James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-08-07 23:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | derek mitchell, james hutchins |
Spiritual Pollution
Who: James & Derek
What: A Conversation About a Stone
When: Present, Early Evening
Where: Curiosities, Vegas
Rating: Low
It wasn’t nightfall yet. Derek didn’t want to wait that long. The effects of sunlight were detrimental, but the vampire didn’t care. He needed answers. As he walked toward Curiosities, he ran his fingers through disheveled hair. There were even darker circles around his eyes, some facial stubble. He pushed open the shop door, wincing slightly at the sound of the bell. It was like every nerve was screamingly on edge.
He looked around nervously, like he was about to get caught doing something inappropriate. Derek spotted the restricted section sign and began edging toward it.
A man sat on a stepladder in the corner. One foot rested on the bottom rung, the other on the pinewood floor of the old shop. A book was open on his lap, a pen caught in his teeth. When the bell jingled, he looked up, usually content to watch a customer explore the inventory in peace, but there was something… dodgy about this one, like he had the shakes. James sat up straighter, waiting until the man approached the staircase to take the pen from his mouth and speak up.
“Need something?”
Derek visibly jumped, turning around. “Shit, dude.” He hadn’t even noticed the guy. The vampire frowned. That wasn’t usually like him. “Sorry.” He shoved his hands into his hoodie pockets to hide the slight vibration that seemed to be causing them to shake.
“Actually, yes, you can help me. I think.” He pulled one hand out to gesture around them. “This is magic junk, right?”
James’s face registered surprise. That was frank. Not taking his eyes off the customer, he flipped a ribbon from the spine of the book into the open pages, marking his spot for later. As he stood up, he set the book on his seat. “Well, some of it’s junk.” A couple of steps would close the gap between the spellcaster and the vampire, but he left the guy some space. It looked like he could use it.
Weird as it was for Sam Hutchins to read the auras of his customers, standing here just now, James had to begrudgingly admit the practice had its merits. “But you’re not looking for junk. What’s the problem?”
Derek stepped away from the windows. That sunlight was streaming in, and starting to give him a sea-sick, itchy-skinned feeling. He rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t remember if he had slept or not. He’d fed, though, but it did little to make him feel better. “Um.”
He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I guess I’m looking for information on how I would summon a lady.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not right. An entity.” The other man was appearing to Derek as sort of wavy. He closed one eye, and pulled out the jet black stone.
“I have this thing, but I think it’s broken. I didn’t get it from here, though. I’m not looking for a refund or anything.”
James frowned. “A conjuring stone?” He looked from the object, just visible in the other man’s fingers, to his face, a question gathering like clouds behind the spellcaster’s eyes. An artifact like that often took no skill, no language, no actual intent to make it work. It was a one-way radio transmission. It was rare for good reason.
A long time ago, good judgment and his sense of self-preservation had gone from being alarm bells to chimes that swayed in the back of James’s skull. Distant, dull. A sound he liked to ignore. Interest piqued, his feet carried him closer to the vampire to inspect it, but he kept his arms crossed for the time being.
The man’s palm was open. It trembled like his old man’s did, not from neurological damage but years of trying to manipulate power the human body wasn’t meant to hold. James leaned closer. The blackness of that rock seemed expansive, endless, a vacuum that pulled light into it. He felt his pupils widen. It took James back to being a teenager, to the time when he wandered into a cave near the southern border of New Mexico. He flattened his hand on one rough rock wall, closed his eyes, and started walking, going down and down, stumbling over the rocks, daring himself to keep going until the air was cold and choked with dust. When he opened his eyes, all the light was gone.
James took a breath. He calculated his risk. He extended a hand. “Do you mind if I take a look?”
Derek glanced down at the stone, then back at the other man. He seemed to be waging some internal debate. Finally, his fingers released the stone, and his hand ached from how tightly the vampire had been holding it. He handed it over.
“Please be careful with it.”
It was his only physical connection to what had transpired, or so he thought. He recalled how it had felt that night, like unseen arms pulling him into an embrace. Even as a human, with friends and family surrounding him, Derek had never felt anything close to that. Acceptance. Acknowledgment. Derek could not lose this.
He swiped the back of his hand across his stubbled face. “Also, are there shades on those that you can pull down?” Derek nodded his head toward the windows. “Or somewhere we can stand that’s not so...bright?”
The stone tumbled onto James’s palm. It took inhuman effort not to let it fall right back out.
'Be careful with it.' From the looks of things, that advice was a day late and a dollar short.
