Zania Castell (brokendoll) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2019-12-30 18:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | #january 2018, caius, caius x zania, zania |
Who: Zania and Caius
Where: Caius’s Office
When: Tuesday afternoon, January 9
Status: Complete
It had been late Monday night when Zania found her first clue related to the tattoo on her shoulder, but it was Tuesday afternoon before she worked up the nerve to do anything about it. After everything that had transpired over the past few months, she thought she would be more comfortable reaching out to another witch for help, but when it came down to actually needing to she found it easier said than done. It felt like a failure on her part, being unable to find the answers all on her own, but in the end her life was more important than her pride. The birds that had tried to peck her to death that morning reminded her of that.
Once Nic showed up at the shop to cover the afternoon, she pulled out her phone, staring at the screen for a few minutes before typing out a text, deleting it, typing out another, then deleting again before she forced herself to send the third iteration. Do you have a minute to look at something with me? I can come to you. She still wasn’t satisfied with it, but once it was sent there was no point in worrying over it anymore. If Caius said no, she’d go to Reagan, but she was hoping he was good to his word. If they were friends, he would help.
After spending a full day off doing nothing but spending time with Reagan, Caius was a bit reluctant to return to work. He really just wanted to keep fucking and loving and napping with his woman. But duty called, they both had responsibilities, so he returned to the office feeling like a new man on Tuesday morning. With no immediate upcoming holidays, he finally had time to clean out his inbox and look into some new business opportunities, and it felt kind of good to fall back into his mundane work, like pulling on a well-broken-in pair of jeans.
When his phone buzzed with a text message, he expected it to be Reagan, and his brows lifted to see that wasn’t the case. Zania. Asking for his ... consultation on something? Caius didn’t hesitate to thumb in an answer and send it along to her. Of course. I’m at the office, is that ok?
Zania barely had time to start biting her nails before she got a response. She closed her eyes for a second, sighed, then typed out a quick response. Yes. Be there soon. She would’ve preferred he was at home, but she wasn’t going to wait. There were downsides either way: at work people might talk, but at home she’d probably have Reagan there and she only wanted to deal with one of them at a time. “I’m going,” she called out to Nic, then she was out the door to make the short drive between her shop and Caius’ office.
She didn’t pay any mind to the looks she got as she walked through the building, aware that people were likely going to talk, but small town gossip was unavoidable. The only person who stopped her progress was the assistant outside Caius’ office and she forced herself to be patient while the woman called to confirm she was expected. She paced rather than barging her way in, her heart beating hard. If Caius couldn’t help, but she didn’t know where to go from there and the anticipation was driving her a little bit mad.
Caius didn’t think Zania had ever come to his office for anything, so he was a little concerned as he waited for her to turn up. It didn’t take long before his assistant ran his desk phone, and he told her to send Ms. Castell on back, and that no, she didn’t need an escort. People talking about Zania’s presence there was the least of his worries at the moment. He cared nothing about small-minded gossips. Caius stood up and moved from behind his desk to greet Zania as she came in. She looked kind of frazzled, where he’d never felt so secure in his power and place in the world, everything on him pin-neat and collected once more. Though he was frowning with concern. “What’s going on?” he asked once she was through the door, already moving to close it behind her.
Over the past couple of months, she’d seen Caius in various stages of discomfort, from his memory being gone to the discomfort of having Reagan lose her magic. Today he looked more put together than ever, finally whole again, while she could feel herself coming apart at the seams. She’d done her best to pull herself together, to maintain appearances where they mattered to her, but she couldn’t do anything about the growing circles under her eyes and she was almost certain there were feathers in her hair. When she entered Caius’s office, she stayed standing, too wound up to even sit. “I need your help,” she said, those four little words costing her more than he’d probably ever know. “I’ve been dealing with something, I thought it was a curse, but… I guess I should start with this,” she said, and reached into her purse to retrieve a folded piece of paper, the seal holding it closed broken but still intact. “Have you ever seen this before?” she asked, pointing to the seal. This part she could’ve done via text, but there was so much more to it and she couldn’t imagine having this conversation over the phone. “Anywhere? In any context?”
