Byron: The Dark Witch

Prompt the Fifth - Mud Wrestling Midgets & Fiery Winnebagos

They sat in the kitchen, tea forgotten and cooling on the IKEA table. They watched each other, wary and uncertain. Incredulity lined one face, stony determination the other. Usually matched for wits, stubbornness and passion, this was a strange moment as they paused, caught at an impasse born of scepticism. The clock ticked. Time melted through light and shadow.

Aoife burst the silence with slow, precise words. “A magus. You want me to help you heal a magus. No, sorry, you want to heal one of them? You? Of all people?”

“Yes.” Replied her brother with a nod as firm as his affirmative.

Her eyebrows rose and fell, rose and fell as her confusion and unrest battled for dominance. “But why? He’s one of them.”

“He might not survive as he is, Aoife.”

“So what? You’ve had your dealing with the church before. You know what they’re doing to people like us.”

“And is that the point?” He snapped, “I won’t watch him die.”

“So send him to a hospital.” She bit back, eyes flashing with indignation. Telltale signs divulged her irritation. He’d upset her.

“I can’t do that. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he came here. If he wanted to lay a trap, he’d not have come to me in the state he’s in right now. No poison or spell could create the agonies he’s in and there’s more...” Byron winced, thoughts of his brief examination of the magus swarming to the surface of his mind, “His injuries...”

The human body was a catalogue of the life it led; calloused fingers belied an instrument practiced and played every day, pale skin indicated months spent cloistered from the sun, shorn hair suggested a possible military past. Past scars, a riddle of narrow escapes and unlucky accidents, leant the body its history, just as the lack of them might imply a kind of unlived life. The magus’ body was a mixture of past hurts and recent pleasures. It also bore the brunt of handiwork Byron had hoped to never, never witness again.

Reaching for his tepid tea, he took a bitter mouthful, swallowed. He took another sip and replaced the mug on the table. Aoife’s eyes never flickered away from him. Analysing his every move, she wanted to know his motives. She was a half-fae, vibrant, brilliant, reckless. She was human insofar as she was mortal, able to use magick, felt more and deeply than her otherkin mother. But she could had inherited the faerie pettiness as well as their humour and sense of honour. It made for a peculiar blend at times. In their childhood, well... he could say now with much more fervour that he loved her as his blood sister than he could as a scrawny human boy whose magick was often as unruly as his hair.

“You mentioned them before you mentioned what he was.” He realised she was responding, “But nothing looks too out of whack to me. Just that wheeze.”

Byron lowered his head, knowing he would have to explain and wishing it was easier, “You glanced through the door and saw his robe before demanding an explanation. That’s hardly a fitting exam.”

She shifted a little guiltily though Byron didn’t call her on it. Instead, standing, he turned to the door, inviting her to follow as he marched upstairs to the bedside of his visitor. With a gentleness he displayed rarely, he drew back the covers and pushed the cloth of the man’s shirt from his shoulders. The torso beneath was blackened. But not by any bruise Byron had ever seen. Pooling like smog over the man’s heart, it was coal black in the centre, fading out into strange patterns, almost symbols in whispish gray tendrils on his skin, sprawling down his chest. That same chest wheezed, a broken rattle catching in his lungs. His skin was white and clammy, his lips grey.

“Look at his face.” Byron murmured, distracting Aoife from her horrified curiousity, “See the bruising. It focuses around his mouth, his cheeks. He was gagged at some point. Recently, though not for the past few days, see how they’re yellowing? They’re healing but it was bad enough to hurt.” He waved a hand downwards, gesturing at the man’s wrists, “He was likely bound, again in the same time frame. He’s been a prisoner. And then there’s the bruising on his feet. Someone didn’t want him to run away. It’s a miracle he made it here from wherever he’s from...”

“His feet?”

“The soles have been beaten. Just standing on them would have been agony.”

Aoife nodded. She knew. She knew all that he knew. But sometimes it helped to have it said aloud.

“And this mark on his chest?”

“I have no idea. I think it’s ben caused by magick... but...”

“... there’s no way to tell what kind is there? Will or Word?”

“No.”

“So he could be your enemy?”

“He could also be our friend.”

“Is it worth the risk?”

“Aoife,” Byron’s tone contained a note that demanded attention, “You know as well as I do, the things I have done. I have killed and maimed men before. I’m not thinking about what his life is worth. I’m thinking that it’s a life and that I need an anchor if I’m going to heal him. I don’t want another life on my conscience.”