“Yeah,” he angled his body in the direction of an open door, hooking a finger that meant it was okay to follow him. “You look like shit, brother.” As James led the way into a small, cramped office lit by pull-chain lamps, he kept an eye on the other guy. Last thing he wanted to hear was the thump of a customer passing out. “That start when you got a hold of this stone, or something else?”
It was like instant relief. Once they were away from the sun, Derek relaxed incrementally. He was still exhausted and even paler than usual, but it helped. “Thanks,” he replied, both to the change of scenery and the observation of his appearance.
“I’m not sure.” That was true. Ever since the visit, he had interacted with a few people. At first, it had made everything easier. There was a confidence, and almost a high. The good things that had happened between him and Penny actually felt deserved. It began to slip away, though, like a fine suit he had borrowed and had no business wearing.
“I need her to come back.”
“Who is she?” James rolled an old banker’s chair out from behind his father’s desk. The springs creaked and stretched too much. He knew from experience it would put your ass on the ground if you dropped your guard. He eased onto the wooden seat and let the pale guy take the chair across from him. Leaning forward, James passed the stone between his hands, his thumb searching for anything carved on the surface. “The one who gave this to you… she give you a name?”
Speaking Elfleda’s name out loud felt like a betrayal. Derek frowned deeply with worry. If he didn’t say it, could this guy even help him? What if she found out? What if she could see him right now, and was overcome with disapproval at even letting some stranger touch the gift she had given the vampire?
Derek resisted the urge to reach out and grab the stone back from him. “Can I just describe her to you? She wears a lot of black. British accent, but a fancy one, like the queen or something. Pops up in your apartment in a bunch of black smoke.”
James’s hands paused. He lifted his eyes to the customer. A hot lump of dread began to climb his throat. Sometimes it was worse to know what was coming before it happened; to feel the shadow of an ax poised and ready to drop.
“Did she ask you to do something for her?” James eased himself forward and set the rock on the floor midway between them. He put his palm over it, a signal to wait before picking it up again.
“Um.” His eyes betrayed his nervousness. Had she asked him to do something? Derek hadn’t taken it as a command, more like...friendly advice. Butcher the farm. After combing through the flash drive, he had come to his own idea of what that meant. Some group of people were purposely arranging for vampires to turn poor, unsuspecting humans. For what, he couldn’t be sure. But that was the impression he had gotten. And even though there were other vampires and other victims displayed in those images and videos, Derek could only see himself, and he could only see his own maker.
They were the farm. It was simple.
“She said I had a gift. Power.”
It looked like they were dodging direct answers. James brought one of his hands up to slowly rub at his eyelids, then moved them both to rest at his mouth in what might’ve passed for prayer on another person. A bad thing rattled to life in his head as he stared at the other man’s t-shirt, a fucked up memory James had avoided thinking about for a long time. It wanted an audience and it looked like it was about to get it.
“Is that why you want this… entity to come back? So she’ll tell you you’ve got power?”
Operating on a hunch, James turned to the desk and jiggled on the bottom handle. The ill-fitting drawer squeaked and jerked open. He rummaged through the contents while he waited for an answer.
“I want her to come back because it felt good.” Derek didn’t know how to fully explain it, not in words. He thought maybe someone working in a place like this might, but the vampire started to worry that had been a wildly incorrect assumption. Maybe this place was just for tourists looking for something different. Maybe it was the magical equivalent to his t-shirt booth.
He began shifting restlessly in his chair. Fingers opened and closed as he stared at the black stone lying there. “Look, I just...if there’s a way I can call her, like an interdimensional Uber or something, that would be super cool. But if you can’t help me, I get it.”
James saw the man shuffling, looking like he was ready to bolt. “Easy…” He held up a hand. “You want to know if the mic’s hot? Let’s find out.”
He took an old pocket flask from the drawer. The silver was tarnished, the cap hard to unscrew, but when he shook it fluid swished inside. He tossed the cap on the desk and swallowed, getting up the nerve to do what needed to be done. The spellcaster tipped the bottle, giving the side a tap with his index finger.
A few drops of holy water splattered on the black stone and the floor around it. James thought it would take a second, but the reaction was quick. The surface of the rock fizzed and popped, kicking off a noxious scent of caramelized sweetness and dead flesh. The smoke that rose from the stone seemed to coalesce and contort into strange, animal shapes. Arachnid limbs, pincers, snapping jaws, all gone before James could say for sure if they were real or imagined.
He coughed behind his forearm. His eyes burned.
Derek watched, horrified at first, thinking this man had ruined his one connection to Elfleda. He didn’t know what to make of the images that appeared before them. He wasn’t even aware of what the other man had poured from the flask.
The vampire had evaded most of James’s questions. But the most telling, revealing thing happened when that acrid, cloying scent reached Derek’s nose.
