Desperate Remedies #4
Reggie was thrashing on the bed when she got there and Liam began weaving his fingers together to cast a binding spell. His shoulders sagged and he slouched as it started to work.
“Do you have it?”
She pulled the mandible from her coat’s left pocket. A single tooth winked at them in the sterile lamplight of the room. Liam took it and turned it over in his hands a few times.
“It was all I could–” she began but he just looked at her and smiled. All the energy was gone from his face and his eyes were ringed with black circles.
“It’ll do. It’s old. And powerful, I can feel it buzzing in my hands. I didn’t realise you came from such a long line of witches.”
Neither did I, she thought, then batted the idea away as she held her father’s hand. His chest heaved and shook as if it were pushing against a great weight. And perhaps it was. “Dad? Dad, can you hear me?”
If she noticed the slightest change in his breathing, it was because she wanted to. “I got back as soon as I could. Dad?”
Liam laid a hand gently over Margo’s. “You can’t touch him.”
“But he’s dying, Liam.”
“I know, Margo.”
“I can’t let him go alone.”
“He won’t be, as long as you’re here. But if you’re touching him during the ritual it could bounce back on you. And I don’t know what that might do, not for you and not for him.”
She batted his hand away and sank into the wicker chair in the corner, the one her father had used for so many years to read one last chapter of one last book before bed. If she closed her eyes she wasn’t sure she’d get up again. Everything was so heavy. The room stank of sweat and desperation.
Liam placed the mandible over Reggie’s brow, humming a low song in Assyrian.
It was a funeral dirge on the surface, but with the right gestures, and the right timing, it could be used to clear a way for a soul in pain to move on instead of remaining trapped in a decaying corpse.
He dipped his fingers into a small pot of a bitter-smelling red powder and drew two crescents on the dying man’s face.
Liam lowered his forehead to Reggie’s and both hands loosely on his shoulders.
He repeated the song, more slowly, and then a third time more slowly still.
Reggie gasped, and the laboured breathing eased and eased until it stopped.
A sharp purple light ran along the mandible and sparked into the air above him.
Margo stared into the space where it went, hands numb and cold. Her lungs burned as she realised she was holding her breath, waiting for her father to do it one more time. Was that it? Was that his whole legacy gone in a second?
Liam looked at her helplessly and spread his hands.
“Look, we did all we could. We broke the curse but…” He backed off suddenly, hands up with the palms facing her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would be that sudden.
” His eyes darted down, then back to her.
She looked to find she’d pulled the hammer from her coat pocket and was holding it so hard her knuckles were white.
It was still covered in blood from the mausoleum.
She shook her head and relaxed her grip. “Sorry, Liam. It’s just… I dunno.”
Liam nodded, gathered up his things, and skirted around her toward the door. “I’ll give you some peace. I can make the arrangements for you. Call me if you need me.”
His boots clumped down the stairs almost as loud as his sighs. Margo didn’t watch him go. She was glad he hadn’t tried to hug her. She hated him for not saving her father’s life, even if he’d never said he could.
“There were a lot of things I wanted to say to you, Dad,” she said, taking his hand again now that the ritual was done.
Her arm ached where the worm-creature had bitten her, though she couldn’t face bringing that up with Liam.
She was young, yet; she had time to fix things if she needed to.
Something stirred deep within the flesh, though there were no tendrils or masses like on Reggie’s body.
“Although I can’t fix things between us now, can I? ”
Maybe he knew she was there at the end. Maybe that was enough.
His pyjama top twitched. Was it a trick of the light? Or maybe a tired mind? She stared at it intently, then just as her eyes began to move away it did it again, and again, and again until the whole thing began to shake.
Margo pulled it aside so hard the buttons tore. The black mark on his stomach was throbbing even as the rest of the body lay inert. It was growing darker even as it pulled the last colour from his skin. She caught her hand to her face – it reeked of the grave.
No, no, no…
They’d stopped him from rising as an undead monster, but it hadn’t stopped the creature growing inside him. They hadn’t even thought of it. They’d moved so fast to tackle the curse that Liam hadn’t asked if she’d found what had bitten Reggie, and she hadn’t volunteered it.
The flesh burst in a spray of foul green-tinged blood as a wormy thing the size of a puppy tore its way out, its chrysalis sliding aside as it did so. The creature looked at her with a face the sad mockery of her father’s.
Margo roared as she brought the hammer down again, and again, and again.
The End