starsmisalign (starsmisalign) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-10-23 16:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | celeste henry, james hutchins |
Next Steps
Who: James/Celeste
What: Options
Where: Las Vegas, Curiosities
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: Low, reference to violence
The back door of Curiosities opened hard and bounced off the wall, the noise ricocheting in the cramped storage room. Light flooded in from the small, paved lot behind the building where James’ truck was parked. A sandbag thudded on the floor, then two five-gallon bottles of water scraped across it. The trip to St. Thomas used to be Sam’s turf, but now James went. They had a standing arrangement with a priest for holy water, issued gratis. The graveyard dirt was a tougher sell involving cash and a youth minister with a shovel.
He nudged the door shut with his foot. “Just me,” he called, so nobody would think he was holding up the place, even if recent experience told him a burglar was likely to stroll in through the front entrance. Music was playing but he couldn’t make out the song.
Taking off his sunglasses, he cut a path through the displays and reading chairs, looking for Celeste. A batch of deliveries waited for Shimmer on the counter by the register. A shaft of sunlight lit the labels on them: there were boxes and envelopes going to hotels, private residences, and into the mail. The package on the end looked like it was reacting to the mild, radiant heat that came from the window. A curl of smoke drifted from one seam of the thick envelope. James picked it up, sniffed it, and frowned. “That’s not good,” he muttered.
He went behind the counter and ducked down, searching the shelves for a letter opener or knife.
Celeste descended the staircase from the restricted section, spotting James first, and then the smoking envelope. She hopped down the remainder of the stairs. “That wasn’t like that when I left it,” the brunette frowned. The air was slightly acrid. She switched off the music. She had been upstairs looking for a certain kind of book ever since receiving Nesryn’s text earlier.The knots were still present in her stomach.
“What’s in there?” she asked, pushing that subject to the back of her mind as she focused on the issue in front of her.
James came up with a knife. “I think,” he checked the address label, “This is one of Sam’s experiments for opening the third eye. The customer’s supposed to burn it, but that’s a pretty low ignition temp.” He used the tip of the knife to tear the padded envelope along the sealed edge. When he upended it, a baggie fell out on the counter, filled with a potpourri of dried leaves, petals, and a granular substance. The smoking kicked up a notch in the sunlight.
He leaned back, blinking. “Might want to hold your breath. Unless you want to spend the afternoon thinking about the fabric of the universe.”
She tugged the neck of her shirt up over her mouth and nose and stepped backward. Thinking about the fabric of the universe didn’t seem too terrible, but the brunette doubted she’d be able to get anything done.
“At least that wasn’t caused by Shimmer this time,” Celeste offered, her voice muffled. She waved a hand in the air in an attempt to waft some of the smoke away from them. “How do we fix it?”
James coughed. A greenish-gray plume drifted into the air between them. He found himself smiling at Celeste through a pungent funk. “We treat it like any stash we need to get rid of in a hurry,” he suggested. “We flush it.” He picked up the baggie, holding it away from his body, and walked it to the half-bathroom, where he upended the offensive herbs in the bowl and flushed. A few seconds later, he dried his hands and came out. “Hazards of working in a magic shop. We’re surrounded by mind-altering substances and things that can kill us.”
He came back over to Celeste.
He liked looking up and finding her here, not just because he loved her, or because she was beautiful and standing in his favorite place. She was looking more and more at home here, immersed in the paraphernalia of the occult. She was starting to figure out the right questions to ask and what to recommend when new customers came into the shop, instead of just leading them to labeled supplies. It was one of the things James had liked first and best about Celeste: she was a seeker.
James stopped in front of her. “Everything go okay?”
She looked up at James appreciatively, one hand reaching out to take his. Her thumb brushed over one of the slightly rough pads of his fingers. Celeste really liked the way they felt in hers, solid and real. “Here at the store? Everything is great.”
The brunette looked down at his chest, trying to figure out where to lead from. Celeste decided on the factual route before meeting his eyes again. “My older brother was in Searchlight today, looking for me. He came to eat at Terrible’s and he had pictures of me that he showed Nesryn. She told him she had never seen me before, then texted me as soon as she could.”
