Chapter 2: Nevianne

The wet asphalt of the parking lot disappeared, to be replaced by dusty, rustic-looking, gray plank flooring. The chill rain was gone, to be replaced by warmth halfheartedly cast by a fireplace. There were distinct barnyard odors: Cows, horses, chickens, and a few other animals that I couldn’t quite identify by sense of poop smell. They still had outdoor plumbing in these parts. I found myself standing in the middle of a carefully-inscribed red pentagram, surrounded by a nine-foot circle. There were Mystical Symbols in each of the five open spaces. It was a fairly conventional Devil’s Trap, though the symbols were different from ones I’d ever seen before. I was staring at a very scared-looking naked blonde. She was a real beauty, definitely worth staring at, even if that wasn’t the reason I was staring. She was maybe twenty at the outside, somewhere on the line between slim and skinny, with a chest that could compete favorably with Sarah O’Donnell’s, and without the push up bra. There were a half dozen women seated cross-legged on the floor around the wall, none of them naked. They looked scared too. Maybe horrified is a better description.

The babe stood and raised her hands, crooking her fingers at me in the prescribed manner. “Asmodeus, King of Demons, Lord of Lust, Prince of Wrath, Wielder of the Bloody Mace, Ic binden thee tæ mine willen!” she said, or maybe sang, in a soprano voice that sounded like it wanted to squeak. The language was a heavily and peculiarly accented kind-of English, with German overtones. I could understand it, but just barely.

Like I say, I’d been Summoned, with a capital S. And I don’t believe in magic, never have. My mother inoculated me against it when she signed my birth certificate. Someone waving his hands and hollering might work in politics, but it’s not going to make it rain. If you shoot lightning from your fingers, they’ll scorch. Ask any electric welding torch.

My phone hadn’t come with me, but it didn’t look like I’d be needing it. I stood up and stomped out of the pentagram, where I was supposed to be confined. The cutie pie stepped back quickly, trying to jump out of her creamy skin in the process. “You’ve got the wrong Asmodeus,” I told her. “I’m not a demon. Sorry.”

It was like I’d let the air out of the room.

“Thou’rt not?” she asked in a teeny tiny voice. The question mark was audible. “Not” sounded like “naught.” The tiny voice sounded somehow both disbelieving and relieved and it got tinier from the start of her short statement to the end.

“Nope. Sorry. What’s going on, that you need the services of a demon? And how’d you grab me, in particular?”

She suddenly became aware that she was naked as an egg, probably because I was so obviously noticing parts of her here and there, all of them worth noticing. One of the other women handed her a thin dress that she shrugged into, tying a woven belt around her waist. The dress reached all the way from her pale, elegant neck to her bare, slightly dirty feet. I was definitely a large number of digits away from where I’d started.

“Ic ... Ic callèd upon ye demon,” she explained, which told me nothing. “Ic bœn en witch.”

“I guessed that,” I said, sorting through the distorted vowels and accents. Past tense accents were on the last syllable: “Called” was pronounced “call-èd.” The “Ic” sounded like “æc,” with the “æ” pronounced “ay,” as in “eye” and the “c” barely there. The “y” in “ye” was more of a “th” than a “y,” not a theta but almost to the “th” in “thorn,” which is actually what that letter (Þ) is called. There was the hint of a breathy “h” before the “witch.” Language has always been kind of a hobby of mine because I like to travel. I speak parts of a dozen or so of them badly. I was trying to communicate in some sort of Saxon or Olde English.

I’d been to lots of reality lines, even to different times, in the past or the future (don’t go there, unless you need new teeth.) I’d never been to one where people really, seriously believed in witchcraft, at least not past about the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.

“How I got here is my question,” I told the sweetie bird. “I don’t want to go getting tugged all over the multiverse every time someone gets the urge to call my name.”

“Thy nahme ist Asmodeus?” she asked, coming out in goosebumps and visibly shivering.

“Asmodeus J. Jones, at your service. And you are... ?”

“Nevianne of Sandy Isle.” That would be Fenwick Island in my own reality stream, I guessed, probably including Ocean City. I was still in the same place, sort of. You don’t move around in space when you flinch unless you walk. Her speech was Anglo-Saxon, but her name sounded more Celtic.

“Pleased to meet you, Nevianne,” I told her, ignoring our audience. “So tell me, how did I get here? Usually I go places under my own power.”

“Ye spell wæs ... It’st very complicætèd.”

“And you’re thinking you screwed some part of it up?” I suggested.

She hadn’t heard the expression before, but she guessed its meaning quickly enough. “Aye. Ic musst hæbbe.”

I didn’t tell her what I thought she was full of, since we’d just met and she might not have a sense of humor. Lots of people are like that, especially the ones who try to summon demons and expect to control them. That still left the question of how I got there, which her magical opinions probably wouldn’t be able to clarify in terms that I’d be able to understand or believe.

I tried mentally to see where I was. Just “looking” around, I could see there was a dizzying number of digits leading into the mists from whence I’d been tugged. Nothing at all looked familiar. If you think of Reality as a sixteen dimensional (actually many more than that) sphere without surface, of infinity minus one directions you can see my problem. Boy, was I was lost! There weren’t any reference points I could recognize.

If I’d been the Asmodeus she had been looking for I’d have breathed some serious fire, turned all of the people in the room into small rodents, and called down a plague of owls upon them. Eat up, birdies!

Lucky for them, I wasn’t. Everyone survived.

Perhaps in response to my expression, the other women left, avoiding looking toward me. Their attitudes said they had to get their hair done, or maybe they remembered they left the stove on or something. They were dressed similarly to Nevianne, at least when she was dressed, just a little more ragged. They wore hats, short black things that came to a point at the top, but didn’t look much like Halloween witch’s hats. They had ear muffs, for one thing. The women ranged in age from maybe Nevianne’s age to the crone range, wherever that starts.

“They’re the rest of your coven?” I asked Nevianne, making a guess as they showed me their backs.

“Aye,” she sighed, looking forlorn. “We sint forleosen.”

“I think you’d be more lost with an actual demon on hand,” I suggested.

“Ic would bœ,” she stated, “but næ all of ye Sandy Isle.”

Well, that stopped me. “You would be? But not everyone else?”

“Ye spell ist æn trade,” she explained, looking nervous. “A bærgain. ye demon serveth me, and when he completeth the task I assign, I would ... would serve him.”

“You were a sacrifice? To the Lord of Lust?”

“Aye,” she agreed sadly.

“For how long would you have to serve him?”

“Forever.”

“That’s a hell of a trade,” I grumbled. “Good luck with that.”

Poor kid. But ... Like I say, not my circus. “I guess I’ll be on my way then.” I didn’t believe in demons and such, so I knew it wouldn’t really happen to her, whether she was a willing participant or not.

“Whither gœst thou?” she asked me.

“Back where I came from, wherever it is.” Actually, I could be thrashing around for years before I could find something resembling my own reality line. I thought at least I’d settle for someplace where they didn’t believe so fervently in Magick and they spoke English without umlauts.