Lina turned and walked to the door, the pouch clutched in one hand, the other resting over the talisman at her breast. As she pulled the door open and stepped out into the night, the setting sun, a final, bloody sliver on the horizon, threw her silhouette across the blighted ground. Her shadow stretched long and dark before her - a silhouette that was no longer stooped with fear, but stood tall, sharp-edged, and monstrously resolute.
Midnight Summoning
Lina closed the apartment door behind her. The lock clicked - a sound like a period at the end of a life sentence. She remained frozen in place, the caustic smell of bleach assaulting her nostrils - evidence of her second desperate cleaning that day. Every surface gleamed with raw perfection, as though she’d prepared the apartment not for a visitor, but for forensic scrutiny. Or for last rites. The apartment felt like an empty shell now, stripped of something essential.Only the blood-dark talisman in her pocket seemed truly alive, radiating heat against her thigh while everything around her remained cold and still.
Lina did not turn on the overhead lights. She moved through the familiar gloom to the low taupe sofa and switched on a single lamp, its soft yellow glow casting long, distorted shadows that seemed to hold their breath. She took the small, crudely stitched pouch from her pocket and emptied its contents onto the battered coffee table. The herbs, the crushed shells, the vial, the small blade - each object seemed to possess a weight far greater than its size, imbued with the gravity of her purpose.
Her hands, chapped and red from her earlier frantic scrubbing, were surprisingly steady as she began. First, the salt. She knelt on the polished wooden floor, the cool grain a comfort against her knees. She tipped the bowl, letting a stream of coarse crystals fall in a thin, controlled line. The sound was a soft, dry hiss, the only noise in the room aside from the frantic beating of her own heart. The white circle grew, a stark, pale boundary against the dark wood.
She remembered Rosita’s warning - *No breaks. Nothing may cross it unprepared.*
Her concentration narrowed until the circle was all that existed, a perfect, unbroken ring of protection and invitation.
Next, the candles. Four of them, black as pitch, their waxy surfaces smooth and cool beneath her fingertips. She placed one at each cardinal point, anchors in a sea of shadow. She struck a match, the flare of it startlingly bright, and lit each wick. The flames sputtered to life, small orange eyes opening in the gloom, their light seeming to be drawn inward by the black wax rather than cast out. The room filled with the scent of burning wicks and the silent, watchful presence of the four small fires.
She moved back to the center and set down the shallow wooden chalice. With a reverence she had not known she possessed, she arranged the other components within it. She crumbled the dried leaves and petals between her fingers, their scent of camphor and grave dirt rising to mix with the smell of wax. She added the four pearlescent shells, their insides capturing the candlelight and reflecting it back as a bruised, stormy purple. They looked like tiny, cupped hands waiting for an offering.
The moment had come. She picked up the blade. It was no bigger than her finger, a sliver of honed metal that felt impossibly cold against her skin. She held her left hand out, palm up, and for the first time, a tremor ran through it. She saw the faint, yellowing shadow of a bruise on her forearm, a gift from Ramon’s last visit. The sight of it steadied her. She was not doing this out of madness. She was doing this because every other path had been closed to her.
She took a deep breath, the air tasting of chemicals and magic. The talisman, tucked beneath her simple white nightgown, pulsed a fierce warmth against her sternum. It felt like encouragement. She laid the edge of the blade against the fleshy part of her palm, just below her thumb.
She remembered Rosita’s words, *Your blood remembers the bargain.*
With a wince of sharp, clean fire, she drew the blade across her own skin.
Blood welled instantly, a line of perfect crimson beads. It did not look like her own. It looked darker, richer, ancient. She held her bleeding palm over the chalice. One drop fell, then another, striking the crushed herbs with a sound too soft to be heard. The metallic scent of it, her own life force, filled her senses. As the third drop fell, the talisman at her chest flared with heat, so intense it was almost painful,and a jolt of raw power surged through her veins, a feeling so vast and intoxicating it stole her breath.
The wall clock began to chime the hour. Midnight.
Lina knelt within the circle, her body alight with the strange energy. The thin cotton of her nightgown did little to hide the constellation of old and new bruises that mapped her shoulders and arms, a testament to her quiet suffering made visible in the candlelight. She closed her eyes and began to speak.
