Frank grabbed a sweater from a basket of clean clothes he kept near an ironing board. An ironing board! It was black, baggy, and smelt like fresh apricots, and when I pressed it against my face it was like stroking a rabbit with my cheek. Who was this man and what had he done with the sarcastic, chain-smoking alcoholic I had come to know as Frank Stone?
“This is for you,” he said, “Slip it on and keep warm. I wouldn’t want you dying of hypothermia on me. Not when there’s trashy TV to be watched and a broken heart to fix.”
I removed my coat and boots and slipped into the fluffy, warm sweater. Frank had decided I would spend the night, and there was nowhere in the world I would have felt safer than with him. Frank was a kind spirit, if a little rough at the edges. But who likes a clean cut guy, anyway?
I thought I did, but then that didn’t explain my attraction to Aaron.
“My heart isn’t broken,” I finally said.
Frank sat down. “Oh?”
“It isn’t. I wasn’t in love with him or anything.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Really? You saw love when you looked at us?”
“No, but I saw love bubbling around in that little mind of yours, though.”
“You read my mind?”
“Not in so many words, but I’m good at reading people.”
“And?”
“And… I think part of you did love him. Or at least loved the idea of him. The man saved your life once, maybe twice. You’d been through hell with him. You could relate to him.”
“So, what about the other part—or parts?”
Frank paused and analyzed my face. If he was reading my mind I couldn’t tell. But the pause hung for a moment. “I think he’s hurt your pride.”
“Pride, huh?” I took a sip of herbal tea and the liquid warmed my insides as it traveled to my stomach. “That rat bastard,” I said.
“At least you’ve learned your lesson.”
“And what’s that?”
“Don’t shit where you eat.”
“Oh. That.”
That.
I hadn’t considered Damien and I may have been heading into dangerous territory by getting involved with each other. Maybe I thought we were invincible? It didn’t seem like a stretch considering how our relationship had grown and evolved since that first time we had met in class. Gods how it stung. He hadn’t even left her. Damien had been lying to two women for months! How long did he think he was going to get away with it for?
“We still need a third, you know,” Frank said. Watching him drink with his little pinkie raised up made me giggle.
“A third what?” I asked when the giggle stopped.
“A third Witch, witch.”
“Right. Three makes a Coven.” A poor one, but a Coven nonetheless. “So you’re saying we need to find another third?”
“It’s not exactly like we’re spoiled for choice around here. There are three witches in the Glen. Three. Tres. Just because you’ve fucked one third of the population doesn’t mean we must exclude them from the Coven.”
“I don’t want to see Damien again,” I said.
“Why? Because he cheated on his girlfriend with you? Because he’s a liar? Let me tell you something; no one likes a cheat—I certainly don’t—and I’m totally on your side, but we need him.”
“So, what, I’m supposed to forgive him and move on?”
“No,” Frank said, “You’re supposed to trap him.”
“Trap him?”
“By blood and by oath, Witches are bound to each other. He can’t just leave, and you shouldn’t just let him.”
“I don’t get you.”
Frank shifted into the lotus position… somehow. His legs were incredibly long, but he made it look easy. Fluid. Like a praying mantis. “You know what? It can wait.” He grabbed his TV remote, flicked on the big screen and queued up the first episode of Friends.
“That’s it?” I asked, “You aren’t going to finish what you were going to say?”
“No,” Frank said. “You’ve had a long day, and we’re perfectly safe as long as we stay here.”
Safe. “How do you figure that?” I asked.
“Like I said. I have my ways.”
I finished my herbal tea, ground the balls of my hands into my eyes, and settled into the sofa with Frank.
Friends probably wasn’t the best show we could have watched—Ross and Rachael totally weren’t on a break—but sitting with Frank eased my nerves somewhat. Maybe it was the tea or maybe it was his presence, but whatever was going on it helped me relax and take my mind off the woods, the hooded men, and even Damien. Aaron lingered in my mind for a while, but that was only because I was anxious about the fact that he might be worried about me. I hadn’t called him yet and I told him I would.
I should text him, I thought.
But my mind and body rebelled against the thought of picking up my phone and writing a text. And as the figures on the screen blurred into themselves, and the glow dimmed and dimmed and dimmed, I drifted into what would be the best night’s sleep I had had in weeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I didn’t dream that night. At least, I don’t think I did. I also didn’t wake up in a cold sweat, panicking and fighting phantom monsters. Maybe it was the exhaustion? Ow! The bright, sharp pain all over my head reminded me of what had happened the night before as if to confirm that it wasn’t a dream.
“That’s right,” the pain would have said if it had a voice. “Someone dragged me by the hair yesterday.”
Any normal girl would have been able to go to the cops about it and get police protection, but I would have to suffer in silence because—well—what was my story? A bunch of Witches are trying to fuck with my life and the life of one of my friends. You should come to the woods with me, with guns. Oh, and by the way, we should probably get a priest too because there’s a Demon involved.
No. That would have been too easy, wouldn’t it?
