Drawing on a Memory Who: Echo, James What: A Ritual for Echo’s Sister When: Before Samhain Where: James’ House, Searchlight Ratings: Low
Her only question was, how did blood magic work?
There might have been one or two spellworkers in the Bishop family tree for all Echo knew, but it was long enough ago before she was born that she wasn’t sure. She doubted it was much like the movies, anyway, because they hardly ever got it right.
James’ house was easy to find, and she picked her way across the yard as the day slowly started to cool off. Overalls and work boots, a dark purple T shirt with short sleeves. The slash mark on her arm was completely healed, the thinnest of white scar tissue. She’d have a new scar later, once this was over. Because her blood was the only way to make this work, she understood that much.
The shifter climbed the steps, knocked lightly on the door frame. And she would have to explain some of her particular circumstances before they went ahead. Not quite the full moon, but close enough. She wanted James to know who and what he was dealing with, for the sake of being honest.
The knob rattled as someone turned the lock. The door swung into the living room. “Hey.” James looked past her, doing a quick visual check of the area between his trailer and the auto shop, and he stepped back to let Echo into the house. “Come on in.” He stood back so she could enter without him crowding her. He was in a time-faded Iron Maiden shirt, worn jeans, and boots, three days’ growth of beard on his face. The living room she came into was clean and comfortable but not all that decorated, except for black and white photos on the wall: Arnette, Sam, a dog he didn’t have anymore, a few places he’d been. The most recent one was a picture of a brunette who wasn’t looking at the camera.
The coffee table and end tables were full of books and notebooks, an incense burner, a couple of minerals and half-burnt candles. The air smelled faintly of burnt plants from cleansing the room: mugwort, sage, and rosemary. There was a bowl full of ashes and stalks, a lighter sitting next to it. “How’s your truck running?”
He let the door close and walked deeper into the room, stepping over a trunk he’d dragged in from the second bedroom. It had gotten warm in there when he opened the windows to air the place out. James pushed the window down and latched it.
“It’s running good, thanks.” Her nose twitched at the leftover scent of smoke, and she stepped further into the room, her attention caught by the pictures on the wall. “Your dad? “ she asked, pointing at the photograph of the older man, studying James where he was still at the window. “I can see the resemblance.”
Echo looked out at the yard through the window for a moment, watched the late day sun starting to dip towards the horizon. “You’ve done this more than once, I’m guessin’. Locator spells? I don’t know what you call it. I know a little bit about spellcraft, just not near enough to practice it.”
She tucked a piece of brown hair behind her ear, eyed the trunk. “How does it work?”
James had nodded when she pointed out Sam.
“A few times,” he said, following it with a mild smile as he finished closing the window. There was something dangling from the latch, a bundle that looked like wood and stone, tightly bound in leather cord. A warded object. There were magic users that went out of their way to seem ordinary or like casual practitioners, others who couldn’t wait to talk about what they did. None was James’ way. If Echo wasn’t picking up on what his house and physical presence were putting down, there was no reason to read off a resume, as long as she trusted him enough to come to him.
“Well,” he took a breath, “I usually go for a map to narrow things down, but you already know they’re here. So we can do that, if you want. Give you a place to work from, no blood required. Or we can dig a little deeper.” James crossed his arms. “Try to forge a connection, see if we can come up with a description. Maybe it’s the person, maybe something connected to them. You draw, right?”
“Yeah, and I’ve done a good bit since I’ve been here. Not just in the breakdown lane.” She couldn’t figure out where to put herself, so she took a seat on the couch, crossing one booted foot over the other. “I thought about it, and using blood would probably be better. Mine, not yours. I figure, she’s got the same genes, or half the same.”
Echo looked down at her hands, turned them over to study the palms. “We should probably clear one thing up first. ‘Cause I don’t know if making a connection with her...if I’ll shift by accident.”
She let it out, just a little of the Wolf, eyes turning dark gold as she looked up at James, and while she didn’t expect a freak out, she doubted he’d appreciate having to corral her if worse came to worse. Roped it back in, sat back a little on the sofa. “We’re not exactly the Cleavers.”