The words felt clumsy at first, a string of harsh, guttural sounds that her throat fought to form. But then she remembered Rosita’s hand on her abdomen, and she pulled the sounds from deeper, from the pit of her stomach where all her fear and rage had been stored for years. The incantation changed. It became a resonant chant, a vibration that started in her gut and filled the room. The strange syllables were no longer foreign; they felt like a language her soul had always known but her tongue had forgotten. The candle flames danced, stretching toward her, their shadows writhing on the walls.
The clock struck its twelfth and final chime.
Lina opened her eyes, her gaze fixed on the empty space before her. She took one last, deep breath and spoke the final words, her voice ringing with an authority she had never known, an authority born of absolute desperation and newfound power.
“Maruz - judgment bringer.”
The name, a key turning in a lock centuries old, hung in the air for a single, silent beat. Then, the four candle flames erupted, leaping a foot high with a collective roar. They burned with a blinding white intensity for a second, then, as one, they were snuffed out, plunging the room into a darkness so complete it was a physical blow. The sudden absence of light was accompanied by a silence so profound her ears rang.
And then, the change. The sterile, bleach-scented air was shoved aside by something else. A pressure built, making her feel as though she were deep underwater. And a scent flooded her senses - not the stench of sulfur and rot she might have expected, but something impossibly complex and intoxicating. It was the musk of a predator, the dark sweetness of night-blooming jasmine, and the clean, sharp smell of ozone after a lightning strike. In the center of the oppressive blackness, a presence unfurled itself, a weight and a power so immense, so ancient, and so undeniably masculine that her body forgot how to breathe. She had followed the recipe. She had opened the door. And something had walked through.
Lina knelt in the suffocating dark, her body trembling with a violent, electric hum. It was not fear. Fear was a cold, shrinking thing she knew intimately. This was its opposite - an expansive, terrifying energy that seemed to radiate from the presence before her, charging the very atoms in the room. Her skin prickled, and the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood erect. She had to see. She had to know the face of the power she had brought into her home.
Her fingers, numb and clumsy, fumbled in the darkness for the small box of matches she had left just outside the salt line. They connected with the rough cardboard, and she dragged the box toward her. Her hands shook so badly she could barely isolate a single matchstick. The first one scraped against the striking strip and snapped. The second failed to catch. A low sound, like the shifting of rock deepunderground, came from the center of the room, and she froze. It was not a voice, but an exhalation of ancient patience. On the third try, the match flared to life, a small, brave sun in the crushing void.
She leaned forward, her hand cupped protectively around the flame, and touched it to the wick of the nearest black candle. The wick caught, sputtering, and a small, flickering light pushed back the darkness. It was a pathetic light, weak and wavering, but it was enough. In its glow, she found herself face to face with the impossible.
He was magnificent. The word was too small, too human. He stood nearly seven feet tall, his broad shoulders and powerfully muscled form seeming to strain the very dimensions of her small living room. His presence was not just large, it was absolute, a center of gravity around which everything else in the room - the furniture, the shadows, Lina herself - seemed to orbit. His skin was the color of deep, polished bronze, but it was not static. As the candlelight washed over him, subtle patterns like ancient, flowing script moved just beneath the surface, and the color shifted in places to the black of obsidian. It seemed to both absorb the light and emit a faint, internal luminescence of its own.
His features were a study in terrifying perfection. A strong jaw, a straight nose, lips that were full but severe - all unnaturally symmetrical, sculpted with an inhuman artistry that was both beautiful and profoundly unsettling.
His chest was bare, the muscles of his torso and abdomen defined as if carved from stone. Across his pectorals and down his ribs were faint, luminous sigils that pulsed with a soft, amber light, a pattern she recognized with a jolt as the mirror of the carvings on her talisman. A simple, dark cloth was wrapped low around his hips, its folds as elegant as a king’s robes.
His hair was black as a starless night, falling in a straight, heavy curtain past his shoulders. But it was his eyes that held her captive. They were the color of volcanic glass, and deep within them, a fire burned, molten and alive, shifting from amber to crimson and back again. He was not looking at her. He was seeing her, a gaze that stripped away skin and bone and went straight to the terrified, furious core of her.
The silence stretched, thick with the scent of ozone and jasmine. Lina felt a single drop of sweat trace a path from her temple down her cheek. Then, he spoke.
