bottle, then tilted it and allowed a couple of them to fall back into the pile again. I didn’t count them so much as look at the size of the heap resting in my hand to judge the self-prescribed dosage accordingly.
The exercise was probably futile in and of itself. I knew the pain in my head wasn’t one that could be remedied with over-the-counter medications-or prescription drugs either for that matter. It was born of an ethereal source and for the most part would remain staunchly unaffected by the pharmaceuticals of the mundane world.
I also knew my stomach was going to hate me-fact is, it already did since I’d been more or less living on the bitter analgesic and coffee for close to a week. Now that I thought about it, I would probably need to avoid any serious injuries as well, lest I bleed out, given the amount of salicylate coursing through my system and thinning my blood. Still, aspirin itself seemed to be the only thing that would at least take the edge off, and I had to do something in that respect. Right now my head was pounding just as it had been ever since the plane touched down. Actually, it had been for the past few weeks, but arriving here had made it thud even harder. If I was going to stem my exhaustion, I was going to need to dull the pain enough to get some sleep. Something else of which I was severely lacking.
Of course, that might not even be possible with the continuous traffic next door. I suppose I should be grateful that this room was at the end of the complex. Otherwise there was no doubt in my mind that the strictly adult soundtrack would have been in stereo.
I popped the handful of pills into my mouth, gave them a quick chew and then took a swig of water and swished them around before swallowing. My hope was to get them into my system a bit faster than they would by simply swallowing them whole. The acrid bitterness caused my mouth to pucker involuntarily, so I took a fresh pull from the water bottle and swished again, trying to rinse the residue if not the taste from my tongue.
Replacing the cap, I regarded the drink silently and wondered to myself if I should have picked up a bottle or two of antacid to use as a chaser instead. I didn’t get much time to ponder the thought, however, as my cell phone began to trill, softly at first then ramping up in volume as it continued its quest for my attention.
Turning, I wandered back to the dumpster refugee that was masquerading as the side table and scooped the device from its surface, making the piece of furniture rock yet again. Glancing quickly at the incoming number on the LCD, I flipped open the phone and put it up to my ear.
“Yeah, Ben,” I grunted.
“Your goddamn finger broken?” he replied, more annoyance than concern bolding his words.
“Do what?”
“You were s’posed ta’ call when ya’ got there. I been sittin’ here waitin’ all friggin’ night.”
I glanced at my watch again. It was definitely after midnight, so I couldn’t logically dispute what he’d just said, on either count. Technically it was morning, and besides, he was correct. I had in fact made that very promise.
“Oh, yeah,” I replied as I reached up and rubbed my forehead. “Sorry about that.”
“Yeah, well, ya’ oughta be,” he countered.
“I’m a grownup, Ben. I can ride an airplane all by myself. I’ve done it several times, believe it or not.”
“Don’t be an ass, Row. That’s not what I’m talkin’ about. It’s not like this is a normal trip, an’ you know it.”
He was correct yet again. There’s very little one can consider normal about catching a last minute flight bound for a distant city to go in search of a serial killer. Especially one who has most likely been dead for better than 150 years but just happens to be up to her old tricks again because the wrong person decided to play with the wrong kind of magick for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t as if I was with the FBI, or even a cop. But, I did have a vested interest because that “wrong kind of magick” had been deeply affecting my life and, more importantly, my wife’s for almost a month now. It was time for it to stop, and I was willing to do whatever it would take to make that happen.
“Yeah, Ben, I know…” I muttered in reply. “But when is the last time you recall anything being normal in my life?”
He answered without missing a beat, “Nineteen seventy-two.”
“I’m pretty sure you didn’t even know me in nineteen seventy-two.”
“You’re right. Anyway, I was just guessin’. Actually, I’m bettin’ you’ve prob’ly never had a normal day in your life, period.”
“It feels that way,” I sighed. “But, there was a time…”
“Yeah, Row, I know there was…” he agreed, his voice trailing off as it lost some of its edge.
My friend was agreeing because he had been around when things were sane. While 1972 was pushing the limit, we truly had been friends for more years than I could remember. So he was well aware it wasn’t until I started hearing the voices of the dead that things began to get weird. And, while it seemed like a lifetime, especially to me, that affliction had only come upon me somewhere around a half dozen years ago.
What with me being a Witch, I suppose that most would think I should be used to such things as communicating with the departed. After all, that’s exactly the sort of thing Witches were “supposed to do,” right along with riding brooms and sprinkling bat wings into bubbling cauldrons. To be honest, I sometimes thought that the Hollywood myth about WitchCraft would be a much easier way to live than I did at present. Riding a broom would definitely save me the aggravation of traffic.
Of course, while the “double, double, toil and trouble” aspect is a disproportionate fiction, Witches do tend to be more open to accepting the unexplained without going to great lengths to debunk it. Magick is certainly a part of our lives, and we know that it is very real. But, by the same token, we also know that real magick isn’t what you see in the movies and on television.
So, while I wasn’t particularly surprised by the fact that I could hear the dead, or even that they sometimes chose radical measures such as stigmata with which to communicate their distress to me, it definitely didn’t make me see it as the norm. No, I knew for a fact that I was the odd man out. Very few people, Witches or not, get stuck dealing with this sort of thing. I just happened to be one of the unlucky ones and, because of me, so was my wife.
And there, in the proverbial nutshell, was the root of the whole problem I faced at this moment in time. My wife. Even as I stood here, she was back in Saint Louis, warming a bed in the psych ward of a hospital-which I suppose was better than the jail cell she had occupied only a few days before, after being accused of at least two brutal murders. Those charges had been dropped, but the nightmare was far from over.
In truth, it was only just beginning because it turned out the thing that went bump in the night was a half sister that, up until a few days ago, my wife didn’t even know she had. And that sister was up to her eyeballs in Voodoo and hoodoo. Of course, that wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that she had apparently taken a perfectly acceptable religion along with its associated magickal practice and perverted both of them into something vile and grotesque. While her take on that was probably 180° opposite mine, I’m betting that her victims would probably agree with me. In fact, judging from the pain in my skull, I knew for certain they did.
But opinions weren’t important right now. What was, however, was the fact that whatever she had unleashed was no longer using her alone as a vehicle to inflict pain and death, it had been trying its damnedest to use my wife as well.
I even had the freshly healing wounds to prove it.
Still, why Felicity had been sucked into this, other than a familial connection we didn’t even know she had, was something of a perverse mystery in its own right. And, solving that mystery was what brought me here, now, to this seedy motel room in the burbs of New Orleans, with nothing more in my possession than what I could quickly stuff into a single overnight bag and my carryon backpack.
“Row? You still there?” Ben’s voice drifted into my ear, breaking me out of the semi-dream state into which I’d managed to sink.
“Yeah, sorry,” I mumbled. “Drifted for a minute there.”
“Twilight Zone?” he asked.
That was his personal catch phrase to describe any time that I would experience an ethereal event, especially one that would push me into a trance or something even worse, such as a seizure. The first few times he had witnessed it happening to me he had been frantic, not that I had reacted much better. These days, however, he just took it in stride-as much as one could with that sort of thing, anyway.
“No… Just tired,” I told him. “So, did you just call to chew me out for not calling you first, or was there
