Page 52 of Sigils & Spells

Merle made a low rumble in his throat. It was sexy as hell. He leaned in close. “Pandora.” My name was soft on his lips.

A loud crash had us jumping and looking around.

“What the hell, man?” Darren was on his feet, the front of his jeans covered in food and drink.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Ramsey flinched and shrank in front of him. He scurried over to the booth.

“Merle, it’s starting again.”

Merle jumped from the booth and rushed Ramsey from the restaurant. “Go, go, go.”

I looked at Darren. What had just happened? I shrugged.

Darren threw the remaining burger in his hand onto the floor with the rest of his lunch, and what looked like Ramsey’s lunch as well.

* * *

Merle

Ramsey was in a panic. He was always in a panic lately. Then again, I would be too.

I followed him down the stairs and out of the burger joint.

He looked up and down the block in an agitated fashion.

“I’ve got to get out of here, I can feel it. I can feel it,” he kept muttering.

I grabbed the back of his coat, the collar already damp with perspiration. Hauling him around to the back parking area, I dragged his sorry ass as far away across the parking lot and into the tree line.

“I thought you were safe. Did you not do your morning ritual?” I tossed him more than simply let him go. He dropped to all fours. The demon was already starting to show on his face. His hair was thinner, his teeth sharper, his breathing noisy and full of phlegm.

I began an incantation. I misspoke a syllable, the tones were wrong. “Fuck!”

Shaking the tension from my shoulders, I needed to not let the circumstances of the past morning, the past twenty minutes cloud what I had to do.

Starting again, I pulled elder magic from the land, letting it flow through my veins, adding power to my words. I chanted and intoned the flow of forces over Ramsey.

For the better part of the past two and a half years, I had managed to narrow in on which incantations worked to quell his personal affliction. But I hadn’t managed to find the exact one that would separate the demon that possessed him.

But I was close. The documents Pandora had delivered had to have the key I was searching for. The Archives, one of the most comprehensive collection of esoteric magical documents on this side of the planet, had to hold the key.

Pandora. She was everything, light and— I felt a surge of heat envelop me, push through and back out. My magic slammed Ramsey in the chest and the smaller man fell back. He landed with a cry. But I didn’t relent. My magic continued to stream into him as my anger and the power I drew upon pushed the demon back into submission. I didn’t want that beast showing its ugly face around here again for a while.

I didn’t want him, any part of him, getting in my way when it came to Pandora. And he got in the way a lot. It wasn’t charitable of me, he needed help. He paid me well for my help, but he didn’t pay me enough to keep me from having a private life.

I was fucking that up on my own without any assist from him.

The sudden lack of magic was audible, like the whooshing sound of a train as it passes by. One moment the air is grinding and loud, the next, silence.

“Wha…what the fuck was that?” Ramsey bleated like a little goat, and he pushed up to his feet.

I adjusted my coat over my shoulders. “What was what? You didn’t do your incantation ritual this morning, did you? How many times do I have to tell you, you have to do that every day.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘A ritual a day keeps the demons away.’ You’ve told me a million times,” he grumbled.

“Even if I said that to you twice a day from the very first day I met you, I would have only said it one thousand seven hundred ninety times. Not even close to a million.”

I breathed heavily through my nose. “Ramsey, it’s been all over town, Kolby Devin’s place up past Traitor’s Ridge, that wasn’t a bobcat that wiped out half of her prize birds. It was you, wasn’t it?”

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