He felt a jolt of shock when Zania stated she needed him, but managed to keep the surprise off of his face. Caius knew she hadn’t been happy with him lately, for reasons he still felt like he didn’t completely understand, but he also knew that Zania Castell was just about as prideful as he was. Asking for help didn’t come easy for either of them. Caius wasn’t honestly surprised to hear she’d been dealing with something, but it gave him a vague sense of weariness. There was never peace for everyone, was there? He walked in close to her and carefully took the paper, tilting the seal toward the light to get a good look at it. Caius’s thick brows drew closer together as he studied it. “This is familiar,” he murmured, more to himself than Zania. Caius had been poring over dozens of books for months now, so maybe that wasn’t so surprising. It took him another moment to place it, but once it clicked, he couldn’t believe he didn’t know it immediately. Caius looked up at Zania sharply. “This was in Baron’s grimoire. Where’d it come from?”
There was a surge of hope as Caius expressed recognition with the symbol, but it all came crashing down when he recalled where it was from. Of course it was in Baron’s grimoire. How long did this bitch have to be dead before she stopped fucking with people’s lives? Zania groaned in frustration, shaking her head at her poor luck. “You know the page you found at my house? The concealment spell was wrapped around it and that symbol was on the seal. It’s also on my shoulder, like a tattoo I never asked for.” She ran her hands over her face, pushing her dreadlocks back and giving them a little tug. “I thought it was some kind of a curse, but my attempts to remove it have failed spectacularly. You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of Baron’s spell, would you?” In this regard she was hopeful. Caius had had Baron’s grimoire in his possession and, if it was her, she would’ve copied every page out before returning it. Knowing Caius, she thought maybe he’d have done the same.
Caius remembered finding the page they’d needed to break the curse in Zania’s basement. Or he remembered Zan finding it, anyway. He’d been so keen on getting his hands on it that he hadn’t even noticed it was wrapped in something else. Fuck. Already Caius was worrying that this might come back onto himself and Reagan somehow. He frowned again when Zan mentioned a tattoo, but it didn't stop him from heading toward his desk. “I scanned in every single page and saved it digitally to make it easier to search,” he told her. Caius grabbed the back of one of the chairs in front of the desk and pulled it around to his usual side. He patted it as he sat in his desk chair. “Come, sit, we’ll find it. Tell me what’s been happening with this not-curse.”
“Of course you did,” Zania said, her lips twitching up for just a second. She’d been trying to do something similar, to ‘go digital’ for reference purposes, but there was power in the pages that spells were written on and she was reluctant to part with the hard copy of even the most obscure and useless spells. It was also hard to properly catalogue when under a high degree of stress. “It sounds insane,” she said, coming to take a seat beside him as he worked on his computer. “Things have been attacking me in mass: bugs, spiders, rats. This morning it was birds. It’s escalating to the point where I worry about leaving the house. The bugs and rats came at me outside, but the spiders got me in the shop. And I don’t even know if it’s limited to creepy crawly things. I’m worried about wolves at this point. And snakes. I could handle one, maybe two, but not fifty.” Where did snakes even come from in the dead of winter? It wasn’t even logical.
He was very precious about his books and tomes, so Caius understood the power of the page. Having digital copies of things just made research and cross-reference easier, and that was his bread and butter, especially these days. If Caius hadn’t come from the family he’d come from, he definitely would’ve been a library hermit. He started opening up files on his laptop, though he gave Zania a concerned glance when she mentioned being attacked by bugs and animals. “No shit?” he muttered, studying her for a moment. Then Caius blew some air out from between his lips and shook his head. “We should’ve all ... done a cleansing or something while we were all together. I’m sorry you’ve been dealing with all that shit.” Caius started clicking rapidly through grimoire pages, sharp eyes hunting for the symbol.
