R: You’re getting ahead of me. Can I confirm? You’re human?
V: Am I? I was.
R: You were human when you met Lacey.
V: Yes.
R: Alright. You were telling me how you two met.
V: She was there. At a party. I said hi, she said hi back. The longest we’ve been apart since is when we slept. Phone calls, meetings before school, meeting between classes, meeting after school. Parties. She was there for the games.
R: You were successful?
V: Yes. I mean, not like I was going to be going to the top school in the country on a sports scholarship, but there was a damn good chance a college was going to invite me to play for them, you know?
R: You use the past tense.
V: It’s an old story, isn’t it? Stupid kid starts using performance enhancers, only it goes bad. Side effects take over. Except they weren’t drugs. Not steroids or any of that. Lacey had another way. Warpaint, a few words. Some of the other guys on the team got into it.
L: My mom always called it riding.
R: Possession.
L: Controlled possession. A spirit of something fierce, to make him move a little faster, make him a little stronger, give him that edge he needs to spook the other guys for a second when he looks them in the eye. Surface deep stuff. Stuff that can be explained away by placebo effect and some cosmetic stuff for the team.
R: What happened? It went wrong?
V: We’re not sure what happened. The stars aligned wrong, or it was a full moon, or whatever it was got a foothold somewhere along the way. I put on the war paint and I wasn’t me anymore. I came to, and I was violently ill, soaked in blood. Someone else’s. Adam Chelt. Kid we’d picked on in school. While I was out of it, I’d gone after him. Ate my fill of him, threw up, ate more, woke up while throwing up. I slip in and out, now. The wind blows the wrong way, and I’m not me. Even when the wind isn’t blowing, though, I’m not the me I used to be. I breathe different. React different when stressed. I don’t get sick, barely eat.
L: It’s a nature spirit. A predatory one. The hawk, the wolf, the fox, the wild cat, all bundled up into one thing. I baited it, I leashed it, and I contained it. There was no way it should have become as strong as it was. No way the boundary between Vic and the spirit should have broken down like it did. But they’re one and the same, now.
R: I note that Vic wears human form.
L: Most deals allow familiars to go back to their regular form. Human form is Vic’s regular shape. We modified the deal, so there wouldn’t be any changing one way or another. Way we figured it, we’re trying to get Vic to be less like a spirit and more like a person. Turning him into a mouse or cat or whatever doesn’t help things on that end.
R: Taking a small form helps to conserve power, but I suppose that wasn’t a concern. No reason to believe he is slowly losing power?
L: No. Maybe he is, but not like that. No. Stuff like his eyes and hair change back and forth day by day, depending on how much of a hold the spirit has. His behavior too. The bond stabilizes things, anchors it all in place, but the spirit is still getting more leverage. Creeping in around the edges.
R: Which gives me an excuse to get back on topic. You say it stabilized him. Was that the reasoning behind forming the bond in the first place?
L: No. We didn’t even realize it was a problem, back then. We did know he was a little more Other than he should be, which gave us the idea.
V: I went to court. I mean, I’d murdered someone, and nobody was backing me up. Lacey went to the local practitioners, but they told her I was shit outta luck. Police said it was drugs, and I couldn’t argue, not without saying something that’d get me sent to a psychiatric hospital.
L: He got out on bail, which kind of didn’t surprise me. Local sports star, you know? We tried to remove the spirit, might have succeeded if he hadn’t spent the days and night he did in jail, in the meantime. Too long, too much chance for the spirit to get its claws in. Came down to it, and we decided we needed to resort to other means.
V: Getting ourselves in deeper.
L: The thing with familiars, it’s like, you’ve got a cord between you and the familiar. A tether, or a channel with stuff flowing both ways. And you’ve locked it in. You always know where the familiar is, and they know where you are. It’s a hard thing to break. Your familiar won’t die like they otherwise might, but they might borrow a chunk from you to keep themselves going, if they want. Part of any connection between things is proximity. Not many situations where a master is going to get separated from their familiar. So we did the bond, sealed it, whole shebang. That bond’s a leash, tying him to me and vice versa. But if you keep a grip on things, that leash isn’t going to stretch any. The distance between us is set. No way he was going off to prison if I didn’t. We’re one unit, right?
V: One unit.
[note: at this point, Victor leaves to get another beer.]
L: Once we had the bond, the system couldn’t get hooks into him. It tried. People pointed fingers at me, but since we weren’t going to be going to the same prison, that didn’t get much traction. There was a pregnancy scare. I imagine the world was contriving to put me in some shitty hick town just outside the prison, regular visits. I dunno. Once I fixed that, things settled down. Probation. We moved in together. So it worked, I guess.
R: What is the balance of power is between you two?
L: What do you mean?
V: She wants to know who wears the pants in this relationship.
R: More nuanced than that.
L: Yeah, no, I get it. Thing is, it isn’t just us two. You’ve got the spirit in there. You want to know who wears the pants? It’s the spirit. It’s the spirit that makes Vic restless, so he can’t be in a car or a city without feeling like he’s in the wrong place. Spirit that’s made it so he can’t touch metal without it hurting him somehow. Knives go out of their way to cut him, scuffed patches on metal catch at his skin to make him bleed, cars won’t start if he’s inside. So we’re here. Middle of fuck all nowhere. Fifteen minute drive to the nearest shitty convenience store where I can buy cigarettes, beer, and bread.
R: In terms of power, do you draw power from him?
L: Nah. No, I tried. Tried to siphon as much as I could, every way I thought I could. See if I couldn’t weaken the spirit so he could beat it.
V: Like radiation, shrinking a tumor before surgery.
L: He was always clever like that. Yeah. Like radiation. Except radiation’s bad for you, right? We pushed, the spirit pushed back, and the spirit won in the end. That’s when we had to move out of the city. It got a foothold in there, and he’s restless all the time, now. So I back him up. He takes power from me. Because he is losing his Self, in a way. Capital S. Takes a chunk out of me, but I try to back him up, so he stays Vic and doesn’t become something halfway between Vic and the spirit.
V: Or the spirit eats me. Because that’s what predators do. They tear chunks out of their prey and they eat them.
R: I suppose that answers my question. What happens after.
L: Been a long, long time since I gave any thought to ‘after’.
[Note: Victor nods at this.]
R: Were there any elements you didn’t expect? Regrets?
L: What kind of question is that?
R: The last question, before I give you the talisman. Same question we’re asking all of the interviewees we’re considering for this chapter.