream and sugar and Luke cleaned everything up. “Liz is kinda fussy,” he explained.

  Dean yawned.

  “You look tired,” Luke commented. “You’re so pale I can see the veins in your eyelids.” Dean’s face got a little red.

  Nathalie glanced at Luke. “He slept over to protect me from a demon and then put in a full day’s work,” she said seriously.

  “You slept over?” Luke asked with interest and a twinge of envy. Dean waggled his eyebrows.

  Sadie frowned at Luke before turning her stare to Nathalie. “A demon? Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes…no, yes… He certainly looked like a demon. I don’t know what else to call him.” Nathalie described her encounter. Dean pulled the wrapped coin from his jeans and laid it on the librarian’s desk. Nathalie and Dean took a step back while Sadie unwrapped it and peered at it closely.

  “It looks like a penny…” Luke said, reaching for it.

  “Don’t touch it!” Sadie said sharply. She waved her hand over it and shook her head. “Well, well, well,” she said angrily, rewrapping it and putting it into the pocket of her dress. She looked at the group. “This ‘penny’ is a demon talisman. It’s not money. It just looks that way so people will pick it up. It’s extremely dangerous.”

  “Why would anyone pick up a penny?” Luke asked.

  “Rich boy,” Dean muttered, but agreed. “I’d pick up a one or two dollar coin, but not a penny.”

  Sadie turned and tweaked the nose of her wealthy boyfriend. “It’s made of gold. If you saw something gold on the ground, you’d have a look.”

  “Seriously, though, Luke has a point. It looks like a penny and no one picks up pennies anymore,” Dean said.

  Nathalie shrugged. “People used to pick up pennies all the time. They weren’t always practically worthless.”

  Luke offered his opinion. “Very true. A penny used to buy a lot more than it does now, like a loaf of bread or a bag of sweets. Anyone would have picked one up. If this demon thinks people still pick up pennies—maybe he doesn’t realize how much times have changed, which would mean that he hasn’t mingled in human society for a while.”

  “I’m convinced,” Dean said.

  Luke’s argument made Nathalie think. “He’s definitely trapped somewhere. He said he was bored. When he threatened me he seemed…at the end of his rope.”

  “If he is trapped, then it’s very possible his memory of society is very old,” Sadie agreed.

  “Or, he had a bunch of coins printed up and wants to use his stock,” Dean quipped.

  “I don’t know…the coin looks rare and is made of gold. I’d pick it up,” Nathalie said, not entirely convinced.

  “Can’t hurt to investigate when a penny was actually valuable,” Luke said, sitting at Liz’s computer and typing away.

  Sadie looked at Dean. “Did you touch the coin?”

  “Yep. It got hot, so it was doing something, but I wasn’t affected because of my amulet.” Dean took it out from under his shirt. “Nathalie warned me. It roared at her when she touched it, but she didn’t have her amulet on at the time.”

  Sadie looked at Dean’s amulet with great interest. “It grew hot countering great power. The demon talisman is invoked simply by touching it. It calls the demon to you so it can compel you to do its bidding. Taline’s work is quite remarkable,” she said softly, as if confirming something for herself.

  “It’s bidding?” Dean said skeptically.

  “Yes. Whatever it wants or needs done,” Sadie said seriously.

  Nathalie looked scared. “Why didn’t he come to me in my room?”

  Sadie thought for a second. “I don’t think the demon always has to respond. After all, it’s his calling card. He’s not being forced. Plus, he’d already ‘handled’ you that day. I think he ignored it.”

  Dean seemed to be struggling with the concept.

  “You remember the hex you just battled? Your torment and agony? Your helplessness?” Sadie asked pointedly.

  “Yeah,” Dean said in a low voice.

  “Beth’s human. She needs something tangible to cast a hex, like a spelled hemp bag. Tangible things can be found and destroyed. We were lucky. But imagine a being so evil, so purely self-serving it doesn’t care about anything but itself. To it humans are like cattle; we’re just slaves. You are there to serve its every whim. His power comes from himself, so if you’re enslaved, the only way to end the torment is to kill it or yourself. That’s it. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t care, it doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t love. Those concepts don’t mean anything to it. It revels in the suffering of others and in the chaos it creates. It hates unendingly and unreasonably. It would make you suffer, and everyone you love suffer…likely at your hand.”

  The room was quiet. They were all looking at Sadie, appalled.

  “And that’s his nice side,” she said gravely. She looked at Nathalie. “When you were telling us about your encounter, you said you didn’t remember at first.”

  “Only once I put my amulet back on. I wasn’t wearing it that morning. The memories flooded back, but when I take it off, it’s like I was dreaming. Hanging on to those memories is like hanging on to a dream when you wake up. It’s almost impossible.”