“I’d laugh if it wasn’t me,” Zania told him in all seriousness. She’d have been intrigued, would have wanted to witness one of those attacks, and would’ve loved to get her hands on such a spell, even if she never planned to use it. Now she just wanted it to stop. “A cleansing might’ve made it spread,” she said, eyes on the screen as he scrolled through the pages. “Nic and Gabriel were with me when I tried to remove the ‘curse’ and now they’re marked too.” Nothing had happened to them yet, but she thought it was just a matter of time. “It’s not your fault though. I’d’ve gotten around to opening it eventually. Plus side is now I’m finally getting everything organized and catalogued.” Desperation wasn’t really how she’d wanted to approach the project, but oh well.
Caius would’ve never kept a collection of unknown spells in boxes in the basement, he was much more anal retentive than that by nature, but he would’ve understood Zania’s desperation. The urgency of searching for answers to a life-or-death situation when you felt completely helpless was not an easy thing to go through. It hadn’t occurred to him that Zania’s problem was at all his fault, but he didn’t say so. Caius just kept looking until he spotted the symbol on the screen. He almost passed it, but quickly clicked back a page, sitting up straighter. “There,” he said, zooming in. “I knew it was in here. That’s it, right? Can I see the mark?” It matched the seal on the parchment, but Caius was curious to make sure it compared exactly to the mark on her body Zania had mentioned.
A shiver ran through her as she saw the symbol on the screen, an exact match to the one etched into her skin. She immediately began to scan the associated spell, hoping it included a way to reverse it, but needing to understand what it was that attacking her first. “Yeah, sure,” she muttered and slid her arms out of her coat. She brushed her hair out of the way and tugged at her sweater, exposing the mark on the back of her shoulder without ever taking her eyes off the screen. “It’s a demon,” she said, half in shock and half amazed. “They summoned a fucking demon to latch on to whomever broke the seal. Who does that?” She had her answer-- apparently her family and Baron’s. “The ritual’s here, documentation on how to perform it, and--can you scroll down?” She reached across him to do it herself even before she finished asking. She needed to see the rest, the consequences and how to stop them.
Caius looked at Zania’s skin instead of the screen for a moment, studying the mark that definitely looked like a purposeful tattoo. Huh. “Baron was a heinous bitch, so that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,” he muttered. Caius rolled his chair back a bit when Zan reached over toward the mouse, then reached over her arms to turn the laptop screen toward her a bit so she could read easier. He scanned the page himself, brow furrowed. Baron and Zania’s ancestors sure as hell didn’t want anybody to get their hands on the page with the curse, it seemed like. Caius wasn't sure what his and Reagan’s families had done, but the hate was almost palpable to him at the moment.
“Baron should’ve been long dead by the time her family’s magic was suppressed,” Zania said as she tried to put it all together. “I can’t imagine her allowing them to do this when she’d been alive. It would’ve included her. It’s possible it did, even in death, but who’s to know?” She hadn’t thought ghosts could do magic, but apparently they could if they had a host. She continued to read over the spell, her lips pressing into a hard line as she neared the end. The next page was something totally different and unrelated. She scrolled back and sighed. “It looks like the demon uses natural things, animals or objects, whatever that means, to scare the target, until eventually killing them. Interfering can cause it to spread. There’s nothing here on how to reverse it, or banish it. You ever banish a demon?” She asked, glancing over him with a raised brow.
Caius had been skimming the words on the screen around Zania’s head too, so he’d gotten the gist of it. It was only vaguely familiar -- he’d been so focused on finding a solution to the curse that he hadn’t read every word of the Baron grimoire. It was a pretty wicked spell though, worse than most of the other curses he knew, especially the part about it spreading. Caius wanted to help Zania, but he also didn’t want to invite another fucking problem into his and Reagan’s life. The question gave him a weirdly surreal feeling. He was a demon, at least in part, and now he wondered if that would ever interfere in his dealings with them. It hadn’t so far, as far as he was aware, but somehow knowing about his demonic blood made him question whether it would come up in the future. “A fairly minor one, out of a teenager, a couple of months ago,” he said, looking at Zania grimly. “But that was a possession, not something like ... this. Yours seems to be running around doing what it wants, and I would think it’ll be harder to get rid of without being bound to a host. You said Nic and ... Gabriel, was it? They’re affected now too?”
