The Serpent and the Light

by Bo Luellen

  Magicae: Book One

  The Serpent and the Light

  by Bo Luellen

  Copyright © 2019 Bo Luellen

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781653199099

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my cousins, Erin Flournoy and Emily Dixon.

  Emily’s drive to write her first book inspired me to become an author. She sculpted her own destiny out of the clay of misfortune. Emily forged the skill needed to rise with the tide despite the storm.

  Erin stuck by me during every iteration of my life, showing me compassion and true friendship. Every time I fell on my face, she was always there to tell me I’m expected to get up. She helped me to see the world through a broader lens and kept me steady.

  I couldn’t be more grateful to have both of these beautiful and devious creatures as my family and best friends.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Henry I

  Chapter 2: John I

  Chapter 3: Richard I

  Chapter 4: Amanda I

  Chapter 5: Henry II

  Chapter 6: John II

  Chapter 7: Richard II

  Chapter 8: Amanda II

  Chapter 9: Henry III

  Chapter 10: John III

  Chapter 11: Richard III

  Chapter 12: Amanda III

  Chapter 13: Henry IV

  Chapter 14: John IV

  Chapter 15: Richard IV

  Chapter 16: Amanda IV

  Chapter 17: Henry V

  Chapter 18: John V

  Chapter 19: Richard V

  Chapter 20: Amanda V

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  This first step into the world of Magicae couldn’t have happened without some key people. Thank you to the test group who read my book one chapter at a time, giving me honest feedback. Without your truth, the book wouldn’t be what it is. Thank you: Misty Moore, Cindy & Trevor Messner, Johnny McLain, Alicia & Taj Murphy, Gabriel & January Rider, Sarah Walters, Mary Jane Whisnant, Larry Fennel, Samara Hamby, Susan Melton Turner, Misty Moore & The Magicae Series Book Club

  To bring some authenticity to this work of fiction, I enlisted the help of several experts in their fields. These individuals spent their time helping me to flesh out the details in regards to the treatment of dead bodies, police investigations, magic, Fey creatures and the concepts of necromancy. These people are:

  Thomas Lee Harris, Jr, Consultant – Druid

  Cassandra Roepke, Consultant – Druid, Fey and Magic

  Sean West, Consultant – Occult, Necromantic Magic, Cthulhu Mythos

  Some of the unnamed consultants wished to remain anonymous due to the discretion needed in their careers. Thank you for your time and experience. You have my thanks.

  My thanks to my editor, Henry Cribbs. His hard work and dedication to the spirit and theme of my books has helped safeguard my vision.

  Cover Art by Sergj. Cover Graphics and Promotional Media by Francessca’s PR & Design. Interior Art by Steve Standeford (Steve’s Instagram - @incompletesaint )

  Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t give thanks to the master authors Robert Louis Stevenson and H.P. Lovecraft. Your stories continue to inspire and terrify.

  Prologue

  Tulsa, Oklahoma - Tuesday, October 16th, 2018 – 2:38 a.m. CST

  Lewis Turner’s first conscious breath since the fall off the bridge was to cough out a mouth full of blood. His lungs felt like they were on fire, and a stream of red mucus coated his jaw, turning his greying beard red. Blinking hard, he focused his vision on a snow-covered railroad track inches from his face. He was on his stomach, and his body felt numb and cold. Lewis’s head was resting at an odd angle on one of the wood ties, as he searched for how he had arrived here.

  He tried to move his right hand, but only received a sharp stab of pain for his efforts. Lewis managed to drag his left arm under him and lift his middle-aged, overweight upper body up a few inches. He was out of shape and a smoker, which was doing him no favors. He looked down at his broken right arm, which was snapped backward across the steel tracks. Blood trailed down the forearm into the spaces between his fingers, decorating the thin layer of powder on the ground red.

  As he threw up his dinner, he thought, Get up!