  “Beings like that use forgetfulness to use people. Their victims forget, take the blame, and can be used again. It’s a part of them, the forget spell. It’s their protection—a way for them to hide from prying eyes. The victim doesn’t remember anything and can’t explain their actions, or more importantly, expose them.”

  Luke piped in. “It could also be the brain’s way of coping with the supernatural. Otherwise insanity may set in if a person can’t accept what they’ve seen or what’s happened. There are many cases of unexplained violence and insanity in otherwise normal men and women committed to insane asylums or sanitariums. I’ve read tons of books on the phenomenon. It’s horrible.”

  “That’s terrible,” Nathalie said uneasily.

  “Sometimes the forget spell doesn’t work,” Sadie said quietly, “in very special people. Those are the ones who go crazy ‘claiming’ to have seen the devil and done his bidding.”

  “We need to hide the talisman,” Dean said worried
ly. “Bury it in the woods.”

  “No, we need to destroy it. I’m not sure if it will give off a call…you know, attract someone with a weak mind to dig it up. We’ll give it to Taline and Wayman,” Sadie said determinedly, “they’ll know how to get rid of it. We need to warn them because there will be more. It’s no coincidence that this demon is here, now.”

  “Won’t we be putting them in danger?” Dean asked.

  Sadie smiled slightly, “I have no doubt they can handle themselves,” she said vaguely. She turned to Nathalie. “Did he say his name?”

  Nathalie nodded. “He said his name was Danner.”

  Sadie looked disappointed. “That’s probably not his name, or at least, not his full name. I was hoping his pride would nudge him to announce it, especially if he thought you were an unbelieving mortal.”

  “Why does knowing his name help?” Luke asked.

  “In the past people were so superstitious they kept journals of the interesting folk, or ‘evil’ beings, they met. With his name, we could possibly have found some information on him. But he’s not taking any chances. He knows to have his full name is to have power over him.”

  Nathalie looked interested. “Are you saying there is possibly a book about him somewhere? That someone may have written about him?”

  “Absolutely, my family has many demon reference books.”

  There was silence at that. What a childhood, demon study instead of Sesame Street.

  “Why would he allow himself to be recorded?” Nathalie asked curiously.

  “Pride cometh before a fall, Nathalie. These creatures are extremely vain. They expect humanity to worship them in all their terrifying glory. I’m quite certain it had at least one mindless slave in thrall who was writing about him in a journal or a ‘tome’ as they used to call them.”

  “Maybe we should look for something like that,” Nathalie said, looking worried. “He told me to stay out of his business. What business? I had no idea what he was talking about!”

  “You said he wanted to break your fingers, but as a favour for whom?” Sadie wondered.

  “Well, if we could find his tome maybe it will tell us what his business is.”

  “My searches on prices and pennies are not turning up anything concrete on the internet,” Luke said. “I’ll do a tome search in the library database.”

  “You think a demon’s tome would be shelved near romance or fantasy in the fiction section?” Dean asked dryly.

  “You never know,” said Luke.

  “Describe again how he appeared to you, Nathalie,” Sadie requested.

  “He wasn’t completely solid, but he could touch me. He burned my arm. It was very painful,” she said, rubbing her arm.

  “Any marks?” Sadie asked as Nathalie pulled up her sleeve.

  “Oh, well, no actually…” she said confused as she checked her arms. “There were some yesterday. Wayman said I was hurt.”

  Sadie shook her head. “You can feel pain but he doesn’t leave any lasting marks, so he’s not corporeal. It’s all mental. It’s just in your head. But in a situation like that you wouldn’t have been able to tell.”

  “Did he say anything about where he was?” Dean asked.

  “No, he just uttered a saying about the penny he tossed, but not the normal one. He twisted it to suit himself,” Nathalie laughed tonelessly.

  “Repeat it,” Sadie said.

  “Find a penny, pick it up, and you’ll be sure to have bad luck,” Nathalie said.

  “No kidding,” Luke said. “A superstition. That’s interesting.”

  “That’s gay—for a demon,” Dean said derisively.

  “You’re right. That is silly. But it explains the gold pennies. That must be his tell,” Sadie said calmly.

  They all looked at her with confusion. “His what?”

  Sadie sighed. “Every demon has an…MO I guess you’d call it. A modus operandi. A peculiarity, a type of style. You know a fire demon because he spouts fire and burns things down, or a storm demon because he causes storms when he’s around, etc. That’s how humans told demons apart, by their different specialties or types of natures, which could be determined by how the demon impacted the people, or society, around them. Every demon is different.”

  “But most normal people can’t see or remember them,” Luke said.

  “True, normal being the operative word. But witches can, and the special people impervious to the forget spell that we talked about before, or a demon’s human thrall.”

  “This is getting stranger and creepier,” Dean said nervously.