He smiled.
James saw it. The discovery left him deflated.
Then angry.
Watching happiness come over a guy who’d been wriggling off his seat, not twenty seconds ago, James remembered an old acquaintance of his, a dealer who moved in the same circles. He liked to let his customers work up a good itch before giving them a fix, let them circle like hungry strays. All it took was a sign that more was coming and their relief was palpable. Their gratitude was palpable.
This wasn’t the same, but James couldn’t shake the parallel. It was a paradigm he hated: that anybody -- dealer, figurehead, god, demon, or entity -- would make themselves out to be a benefactor, the only one who could fill a void they probably dug in the first place.
“It’s an illusion,” he said, rooting around in his father’s desk for a container he could use for the stone. Not seeing anything, he wheeled over to a bookshelf and picked up a wooden box. He shook out the contents. ‘She didn’t give you anything you didn’t already have.”
Derek’s head snapped back up, tearing his gaze away from the stone. “How would you know? How could you know?” There was an edge to his voice now, one that wasn’t typical for him at all. “You don’t know anything about me.”
He couldn’t know that even when he was human, he had been rejected. How his parents couldn’t wait to get him out of the house. How his friends didn’t give a shit when he did something stupid and dangerous. And then how the woman who tore him away from everything had thrown him away like garbage.
The vampire slumped forward, his face falling into his hands. He was tired. Weak. He didn’t think he could even fight this man if he tried to take the stone from him. Derek wasn’t great or powerful or gifted. There were thousands, if not more, just like him. He had seen the digital proof.
“What does it matter to you? If I let her come back or not?”
James felt his hands go up in frustration, so he distracted himself by putting the wet stone in the box and setting it back on the floor between them. His palms felt dirty. He wiped them on the thighs of his jeans, as if he could rub off the spiritual residue of whatever energy the Emissary pressed into her summoning stone. “I don’t have to know anything about you,” James said. “I know enough about her.”
He leaned back against the creaking chair and combed his fingers into his hair. At some point, he had started to sweat. The roots of his hair were damp.
“If I’m right about who this is, what she does, it’s like spiritual pollution. Which is worse than possession. You can exorcise a demon out of a person, but if you spend enough time with that stone in your pocket, then every pore in your body will be saturated with that, whatever that is.” He made an open-handed gesture at the floor. “If that sounds like a good time to you, by all means, sleep with it under your pillow. I’m not gonna stop you.”
Spiritual pollution. That was interesting. What exactly would that mean, for a vampire? Derek smiled sarcastically. “And what if my spirit is already polluted?” He wasn’t sure why he was being a dick now. The guy was only trying to help him. The vampire’s smile faltered.
“I’m sorry. I don’t...I’m not usually like this. Maybe you’re right.” He didn’t need Derek’s problems. What was he doing? As the stone sat away from him, even for this brief period, it was like a cloud shifting. But the idea of throwing it away, of getting rid of it, scared him. To never feel what Elfleda gave him, just for one brief moment, again. “I have to go.”
“I’m not--” James truncated the sentence and closed his eyes. He asked himself if he was being a hypocrite. Maybe he was. He couldn’t fault the guy for thinking he was doing what any witch did when they called on a spirit to make something happen. But he knew that it was different, because from what he understood -- reinforced by the question of whether the stone was ‘broken’ -- you didn’t call on the Emissary. She called on you.
James went back to that tiny house in Arizona, to the sight of his mother waking up in sweat-drenched sheets. She had cried out for him, rambled about the dark lady she’d seen in her visions who had finally paid a visit in her sleep.
“I’m not judging you,” James said at last. “I just think you should get what you want without the trap.” He leaned down and picked up the box in a neutral position. It could be taken or left with him.
Derek found himself standing without realizing it. He looked at the box, then at the other man. The expression on his face was unreadable. Though a more perceptive person might recognize it as pleading. He needed someone to tell him what to do.
Again and again, he had reached out. Left little Easter eggs. Like telling Nesryn about his killing habits, and having the response be caring. Derek hadn’t realized it at the time, but he hadn’t been seeking acceptance. He wanted to hear someone say it was bad. It was wrong. It was unnatural.
On the flip side was Elfleda. She saw what he had done, and said it was good. That approval had also been appealing. But neutrality...it sickened him. Derek wanted to be called on his bullshit. Wanted, for once, a human to look at him with shock, and not because they were about to die at the vampire’s hand.
“Thanks for your help.”
Derek took the box.
Wearing a blank face, James stared at the spot where Derek had been. He waited until the bell sounded on the door to stand up. He laced his hands behind his neck and paced the small office, squeezing until it hurt. “Fuck.”