James shrugged. He picked up a rock from the table and sank into a chair diagonally from her. “Who is?” Not him, Sam, and Arnette. Not Celeste’s family. He leaned forward, palms turning the piece of Devonian limestone from the Spring Mountains. “This area is full of therianthropes,” he told her. “Wolves, cats. When you shift, do you still know who you are? Are you in control?” If the answer was yes, there shouldn’t be a problem. If it wasn’t, James would have to think through a safety net for the ritual. He’d like one that didn’t involve stabbing a stranger with a piece of silver in the middle of his living room.
“Yeah, I know. Smells and sounds get sharper, and the urge to run is like an itch that can only be scratched by a lot of open ground, but I’m still me. And I’ve never hurt anyone.” A pause, and Echo cleared her throat. “Well, I’ve never hurt a person. That’s how I know it’s still me, just with fur and a tail. A few animals, though. Unca says that’s normal, almost to be expected, but you get outcast status with a fuckin’ quickness if you start biting people just ‘cause you can. A real Alpha wouldn’t abide that.”
She looked at the rock in James’ hands, the way the light fell on the green stone. “It’s close enough to the full phase, I thought I should say something. I know me, but you don’t.”
“I appreciate the heads up.” James set down the rock. “And not being turned into a werewolf. No offense.’
James looked at the corner of his living room where he usually did magic on the floor, then over at a small dining room table with chairs. What he had in mind for Echo was better suited to a flat surface. “Come on.” He pushed off his knees and pulled out a chair for Echo at the table, tapping the back, then started putting things on the table while she got settled. James walked back and forth in the living space, setting out a ritual knife, a towel, gauze and tape, a porcelain bowl, a mirror, a lighter, a pad of paper and pen.
“You said she. I’m assuming it’s your sister.” He walked into the kitchen for a second. There was a sound of hot water being poured into a container. When he came back, he set it steaming on a hot pad and poured a packet of loose, dried leaves into it, which were a mixture of jasmine, sandalwood, and lavender. The vapor would open up her intuition without making their eyes look like they’d been smoking in a car.
James sat down, took up the pen and thick pad of paper. The ritual was dependent on Echo to work: her blood, her family, her intention, so it would work better if it came from her. Blood was a powerful ingredient for somebody with no spellcasting experience, but he ought to be able to ground her, especially if he gave her control over some elements of the ritual. The simpler, the better. He went back to sigil-making 101. “Some people do this with letters, but you’re an artist, so we’re gonna try something else.” James murmured, passing the pad of paper to Echo. “I want you to think about what you want, but don’t think about searching for it. Think about having it. Then draw a symbol that represents it. Something simple and crude.”
The chair’s legs scraped quietly on the floor as Echo sat down, picked up the pen. Stared down at the blank sheet of paper and dug around inside herself, the way her hands used to dig into the dirt of her backyard. One thing.
The pen started to move after a minute, a scratching noise on the paper as Echo began to draw. It would have been a lie to say she’d been lonely growing up. She’d had friends, a circle she could trust, shared experiences and created memories she treasured. So loneliness was the wrong word.
But she’d wondered sometimes what it would be like to have a sibling. Caitlyn never remarried, though sometimes she would take up with another shifter. Despite some of her woo-woo beliefs, her mother was a traditionalist in the sense that it was better to start a family with two parents, Either that or she didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.
Two plain hearts, drawn in black ink, one overlapping the other. She didn’t think it would be that simple, and yet.
James put a clean towel on the table. He took up the knife and reached for her left wrist, positioning it over the bowl. “Alright, this’ll be quick. We don’t need a lot.” He made a thin incision across her forearm with the sterilized knife, then set the knife down and angled her wrist so that Echo’s blood ran into the bowl. Red drops splattered the bottom.
It stung, but not much, and Echo watched blood well up in the cut before drip-drip-dripping into the waiting bowl. Wolf blood was potent, that was how they passed their genes down, mixed it with the human side to make something new. She flexed her fingers before James bandaged the shallow wound, bled just a little more.
