“I’m ready,” she said.
Valerie would not make a comfortable ally, Sarah thought as she let her into her car, but she might be useful. She made no attempt to break the silence between them, but drove swiftly to the coffee shop on Lamar Boulevard. There they settled into a corner booth and, after the waitress had brought them two steaming cups of coffee, Sarah finally spoke.
“Now tell me what you mean about Jade being trapped. What did you do? What happened? And what exactly is Jade, anyway? How did you summon him?”
Valerie glared at her sullenly across the gold-speckled formica table top. “What do you want to know first? I don’t know much about Jade . . . just what little he told me, which I don’t believe, or what I could guess, which turns out to be mostly wrong.”
“Start at the beginning,” Sarah suggested. “Where did Jade come from?”
“I don’t know. I just called him up and he appeared. I painted the magic circle on the floor like the books said, to protect myself, and I said some invocations, which I found in the books, and I made a blood sacrifice.” Her lips twitched upward in a tight little smile.
In her lap, beneath the table, Sarah’s hands clasped each other. “What sort of sacrifice?”
“I killed a rabbit. I bought it in a pet shop. And I had the most beautiful knife . . . a guy I knew, a real warlock, gave it to me once, in trade for some drugs. He said it was a genuine, sacrificial knife, real powerful . . . I never thought then that I’d use it for anything like that, though.
“But one day . . . it was after I’d moved into that house . . . I started thinking about magic. I’d always known people who were into witchcraft, but I wasn’t. It always seemed, well, those covens always seemed to be into dancing naked down by the lake, and group sex and stuff.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t interested in that. But then I started thinking about being able to get some things . . . money, mostly, because I was always broke. And I got some books at the library, and I thought I might as well give it a try—I decided I’d try to summon a demon, if there were such things, and make him work for me. So I did the whole number, with the chanting and the rabbit and the candles and the blood, and . . . he came. Jade.
“Only it wasn’t like the books said it would be. And . . . he tricked me. He made me come out of the magic circle, where I was safe, and then he—” Valerie’s mouth moved but no more words emerged. She licked dry lips and looked pleadingly at Sarah.
Sympathy welled up, overwhelming Sarah’s dislike of the woman. She reached across the table for her hand, but Valerie jerked it away.
“He took over,” she said flatly. “Just took me over . . . just . . . snuffed me out, like I wasn’t anything, like I didn’t exist, so that he could use my body. And I couldn’t stop him.”
“But you managed to fight him off.”
Valerie shook her head. “No. No. I told you . . . I couldn’t do anything. He was too strong. He must’ve . . . I don’t remember, but it was horrible. He smothered me and took over.”
“Then how can you sit here and tell me about it?” Sarah asked sarcastically.
Valerie shrugged. “Because in the end he let me go. He let me have my body back. I don’t know why . . . I guess I tried to kill him, or myself.” She stretched her arm on the table, palm up, and peeled back the sleeve of her green sweater, revealing a tightly bandaged wrist. “I can’t remember doing it, but I figure I just couldn’t stand having him in my body. So my body rejected him. I couldn’t drive him out, so my body tried to kill itself. Kill me, I mean. Or him. Anyway, it worked. Jade got out. He said he could have stayed, but it wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping me alive. He wouldn’t have been able to trust his own body.” She smiled faintly.
Sarah sighed. “That’s not very useful. If the only way to avoid being taken over is to kill yourself . . .” She sipped her coffee.
“Jade says I want to die. He says he’ll let me die after I . . .”
“He says you want to die, so you believe him? And he’ll let you die—that’s some reward!” Sarah said, a little too loudly. The emptiness in Valerie’s eyes, the flat, childlike way she spoke, made Sarah’s skin crawl.
“I don’t care,” Valerie said. “Maybe I did once, but I don’t anymore. I don’t care if I die, so maybe that means I want to die. I don’t know anything else I want.”
“You must have wanted something a lot in order to try conjuring up a demon,” Sarah said. “What did you want? Surely not death.”
“I don’t remember . . . money, I think. A lot of things, maybe. It doesn’t seem real to me now. Jade told me he’d give me whatever I wanted . . . but that was a joke, I guess, because by then there wasn’t much of anything I wanted. But I brought you to the house for him. I did what he asked.”
“And did he reward you? Did he keep his word? What did he give you?”
“Oh, there’s plenty of money, now. I don’t have to work anymore. I can have whatever I want,” Valerie said without enthusiasm. “Jade told me the way, he said the simplest way was for me to find a rich man. He said even I could learn how to make a man be in love with me.” She fell silent, then raised her eyes to Sarah’s. “Only . . . I have to let him do things to me.”
Sarah shuddered. Again, Valerie reminded her of a child—a molested child who did not understand. “Leave him,” she said. “If you’re not happy . . . do something about it. Why do you talk as if you have no control over your own life? You don’t need that man’s money, you don’t have to obey Jade’s orders, you can go away—”
“Jade won’t let me go,” Valerie interrupted. “I’m not like you. I’m not strong. Jade hurts me if I don’t obey him. He called me back this morning, early. He said I’d made a mistake with you, that you were too much trouble, he couldn’t have the patience to spend the time it would take to wear you down. Also, he thought you might have run away for good. He told me to bring him another body, any kind of body would do—any human body, that is. If I didn’t, he said he’d use mine, that he could control me and my death wish for long enough to get out into the world and find himself a more suitable, permanent home. I didn’t want him to do that to me again; I’m afraid of him. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I do,” Sarah said softly, but her words made no impression.
“I kept trying to kill him,” Valerie said. “I kept trying to trick him. When he was in my cat’s body, I killed my cat.”
The smell of the cellar was strong in Sarah’s nostrils.
“But Jade didn’t die. The cat did, he escaped. But I still thought . . . maybe if he was trapped in a body that was dying, a human body, away from the house and away from other people and animals, so he couldn’t escape into some other animal . . . I thought maybe then he really would die, for good.
“So when he told me to bring him another victim right away, I thought of old Mrs. Owens, the landlady. She didn’t know I’d moved out, and she was the only person I could think of to get to come to the house. And I thought, she was so old, she’d probably be weak . . .”
“I don’t think age has anything to do with it,” Sarah murmured.
“The minute she stepped into the house, he attacked. She fell on the floor like she’d been hit by lightning, stiff as a board. I thought she was dead, at first, then I looked at her eyes. And I saw him. Those yellow eyes. Furious. He was trapped. Something had gone wrong, something he hadn’t counted on. I guess she’d had a stroke. And he couldn’t get out, and he couldn’t use the body.” Valerie dribbled a spoonful of sugar into her untouched coffee and stirred it around. “I hoped he would die there, and never be able to get out. It was the first thing to give me hope in such a long time, seeing him trapped inside her like that. So I took the body back to Mrs. Owens’ house and left her there. And I said a spell of protection around her door, just in case. And then I thought I’d better go back to the house, I thought maybe . . .”