Chapter 30
thirty
. . .
Present Day
The tears continue to flow steadily out of my eyes. I hate crying, but I’ve cried more in these days with Kit than I have in the past three years.
He’s gone, but this isn’t over. The first thing I do is line every entrance of my apartment with salt, pouring it heavily.
Next, I grab my laptop and my phone so I can call Matthias, who picks up on the second ring.
“Lacy?”
“Hey,” I whisper then say louder, “Hey. I—” I cut myself off with a huge sniff. “I’m free. He’s gone.”
“Did you exorcise him?”
I clear my throat, still raw from sobbing. “Yeah. Thanks for your help.”
“Of course.”
“But we have a problem still.”
“Which would be?”
I explain the Balores situation to him, to which he says, “Well, shit. Why do demons like you so much? Let’s start researching options.” After a few minutes, he offers, “Drink only holy water for the rest of your life?”
“I feel like that would make me ill.”
I search how to keep yourself from being possessed by a demon. I click through a lot of useless sites as Matthias does the same. I keep clicking through results, digging deeper and deeper with each page.
“Oh, hey,” Matthias says after a bit. “I may have found something. A protection sigil.”
He forwards me the link, and I open an academic article by a Dr. Nerys Gray.
It was published in the late ’90s, the PDF being a scanned copy of the original print article.
Most of the article focuses on the concept of calling demons and demonic possession.
All theories, all made to seem impossible.
However, at the end of the article, there is a note about keeping oneself safe from demonic possession.
Charms are a suggestion, as well as marking oneself with a certain symbol.
A daemonium pentagram. There is a picture of the hand-drawn sigil at the bottom of the page.
The sigil is made up of one continuous line, jaggedly cutting across itself multiple times to form a somewhat circular shape.
In the center of the circle, there’s a pentagram.
That’s the symbol Kit must have meant when he said I could get it tattooed on me. He was right—it’s incredibly ugly.
The article doesn’t specifically say I can or should get it tattooed on me—it covers drawing the symbol on oneself or on houses and cars for protection, but a tattoo is a more permanent fix than having to redraw the symbol every day.
Before drawing the symbol, Dr. Gray details, the area should be blessed with holy water.
I have that, sans seltzer, thanks to Kit.
He acquired it before we went to the old mill.
She also notes that the sigil is mainly to keep oneself safe from demonic possession, but it offers other protective charms as well, though it doesn’t specify what I am being protected from.
Are there…are there more than demons and ghosts to worry about?
I shake my head. Nope. Can’t even begin to consider that there is even more out there than I already know.
We are not dealing with vampires, werewolves, or anything worse. I just need to worry about Balores.
I glance at the clock in the corner of my screen. It’s ten a.m.
“Sounds like I’m getting the tattoo,” I say dejectedly. “It’s the only thing even remotely close to a permanent fix.” I’ll get it somewhere easily hidden.
“Go to Ink & Sword on Main. They won’t question it.”
“Oh, I’ve been there. I like them. Call you later?”
“You better.”
I take a picture of the sigil and leave immediately, climbing in my car and driving to the studio where I got my one and only tattoo (August’s birthday in Roman numerals on the back of my neck). I stride in and hold my phone out to the person behind the front desk, who reels back at my aggression.
“Do you think I can get this? Today?”
They study the sigil with a bleached, raised eyebrow. “Sure. Seems simple enough. We have an open morning.”
I’m in the chair twenty minutes later. The artist cleans the area with alcohol and when he turns away, I quickly drop a few drops of holy water on the area, spreading it around and hoping my skin has enough time to absorb it.
The artist comes back and presses his sketch of the sigil onto my skin.
I’m getting it just above my hip. Soon, the needle is poking into my skin, the ink taking place, and I’m clenching my fists, the pain sharp and biting—it hurts more than it should. Hopefully that means it’ll work.
When he’s done, I breathe a sigh of relief. I was expecting to feel different, but I don’t. I thank the artist and, not knowing what else to do, go home.
When I get in my car and turn on the ignition, I realize I didn’t have to crank it hard the way I used to.
I missed that when I drove over here. I turn my car off and back on to see if that was some sort of fluke.
It wasn’t. It’s been fixed. Kit fixed this.
He had to have one of the times I was asleep in the void.
My eyes water uncontrollably. Goddamn him.
I clear my throat, blinking rapidly to keep the tears at bay.
My heart aches. It’s like a dam has broken and nothing but Kit will be able to patch it up. But I can’t have that, can I? I sigh, ignoring the one tear that escapes down my cheek, and put my car into drive to take myself back to my apartment.
After I enter, I fix the line of salt inside my front door, add an extra line outside my door, then lock everything and close all my shades.
I should call Matthias, but instead I crawl in my bed, clutching my pillow to my chest. I hate myself. Not because I exorcised Kit, but because I miss him.