Neophyte / Adept (33 page)

André balled his fingers into fists. Why was it always him?

Cautiously, he held one out until it flowered into five
gnarled, veined tentacles, and he touched the sack.

There was no reaction––unless it was the
reaction of André’s heart beating. “See? Told you,” he said. “Dead.” He
breathed a sigh of relief. The powerful form in the burlap sack remained
immobile.

But then what had that whispering been?

André wet his lips, anxious to resolve this. He could sense
Thierry’s uneasiness.
The Mark. Just the
Mark.
And then they could get this over with. Either the body would give up
its secrets, and remain dead––in which case, they would give it a
less-ignoble burial, probably in the old man’s garden––
or
...

He withdrew the blade. Puncturing the burlap had nicked the
skin. There was blood on it.
Running
blood. André gasped. Thierry shook his head. It was there.
The Mark.

The skin had the fine silvery penstrokes they had only heard
about but never seen before. What had the client said? You must
say
the words?

That was
very
important.
The Last Rites....

Looking at the huge form before them, the only words André
could muster were
how
? How had the
body seemed to double in size the last half hour? As though it were still
alive––or worse––
changing
.

The face was hardening, becoming bolder, the skin tighter.
André had never heard of bodies altering so drastically. Hair was forming where
there had been none.

What had the client said? This work must be done
before
first light.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get it there in time, Thierry.”

“In time or out––just as long as it’s off our
backs.”

“I think we’re too late.”

The figure was rising up, stepping from the
wheelbarrow––Thierry and he tried to run––its shroud
falling to the wayside––but it was too late.

“Something wicked is in the works––we’re dead
because of it.”

“Its
Mark
. Look at
its Mark, André!”

On its feet now, the figure was even more massively
intimidating than they could possibly have imagined. Who had not wanted it
seen, and why? They slammed into a crypt wall, trying to escape, turned,
staring at it, their backs to stone. Confusion and fear somehow jammed
together, locking up their ability to move.

“But you c-can’t
be
––”
said Thierry, looking at it. The shadow advanced.

André didn’t care what the old legends said. This thing
was
huge. It was here now, before them.
Sizing them up. André hadn’t meant for things to get so out of hand.

“We t-tried to
s-save
you,” he said, trembling before the onslaught of the shadow.

Suddenly the light shone.

They were transfixed by the hunter’s Mark.

And then it spoke.

“Stormr hamrinum,”
it said. The words a kind of mélange, a confusion of color and sound
and––

The grapefruit-sized ventricle at its elbow released a surge
of magic. The invocation, a brilliant orange fireball, engulfed the night sky.
It seemed to envelop Thierry and André; before they knew it, fire, like burning
coal, had invaded their bodies, rushing to their very souls. Halsey Rookmaaker
woke screaming––the writhing bodies still with her, like shadows
from a dream.

For a moment that lasted an eternity, it felt like the
monster was in her bedroom with her. It was kneeling, when a voice sounded:
“The war is starting. Battle lines will be drawn. She and the vampire are
headed towards Prague. Find the other one and kill him. Do not let it survive.”

“And them?” said the Hunter.

“The Dark Order shall rise again, my old friend.”

Chapter 1
– Her 18th Birthday

I felt like I had run really far and stopped––my
heart rate was off the charts. Who had that figure been and why was I seeing
him? True, he had been really big––hulking even––but
even in my dreams I could feel what the other men had been thinking. Their
perceptions of him colored the flash-memory. He had grown, changed, shifted,
killed. It had been really dark. I wished I had seen him better. But did I?

It was a second before I realized they were dead. That I had
seen it happen. And that it was probably real. Père Lachaise was in Paris,
France. I had seen something which had happened a great distance away.

I reached to turn on the light, but the lightbulb blew out.
This was something which had been happening on a regular basis, and I wondered
why it hadn’t happened before. Probably because I needed to know it was
possible
before
I could do magic. Which
was a depressing thought.

I didn’t like to think that I was so much of a
follow-the-leader that I had to wait for Lia to tell me she had been blowing up
microwaves and stuff before she realized it was the craft that was doing it.
The magic spark in her skin or whatever,
her
core self
, that was saying,
There’s
something going on here. You’re coming into
your
Self.

My
Self was in her
nightgown in her four-poster, shivering slightly, because the wind had knocked
open the French doors, and when I looked
he
wasn’t there. Lennoxlove Lenoir, one of the vampires from France. When Hunter,
and what I had just seen in my visions, I realized he hadn’t been one, either,
a vampire. Then who
had
the Hunter
been?

Somebody looking for something.... That’s all I knew. I think
instinctively I knew that. Boxes of empty Sylvanias littered the floor. I gave
up and lit the Iron Roses, two entwined candle holders like roisin dubhs, black
Irish roses, with links to northern Wicca.

When I looked up LENNOXLOVE in a search engine, it gave me a
place in Scotland. Which was weird. Maybe
that
was where Lennox was from. I had always taken him for American. It was too
depressing to think about. What did I really know about him, other than the
fact that he was really good-looking, with long, dark hair that shot out
dynamically
just so
. He was always
making interesting shadow figures, creeping into my loft. My landlady didn’t
know. She thought I was just a loner. A
stupid
ragazza
.

