“And then it hit me out of nowhere, and I was back to who I was.
“This is who I am, Crystal. It is what I do. I have come to live with it. But it is as much a part of me as my toes and my fingernails. I cannot fight it. Cannot.
“But I have promised you already, and I will keep my promise. I will never force myself or anyone else upon you.
“But the desire has burst inside me. I want you. I want you madly. I cannot explain why, I cannot deduce if a demon is working through me to get at you, but I want you.
“More than that, however, I want your friendship. You still have that soothing effect on me. When you are not around, I lose my mind. I’ve come to...love you. Not romantically—so don’t get nervous. I’ve come to love you...almost as a daughter, or at least as a younger sister.
“There is no help for me. We are witches, Crystal. The world has no place for our problems and our desires. We are here to find our own way. These fools with their concepts of depression and mental illness and manias and mind-altering drugs and whatnot are lost in the wilderness. Our problems derive from magic, a power that not even we fully understand. Even human problems derive from magic, but to a lesser extent. We are beyond help, Crystal. We have to find our own way or die trying. Survival of the fittest. Survival of the one with the least exploitable weakness.”
She stopped abruptly. Waited.
After a long pause, she said, “I’ve said it all, Crystal. I have no big ending. I just wanted you...to understand.”
“Do you know why the demon or incubus was so entranced by you?”
“Because I’m extremely good looking?” Shira, ever the joker.
“It seems to me like you sucked his power.”
“Did I? I don’t know. I know what you’re thinking: Am I a demon? From what you’ve told me, demons are parasites. There’s a little bit of demon in all of us, I think. Isn’t there? But witches seem to be selectively parasitic.”
And all demons were once witches, Luke had told me. I protected the thought.
Shira had a problem. Quite a problem. And she was being honest to me about it. And she would never force herself on me.
It wasn’t a fairytale friendship that we had. Far from it. It was about the most realistic, brutally honest friendship a person could ever ask for. No bullshit. No lies. No pipe in the sky.
I stood up off the one-seater, walked over to her. Sat next to her. She flinched minutely, and I felt the shame coming off her in waves. The regret. The fear of losing me, her friend.
These emotions were honest in her. No deceit. No forced thought from her into my head. I had progressed too far in my abilities to not know the difference between the two. I know the flavor of deceit, its texture.
I put my arm around her shoulder, brought her to me, kissed her head.
She started sobbing quietly almost the moment I touched her.
And then she collapsed onto my chest, clutched my clothes while she wept a lifetime of tears.
-5-
I told her about the war.
I told her about Luke and my role in taking the demons down.
I wasn’t sure what her response would be. She seemed, after all, to be searching for one of the demons willingly. If anything, she would want him (it?) to live.
But I felt she was the key. If she had the power to entrance a demon, there was something to be known here about how to do it. Could I do it as well? Was she the only one?
Gone was the glamorous diva of all the months before. In front of me now was a sincere, honest witch who was willing to listen.
I told her everything I knew, that all demons were once witches; that they chose to become demons after being drained of their energy, tortured, punished, until all they had left was the choice to live without their powers and likely die, or to grab onto the hope of endless strength, the strength of demons, the parasitic power they hold over us in weakening us and recruiting us to their ranks. And the promise of eternal life.
Her eyes grew wide as I spoke to her, the life coming back into her cheeks.
When I was done, she said, “I was wrong.” I didn’t understand what she meant. “I was in the clutches of a demon, Crystal. I was. And he weakened me. He left me with this...insatiable desire so that I sabotage my own survival. Look at us. You’re making me a fortune. You make me happy. I value your friendship, and yet this seed inside me... It lives inside me, wanting to destroy what we have. Maybe I never lost a child. Maybe I only thought I had.” Pause. “Goddamnit. What—what a treacherous liar.”
Fury grew inside her as she realized how she had been had.
“He used my weakness,” she said.
“You were too powerful,” I added. “Other witches would have called for a hunter, but you never reached the point of needing one.”
“And yet he still got to me. He left me with a permanent disability.”
“But you got away, and you’re still here. And you’re still powerful.” I told her about Roxy, Sirvana, the two witches who had forgotten all their connection to magic.
“It’s no weakness to call a hunter,” she said. “It’s a strength. If I had called one, I would never have ended up with the curse I have now. But my weakness overpowered my call for help.” She reached for the brandy and then decided against it. “This has gone to my head, dear. I feel out of sorts. Call your Luke. You have me on your side,” she said.
“I wish I knew how,” I said.
“You know how. It’s inside of you. All of it is inside of us. You just need to dive deep enough.”
I’ve been trying.
“Crystal,” she said. “You are the key. Do you realize that? Of all the witches to convince, I am the toughest. And yet, by you being here, by you simply being the caring and loving person that you are, you’ve turned me around. You will unite us, Crystal. How many witches are there in the world? There must some huge number. I only know ten or fifteen witches, am only friends with four including you. But there must be hundreds of us scattered around. Maybe thousands. You are the key. I will help you, Crystal. I will help you. You’ve made a believer out of me.”