James swallowed. He closed his fingers around her hand and nodded, waiting to calibrate himself before he said anything.
He did a mental run-down of what she’d told him. He knew that Celeste’s relatives were a bunch of reclusive, vaguely religious survivalists. He knew they were prepping for doomsday and they raised their kids on hunting and weapons. He knew that Celeste left them in Moab years ago and stayed moving until she landed in Nevada. He knew the patriarch of the family had died back in August, and now her older brother had tracked her to Searchlight. The guy must’ve been decent at it; James doubted Celeste left much of a paper trail. The El Rey probably used paper booking and her pay at Curiosities was under-the-table.
James started to get an internal, crawling feeling he didn’t like, one he wasn’t too familiar with. But she was holding his hand, which rooted him to the spot, and he didn’t want her noticing him looking unsettled anway. Calm and still, he told himself. Listen to her.
“It’s been years, right?” he asked, backing against the counter. “What do you think he wants?”
Celeste used to think that if and when her family decided to locate and find her, their motivation would be to talk her back in. And back then, that had felt like the worst case scenario. That was before her father died, though. Caleb was nearly twelve years older than her, and they had never been close, but the brunette had always felt vaguely unsettled by the behavior he demonstrated. He was the definition of an extremist. And if he was there alone to find her, and Nesryn said he had been, that was even more unsettling.
“I don’t know,” she admitted finally, not letting go of James. Her hand squeezed his. Celeste repeated the words she had admitted to her friend one night in the desert. “But he’s dangerous. My father always thought of what we did as defensive, building a wall between us and things that would destroy us.” It was uncomfortable talking about these things to anyone, but telling them to James was easier.
“Caleb, my brother, he always used to ask why we didn’t just destroy them first.”
“Who are ‘they’?” James gently pulled her hand up to the center of his chest and locked it in place, a gesture he found himself doing a lot with her. He used to tell himself he wanted her to feel his heartbeat, and then he told himself that the weight of her hand settled him down, but he was coming to think of it now as a possessive or protective gesture. He didn’t know which. Maybe it was all those things.
Celeste smiled despite herself, with her hand pressed against his chest. Her other hand reached up to cup the side of his face. “The people who are going to bring about the end of the world. The sinners, the ones who can’t or won’t be redeemed.”
She closed her eyes and just stood there, feeling him. How could she have ever believed that she wanted the world to end? Logically, she knew, but when the brunette thought about James, or worse still, a lack of James, the room threatened to spin out from under her feet.
Celeste opened them again, and she had to break the worst part out loud. “If he thinks that’s me, and there might be a reason he would, if he knows I’m here, then…”
Sinners who wouldn’t be redeemed. James blinked hard and looked at the ceiling, trying to cover his revulsion over that phrase. It wasn’t the greatest thing to hear standing in the middle of a magic shop. He turned his mouth into her palm and pressed a kiss into it. “Listen to me.” He made sure he had her eye contact. “We won’t let him anywhere near you, if that’s what you want. He might be dangerous. I’m not gonna downplay that. But you already know what he can do. He doesn’t know shit about what we can do.”
James ran a hand over her hair. “Why would he think you’re bad, Celeste? What do I need to know?”
“I wasn’t always careful,” she admitted. “When I finally left home, I wasn’t used to being around strangers, and I was angry and confused.” Celeste let her hand drop to his shoulder. The brunette didn’t like to think of that time, mainly because she had been stupid and careless, and she had prided herself on always surviving.
“When I came up with the idea that maybe it would be better to make the apocalypse actually come, I told someone.” Celeste took in a steadying breath. “Caleb showed Nesryn photos of me. The person who took them is also the person I told that to.”
James could believe that. The idea of jump-starting an apocalypse was one of the first things Celeste told him about when he was still a stranger. Back then, he thought that was eighty percent because she wanted to find out how and twenty percent to see what reaction she’d get out of him. The one read he hadn’t gotten off of her was confusion, but it sounded like it hadn’t always been like that for her.
