He shook his head.
“Whatever’s supposed to help you on to the afterlife, I think the Hyena scared it off. It’s why you’re so… whole.”
“I don’t… I can’t.”
“There’s another option,” I said. “I… I think you’re pretty amazing, lasting as long as you did. And, I think there’s something to you, that maybe resonates with me. Being scared, being alone. I had a long series of bad days, too. We’re similar, kind of.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to answer right away, but… well, it’s maybe not the best idea, it would mean you’d have to help me in some pretty ugly stuff. But would you want to be my familiar?”
“What?”
“Like the witch has her black cat, kind of. You could be alive again. And I think you’d be you, because you’d take a little bit from me to stay whole. I’d… I’d like to think I’d take from you too. Because helping you, like someone once helped me? It might nourish my soul, my being, if that makes any sense.”
“Not really.”
“Is that a no? You’re totally allowed to say no.”
“You… you stopped the wolf, didn’t you?”
“The Hyena. A goblin. Yes.”
“I don’t know what I could really do.”
“Show me escape routes,” I said. “Help me move faster. We’d figure it out. But I’ve dealt with a lot of ghosts and goblins, and… it sort of feels right? To be honest, this thing I have to deal with next? I could really use help. But please, don’t feel pressured to say yes. I would… hate myself forever if you did.”
He nodded slowly.
But he didn’t get a chance to give me an answer.
Lights flickered on, all around me. Dots. Beams.
Flashlights.
“Toronto PD! Slowly raise your hands over your head!”
I looked at the corpse, then at Evan.
Police?
Of fucking course.
4.x (Pages 4)
Black Lamb’s Blood
Introduction
What got me into the darkest practices was a desire to do good. First as the youngest child of an evangelist and templar, then as a purveyor of dark texts and a colleague to men and women who perpetrate crimes against the world, each time they deal with that which is Wrong.
This text will not find its way to many on the side of Right. I itch, already, to get into minutiae, to argue the meaning of Right, just as I know many of my contemporaries and peers are already telling themselves that they do not Wrong. They tell themselves they are the exception.
The others, the unrepentant, the ones who have given up on the delusion, I suspect they have already put the book down, tossed it aside. They equate Right and Wrong with Good and Evil, and they have already dismissed conventional morality.
I am not an expert practitioner. My bindings, such as they are, have all been minor ones. Careful ones, a very small number when one considers my age and my long career. I am alive now because I am deliberate, because I move with excessive caution, not because I am good. Certainly not because I am Good. That particular quality is up for debate.
It is with this cautiousness and deliberation that I approach my first work. This cautiousness and deliberation does not pay particular heed to the consequences of this writing. I might, for example, say that it is unusual to wait so long to write their first work, that my fellows are narcissists by nature who write and write early out of ego and self-congratulations. In saying this, I make enemies, dangerous ones who are liable to act on this insult.
I have always been honest to a fault. Child of a preacher, an evangelist and templar. Nothing else would be permitted, even before my siblings and I were invited to see what lies behind the curtain. I’ve known since I admitted I was a diabolist, that anything I wrote would have to be something that would offend certain parties, march to a different rhythm.
When I say that I approach Black Lamb’s Blood with care, I mean that I chose my topic only after a great deal of thought. Writers are told to write to fill the empty space on a bookshelf, the book that has yet to be written, but practitioners, narcissistic practitioners in particular, are prone to a kind of masturbation. Self congratulating drivel, with crumbs offered to the peers as incentive to buy and read their texts. These crumbs come as knowledge of demons and means of summoning, but not the truest means of controlling the things. Such knowledge is retained by the one who bound them. Nothing meaningful is offered.