Honeymoon of the Dead

by Tate Hallaway

  So I changed the subject. “How’ve things been at the store, William?”

  Though I think Dominguez and Mátyás were deeply bored by the whole thing, I easily filled the rest of the lunch conversation by asking after clerks, customers, and inventory. After we got the bill, Dominguez motioned me close.

  “You should probably fill us in on the details of your plan before we leave.” He gave a knowing nod in the direction of hottie waiter. I surmised that the idea was to make sure the kidnappers and their cohorts knew where to find us, so the trap would be set.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to be overt in broadcasting the information by overenunciating and projecting my voice in hottie’s direction. “Okay, so here’s my thought,” I said, as we all stood around by the door, putting on jackets and hats and mittens. “There’s a huge cemetery just up the road called Lakewood. It’s where Hennepin Avenue ends,” I told William who was already getting out his phone to use the GPS app. “We’re going to do a ritual there.”

  “What are we planning to do? Raise the dead in broad daylight?” Mátyás said with a slight sneer. I understood his objections. He’d practiced the Old Religion his whole life and knew that all the Halloween stereotypes of spooky witches conjuring skeletons and whatnot were a load of bunk. But I wanted to choose the kind of place the Illuminati boys/vampire hunters expected, or maybe even feared, that we’d be up to something powerful. That way they’d be more inclined to check out our activity.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  William looked positively horrified. Even Dominguez raised an eyebrow in concern.

  As soon as Dominguez and I drove through the front gate, I realized I was returning to the scene of the crime, albeit the lesser one. Parrish had helped me hide the bodies of six Vatican priests in the lake in the middle of this very cemetery.

  Lakewood wasn’t your typical garden of stones. The rich and famous had been buried here since before Minnesota became a state, and it had funerary art to rival some of the more famous cemeteries of Europe, à la Père Lachaise in Paris or Highgate in London. There were Art Deco pyramids as large as houses, as well as modern brushed-steel sculptures. Weeping angels perched on top of obelisks well over twenty feet tall and Celtic crosses stood as tall as nearby maple trees. Even the plain headstones tended to be large, as if trying to compete for attention.

  Roads wound around numbered, hilly sections, where trimmed cedar bushes stood sentry over markers, and oaks, elms, and pines sheltered noisy flocks of starlings. Passing a bronze, life-size statue of an elk, we made our way closer to the lake in the interior of the cemetery.

  Despite the morbidity, there was a stately peace about Lakewood that attracted regular visitors who used it like one of the many parks that stretched between Lakes Harriet and Calhoun. In the summer, people could be seen picnicking near the lakeside with binoculars, on the lookout for passing wood ducks and gaggles of Canada geese. I’d even heard that foxes and deer lived inside Lakewood’s fenced confines, undeterred by the headstones and graves.

  Dominguez pulled to a stop alongside the lake. It had changed a bit since I was last here. When Parrish and I had stashed the bodies under the cover of darkness, you could walk right up to the water’s edge. That was no longer possible.

  Poking through the snow, I could see thick matted masses of prairie grasses. A bit of orange flexible fencing was also visible. I wondered if they’d made the changes after the drought that had unearthed the grisly corpses of Lilith’s adversaries.

  Lilith stirred warmly under my skin as though pleased with the memory.

  When Dominguez coughed, I wondered if he’d sensed Her. I put my hand over my stomach to hide my shame. Snakes hissed in my subconscious. Athena reminded me that I still had other options.

  “Uh, so . . .” Dominguez said, with an uncustomary lack of words. He scratched at the short hairs at the back of his neck. “Here we are.”

  Could this be more awkward? Especially given that he was probably the guy they’d called when the bodies surfaced.

  I could still picture Parrish carrying the plastic-wrapped bodies one at a time into the water. His head would disappear under the water as he made his way to the center of the shallow lake while I sat on the shoreline, tears streaming from my eyes.

  Not the best night of my life.

  Though, without Lilith, I’d be the one dead and buried.

  The cloth upholstery creaked as Dominguez shifted in his seat.