  Lewis’s early days in the military began to take hold, where his mind was now lacking. He had never seen combat, but the conditioning was there. His hand dug into the gravel under his body as he struggled against the pain. Through sheer force of will, he managed to pull his legs under him to get to a sitting position.

  His head was pounding, and the surges of pain he felt throbbed in time with a loud thumping in his ears. He brought his left hand up to the side of his head and covered his left ear. Looking up, he saw the source of the torturous noise. He was under a busy highway overpass. Each time a car passed by, the bridge drummed an echo that spiked every nerve in his brain.

  It was dark, but there was some light from the street lamps on the highway above. Lewis brought his uninjured arm up and rubbed his eyes. A new sense of wetness squished as he felt the smooth exposed bone of his left ocular cavity just above the eye. His tongue snaked along his lips, and the flavor of iron fired into this taste buds. As he opened his eyes, his black ball cap was lying just in front of him, with blood splattered across Lewis’s Hoagies logo. Through the fog in his head, he fought for the meaning of those words. They were familiar and yet alien.

  He looked down at his blue denim jeans, stained with mud and blood. On the right side, he saw a set of keys hanging from one of his belt loops. The dirty troll doll that was attached to the keychain sparked a memory. The toy was given to him by his daughter after she had won it in a crane game at Coney Island. He saw her face now, and it reminded him of why he needed to get up.

  He attempted to get up, but all he could do was scrape his legs a few inches along the gravel. His growls of frustration and pain echoed in rhythm with the pulsing beats of the passing cars overhead. His hand slipped, and Lewis slammed hard on the ground, breaking his nose on a rock. The new hurt jarred his mind. The smell of tar from the tracks was accompanied by a familiar odor from his shirt. The aroma of meats, cheese, and cleaning products sparked to life his memory. It had been a typical Saturday night in Tulsa with his closing crew, and he had just come from their annual Halloween Party. Something happened that was in the corner of his mind, but the pain was so intense, it made it hard to focus.

  Intense light from behind him cut its way through the darkness and caused his shadow to cast forward. His head exploded with new pain as the sound of a train horn blared into the night sky. Lewis put his hand up to his ear and attempted to muffle the noise. The train tunnel under the bridge was amplifying the horn to the degree that it brought tears to his eyes. The earth beneath his feet bounced as the oncoming locomotive sailed smoothly over the tracks towards him.

  His mind searched for meaning, How did I get here? I have a daughter that is counting on me!

  Another blast of the train horn rang out and shook him from his line of thought. He writhed on the ground and struggled to get away with the few working limbs he possessed.

  He found his voice and called out, “Heeeeeelp me! Please, God! Help!”

  In the distance, he saw a vague outline of someone standing deep in the tunnel a few dozen yards away. His vision was blurry from a combination of the head wound and the blood that trickled down into his eyes. With a new surge of hope, he lifted his body up to his knees and made a valiant effort to wave his hand. He heard a soft cracking sound coming from one of his legs, as something bent at an unnatural an
gle. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t feel the pain, but he was grateful for the reprieve.

  Desperately, he yelled, “Please help me!”

  Another blast from the horn spiked an agony he had never thought possible into his mind. The great engine was almost upon him now, and the gravel under his body vibrated his freezing skin. He willed his body in motion and grabbed the nearest train rail. Using all his remaining strength, he slowly made headway over the track.

  His heart came alive with hope. I'm gonna make it.

  Through a bevy of screams and wails, Lewis dragged himself just beyond the rail. Each motion came with the terror that the train was going to get to him before he found freedom. Lewis rolled his broken body over, sat up, and looked back to see he had barely cleared the tracks. He coughed up blood, as several teeth were missing from his smile of satisfaction.

  The blurry stranger loomed just in front of him. Lewis’s vision was getting worse, and all he could make out was the faint outline of the person. The blare of the train shot out again, making his bones vibrate.

  The shadowy watcher said something to him that he couldn’t quite make out, but the words brought a sense of total peace come upon him. For the first time since he woke up, he wasn’t scared or in pain. Mercy removed the vicious sound of the train, and he was blanketed in blissful silence.