I started laughing. “The Wicked Witches of LA,” I joked.
She laughed, too.
But behind the laugh was the strain of what this task entailed. It had taken me a month to bring even one person on board. And how many witches had been taken by a demon and turned in that month? We were growing less, and they were growing more.
It was too slow.
But it was also all we had.
I had my doubts that the others would believe.
You are the key. Her words played in my head like foreboding piano music before the knife comes out and stabs the woman in the shower.
You are the key.
“Aasiyah, the Mistress of Hunters, their leader,” I said. “We need to set up a meeting with Aaysiah and the hunters. Somehow. Somehow.”
Shira swallowed hard, looked nervous.
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve never met a hunter. I’ve always thought of them as...dogs of some sort.”
Dogs. “I’ve only met one...”
“And you love him,” she commented.
I didn’t answer. It hurt too much to know I couldn’t be with him.
PART TWO
~ Luke ~
-6-
“’ey, Lukey baby, rough nigh’?”
That’s Eddie. He’s Australian. Dude’s more difficult to understand than a shark without teeth. I met a guy once from South London. Jeff. He was pretty rough to get as well, used to work over here at Ally Joe’s with me and Eddie, back behind the downstairs bar. Rosie had to let the guy go because no one understood the fucker. They’d ask for a twelve-ounce and he’d say, “Woodjoo like ahhees wiffa’?” Would you like ice with that? It made for good conversation with some of the tourists, but even they got sick of him eventually. Jeff moved on.
“I’m fine,” I said. Eddie’s expression did nothing to convince me he believed me. He saw t
he tiredness in my eyes, a tiredness I’d had ever since the dreams had become...a little too real.
He knew enough not to probe further, and whereas “Rough night?” had once meant I’d slipped into a sexy Latino chick under the palm trees after a few shots at the Tiki-Licious, leaving him behind to hunt for a girl thirty years younger than him (which he did quite successfully most times), he knew better now. Eddie’s been my right-hand man in this ordeal. If you’d have asked me a year ago what Eddie’s idea of the supernatural was, I’d tell you it was a centerfold model with a natural double-D cup. So would Eddie. But events shape our lives, they open our eyes to friends we always had, but never actually looked at.
And they take things away.
“Wanna talk about it?” he asked.
“Is there any point?”
Eddie sighed, showing the lines on his face which somehow didn’t detract from his ability to woo the fairer sex. (That’s what happens when you have a few million lying spare in the bank, I guess—but he is charming in that older guy kind of way.) He’s got kind of a modern Crocodile Dundee look going for him, only with graying hair. “Well, I’m here for ya, mate,” he said. “Grab a beer tanigh’?”
“Sure.” I nodded, feeling the weight come down on me of the most dazzling, fantastical, mind-boggling experience I’d been through in the last few months—mind manipulation, mind games, hunters, demons, witches. Do you believe in dark magic? Trust me—this stuff I’m gonna tell you will blow your freaking socks off. It did mine.
I hate to use the word magic. I think immediately of some kiddy story with freakin dragons and a goddamn crystal ball wielded by a fairy godmother who smashes a pumpkin upon someone’s head or some crap like that.
No, this is none of that. This is so far from the Cinderella version of magic that to compare the two is like comparing Danielle Steel to E.L. James.
We’re in the E.L. James category.
I decided to put this stuff down because, well, if I ever go insane and you find me in a loony bin, there’ll be a record as to why. (Although my trust of loony bins went for the birds after they found that girl floating in the Gulf, the very girl I had dreamed of the night before.) How many crazy guys in those wards are really crazy? And if everyone were crazy, wouldn’t “normal” be the new insane?
But we’re getting philosophical, so let’s get on with it.
As a point of orientation: The place is West Rocks. You’ve probably heard of it. Big beach resort on the west coast of Florida, just off the Gulf in Primavera county. Sadly, our biggest claim to fame is not the Hotel Strip of Sheratons and Marriotts and Hyatts that folks pay an arm and a leg to stay at throughout the year. It’s not the Surf’s Up stores that line the beachfront, offering everything from shirts saying “West Rocks, Voted #1 Beach on the Florida West Coast” to indoor surfing to goggles and insanely revealing thongs for those who can wear them. (A lot of people try and wear them...who shouldn’t.) It’s not the Henna tattoos you can get at every corner, the Friday and Saturday night open-air movies during the summer; it’s not the pirate ship you can pay a measly thirty bucks to jump on and drink free rum all afternoon while catching your death of sunburn. It’s not even Ally’s Shrimp Alfredo that’s put us on the map. No, the one thing everyone seemed to remember, and which almost every tourist asked me about if I started shooting the shit with them long enough, was something more sinister. Something all the locals wanted to forget, but which all the outsiders kept reminding us of.
It was the sixteen-year-old girl they found floating in the ocean.
Her black hair was splayed around her like the mist of death, her arms and legs out to her sides while the ocean lay still below her as if she were in an eternal crib. She was so young that she was floating face down. Older women tend to float upwards after a few days because their breasts fill up with air and flip them around. But this girl...was a child.