  “I wonder where the boys are,” I said, anxiously looking for something, anything else to talk about. I was seriously regretting my decision to come here, of all places. “Did they get lost or something?” Given the size of Lakewood, it was a real possibility.

  Just then William pulled into the space behind us on the narrow road. I all but jumped out of the car to get away from Dominguez.

  “Wow,” William said. “Did you see this place? It’s awesome!”

  “How is it I always end up in a cemetery with you?” Mátyás grumbled. “At least this time we didn’t have to bring shovels.”

  A nervous glance confirmed that Dominguez was staring at me very disapprovingly after that remark. “Heh. Heh,” I said unconvincingly. “Good joke.”

  “I’d still rather do this in the parkway or the rose garden,” William said, still mostly to himself. “This place is cool and all, but it doesn’t seem very kosher to hold a ritual in a cemetery. There’s, like, all the dead spirits and stuff.”

  “Nothing says ‘evil witches’ like a ritual in a cemetery,” said Dominguez. “Let’s just hope it’s worrisome enough to spark the concern of the vampire hunters.”

  “Wait, vampire hunters?” Mátyás interrupted. “No one told me anything about vampire hunters.”

  “Oh, yeah, those guys Sebastian thinks are in the Illuminati Watch? Well, Dominguez thinks they’re actually vampire hunters.”

  “Illuminati?” William asked. “Who’s in the Illuminati?”

  “How did they find out about Sebastian?” Mátyás asked. “He’s a day-walker, not exactly your usual suspect.”

  Dominguez, who had wandered off apparently to do a little reconnaissance, piped up, “That is the question I plan to ask when I catch them.”

  The wind had picked up a little and murmured pleasantly through the trees. We stepped off the road and into the snow pack. Mátyás complained quietly about his shoes getting ruined. After we came to a good spot, we stopped and stood in a loose circle around a crumbling gravestone that pictured a relief of an upside-down torch. Our breath came in white puffs.

  “It’s my fault,” Mátyás said suddenly. “I’m sure of it.”

  “What? Why?” I asked.

  “I didn’t always get along with dear Papa, you know. I could have given something away, especially if I thought they were simply Illuminati Watchers. I know how much those people irritate my father.”

  Sadly, we all recognized that it was very much like Mátyás to give over some secret of Sebastian’s to a blogger simply out of spite.

  “Let’s not worry about blaming anyone right now,” Dominguez said. “I’m freezing. Let’s do this thing if we’re going to do it.”

  The plan was for Dominguez to hide in the bushes and keep an eye out for the approach of the Illuminati Watchers/ vampire hunters. William, Mátyás, and I would do our best to make the ritual as flamboyant as possible, even though my real purpose was nothing more than to cement my relationship with Lilith and thank and release Athena from Her service to me.

  William, I knew, always traveled with what he called his “magical gym bag,” and I asked him to retrieve it from his car. He pulled out an ordinary, navy and maroon nylon duffel from the trunk and brought it over to the spot we’d chosen near the banks of the small lake.

  Frost fogged William’s glasses as he knelt in the snow in the midst of the graves to unzip the bag. From inside, he pulled out four thick pillar candles, a box of matches in plastic Baggie, and a smudge stick of bundled sage and sweet grass
tied with a green string. He found a Boy Scout compass after digging to the bottom. After determining the approximate size of the circle we wanted by marching in the snow, we placed the white candles at the compass points.

  Mátyás rubbed his quickly reddening nose. I watched him out of the corner of my eye with concern. Only a few weeks ago, Mátyás suffered a pretty serious case of hypothermia after having been buried in snow during a blizzard. Frowning at his light coat and thin, cotton mittens, I wished he’d dressed more sensibly.

  Dominguez watched all of our silent proceedings with his usual disapproving expression, his hands jammed into the pockets of his respectable wool trench coat. He couldn’t look more out of place with his precise crew cut and sedate, serious suit and tie, leaning against the smooth trunk of a willow tree—a G-man among witches.