The room was cast in darkness when I swam into wakefulness. Frank, beside me on the sofa, lay motionless. But even though the windows and shutters were closed so tight that not even a faint streak of light could break through, the swallows singing in the sky told me that it was morning so I sat upright and checked my phone.
No messages. No calls.
Frank stirred and opened his eyes. “What time is it?” he grumbled.
“About seven,” I said.
He rubbed his eyes, stood up on autopilot, and staggered to the kitchen. I watched him switch on the coffee maker and pour two hot cups of coffee, but we took our warm drinks in silence. I guessed we both needed a little coffee to help us wake up, though I needed it less than he did. Somehow I felt fresh today.
“Well, we can’t stay here all day,” Frank said after finishing the last of his coffee.
I nodded. “I didn’t want to stay here all day either,” I said. “Actually, I wanted to go to the bookstore.”
“Bookstore? I thought it was closed.”
“Ah, but I have keys.”
“And what would we be going to the bookstore for?”
“Answers.”
Frank didn’t argue with me. He slapped on a pair of black leggings, a long Metallica shirt, and pulled on black pea coat with the collar up. Me? I had no choice but to wear the same clothes I had worn the day before because Frank was impossibly tall and none of his clothes would fit me. My hair was a tangle of copper wires, my eyes still had bags under them, and my clothes were creased, but today I honestly didn’t care what I looked like. So we made our way out and set off toward the bookstore.
Dawn was breaking by the time we left the apartment, and the snow and ice hadn’t yet thawed. It was like we were walking in some kind of winter wonderland. Without a cloud in the sky, the world seemed to glitter and sparkle under the morning light. Most of the cars parked on the side of the road were partially concealed, if not completely covered, with snow, and the buildings didn’t fare any better.
<
br /> We decided to swing by Joe’s on the way to the store. Joe opened early every morning to capitalize on the night-shift workers in the office building on the other side of the road. It was a call-center—tech support—though I had never been inside and I had never worked a night shift, but I knew what it was like to be hungry in the wee hours of the morning and Joe wasn’t a stranger to seeing me at early hours. Not these days. So he wasn’t surprised to see me.
The warmth of the building, the hissing of steamed milk, and the smell of ground coffee and sizzling bacon greeted us as we entered and I started to salivate. I wanted to stay there, wrapped in a blanket of delicious smells, warmth, and, more importantly, people. Safety in numbers, and all that. So we stayed, ate, and headed to the bookstore with full stomachs and warm bodies.
“So, why the bookstore?” Frank asked. We hadn’t opened the main shutters covering the display window so as not to draw attention to our presence, so the store was dark until I turned on the lights.
“I have books here I need to look up,” I said.
“No shit. What books?”
“Old books. The kind you can’t find in stores.”
It didn’t make sense to him. He checked me with a puzzled face but I headed into the back room, ignoring his doubts. There, in the back, I dug behind piles of boxes full of unpriced books and retrieved a dusty old chest so heavy I had to drag it out of the back room.
Frank approached, curious. “What’s in the box?” he asked.
“I told you. Books.” I opened the chest and carefully looked through dust jackets and spines to find texts with the right subject matter, laying them down on the counter whenever one struck my fancy. “These are the books that aren’t for sale,” I said.
“I gathered,” Frank said, picking one up from the table. “Did you rob the library of Alexandria for them? They look ancient.”
“That’s because they are ancient,” I said. “James, the owner of the bookstore, is like a collector. He hops from country to country, from city to city, locating old books and trinkets. Some of the things he finds he sends here for safe keeping.”
“Safe keeping? In a bookstore? Is there a vault back there or something?”
“Have you ever heard of anyone robbing a bookstore?”
Frank couldn’t answer my question with a yes. “Wow. It’s genius.”
“Isn’t it? Now, start digging.”
No one book would have the answer I needed, so I would have to go deep. Lucky for me I worked best under pressure, but I feared that Damien may creep into my mind at any moment and—shit. I stopped in my tracks as the thought of my cheating coward of an ex-boyfriend clouded my thoughts and sent me free-falling into the depths of my emotions. No, no! All I could hear were Natalie’s words in my mind. I wondered if they had fought after I left. Did she even suspect me?
No.
Why would she?
I didn’t suspect. Damien was a great liar. After all, he had everybody fooled; me, Natalie, Eliza and even Frank. Oh Frank, great reader of people. How couldn’t he have seen this coming?
A hand reached for me through the roiling storm of thoughts and, like a lifeline, pulled me back into the bookstore. It wasn’t his real hand, though; but rather a hand shaped in the form of an odd question. “So, how’s Aaron?” Frank asked.
I looked up at him. His face was buried in a book he had picked up, flipping through pages as if he were reading them at a superhuman speed. Or maybe he was just skimming them.
“Aaron is… fine,” I said. I hoped.
“You talked about him,” Frank said. “In your sleep.”
“You heard me sleep talk? Wait… I sleep talked?”
“You sang like a canary,” Frank said, “And now I’m curious.”
“What did I say?” I almost dared not ask.
“You said a bunch of things. One of which I suspect is what we’re looking for in this comprehensive book on Latin words, the other was Aaron. You got a picture of him somewhere?”