“Okay.” He let go of her hand. He rubbed her upper arms to let her know he was still with her while he thought it over. “How do you want to play this? Do you want to get out of town for a while? Do you want to lay low and get ready? Or do you want to find him first?”
Celeste thought about that carefully. Had, in fact, been thinking about it since she got the text. “I had a conversation with Phanuel when she gave me the feathers. I was thinking if I could use magic to maybe, I don’t know, heal them? My family, I mean.”
She leaned her forehead against his chest. She was well aware what James was capable of, what they both were capable of. And she knew what the most direct solution would be. The question was whether she could make that decision. “He’s dangerous. Not just to me. And laying low, that feels...weak.”
He took a deep breath and stared across the shop, chin resting on top of Celeste’s head. The late afternoon sun bathed the wooden shelves, the spines of the books, and the objects on display in yellow-orange light. It looked comfortable, safe, out of sync with the thing they were talking about.
“But they’re not sick, are they?” he asked after a minute. “So it wouldn’t be healing them. Unless I’m missing something, the only influence they’re under is brainwashing. You could try to make them see things clearly, but what’s that mean? Does it make you another person planting ideas instead of letting them have their own?”
James reached up and rubbed his eyebrow with the pad of his thumb. He wanted to tell her there was nothing weak about laying low, as long as they used the time to get ready, but it would’ve felt like a lie coming out of his mouth. It might be true for other people, but ‘laying low and waiting’ wasn’t how he operated anymore. “If you want to go after Caleb, I can do that,” he said quietly. “I’ve done it before.”
She looked up at him curiously. “What do you mean?” That wasn’t really the question, she had a feeling that she knew what he meant. And that he would see right through that. Celeste shook her head. “No, that’s not really what I want to ask. What did you do?”
The question was without judgment. The brunette had once asked him how to hurt people with magic, after all.
He cleared his throat. She really wanted him to go into this? He lowered his hand from his face and tried to figure out what to say while he stared at her necklace. Back at the El Rey, James had promised he wouldn’t keep things from her anymore; he’d be one-hundred percent real with her, and Celeste could make her choices from there.
James put his hands around her lower back and decided to start at the beginning. “The first time I hurt somebody, I was in Louisiana. I was, I dunno,” he shook his head, “Nineteen? Stupid. I’d gotten into a ritual where I summoned this-- thing I don’t name. It really started when I was a kid, I couldn’t even drive yet. It was an accident that time, but the next time, I did it on purpose. I didn’t have any business doing it because I didn’t know how to kick it back out or how to control it. It was like riding shotgun in my own body. It started out as a fight or two. Then the fights got worse...” He trailed off.
“Eventually the ritual thing stopped, but I’m not gonna lie, after that, after I knew what it felt like to hurt somebody, how to separate myself from it, it got easier. Especially if it was for something I thought was right. Something I knew needed to be done. And I got smarter. I figured out how to use magic instead of a knife.”
James frowned. “I haven’t done that in a long time. Unless you count Searchlight, and I guess you could. What I’m saying is that I can do it and I still sleep at night. Whatever that makes me.”
She listened to this quietly, intently. If there was one thing Celeste trusted inherently, it was her instinct. And it told her that James wasn’t evil. “I always thought I could do it,” she admitted. “If I hated someone enough. The person I wanted to hurt ended up dying, anyway.” That was the first time she said that out loud.
“With Caleb, it’s different. It feels logical and cold.” The brunette frowned, struggling to explain. “The world doesn’t need someone like him. And if it has to come down to me or him? I choose me.”
He wondered if the one person she meant was her dad.
James picked up her chin. “Good.” There was too much at stake to be ambiguous. “Because it doesn’t matter if it’s a trigger or a spell,” he said. “If we hesitate, it could go bad. The minute you say this is what you want, I’m in. That’s what this is.” He gestured between them. “Okay?”
She leaned up to kiss him, lips brushing over his as she placed her hand back over his heart. Pulling back, Celeste nodded. She knew he was right. “Okay.” The brunette looked up at him, thinking. “Nes said he was talking on the phone to someone about me. I want to find out who. And I want to know where he’s staying.” The knot that had taken up residence in her stomach earlier that afternoon began to untie itself.