After a moment, he put a piece of gauze across the incision, tore off some tape, and secured it. James tore the piece of paper off the pad, folded it, and struck the lighter at the corner. Once the fire had destroyed the sigil, he tossed it in the water.
“Now I’m going to hold your hand.” James picked up the fingers of her non-dominant hand. “When I start talking, I want you to look at the mirror and think about having what you want. I need you to believe it’s working, Echo. Imagine it working. If she’s close, you’ll see something that connects you to her. Use your blood to draw it on the mirror. When you’re finished, wipe it away.”
She cast outwards, like a kid throwing rocks into a lake, looking for common ground with someone she’d never met. There was a tiny red spot on the gauze. His palm was as callused as hers was.
James took a deep breath of the perfumed air and looked at their joined hands. When he was ready, he said, “Cudere nexum, ubicumque quaestio est de mente, et speculum ostendit ei in via, ad eam sororem.”
The tree was old, a fir or a spruce, she was too young to tell. Her mother had pulled her away before she could try to climb it. She was just shy of seven, and it was the only time they’d gone up to Oregon to see Rowan’s parents. It had gone up and up and up, so high that she couldn’t see the top no matter how much she craned her neck. Her hands had been sticky with sap when they’d stepped inside. The tree was the only solid memory she had of the trip, and on the car drive back she’d asked her father if God had put it there as a Christmas tree that could be seen from heaven. Had he answered her?
Her index finger dipped into the blood, crimson fluid viscous to the touch, and she smeared the clean glass of the mirror with it in the primitive image of the fir-or-maybe-spruce in her grandparents’ backyard. Stared at it, angular features becoming more taut as if she could think it into existence. Her free hand moved, wiped at the image, leaving a red smudge.
James watched her draw until she swiped at what looked like a tree, that last motion breaking the spell of the ritual. He gave her mind a second to process any residual images she might have gotten at the end and shake loose of it. If the look of concentration and sureness of her drawing was anything to go buy, she’d tapped into something shared, which meant her sister was near.
“Confractus nexum. Echo?” He let go of her hand. “What did you see?” The pad of paper and pen were close by in case she wanted to draw it more clearly.
“There was a tree in the yard, a really tall one. I wanted to try and climb it, but Momma wouldn’t let me.” Echo’s voice was subdued, and she was looking at her hands again, feeling a little like she’d just emerged from a dream. “I hadn’t thought about that in a really long time,” she told James. “But it means it worked, right? That she’s close enough mI can...that I can find her?”
There was a pause, and a frown line appeared between her eyebrows. “Does it work both ways? I’m sure that’s a stupid question, but with how weird this place is…”
James nodded. The quickness with which she drew that tree made him think her sister was not only close, but that it was a powerful memory for her, too. “I’d say she’s real close,” he said, folding the towel over the knife and setting the bowl out of Echo’s way, “and if she’s a wolf, this close to the full moon, there’s a good chance she saw it, too. Or she might have felt a presence. Maybe you can find a way to use what you saw to send her a signal.”
He leaned back in his chair.
“Thank you, James.” She let out a soft breath, and her voice was low when she added, “The full phase is in two days. I can do some meditating later, clear my head. Might not be a radio signal, but a clear mind reaches farther than a cluttered one. If she did notice something, maybe that’ll help. Ease the shock, at least.”
James nodded. “Couldn’t hurt. If that doesn’t work, there’s always flyers on telephone poles.” He smiled to let her know he was kidding and scraped his chair backwards across the floor. The bowl and folded towel with knife were the first items he picked up to carry to the kitchen sink and wash. “The bathroom’s right there in the hall if you want to wash up,” he added, indicating the blood on her fingers and a drop that had made its way down Echo’s wrist. “If you’re feeling foggy, it’ll wear off soon. Fresh air’ll help. The stuff floating in that water smells mild, but it can pack a punch.”
She laughed a little, and her knees did wobble when she got up from the chair. Found the bathroom and turned on the tap after a glance at herself in the mirror. One step closer, or maybe a lot more than one. Almost there.