I fetched from the bedside Volume number two of my Diaries,
feeling the heavily-worn pages with my fingertips.
It had had a Mark.
The hunter had had a Mark. That seemed to clunk
in my brain as something which was important.

But that wasn’t possible, was it? He was a shifter. I had
seen him change into a wolf––or a kind of wolf. There hadn’t been
one in over a century. A witch or wizard
and
a shifter. A witch or wizard
shifter
.
So others had said. I saw him changing, becoming something more than he
was––which is what
I
wanted to do.

I sighed, letting my mind wander:
So be it
, I thought; which had become, of late, my motto, with so
many lightbulbs being destroyed. They were collecting like the bones of dead
things in my trash can.

I wrote out the last few lines in my somewhat loopy
handwriting and closed the diary. Dedication... Erm––I thought a
bit...

Let’s see...

I hit upon a likely line and wrote the following:

To my amanuensis, Lennoxlove Lenoir, and as some have taken
umbrage, I can only stress that the remainder of the Diaries shall be written
through my eyes only; forgive him his trespasses, even if he isn’t in this
volume, much.

Let them make of that what they would, I thought, before
realizing the likelihood of any reader actually reading this far was beyond
unbelievable. But then all of this was. Vampires and werewolves and me. I was a
Wiccan. A Neophyte now, to be more precise. There was also Adept, and then
those who were Fledged; the great end-all be-all, Fledged; the steppingstones
to magical apotheosis.

As for
why
no one
would read this––well, that was one of the Lenoir’s rules, wasn’t
it? To shut the hell up about the existence of vampires. The other rule was
don’t make too many vampires. Would I be held accountable if this account were
to somehow get out? I had been in the world six months. Long enough to know
better. But I had never been indoctrinated, in the Wiccan sense. True, I had
taken the Rede, a kind of Hippocratic oath, but I had never sworn allegiance,
or, in fact, sided with one group over another, unless verbally. Maria Lenoir
knew, for instance, that my heart was with the werewolves and with her cousin,
Lennoxlove Lenoir. Almost like I was torn. In truth, the predicament had never
been difficult. If anything, it felt like the right thing to do. As if I was
born
to be split. Like magic itself.

Not one or the other––but both my
Lennoxlove-allegiance and my werewolf-allegiance existing simultaneously. It
felt natural. Just...

Stop defending it
,
I told myself.

But if it got out that I was running around with a pack of
werewolves,
and
with the only vampire
in Rome, would the Lenoir come for me?

It was a chance I would have to take. I would be willing to
take. Writing was like therapy, to me. I felt better when I did it. It helped
me make heads or tails, X, Y, or zed, of things. Plus, if I wanted to attain
the highest Wiccan standard (and I did), I would
have
to keep the diary. Fledged wasn’t something I could do in a
controlled environment. I had thrown my future away, after all. Wiccans wrote.
Kept Books of Shadows.

Briefly other Wiccan Initiates––Shaharizan and
so forth; Gemma Moonflower and the like––those who were going to
established Wiccan Households, such as Harcort, or the Covens. There was also
the House of Peril and some other ones, chief among them Ravenseal. It was said
Ravenseal was the best. Then why didn’t I want to join it? What was it about
the easy opportunities and likelihood of running into ‘the best people’, at
Ravenseal, that bothered me so much? Was it that I was fraternizing with the
enemy? (They had selected me at the Gathering. Which was kind of a
recruitment-type thing.)

No––I was in this by myself.

It was winter finally, fully and completely. For the past
six months, since I had been on the mainland––first in Paris and
then traveling down through the oddly-shaped boot which formed the Italian
Peninsula, where I mostly stayed––I had grown used to what I
referred to as the Mediterranean lifestyle, easygoing and rich in sensory
stimulation, funded of course by my vast financial resources. I was
independently wealthy––but you could’ve fooled me. For the first
seventeen years of my life I had been raised in New England, in an all-girls’
school, the kind most parents would be horrified to send their children to. St.
Martley’s Academy for the Gifted was a school for freaks. I didn’t know why,
but I would probably always think of St. Martley’s that way. As a place I had
escaped from. And now I was free.

It was cold being free. Rome was as inhospitable as it had
ever been––at least climactically; on a personal level, it was icy,
windy and chill-inducing. That’s really where our story starts, on my
eighteenth birthday, when I was altogether lonesome for an entirely different
reason. Oh, I had friends, all right. In fact, two of them were getting
married. As Lia said, there was no point postponing the inevitable. Her heart’s
joy was found in Gaven. The King of all who were werewolves.

My
heart was lost.

I got up from my bed, because I always wrote supine. It
helped the blood flow, you know?