  “It’s too bad the rest of the coven can’t be here,” William said, after we had gathered everything. The three of us stood facing each other around the edges of our snow-tracked circle. “Maybe I could get some of the others on a conference call,” he suggested.

  “Talk about ‘phoning in’ your performance,” Mátyás said with a shake of his head. The sun shone on his back, but he rubbed his shoulders briskly.

  “I think we’re okay,” I said more kindly. “This isn’t going to be that big of a thing,” I reminded them. “Just an affirmation to Lilith that She’s the Goddess I want in my life.

  We’d decided that William would cleanse the area with his smudge stick first, walking counterclockwise around the spot we’d marked to banish the negative energy, and then I’d cast the circle. As he moved, William blew on the embers of the incense, sending billows of scent into the frosty air. He paused at each of the candles as though to give the cardinal points extra attention.

  House sparrows chatted happily in the nearby branches, despite the chill in the air. The edges of everything seemed crisp and sharp in that way of winter light. The gravestones on the nearby hill slumbered silently under a thick blanket of snow.

  Once William had made his way back to the east, he stuck the unlit end of the smudge stick in the snow just inside the circle. Now it was my turn. I used William’s athame—his was a black-handled, steel knife with the head of a stag on the pommel (I recognized it from our spring catalog; it was very popular with men). Taking a moment, I attuned myself to the energy in the blade.

  His was a very mellow, thoughtful vibe, almost Zen- like. The aura imprint was a deep, rich indigo. After taking three deep breaths to ground myself, I imagined the energy of the earth moving into me and flowing into the athame.

  I visualized a bluish beam of light tracing along beside me as I walked the same path William had, only in the opposite direction.

  A beat-up white compact car of some variety drove along the road on the other side of the lake. Though it might have been someone just on a tour or searching for a relative, my eyes followed its slow progress until it turned out of sight.

  My feet crunched in the snow. After making one full pass around our circle, I stopped in the spot where I’d started. Facing away from the circle, I addressed the east. “Powers of the east and air, be with us and add your abilities of communication and the swiftness of thought.” The breeze tugged at my hair, and the image of a woman dressed in a cloak of snow white feathers that shifted in a constant wind came into my mind. Her eyes were clear and bright with youth. She held a bright sword, and her long, blond hair fell past her shoulders.

  I moved to the south. There I called upon the element of fire. “Add your enthusiasm and passion to our workings tonight,” I ended. Here, I visualized a column of smoke forming itself into the shape of a woman holding a staff. She had embers for eyes and hair the color of fire.

  In the west, I invited water to join us and bring with it love and insight from the unconscious. I pictured a waterfall becoming the Lady of the Lake with raven- colored hair and robe that wavered and blurred as though underwater. She held a chalice in her hands. Her belly swelled slightly, as though in pregnancy.

  Once I stood in the north, I repeated my invitation, this time calling to earth and wisdom. I imagined an old, black woman with tired eyes and steely gray frizz covering her head. Her body bent with age, but with muscles still strong as stone. In the cup of her withered hands, she held a single gold coin.

  When I’d returned to where I’d begun, I turned and faced William and Mátyás. William’s eyes were closed, and from the furrow in his brow I knew he’d been adding his energy to my workings. Mátyás had his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat, and he shifted from foot to foot miserably. I scanned for Dominguez but couldn’t immediately see him.

  A jogger passed, giving us a curious glance as she huffed her way around the bend of the lake.

  Now, it was time to invoke the Goddess. My thought was that I’d call to both Lilith and Athena, so I could explain my choice to them both.

  Spreading my feet slightly, I lifted the knife over my head, holding it with both hands. Normally, I didn’t feel the need to be quite so dramatic, but I tried to keep in mind our dual purpose of attracting the attention of the vampire hunters.

  Mátyás snickered a little. William opened his eyes to see what the fuss was about and even his lips twitched in a little smile, though I knew from experience that William enjoyed the more dramatic aspects of witchcraft.

