Re: [log: antique store - daniel/claire/louis]
Louis nodded, once, in response to her assertion that no one deserved to go through such a thing. That it had happened, this violation of his soul, that it was still happening, was something he had come to take for granted. He couldn’t very well get on with his life if he didn’t.
“Truthfully, I have no idea,” he said. He found his tea again, took a sip from the now lukewarm mug. “It was old, silver, heavily tarnished and worn. I think it was a male saint, but I couldn’t see any more detail.” He reached into his pocket for his phone. “When I first became reunited with the thing, I took a photo of it. When its hold was broken, it melted away into nothing, so there’s nothing to show you but the image, I’m afraid.” He passed his phone to her. “I have no idea if the saint would even have significance. I never thought about it, for whatever reason.”
It needs you. He drained the mug and set it aside, doing his best not to look too miserable. Feeling sorry for himself wasn’t going to help anyone. “I suppose it must do. Otherwise it would torment me further. Probing for weaknesses?” That wasn’t good. “In what way?”
The symbol was intimidating. The image of a mace with two lion’s heads - what was in that, then, for the people who thought of it? Duality, war, violence. He looked at it while she described the killings in the Capital, only turning his gaze up again when she started in on the gory details, lip curled. “Much more blood than New York,” he said. “So it’s gone back to its typical way of doing things. If it is me - the thing,” he said, correcting swiftly. “It’s not acting for anyone but itself, now, so the rituals have taken a turn for the ancient rather than the purely biblical. I suppose it makes a kind of sense.”
He was starting to feel genuinely sick. Blood daubed on pale skin, the broken minds of long-staring cultists. How had this become a part of his life? He felt Daniel’s long stare and looked up, caught him looking at his chest. It didn’t frighten him, that stare. It did make him wonder, though.
He liked Daniel’s conclusion - not merely logical, but solid, clinical, enough to bring him out of himself a little. “That would make sense,” he said. “But how? I haven’t gone to the Capital in months, not since it became...active again.” The level of heat in the room had not dropped. It was getting more intense, actually. Drier, too, not the wet heat of a summer in the pacific northwest. The fan on the air conditioner kicked into second gear, whining quietly in its metal casing. “Or could it have been before then? Is it like...a contagion? Or a disease? Airborne, waterborne, something like that?”
“Perhaps all one needs is to be in the same room,” he said. The fan inside the air conditioner shrieked, once, and halted, burbling and chugging to a stop. It was now at least ninety degrees inside this room, warm enough to make any cold-blooded predator want nothing more than to sun contentedly on a rock, warm enough to make a scion of the church drip sweat from her temple.
“Or maybe it was the heat,” he said, softly. “Heat makes men mad. Or perhaps they were not mad at all, but seekers, finding their own light. Sweet thought. Have you ever been mad, Bellatora?” Blue eyes swung to Daniel, still as clear as a moment before, a stare that ran backward a hundred miles into sunlight, but shed not a glint outside.