Page 70 of I Will Always Find You
Then the medium began to shout out words of bitterness and rage in Italian, then in Latin, and finally in an ancient language that only the Romani witch could understand.
“What the hell is happening to her?!” Marshall shouted.
Everyone at the table jumped up in alarm, and several people rushed toward the front door, escaping the madhouse completely. Two of the larger men tried to restrain Madame Albertine, but as soon as they touched her, they were thrown across the table by an unseen force, slamming hard into the wall on the opposite side of the room.
That was the last straw. Everyone still around the table, aside from Marshall and the Romani witch, fled from Madame Albertine’s house, followed by the two battered men.
Remaining calm, the Romani witch pricked his palm with the pin he had hidden inside his suit lapel, causing it to bleed. Without hesitation, he took hold of a panic-stricken Marshall’s hand. Before the Englishman could fully comprehend what was happening, the Romani witch smeared the blood across Marshall’s forehead and recited the activation words of the Blood Puppet spell.
“S?m!”
The television tube suddenly exploded with a deafening crack, sending shards of glass hurtling through the air.
“Marshall, I want you to leave this house, go back to your room at the Château Frontenac, take off your clothes, get into bed and go to sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you will remember nothing about this night except that we left here together after an uneventful séance. We then went to dinner, had a lovely time, and returned to your room to fuck ourselves silly. You will not ask any more questions about this night. Am I understood?”
“Yes,” Marshall responded, devoid of emotion and autonomy.
“Good. I love you. Remember that, always. Now go, and don’t talk to anyone.”
Once Marshall left and he was alone, the Romani witch turned back to confront Madame Albertine, who was still very much in some possessed state.
“Who are you, spirit?” he asked in a serious tone.
“T’as fait ça à moi! [You did this to me!]” the old French woman shouted over and over again.
Walking closer to the woman, the Romani witch asked his question again, but this time it was a demand, not a request. “Who are you? Tell me!”
Only the Romani witch had gotten too close, too overconfident in his approach, and the possessed Madame Albertine reachedout and grabbed onto his arm, trying with all her unnatural strength to pull him towards her.
As he fought against her, the Romani witch saw her eyes turn wholly-black, and a viscous tar-like substance erupted out of her mouth, spilling down her chin and bathing her shawl in the ebon substance from another realm.
Still clutching the Romani witch, Madame Albertine stared into his eyes with the dual black pools that had formerly been her own blue orbs, and screamed in his face once more: “Mi hai fatto questo! [You did this to me!]”
A piercing wail erupted from the medium, and a spectral force hurled the Romani witch across the room, slamming his body into the wooden and plaster wall with bone-rattling force. The séance chamber, once a sanctum of whispers and flickering candlelight, lay in utter ruin, as if a tempest had ripped through it, leaving chaos in its wake. The table was overturned, and the tattered curtains fluttered like ghostly apparitions.
Madame Albertine lay slumped over, still sitting in her chair, her body lifeless, as dead as a doornail.
The Romani witch, battered and bruised, but thankfully still in possession of an unbroken body, picked himself up off the floor and surveyed the catastrophic scene. “What the hell just happened here?!”
Walking over to the dead medium, wading through the debris, he gave a thorough examination of the black ichor covering the old woman. However, he knew better than to touch it.
“This isn’t blood, but an unnatural substance,” he whispered to himself. “Or perhaps asupernaturalsubstance! It looks like—no, that’s impossible.” Only the Romani witch knew very well that nothing was impossible.
The black ichor resembled the living darkness he had encountered before.
Was this a directed assault against him? Was the medium used as a pawn, a tool for a greater power to strike out at him? He had enemies: Baba Yaga and the dark wizards of the Black School, even the blood-drinker god. He had defeated all of them, one way or another, but none of them, he believed, were truly gone forever.
Staring at the dead medium, the Romani witch asked, “Was this you, Cannibal Hag? Attempting to strike at me from the Shadow Realm?”
He did not expect an answer.
Nor did he receive one.
Knowing that none of this substance could remain in the mortal realm, the Romani witch apologized to the dead woman for what he was about to do. He said a prayer over her, an ancient one from Éire, taught to him by Aodhán, to help her spirit cross over gently. To cleanse her from any dark taint this incident may have left upon her.
As he stepped through the threshold, a surge of fiery energy crackled at his fingertips, and with a flick of his wrist, the Romani witch unleashed a torrent of flames that engulfed the house in a raging inferno. The air was thick with the acrid scent of burning wood and ash, a stark contrast to the chilling scene he left behind. He knew there could be no evidence of what had transpired, especially nothing from the Shadow Realm lurking in the mortal world.
Before he left, he spelled the fire to not spread past Madame Albertine’s house.
