“Molly used the iron,” I said. “I think I will too.”
“Blind faith?” Rose asked me.
“Grandmother…” I said, trailing off as I struggled to find a way of putting it, “I didn’t get the feeling she’s actively trying to fuck us over. It’s more… collateral fuckery.”
“Collateral fuckery,” Rose echoed me.
“She’s not going to sabotage us, and I can’t think of anyone else who could or would.”
“You want to trust the woman who summoned a demon that’ll jump into our eyes, and left it in the attic for us to use if we needed?”
“I don’t want to. I think I have to. I won’t force you to do anything,” I said. I got the lamps around the edges of the room and brought them closer to the circle, before using them to light tall candles.
“I’ll do the holly, then,” Rose said.
I could hear the faint sounds as she dropped individual berries in her bowl. My nuggets made a clatter.
“More abstract things for the middle ring,” I said. Rose gave me directions to find each object she’d already set up on her side.
A dagger. An hourglass. A dreamcatcher. A small silver skull. A coin.
“Which catches you up to where I was,” Rose said. “I got stumped. A rose, and something personal.”
“Kitchen for the former,” I said. “I can’t help with the latter.”
“We need the token offerings for the Others. I’ll need a mirror in the kitchen to get that stuff, with the rose.”
It wasn’t a fast process. Molasses, milk, vegetable matter burned into a clean ash, honey, meat, and alcohol. I plucked a rose from where it sat in water. A touch limp, but it didn’t matter too much.
“My food is looking pretty sad,” she said. “Am I going to offend them if this milk isn’t any good?”
“Did it go bad?” I asked.
“No, but I’m not even sure it’s milk. It could be an illusion.”
“It’s the thought that counts, right?” I asked.
“I’m not so sure,” she said. “Not here, with something like this.”
I put the wine aside for later before going upstairs, my arms full. Everything went into a bowl, except the rose.
The basic stuff in the inner ring. The dagger, hourglass and all the rest in the middle ring… leaving me with one empty circle. The personal touch.
I hadn’t brought much with me. I could probably dig a paintbrush or something out of a cabinet, but… it didn’t feel like that was exactly it.
I checked my pockets, and I retrieved my keys. Joel’s keys were still on them.
I felt the weight of them in my hand. They weren’t my motorcycle keys, which would have been my first choice, but… they sort of fit. Keys opened doors. There was a freedom. They represented ownership, protecting things, and the fact that my friend’s keys were on there…
I didn’t like to owe people things. It was why I tended to insist on some reciprocation, paying back the woman who’d given me a drive here. Giving Joel my bike keys for his. I felt it was important to acknowledge those debts.
It would do. The keys found their place in the empty circle.
I set out the food as well. One offering to each bowl, for the outer ring.
“Oh, this next part is fun,” Rose said.
I checked the book to see.
Clothes off.
“One at a time, or both of us at once?” Rose asked.
I didn’t know. But when I opened my mouth to say so, I felt myself leaning one way, and pushed myself the rest of the way. “Both.”
We stripped down, then sat in the center of the circles, backs turned to each other, with the mirror between us. I had to get up again a moment later, to get the book and lay it across my crossed legs.
Then the ritual itself. Looking around, I was aware of how dark the room was, with the oil lamps closer. I’d heated the wax on the bottom of each candle before fixing it to the floor around the circle, and reached for one now, along with a pair of tongs.
Incense, lit. Metal ore, heated.
Metal ore, heated some more.
Okay, it took a while to get to the point where I could see the heat in it. I quickly set it down, quiet, and moved the candle out of the circle.
This was it. I glanced over my shoulder, and I saw Rose, the edges of her shoulder, hair and face lit by the candles and lamps. Our positioning made it hard to see anything else, which was sort of the point.
I nodded a little.
We began in unison, reading the text. There were three translations for each line, one in a foreign language I couldn’t place, one spelled out phonetically, and another with the English translation.
Our voices faltered some as we stumbled here and there. For the first four or five lines, one of us would reach the end before the other, pausing a fraction to let the other catch up.
We finished one line, almost chanting now as we sounded out the syllables with a kind of rhythm.
The circle moved, the bowls sliding across the floor, the diagram moving beneath them. Putting another bowl in front of me.
Another line.
Again, the circle moved before me. I didn’t even dare look back at Rose. We’d found a stride, now, and the words were flowing more easily. The space outside the circle seemed to darken, as my focus on the inside of the circle deepened.
I was in the ‘zone’, so to speak. My eyes passed over the phonetic guide, but my peripheral vision caught the English words transcribed below, and the meaning became clearer. Not the entire meaning, but the big words, the emphasis.
These were the little things, the fundamental things.
The bowl of incense slid from its position in front of me, but it slid down and to the right, as if it were sinking into the floor. I didn’t look, convinced that I’d lose my stride and break the illusion if I did.
The dagger slid into place.
There were no words in the book to recite. I could have sworn they’d been there before. The silence rang, heavy.
“War,” I said, if only to keep the momentum going.
I could hear Rose behind me, taking my cue. “War.”
The circle moved, giving me a sense of relief, and a view of the hourglass.
“Time,” I said, in unison with Rose. Something we didn’t have enough of, something dangerous, foremost in our thoughts, with its association to Laird.
The dreamcatcher, a hoop with a network of threads within.
“Dream,” I said.
But Rose was speaking at the same time, and she said, “Fate.”
The circle moved. The little silver skull. Deceptively small, no doubt valuable. It glittered in the light.
“Doom,” I said.
“Death,” Rose said.
The coin, an old one, from an era before coins had been pressed with exact images.
“Fortune,” I said.
“Ruin,” Rose said.
The lifeless rose.
“Family,” I said.
“Myself,” Rose said.
Then the personal token.
Somehow, this seemed more meaningful. Weightier.
I wasn’t being presented with a surprise, something to associate an idea to. This was something else entirely.
“To everyone and everything that’s listening,” I said. I heard Rose start speaking behind me, but my words drowned hers out. “To me, and to nobody in particular, I’ve gotta say, I didn’t choose this. I’m doing this for family, to respect them as they were in the past, when my cousins were also my friends, so the others don’t face what Molly did. I’m doing it to respect stuff in the present, because even if I dislike my cousins, I don’t want them to have to face this situation and get killed off. I’m doing this for the family that comes in the future, so my kids and all our descendants don’t have this debt hanging over our heads. Above all, I think I’m doing this for my real family. For the friends I made who gave me support when I needed it most, so I can demonstrate what they taught me. Past, present, future, and… more abstract.”