“There’s also someone else who might be able to help. She’s in Searchlight, she’s a witch, too,” Celeste added.
“Who?” James scanned his memory for a magic user Celeste might know from that meeting at the diner. The only other one was Gabe. He knew it was a bad double-standard, but he’d gotten mildly suspicious of witches flying under his radar, especially in a town that small.
“Her name is Fern, I met her when she was staying at the El Rey.” Celeste didn’t think she needed to know all the details, but an extra pair of magical hands could come in...well, handy. “We both like plants,” she added, as if that explained everything.
“Fuuuck no.” James lifted his arms and wandered a couple steps away from Celeste. He locked his hands behind his neck and tried to get a hold of the wave of anger creeping up from his stomach. He had meant it when he told Noah he didn’t have a problem with Fern. It was one thing to let Fern get close to him because he knew what she was about; he wanted to learn from her, like she wanted to learn from him. But it was another to realize that someone tied to Elfleda was already close to his girlfriend, right under his nose.
“Look.” He took a breath and tried again. “You need to know. Fern’s an acolyte of Elfleda. She came looking for me on Elfleda’s orders. She’s who I did the ritual with at the cemetery. She’s like one of those LDS kids on a bike. Everything she does is for ‘the Lady’. You can bet if she does you a favor, it’s because she thinks it pleases her. You know where Phanuel’s been the last month? Locked up in her trailer because someone planted a bunch of poison weeds around her house.”
He walked back towards Celeste, cutting past her to go behind the counter. He knelt to retrieve something from under a shelf. It was a jar with a lid. Inside it was a dried piece of the plant that he pulled out of the angel’s yard. James set the jar on the counter between himself and Celeste. “She told me she’d been doing some gardening.”
Celeste stared at the jar and swallowed. She remembered Fern’s reaction to seeing the feather, and thinking it was odd, but justifying it in her mind. She crossed her arms and shook her head, feeling like an idiot. “I thought -- “ Her eyes slid away from the jar, away from James. “Fern told me about how she grew up, and it sounded a lot like my family. I thought she was just...damaged. That maybe I could help her.”
Finally, she looked up at him. “I picked something from outside Phanuel’s trailer, too. Just like that.” Celeste nodded toward the jar.
He saw the uncertainty in the way Celeste hugged herself. It was clear that she cared about the witch. Fern was someone Celeste felt connected to and he’d just screwed it up for her. “I get wanting to help her, but somebody else got there first.”
James put his hands on the edge of the counter. “What I’m telling you about Fern needs to stay between us. I don’t have any reason to hurt her, and I’m not gonna tell anybody about the ritual in the cemetery. I just don’t want you walking into something not knowing what it is,” he said. “The guy who broke into the shop a couple weeks ago, the one who was looking for power? His name was Noah. He said Elfleda wanted him to meet Fern, so I told him I’d help if he kept me in the loop about what she’s doing.”
James lifted his shoulders. “If you want her help, that’s your choice, but this is what she’s connected to.” James lifted his shoulders. “You already are, because of me.”
“I understand,” she said, looking at the jar again. “I won’t tell anyone.” Celeste wouldn’t dwell on how she felt about Fern then. Mentally, she pushed it away, compartmentalized. Her current goal was dealing with Caleb and, by extension, her family. She could process everything else later.
“I was thinking a location spell for Caleb first,” she said, looking back at him. “If he’s staying in Searchlight, I need to know.” It was even possible he was at the El Rey.
“Yeah. We can do that.” James tried to get his head back in the game. Between Caleb and Fern, he was the threat to Celeste right now. “We can do it now, if you want,” he said, pointing upstairs. It was as easy as flipping the sign on the front door and turning the lock. “By the way, there’s no way in hell you’re staying by yourself tonight. I know you can take care of yourself. It’s for me.”
She took his hand and smiled. “I love you,” Celeste said, eyes meeting his before gesturing upstairs. “Let’s find him.”