Nick nodded. “Here. I brought the books.”
I looked over the texts. Basic Protections. Possibly useful. Runes: Natural. Very useful. One text that had apparently been torn in half. Only the latter half of the book remained, and…
Essentials.
Perfect. It wouldn’t have made sense if they didn’t have a copy, short of the demon eating it. This was the book a practitioner needed to have in their library. The farmer’s almanac. This one was an older version, at a glance, compared to my grandmother’s, and the spine was tattered, held together with clear tape. I took a minute to double check I had the circles right.
Joel returned. He had what looked like an American silver dollar, rather tarnished, and he had myrrh.
I flipped through the book, reading up on the symbolism. Our coin wasn’t gold. Did it matter? The book was vague.
“We’re… fudging a few things,” I said, speaking my thoughts aloud.
“Iron isn’t raw ore,” Nick’s son said.
It wasn’t until he mentioned it that I thought to check. This text, like the one I’d read from, had iron as one essential component. Rose’s text had had holly.
“Does it matter if we bend the rules some?” I asked. “I’m… my perspective is that the magic stuff is bullshitting. Symbolism. That the spirits really want to hear the right words and see the right steps being taken.”
“We fudged it too,” Nick said.
“Did you fudge it this much?”
“No.”
“Right,” I said. I sighed. Addressing my group, I asked, “Everyone has their personal items? Something of significance to them?”
They each nodded, with the exception of Joel.
Alexis’ hands were empty, though. I had to wonder what she’d picked.
“Who’s first?” I asked.
Tyler.
“I’m gonna step out, then,” Priss said. “Keep my eyes virgin and innocent.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Goosh? Joel? Go with her. She’s your model. Get advice from her on being the designated liar, what you can do, what you can’t, what to stay away from, and when to step in.”
“Okay,” Joel said.
“Can I stay?” Goosh asked. “Maybe I don’t want my eyes to be virgin or whatever.”
I shook my head a little, but I said, “Sure. Go with your gut. That’s what I’m doing here.”
Joel paused. “Are you doing the right thing?”
“No idea,” I said. “But I need help, and… it means a lot to me that you guys are following through with this.”
He nodded.
I took the chunk of sawed-off poker iron from Tyler. I gave him the book, open to the right page.
The remaining Knights stepped into the kitchen. Around the corner. Giving Tyler and the rest of us some privacy.
While he began reading, I held the iron with pliers and heated it up with the small acetylene torch I kept under my sink.
I dropped the iron in a bowl.
Tyler’s ritual. The rest of us stepped back to the edges of the room. I leaned on the dining table for support, the various food items behind me, the demon arm still wrapped in my jacket on the table.
“You need to strip,” I said.
“No way,” he replied.
“Open yourself up, make yourself vulnerable, show you have nothing to hide.”
“Really? Or do you want the girls naked?”
“I offered before,” Alexis commented. “He said no. He wouldn’t go this far now.”
“Fuck,” Ty said. “No peeking.”
He began chanting. I closed my eyes, thinking and listening.
“Oh my god. This is really for real,” Tiffany murmured.
“Shh,” someone else said.
She was seeing things change, the bowls and lines move, the light change.
Somewhere along the line, the pink of light shining through my eyelids became black.
I opened my eyes, my hand raised to block my view of Tyler’s bits, and I could see Tyler in the midst of an oasis. Light streamed in through the balcony window in thin rays, making it seem like we were in deep space. Said light faded as the diagram and Tyler grew more pronounced.
I hadn’t clued him into this part of the ritual. I would let him figure it out much as I had.
The knife appeared, sliding around until it was in front of him. Something Ty had made himself when he’d been into metalworking. Our ‘dagger’.
“Severing ties to the old Tyler,” he said.
Not quite a one-word response like I’d given.
The ‘hourglass’. We’d found an hourglass, but it was cheap, chintzy, something small from a board game. On impulse, I’d included the Stonehenge charm I’d liberated from Duncan.
“Makes me think of phases of the moon. I like being out and about at times when I’m by myself more than I like places where I’m by myself.”
It was an odd fit. Was it too far off?
The dreamcatcher, one of the things we’d found that actually wasn’t fudging it.
“I don’t want to be a salaryman. The idea terrifies me. I want to be on the other side. Be an artist, be a wizard, be inspired.”
The skull moved into place. A cat’s, bleached. A paperweight from my bedroom. It had sat on my stacked copies of tax returns before the police scattered everything. A kind of personal joke. Death and taxes.
“Until death, I suppose,” Ty said.
The coin.
“I get this is serious,” he said. He was rambling as much as anything. “There’s a weight to it. Price to everything.”
I nodded. He’d caught that in my broad-strokes explanation of what had happened thus far.
The rose. It was more lively than the one Rose and I had used.
“It’s all interconnected, I guess?” Ty suggested. “Life, death, time… yeah. Saying I’m buying into this until the day I die is meaningless if I’m not in it when I’m alive. I’m devoting my life to this.”
I winced. I harbored concerns about Ty’s ability to devote himself to anything. But, as I allowed myself to think it, maybe he could be something else. One could devote themselves to music without devoting themselves to a singular instrument and style. Ty was the type who, if they were a musician, they’d try every instrument and get the sense of every style they could find out about. That took a devotion unto itself.
The personal item.
A USB stick.
Like I had, he seemed to feel this needed more explanation.
“My sister is twenty years older than me. I saw life wear her down. Debt, a marriage that became loveless, kids. She did everything right and it did her wrong in return. That stick is my journey. The poetry I wrote when I was twelve, photos of the stuff I made last week. It has my email archive, and I’m pretty sure my emails to and from my sister are there. It’s… it’s me trying to find my way to where I need to be. Blake’s done right by me, and maybe I don’t need to be there long term, but I think I should be at his back in the short. But this stuff seems too interesting to not investigate. That’s who I am… and maybe with this, there’s no way I can fuck up and wind up like my sister did.”
The bowl carried the USB stick away.
There were only the lines to be recited over the food. Offerings to the various major types of Other.
Then the pledge.
Tyler looked happy.