“Not yet. Not until we know what we’re up against.”
“I know…”
“You know shit,” I cut him off. “We both know shit.”
“I know a lot more than you think, little girl…”
“Bullshit,” I cut him off again and watched in satisfaction as he narrowed his eyes on me.
“Careful…” he warned.
“If you call Virgil, he is going to rush over here for what exactly? To put him in harm's way again? This…” I ripped my tank top down, exposing the ink on the top of my breast, “this is supposed to protect us.”
I swallowed hard as Hellsing slowly closed the distance between us. His eyes were drawn to the symbol tattooed on my skin. I held my breath as he reached up, gently brushing my soft flesh with his fingertips, leaving a trail of heat behind his touch.
My mother had inked the rune into my skin when I turned sixteen. She’d said it was for protection from the demons my father fought. Unfortunately, those demons found me.
I pulled away, adjusting my top as I continued. “It didn’t protectme, what makes you think it will keep him and my mother hidden?”
“This is my fault,” he uttered, brushing his hands through those long locks of dark hair. “It attached itself to me and I wasn’t careful. I felt it, lurking in the shadows, waiting, watching, but I did nothing. I thought I was just feeling residuals from that day. PTSD shit. I should have known better. It was me. I brought it to your door.”
“You can’t blame yourself…”
“I do. Because of that symbol, I am what I am. A vocation is what the church called it, a calling is what your father had named it,” he grunted in fake amusement. “It’s a curse, Grace. There’s no other word for what I can do.”
“I…I don’t understand,” I shook my head.”
“I can walk in death’s shadows freely, Grace.” He raised his sleeve, showing me the rune on his forearm. “I can walk through hell, and because of this thing on my forearm, I can do it without being seen.”
I placed a hand over my mouth as I stared up at him. “And yet…I was spotted. Do you have any idea what that means?”
I shook my head slowly, somewhat in shock only because I had felt what he’d gone through only hours before. He closed the distance once again between us, crouching down before me and grabbed my knees.
“It means…somehow, when I allowed him to possess my body, that left a connection. One strong enough to bypass, this…” his fingers trailed back to my breast, and they lingered there for a moment, sending a shiver through me. One I held back until he pulled away.
“I need to make a call.” He turned and went toward the front door.
“To whom?” I asked.
He turned slightly to glance back at me. “To the only person I know who can offer some insight.”
I grabbed his sleeve. “Not my father?”
He didn’t look at me as he shook his head. “Not yet. But I will call him eventually, Grace. I get you're an independent woman and all that, but you can’t hide everything from him. Not this.”
I watched as he left the shop, the door shutting soundly behind him. I could see him pace on the other side of the shattered windows, his voice a low rumble, barely audible, as he spoke on the phone.
I kept thinking back on what had happened, on what he’d just confessed to me. I could still see Peter convulsing on the floor, his body wracked by some force I couldn’t see. His fists had clenched so tight his knuckles had turned white. He looked scared and I couldn’t get that look of fear on his face out of my head. In that moment, it was like something had torn him open from the inside, the way he gasped for air, and his eyes rolling back, a black film covering them, I thought I’d lost him. My father had spoken of possessions, but I’d never seen anything like this, and sadly, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do but watch him suffer.
Or so I thought.
That’s when I remembered that spell. It was a faint memory and leaving him briefly I’d dropped to the floor, scrambling through the broken glass and the dust, shoving aside candle stubs, and scattered herbs, searching for that damn memory. I just needed to see it, to remember. And out of the corner of my eye, peeking through the broken wood, I saw it. My hand was shaking as I pulled it out, it was something I’d picked upyears ago in a dusty shop off Chartres Street from a woman who claimed it had been “salvaged from the bayou fires.”
Its cover was a deep, cracked leather, with veins of gold threading that decorated the surface of the book. Across the front, embossed in tarnished brass letters barely clinging to the surface, read the title,The Grimorium.
Even saying the title out loud once had felt like it was wrong. It felt heavy and ancient. I’d only skimmed through it once, half out of curiosity, half out of fear, because every page seemed to hum with something that wasn’t supposed to be awake. The ink was rust-dark, uneven, as if it had been written in something thicker than ink. The pages were edged in soot and smelled faintly of cedar, smoke, and old blood.
My fingers trembled as I flipped through it, my breath uneven. Each symbol I passed seemed to crawl beneath my skin, pressing like a pulse under the surface. My fingers found the spell I needed, “Requiem ad Cor Infernalis”, a ritual meant to reverse spiritual possession through a blood conduit.