  “So, witches had contact with demons along with special people,” Nathalie said.

  “Yes. Willow had contact with a demon, and she knew how to call them. It’s the blackest magic, and to get that knowledge was very difficult since much of it died with the druids. She wrote about it in her diary.”

  “So, I’m not special,” Nathalie said in a relieved voice.

  Sadie laughed. “Now how do I answer that? No, not special to demons. Special only to your friends and family.”

  Dean took her hand. “You’re special to me, baby.”

  “Do you have the invocation spell to call a demon?” Luke asked Sadie, aghast.

  “Of course I do. No one would believe it works these days, but I’ll bet it actually does. Why do you think a witch’s grimoire was secret and kept hidden? It contained very dangerous information, and in the wrong hands, well… Willow’s grimoire is a very bad book,” Sadie said, shuddering as she thought of some of the spells in it.

  “That’s awful,” Nathalie said. “Why don’t you destroy it?” she asked curiously.

  “I can’t,” Sadie smiled cynically. “It won’t let me. There’s a self-preservation spell infused in the book. It can’t be done.”

  “Willow was one devious witch,” Dean remarked.

  “Actually, it wasn’t Willow who did it. It was another witch. She stole the book from Willow’s home at the same time the townsfolk were sentencing Willow to die. That witch spelled it to protect the knowledge in it. She was the one who returned it to the Kellars to keep for the heir, along with Willow’s diary.”

  “Wow, I wonder how you do that to a book?” Dean asked curiously.

  You kidnap and murder a living person by performing a ritual that drains their blood onto the spelled vessel, a book in this case, and as the person dies, you chant your spell, and their life essence transfers to the now animate object. Self-preservation spell complete. Simple. Sadie thought in her head.

  “I have no idea,” she said out loud. Some things were better left as a witch family secret.

  “Who was the witch?” Dean asked.

  “Elanah Von Vixen,” Sadie said.

  Nathalie looked startled. “Really? Elanah Von Vixen was instrumental in helping the witch hunters root out witches in the history books I’ve been reading!”

  “Self-preservation,” Sadie said. “If you can’t beat them, join them. I’m not sure who she was working for, but she was playing for both sides.”

  “Guys,” Luke said with barely controlled excitement. “I think I found a tome! I remember seeing this when Sadie and I were doing research. It’s called the ‘Tome of Dannerlich,’ by Klaus Deitriche.”

  “Are you kidding?” Nathalie asked incredulously.

  “No. It’s in Superstition, but it’s a reference book. You can’t take it out. You have to read it there because it’s in their special collection and it’s over four hundred years old, and it’s in German.”

  “Dannerlich? That’s close enough to Danner for me. I have a reference book of demon types at home. I’ll look him up and see if he’s in there,” Sadie said.

  They all looked at her with odd expressions.

  “Remind me again why you have books like that?” Luke asked with a slight frown at her.

  Sadie frowned back. “We are a family of witches, Luke. They’re heirlooms. The book is very old and very valuable. It’s hand written and it actually h
as a lock on it. It lists different types of demons and provides a description of how to identify them. Some have markings; some have a peculiar effect on the people and places around them; some of them have special abilities. Danner seems superstitious, and superstitions had to come from somewhere. Someone at sometime suffered, oh I don’t know, by having a black cat cross their path or by walking under a ladder. Maybe it was because he was around and, let’s not forget, he’s probably been around for thousands of years.”

  “Everyone has an accident now and then. It’s not because of a ladder or a cat,” Dean said disbelievingly.

  Sadie gave him a wan smile. “True, but if a whole town of righteous, God-fearing, witch-hunting people were to experience the same phenomenon consistently, they would cry evil and hunt it down.”

  Nathalie spoke. “I agree. Superstition has got to be the stupidest name for a town I’ve ever heard of. They named it that for a reason, and that’s one of the reasons Rain is out there. She’s researching the origin of Superstition’s name. Since she’s there, I’ll get her to find the book. Maybe she can have it photocopied and we can get it translated.” She paused for a moment. “I’ll also ask her if she’s noticed anything unusual in that town and have her ask around to see if anyone knows how the town got its name. If Danner is or was there then someone at some point wrote about what was happening either in an official town record or in a personal diary.”

  “That’s going to take a while since they work on a horse and buggy system,” Luke said. He still hadn’t received a few of his interlibrary requests.

  Dean cleared his throat. “So…Sadie…how do you fit into all of this?”

  Sadie was startled. She had forgotten about her own problems while helping Nathalie with hers.

  “Luke mentioned that you had a problem and that you may need some help…” he trailed off.

  Everyone looked at her expectantly.

  Sadie sighed. “Nathalie has a demon and I seem to have a ghost or some sort of entity possessing me. It borrows my body to do things but I don’t know what it does, or why.”