For just a moment, her expression was dumbfounded. She had almost forgotten, he supposed, about his years as a man worthy of being hunted. He thought it was for the greater good – picking off the people who plagued his kind with hate and hurt and hunts. But that was foolishness. Such actions upset the balance more than it maintained it. And that was the important thing. Waiting for her response, he thought of all the other reasons he had to want to help. Even if this man was a church minion whose power went against the nature of magick, Byron had memories darker and more painful than he cared to dwell on, memories of Atlanta where everything that made him himself was ripped apart, fractured and thrown to the southern wind. He had been the victim. He had been rescued and healed though he was unworthy of redemption.

“I’ll help.” Her face had closed, she understood him again, “But I think we should just deal with the bruises now, maybe see what can be done for his lungs but that,” she waved her hand over the strange black stain, “that I have no idea.”

*

They chant together, hands linking over the unconscious magus. Their voices are low, renewing their oaths, calling upon the earth to aid them. Byron’s blood sings, the magick responding with glee. Aoife blocks the potential for the raw, black magicks of his past to creep into the healing magicks. She anchors him. He soars.

He is warm.

Magick whistles through his body, a shiver, a whisper of the organic. It is inside him and he is inside it. At first it flutters, a flurry of excited leaves stirred on a November day, unfolding from within and without him. He greets it, extends himself to the power outside of himself. He offers it fragments of his story, the only thing that is his to exchange and it curls tight about him. The wind roils. The sun swims in delicate flights of fancy. The magicks are still content from Beltane, still swirling with enjoyment and celebration.

The air smells of peaches, warm and light. He asks to heal, to find the sources of hurt and make the damage unwrought. The essence of a stranger tipples in the aether all around him. That is Edward McTaggart, magus, stranger to lores and blood magick. Aoife’s presence swims around him, a weight about his waist, reminding him...

Pools of energy begin to pool into his hands and he raises eyes so green they glow and Aoife releases him. The onslaught of pain is not new, he is used to his blood magicks hurting him as part of his penance. He brings his hands to the face of the magus. Once more, he sinks into the magick, travelling through it, into this body, into the burst cells as he feeds little drips of power into them, rejuvenating them. And then the poor, abused feet that this man had walked on in order to find him. Byron’s head falls back on his shoulders, he takes away the bruises one by one – it is easy damage to repair.

The wheeze is harder. He falls lower into the magus’ body, past the sick, black thing that he now sees with painful clarity. The stain is alive, spreading downwards into the body. It is heavy, oily. It threatens to latch onto him as he passes but he dives deeper, knowing the way up will be just as hard. Edward’s lungs are full of the stain. Smog-like but alive, it swirls around his lungs, poisoning them with the same, odd blackness. Weaving threads of his own magick together, Byron nets off the clean sections of lung, pushing back against the writhing stain.

He doesn’t know anymore about this monster than Aoife, but he something tells him, Edward McTaggart is a dead man walking.

*

It was three hours later that Bryon and Aoife emerged from their trance. Exhausted and shaking, he made tea and they slumped together onto the bed in his room. Just about big enough for two, they talked of the strange stain, the fears Byron had for his not-so-welcome guest; they muttered about magick and the fluxes felt in recent weeks, the upset in the normal harmony of things... Byron began to tremble. His addiction never left him, and from time to time, when he called upon blood magicks like those used in healing, he was plagued by the dreams and the vivid recollections of his past. Aoife took his hand in hers and he remembered the way he’d woken up after nightmares before, wishing she was there. She was the only link left to their childhood, he told her, and that was important. And then his magick revolted and took him into its feral embrace.

He could be everything, it promised him. It could take him away. Forever. It opened its jaws for him and he was swallowed whole.

He didn't know that when he woke up, Edward McTaggart would be awake as well, ready to tell him about the witch whose trial had so recently disturbed his meditations. He didn't know what was in store for him. He didn't know that he'd be swept up into a game as bloody and sadistic as his worst memories. But he did dream of the black stain and he did know that something about it would plague him until its mystery was solved. But until he was awake, he was plunged into his own personal hell.

Aoife, tired eyed and pensive, held his hand until dawn and his dreams broke and they were both finally able to sleep.

Word Count: 1,842