  His thoughts drifted to the divorce from his wife, and how it left Riley with a broken home. His infidelity surfaced in his mind. It reminded him of how he had dragged his family into a brutal custody battle. The guilt welled up inside of him, as he remembered every moment he had disappointed his little girl, his spouse, and his family. The feeling went from a vague sprinkle of moments from the past into an overwhelming geyser of regrets. All the suffering he caused his family coursed through him, and nothing he did could stop the flow of recounted sin.

  He took a deep wavering breath and let himself lay back. Lewis felt the cold of the steel track on the back of his neck, as the vibration of the train oddly soothed his shoulders.

  Just before the metal wheels severed his head from his body, Lewis mouthed, “Forgive me!”

  Chapter 1: Henry I

  Tulsa, Oklahoma - Tuesday, October 16th, 2018 – 8:01 a.m. CST

  A cockroach crawled over the head of a balding young man in his twenties, as he laid face up on a broken yellow living room couch. He was breathing deeply in a restless sleep, with his face twitching under the tiny insect legs. Around him was a stained brown carpeted floor filled with old food rotting in to-go bags. The roaches owned the living room and roamed the apartment with impunity.

  Henry snapped awake and brushed off the bug as he sat up. He coughed hard, clearing his lungs of phlegm and last night’s vomit that had been left in his throat. He looked around confused for a long time, then held his head in pain and moaned. The young man didn’t usually get hangovers, but this time Henry Jekyll went all out in his self-abuse. He had done way too many shots with his friend Dallas at the company Halloween party, and he was having trouble deciding if it had been worth it.

  Even though Dallas was four years older than Henry, he judged her an immature teenager in mentality. Prone to one-night stands and binging on a host of different men, she represented everything he was raised to despise. Still, she had something about her that was dangerous, and no adventure came without risk.

  He swung his legs off the couch, as his head throbbed and his body felt like the floorboard of a taxi cab. Henry searched for the murky details of the evening and vaguely remembered calling an Uber to get home. A rise of self-loathing came over him as he mentally kicked himself for falling in-step with the party line.

  He clenched his fists, This isn’t just some blow-off job just to pass the time and pay the bills! I’ve got goals and a career to think about. Final exams are coming up in December, and here I am following some skirts around. Instead of studying, I spent the night dressed up as a vampire and getting blackout drunk. This can’t happen again. I can’t risk going back home.

  To his surprise, the door leading to the only bedroom slid open, and a disheveled blond-haired Juste Theriot crawled on all fours towards his feet. He was only wearing a white pair of underwear with a yellow stain on the backside. The man’s hair was matted down, and two plastic bolts were still attached to his neck by spirit gum.

  Henry asked with a raspy voice, “Juste, where the hell did you come from? How did you get in without a key?”

  Juste’s Cajun accent was thick as he replied, “I came in through the window. She let me in.”

  Instead of using the front door, many of his co-workers chose to enter his apartment this way. It was an ongoing game they played that the landlord hated, and he thought it was hilarious. This time he was a little surprised by it, as Juste had been incredibly drunk the last time Henry saw him, and his apartment was a good three miles away from the party.

  Henry sprang to his feet and walked over to the frost-covered window and shouted, “You ass! It’s been snowing for the last two days. How did you even get here without a car? Don’t tell me you walked with no coat?”

  He took a closer look at the first-floor overhang that outstretched only a foot below the second-story window. In the snow, he saw shoe tracks that had taken a terrifyingly staggered path from the edge of the roof to the window. Henry recreated the daring journey in his head, following how Juste had successfully scaled the building and almost walked off the edge twice before making it to the window.

  He looked at the window’s lock and asked, “Juste, what did you mean when you said, ‘She’ let me in?”