You must understand that we really have very little crime around here. Very little. Where there aren’t hotels, there are retirement homes. And it’s a fact that the majority of the population is well over sixty. There was once a shooting at the beach that I can remember, but that wasn’t big news. It’s Florida. People own guns. And as far as I know, no one was hurt.
Remember that story that ran in Portugal quite some years back, about that little girl who was taken? Maddie, I think her name was. Algarve. Her folks were vacationing there and then she disappeared. It was all over the news. No one could find her. Everyone got involved. And she was never found. The whole thing remains a mystery.
Mysteries stick people to things.
The death of this girl, the one in the ocean, wasn’t a mystery to me. But the reason for her death was something I could only tell Eddie about. If I’d told anyone else, I would’ve ended up in that loony bin I told you about earlier, and I’d be too drugged up to even remember my name, let alone a dream I’d had of the girl the night before.
There are people who will tell you they saw the girl on the beach a few days before. Some will say they took photographs of her, only, when they looked at their pictures, she wasn’t in them. One guy swore he’d kissed her on the beach, but when questioned more deeply, he didn’t recognize her.
She came out of nowhere. No hotel room. No local apartment. No name. No parents. No one to claim her. She was, and remains, a total Jane Doe.
Except in my own head.
Rumors began. Questions were asked. Was she drowned? Did someone hold her under? Conflicting witness accounts were told (there were no witnesses in actuality, that was the problem). Photos were examined. It was nationwide news. No one talked about anything else down here for weeks. CNN, Fox, USA Today. It ran forever, and would keep on rearing its head.
Truth is, the girl drowned and no one knows how or why. And if they discovered why, maybe they’d let it go. But we hold on to mysteries. Mysteries keep us looking, questioning, wanting to understand.
The girl died in front of a million eyes.
And no one saw a thing. No one even saw her body.
Except me. I’m the one who found her, can you believe it? Here I was, easily three hundred yards away, a wide boulevard and palm trees and beach sand all blocking my view, and I’m the one who noticed something rocking in the ocean, motionless. One minute there had been nothing, and the next, there she was.
I was no foreigner to psychic phenomena, inexplicable occurrences. My mother was a white witch back in her day. (“White Witch”—now there’s a politically contentious word if there ever was one, but she called herself that so I stick with the word.) She read books to do with energies and auras and held the occasional séance while incense burned and eastern music flowed in the back. It didn’t help her much. She died at the age of forty-two after the cancer had eaten up all her insides. But she drilled into my head that things like this can occur. A look, a sense of something wrong (or right, although the “right” occurs less often). Maybe it was those old lessons that kept me looking, kept me wondering.
On the day the girl was found there were people on the beach, playing volleyball, soaking in the sun, flirting.
And not a soul took note of her.
I could have rationalized. I could have said that all those people were there and so I shouldn’t worry and how the hell could I even see this far away while giving an older woman her Martini and taking a sexy teenager’s order for a Crab Cake and Baked Clams while she eyed my tats.
But I knew. And after I had thrown my tray on the ground and had Rosie bellow at me from behind; after I had crossed the boulevard at a dead sprint, dodging cars with crazy rims and pumping everything from hip-hop to C&W, I really knew. It hit me like a fist, the image in my mind, the feel of the girl’s cold and clammy skin. Already I was seeing it, in my mind’s eye, fighting it back, refusing to agree or believe what my heart was telling me was true—so...horribly true.
She’s the witch I failed to save in my dream last night. That dream—that fading, foggy dream that was nothing but...
And then they saw as well.
They finally saw it.
Many would say afterwards that, sure, they’d seen the girl. But none of them really had. It was almost as if she had...materialized only after I’d seen her. And only then did other people notice her.
But the mind justifies, it makes excuses, it adds things to memories that weren’t really there.
I was still hoping as I waded into the bathtub-hot water and swam over to the floating body, tendrils of black hair spread around her head like mist. I was still hoping.
I counted the minutes in my head, the time that had passed since I had seen her from my waitering post, to the time that I was now in this hot bath, fighting the water to meet her. Had it been two minutes? One? Can someone still be alive after not breathing for a minute? I tried to recall what they taught me in first-aid, what I’d seen in medical shows growing up—brain dead, lack of oxygen, no point in saving her if she’s been down twenty minutes. I fought all these thoughts away and just hoped against hope. If I’m more honest with myself, I will say I prayed. I did. I’m not a religious man, not in the slightest, but I freaking prayed right at the end—until I touched her. Until my arm stretched out and my two fingers felt her skin.
And then I stopped praying.
And I stopped hoping.
I stopped doing anything. Because I knew. The temperature of her skin had told me.
Two men swam past me, grabbed her, turned her over. One of them, a Hispanic guy of about forty or forty-five, gave voice to what was going on in my mind. “Oh, Dios mio!”
I just stood there.
Her Mind Games: A Dark and Erotic Paranormal Romance Page 3
