Pockets of Darkness Read Free Page A

the cross.
    “I can’t help but bring it with me! It goes where I go. I could have explained that if you’d—”
    She dismissed him with a snarl, closed her eyes, and whispered, rolled her head like she was working out a kink in her neck. Her voice sounded like wind seeping in under a door, a gentle and persistent susurrus that went on at length. When she opened her eyes again her expression was calm, and her voice was even.
    “I cannot see the demon, no, Elijah Stone. “Where is it?”
    “Right next to me. It’s always right next to me. It’s staring at you.” He pointed to a spot near the briefcase.
    “Ah, that is what I feel. I feel its eyes on me.”
    “So get rid of it!” Elijah ground his foot against the floorboards. “That’s what I’m paying you three thousand an hour for, right? Get rid of it. That’s what I came here for, what Lady Lakshmi sent me here for. Just get rid of the damn thing.” Please, dear God, get rid of it.
    Adiella turned a page in the book and read silently while Elijah continued to fume and worry. She reached below the counter and brought out a second book, and later a third.
    A car with a busted muffler clunked by. Another revved its engine. He heard shouts in Spanish, then things settled down and the bar music caught his attention: Kanye West’s Coldest Winter . Appropriate for the weather, he thought. More time passed, and Elijah’s legs grew sore from standing. The couple upstairs turned off the television. He looked at his Rolex: 9:15. Had three hours really passed? No wonder his legs felt like wood and his feet were numb. He needed a restroom.
    A fourth book came out, this one about the size of the Shakespeare tome he’d glanced at earlier. She relit the candles, turned off the lights, and started chanting more erratically than before. The animal beads clacked as she twisted this way and that, her shoulders jerking.
    “Is it gone?” she asked, finishing undeterminable minutes later. She looked even older to Elijah now, eighty, ninety, brittle and frail like she might break with any breath, like casting the spell had added decades to her small frame.
    “No. It’s not gone. It’s still watching you, and it’s babbling in some language I can’t understand. It’s always babbling.” He rubbed the side of his head. “It only shuts up when I’m sleeping.”
    “This demon,” she said, squaring her shoulders and again blowing out the candles. She waited a beat before turning the lights on. It looked like a few of those decades had melted from her, and she stood a little taller. She made the sign of the cross once more. “This demon, describe it to me, yes.”
    “It’s fuckin’ ugly.”
    “In detail, please.”
    When Elijah finished his account he crossed his arms. “Shouldn’t you have asked me about this, oh, say nine thousand dollars ago? Tell you what it looks like? Sounds like? It smells, too. In fact—”
    “It is not a demon I am familiar with, Elijah Stone.” She tucked the errant hairs back under her scarf. “And I have faced many demons. I have exhausted my magic in an effort to sever this particular beast from you. It should have worked. My magic is strong.”
    He would have called her a charlatan, the word churned in his mouth, ready to spring out. But he held his tongue and merely thought it. Rip-off. Fraud. Con artist. He wasn’t about to write her a check. He’d bring out his cell phone, call a cab, maybe call the police while he was at it, and—
    “It should have worked, but it is a dominant demon that has attached itself to your soul. As I said, old. Very, very old. It defies me. And that it can hide from my sight … its power is great. You say it babbles?”
    “Well … it makes noises. I figured it was talking.”
    “I hear nothing.”
    “I’ve gathered pretty quick that only I can see it, and only I can hear it.”
    “But you can’t understand it?”
    “Hell no.”
    “Powerful,” she repeated.
    “Powerful? Horrible is