  Juste looked up with a layer of guilt and regret on his face, as movement from the open bedroom caught Henry’s eye. A sizable woman was getting dressed with her back to them both. As she put on her bra, Maisy Harding gave him a cold gaze over her shoulder, then went back to putting on her clothes. The woman’s fat rolled over her capacious black underwear, as the mountainous female forced her pants over her ample backside.

  He slapped his forehead as the stark realization came over him, Oh, shit! That’s right. Maisy!

  Henry closed the sliding door to the bedroom and explained, “Dude, Maisy came by after the party. I had just laid down in bed when she banged on the door. She was blasted drunk, no coat, wobbling, and asking to stay the night. I didn’t want her getting behind the wheel, so I let her crash out in my bedroom.”

  The Cajun put his hand on his mouth and uttered, “Oh, no. Did you two…?”

  He gave his friend a disgusted look and answered, “Miss perfect Pentecostal? Are you kidding? Oh, she tried, but I wasn’t having it. She was like an octopus, man. All over me! If everyone found out that the star pupil of Eastland Christian College came by for a booty call, I’m sure it would cause a stir. Her dad might show up with a shotgun and force me to marry her. The only reason I let her stay was that I couldn’t figure out what I would say to Lewis if I showed up for my shift, and she had killed herself or somebody else on the road. So, I let her take the bed, and I took the couch.”

  He made a mental connection and observed, “Hey man, wait. You came from the bedroom?”

  The door slammed open, as Maisy stood triumphant in her outfit from the previous night and announced, “I had to shake cockroaches out of my purse this morning!”

  Henry looked at the wrinkled bed and scoffed, “I think what you meant to say was, ‘Thank you for letting me stay the night.’”

  She shoved past him and walked out the door, and spouted, “Whatever!”

  The balding man sat down on the couch and pleaded with the Cajun, “What the hell happened last night?”

  Juste appeared as if he was barely hanging on to consciousness as he replied, “After you left, the Halloween party started winding down at around 3 a.m. My Dad told me the next time I showed up drunk at the house, it was going to be my ass. So, I sorta remember catching a ride to your place. I tried banging on the downstairs door, but I guess you were passed out. I remember crawling up the terrace, walking on the ro
of, and banging on the window. I saw you on the couch, sleeping, but you weren’t budging. So I laid into the window really hard. I guess you couldn’t hear me or were just being an asshole.”

  Juste looked away in shame and continued, “I saw the light from the bedroom snap on.”

  Henry fought through the migraine that was torturing his forehead and pressed, “Dude, are you saying you…”

  The Cajun looked at his phone and retorted, “Look, we’ve got to get our asses in gear if we are going to make it to work. Do you have a shirt I can borrow?”

  Henry went and pulled a clean shirt out of his closet and shook a few cockroaches free from its folds. As the two walked outside in the bright morning, Juste started a coughing fit and regurgitated a stream of black liquid out of his mouth and nose. Eventually, he emptied his stomach of its contents and sat down, exhausted on the street corner. The neighborhood street was dirty, with trash blowing in the cold wind. Up and down the road, echoes of his friend’s heaving bounced off the dilapidated red brick apartment buildings and run-down houses. Before the two started walking towards the sandwich shop, they sparked up a joint and soothed their woes. As they made their journey down the cold street, Henry tossed the roach on the sidewalk and waited patiently for his friend to feel talkative.

  A mile into the trek, Juste clapped his hands together in a moment of stress and exclaimed, “I’ve got to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone!”

  An inner giddy feeling came over Henry, Sweet Jesus! Here it comes! He stopped dead in his tracks and replied, “Dude, we’ve been friends for over a year. I eat your mother’s horrible Cajun cooking. You can trust me.”

  Theriot started walking again and revealed, “Okay, so last night I was knocking at the window. The bedroom door opened, and I saw someone walk out of the dark. The window was fogged up, and I couldn’t really see much. I remember the window sliding open and then falling into the living room. The next thing I know, someone has me by the arm, and I was pushed into your bed. I really didn’t know where I was, and I could feel someone on top of me.”