The lavender hangings around my four-poster reminded me of
the one I seemed destined to live without. Since scrying Lennox, he had shut me
out completely. Why had I fallen for him so hard, when it didn’t even make
sense? Lennox was of immortal make and I-I was not. How could I ask him to love
me when he would just have to leave me, whether through age or some other
mishap? And then, if I
did
die (
if?
I asked myself), would I really want
him seeking out the kind of happiness we might have shared together, in someone
else? The answer was most definitely not. I didn’t care if that made me
selfish. And then, for my own morbid amusement, I thought about it: of me dying
and him and everyone else being left behind. In particular, I liked the grief
and devastation, with regards to other people mourning me. I saw Ballard
punching a wall––but then Liesel, this really hot older werewolf
hamrammr chick walked by, and he forgot his grief. Lennox, in the dream-revery,
didn’t show any emotion, just remained sullen: something I intuited to mean his
sense of
guilt
at dragging me into
this world. But I had dragged myself. My pink and wigglies squirmed
pleasurably. Maybe, I thought, he would light a candle––
two candles
––
the Iron Roses
––keeping an
eternal vigil over me, or at least on my birthdays, as years became centuries
and we––that is to say, he and I, or the memory of me, at any
rate––passed into the millenniums untouched and together.

It changed suddenly, and my eyes were like his, or like his
family’s, Dallace and Camille’s; like colored planets of raging storms, or
swirling tempests: the eyes of the
lamia
.
The Latin for vampire made me think of something else, maybe because I had been
studying orchids.

Could two people walk through a world eternal and unchanged
together and forevermore and really have anything to talk about, or would it
all seem like one long burdensome journey?

I had to get this down in my diary, before I forgot it, but
my diary was already full.

Two of them were. I put the now-finished second volume beside
its sibling, on my small wooden bookshelf, I had purchased from an antiques
shop down in Via dei Condotti, on the strada where I lived, with, of course, my
landlady’s permission (she wouldn’t approve a refrigerator, and now I had a
melted half-tub of rocky häagen-däaz I had been dipping into the last
twenty-four hours with increased lethargy, the name of which was Sundae
Mooning. I figured that fit me to a T, or an H, as the case may have been).
True to her word, my landlady had kept everyone––including herself––from
entering my room, for the two or so months since I had been gone, figuring out
what I already knew: that there were some people in this world who could do
extraordinary things.

I didn’t say good things. Just things. And sometimes,
magical things.

Thinking the thought made my skin tingle all the way down to
my Wiccan Mark. I had been persistently, failingly obliged to try not to look
at it, every possible second, but had failed miserably in my self-imposed
abstinence. It was an itch too easy to scratch. It was so unlike me to have
this physical proof, this everyday, full-time reminder of what I had the
potential to become: someone in this world who could do extraordinary things. I
felt that potential like a solid mass in the pit of my stomach. As for the
Mark, it was docile now, but an hour ago it had been raging unchecked inside of
me, writhing and twisting up my arm.
Orchis
halsey
or whatever.

It had been so bad I had felt like there was another part of
me I didn’t entirely understand yet that sometimes had control over me. Like
there was someone else––or something––inside me; a
submerged part of my identity, like a stalk, almost, which puts out leaves, and
then one day,
bam
, there’s a flower
there. My Wiccan flower.

My orchid.

I looked up what it might be called, its genus and so
forth––but whereas Vittoria, who was my nemesis, could be said to
have nightshade, I had no real clue what my orchid was. I just knew that it was
a flower-Mark and therefore that my virtue was either Grace or Goodwill and
that it looked badass; and as I didn’t want others to know what it looked like,
I showed no one. But my landlady wasn’t any ordinary person. In fact, she was
extraordinary. She could tell there was something different about me the first
time I returned and she threatened me.

She said “Hmph!” and “Snrgh!” And then looked down her long,
pointed nose, at me. “I’m watching you,” she said to me.

She jabbed at her own two eyes with her index and middle
fingers. Instinctively I looked for her Wiccan Mark, but there was none.

I couldn’t meet her gaze lest she penetrate
my
inmost thoughts, but I nodded. “May I
go to my room, now?” I said, as straight faced as I could manage.

She nodded, slowly, and like I had done something wrong.
And, leaving her, I felt like I had. Why did she hate me so much? And why
didn’t I just move out? I had crossed an ocean by myself. I could do anything.

It may have sounded weird, but in that moment, I realized,
anywhere else and I wouldn’t have been as safe. She was... watching over me or
something... I couldn’t explain it. It was almost like my landlady was one of
my Four Protectors.

* * *

Eighteen and Wicca
.

No, that was no good.

The Diary of a Teenage Drama Queen
.

Too melodramatic.

Halsey Rookmaaker, Teenage Witch
.

It sounded like I should have pom-pons or something.

I settled on
The
Wiccan Diaries. Volume III.

Being one year of the
life of an of-age witch
, I wrote. For so now I was. It was December 21st.
My birthday. I put the pen down and thought about that, and my Diary.

I must become Adept
,
I told myself.

I did not forget that it was in this year, those who had the
Craft passed the particular milestones (which, I had no idea what
those
were) enabling them to
matriculate––a funny college word for
go on
––to the next level. After Adept, it was up to the
individual, I was told, to become Fledged, but I had a problem. A big, big
problem. And it wasn’t going away. Every day it got nearer. What to do about
Ravenseal?