“Yeah,” Zania sighed. “They were there when I tried to remove it. It hasn’t started in on them yet, but they’re marked, same as me, same place and everything.” Even though the spell had failed, it must have been considered ‘interfering’ and latched itself on to anyone in the room. It seemed like a fuzzy line and made Zania even more reluctant to ask for help, concerned that anyone else might get pulled in. She didn’t think that applied here, all they were doing was talking, but she’d rather be safe than sorry. “Okay,” she said, giving the desk a little knock. “Would you mind printing that page for me? Just so I have it for reference? I’ve got some more research to do.” At least now she knew what she was after and that was half the battle.
“Of course,” Caius murmured as he reached for the mouse and hit the right button. The printer on a table beside his desk quietly whirred to life. Caius sat back again and eyed Zania briefly. He didn’t want to get cursed himself, or marked or whatever it was, but he also couldn’t leave her high and dry. She had her brother and her boyfriend, of course, but Caius didn’t know the extent of Gabriel’s abilities and he’d never been very impressed with Nic’s. “Let me know if there’s anything more I can do to help,” he told her. “Research or trying to ward you or rallying the coven back together. We’re all apparently extremely powerful collaborators.” He gave a faint smile.
“We are, aren’t we?” Zania said, a smile tugging at her lips. “I’d do that again in a heartbeat, but the last thing we need is you getting marked too or, worse, the whole coven. But I appreciate the offer.” Her family had apparently played its part in all this nonsense with Baron and she would find a way to deal with it without passing it on to anyone else. She was confident that there was a way to stop it; it was just a matter of finding it before the demon decided to claim her. She had the feeling that things could get much, much worse. “If I find any new leads, I’ll let you know. Since you’ve got three grimoires at your fingertips as opposed to my one plus boxes of mystery.”
The way the thing spread did pose a problem, but part of Caius was sure the coven could handle it and destroy the demon without much trouble. Maybe that was giving them too much credit, though. They’d achieved what they’d done because they had a clear ritual plan and he was in charge, but Caius didn’t have a plan for this. He could probably make one if Zania wanted his help, but she seemed to have it in hand. “I’m just full of resources,” he agreed with a small chuckle. Caius pulled the sheet of paper off the printer to hand to her. “Keep me updated, please.” Even besides the chance for it to spread, Caius cared about Zania and he definitely didn’t want her to get pecked to death by crows or something.
“I will,” Zania said as she accepted the print out and tucked it in her purse. “I’m not above asking for help when I need it, but I want to get it right, for everyone’s sake.” If she found a solution and couldn’t handle it, Caius was probably the only witch she knew that could help. Loathe as she was to admit it, he was probably more powerful than her, though even the thought grated on her. It wasn’t skill, she told herself, but experience, and there were some things that she’d not dipped her toes into that she thought Caius had probably taken on. “Nice place, by the way,” she said, looking around as she stood. “Little stuffy for me, but it suits you.”
Caius stood with Zania to walk her to the door. “Thank you,” he said with a faint smile. His office was fairly austere, with nice furniture in muted grays and blues that he’d picked out when he’d taken it over. He supposed it did suit him. “Good thing it’s my office then, I suppose.” Caius opened the door for her and gave her a nod. “Please don’t hesitate to reach out, if we can do anything,” he told her again. After what the coven had done for Reagan, Caius was inclined to help any of them with anything he could, but Zania especially. They had history. It hadn’t always been great history, but it was still history.
Zania nodded. Caius and the coven were valuable resources; she wouldn’t hesitate to call in a favor if her life depended on it. She just hoped it wouldn’t come to that, that she could figure this out on her own before circumstances became… well, more dire than they already were. “See ya around,” she said, giving him a small smile back. “Tell Reagan hello for me.” A part of her didn’t want Reagan to know, a desire to limit the number of people who knew she had a problem she couldn’t solve, but Reagan was his wife and she might know something Caius didn’t. Not that she’d ever say that. With one last wave, Zania left, hoping this clue might lead to another and that she’d find her way out of this before it was too late.