Since when did I sleep talk? And what the fuck else have I said?
“I think so,” I said. Although the truth was that Aaron and I never took selfies together, nor did we engage in ‘couple’ activities. For a moment I kind of wished we had. It would have been easier to show Frank who Aaron was. But it would’ve also given a name whatever it was that Aaron and I had shared those months ago. So, using my phone, I went onto his social media profile and found a picture of him, but a pang twisted my stomach when I saw it. I remembered the day he uploaded it. Despite being the jackass that he was, he was very handsome. He had eyes like a clear blue summer sky, hair the color of gold straight out of the earth, and a rock-hard body you could sink your teeth into.
Frank snapped the phone up from my hand and wolf-whistled. “How could you have been sitting on this and not shown me what he looked like?”
“Sitting on this? That’s your choice of words?”
“Witch, if this was my man I’d be sitting on him all day.”
I suspected Frank was digging for more pictures. He had put the book down, now, and his pale face was illuminated by the glow of my phone. I blushed.
“I don’t know,” I said, “Aaron and I were never really…”
“What?”
“Close.”
“I would be close to him whenever he asked for it.”
I could see him practically foaming at the mouth. “Can you give me the phone back now?”
“Just a minute, I’m sending myself a picture of him.”
“What? No!” I snatched the phone out of Frank’s hand.
“Remind me to send him a friend request,” he said, grinning.
“Can we get back on topic here, please?” I said. “Aaron is off-limits.”
“I can’t promise you that, honey. You better get to him before I do. We’re friends and everything, but that there’s man-candy and I’ve been deprived for far too long.”
I shook my head and took to the books again, but inside I was smiling.
“Alright, so, this Nuptis Profanum business,” Frank said, returning to the issue.
I turned to him and gaped. “How did you know that?”
“Haven’t you been listening? You sleep talk, and you said that a few times; keep up, witch. Anyway, quite literally, it means, profane nuptials—a blasphemous wedding.”
I shuddered, as if a ghostly hand had just slapped me across the face. “A blasphemous wedding?” I asked.
“Yeah, haven’t you heard about them? They’re legal in a few states now,” Frank said.
“They’re, wait… what?”
Frank raised both his eyebrows and smirked. “Blasphemous weddings? Gay weddings? I was making a topical joke.”
“Oh…”
“God-dammit. See? It’s not funny if you have to explain the joke.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Just pick up the book and let’s get this bit over with.”
It took us a while, but we did manage to find a few references to blasphemous, or unholy, weddings in one of the books in James’ collection. There wasn’t much to go on, though. Only that the topic of these profane nuptials was clumped in together with Black Masses and generally linked to devilry and devil worship.
Devil worship.
This entire situation was starting to look similar to what I had already been through once before at the Ever Dark Mesa. In my mind an image was forming; a snapshot, of a demonic pentacle drawn into a rocky ground and the ram’s head at its center. I was certain the man who tried to kill me wasn’t into devil worship, but for a nonbeliever he sure did know the elements of a ritual circle.
“Says here, some cults go beyond just worshiping the Devil; they marry it,” Frank said.
“Marry it? I don’t understand.”
“I’m not exactly reading a how-to guide here, you know. There’s a lot of text to go through, but the gist of it is that an unholy wedding requires a man and a woman, and the devil. But I’m thinking any old demon will do
.”
“So, a three-way wedding?” I asked.
“Not exactly. Demons don’t get married, only people do. The book keeps referring to the unholy wedding as the total union of a demon and a host, and a kind of defiling of the soul; in most cases I’m guessing the innocent’s.”
“Innocent?”
“Whoever isn’t possessed by the demon at the time of the marriage.”
Then, like a flash of lightning, an answer came to me. It was only one answer in a sea of questions, but it was something. “Holy shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What is it?” Frank asked, leaning on the edge of his seat.
“It’s Aaron. They sent a demon after Aaron and they’re gonna marry him to me. This is how he’s linked to the hooded men! He’s the host, Frank!”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Frank said. “I’m not reading verbatim here, only making my guesses based on what I know about demons. Vast though my knowledge may be, we have to think about this rationally.”
“I am thinking rationally.” I said. “Aaron has been experiencing all the signs of a demonic oppression. First he loses sleep so his mind begins to suffer, then he gets sick so his body suffers, and slowly but surely the people in his life begin to turn their back on him, severing his ties to anyone who could help him.”
“And that makes him ripe for possession…” Frank said, finishing my trail of thought.
The thread of our conversation stopped spinning as we considered the facts in unison, and in silence.
“You need to get to Aaron,” Frank said, “You have to get to him, and make sure this thing doesn’t try and possess him.”
“I… don’t know how to do that.”
“Relax, I’ll give you a crash course. Just text Aaron and let him know you’re coming to him.”
I was already writing the message by the time Frank finished his sentence. “Done. What are you going to do in the mean time?”
“I’m going to talk to Damien, and then you’re going to speak to him.”
“What? Why is that necessary?” I would rather let the devil possess me over talking to Damien right now.