  Ignoring them both, I concentrated on drawing forth the Goddesses. Lilith, as usual, lay coiled in my abdomen. Carefully, I conjured the picture of Her awakening separate from me. Mentally, I crafted Her image: a desert woman with brown, sun-kissed skin dressed in rich, silken robes. Her feet, I knew, She’d keep hidden, as in many myths they were those of an owl. Her breasts and hips were full and sultry, and Her eyes held a siren’s spell to seduce unwary souls to their destruction.

  I knew I’d called Her when I heard Mátyás take in a breath. Again, William cracked an eye open but frowned—apparently he wasn’t as able to see Lilith as well as Mátyás.

  For William’s benefit, I said, “Welcome, Lilith, Mother of Demons.”

  A weird noise, like the sound of someone moaning, drifted through the breeze. All of us, even William, turned in the direction of the sound. The wind picked up and snow scattered around the edges of the circle. I sensed something that looked to my magical eye like a wisp of smoke curl around the bubble that surrounded us. The guardians of the quarters seemed more alert, as though ready to defend us.

  In my head I heard Lilith’s voice. “Dark spirits are drawn to me. Do not fear them.”

  Easy for Her to say, I thought, now clearly seeing the hollows of eyes and an open, screaming mouth in the smoky thing that swirled desperately around the circle. It suddenly dawned on me that it was a ghost.

  William must have had the same realization because he asked, “Could we hurry it up?”

  Mátyás, meanwhile, suddenly seemed to be enjoying himself. His eyes traced the movement of the ghost with a kind of delight. Lilith smiled at him. Sensing Her attention, Mátyás looked at Her and they briefly shared a glance. He paled and dropped his eyes almost instantly, however.

  Wow, Lilith scared the bogeyman. I’d have to ask him about that later. Meanwhile, I had another Goddess to call.

  My arms were getting tired so I shifted position. I pulled my legs together and opened my arms, like a cup. Now I created the appearance of Athena in my head.

  Broad shoulders and a strong, straight back, Athena stood with Her legs slightly apart as though ready for action. Her silvery helmet glinted in the sunlight, as did the sharp edges of the lance She grasped in a muscular arm. She held Her shield off to the side, though I could see the hint of twisty snakes, coiling this way and that over the rim.

  Though regally beautiful, Her face, what could be seen of it under the nose plate, could only be described as fierce. Her expression was stern and forbidding, as dark as the coiled locks that spilled from beneath Her helmet. Seeing the hard look in Her storm gray eyes, I began to wonder if I might have misc
alculated how easy it would be to bid Her “hale and farewell.”

  Again, for William, I said, “Welcome, Athena.”

  Once Athena had fully materialized, Lilith hissed, clearly unhappy to be sharing the stage with Her.

  Mátyás shot me a look as if to say, “This is your other Goddess? Are you insane?” I just shrugged.

  William, meanwhile, kept a fretful watch on the churning wisps of ghosts that encircled us. There were more of them now, and their pace increased, dancing around us like oily reflections on a soap bubble.

  Everyone waited for me to speak, and I sort of wished I’d prepared something more than “Hey, thanks for your efforts, but Lilith is my one and only gal pal.” As usual, I was forced to fake it.

  “Mighty Athena, Goddess of War and Wisdom,” I said, bowing slightly as I addressed Her. “No one could ask for a better protector. You saved Teréza from the snow and me from my enemies. I’m deeply grateful.”

  “But it isn’t enough,” the wind, or maybe the ghosts, whispered in my ear.

  Clearing my throat, I continued, “Please accept my humble thanks.”

  “No.”

  This time the voice was much clearer. Even William’s attention was pulled from the ghosts by the sound of it. I looked at the two images of the Goddesses. Athena’s knuckles whitened as She gripped the spear tighter. One foot had moved forward, as if She might be preparing to strike me dead.

  Lilith fairly twinkled with an I-told-you-so smile.

  I had no idea what to do next. Gods and Goddesses were always supposed to go when you asked them nicely. Of course, I didn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it came to getting rid of the ones I’d called.