Something Wicked This Way Comes

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“What’s he doing here? Could he be visiting someone? No doubt about it. A busy man is what he is.

How gracious and nervous was he to see him again, with his insolent pose and black curtain for hair! What cruel handsomeness had he bequeathed? Emil Graves had looked upon him as a prickly, unfeeling ghoul. He had the everlasting warmth of a raging blizzard and the tongue of a venomous serpent about to strike.

The fellow he was so unnaturally fixated on moved quite like a dark cloud through the streets that seemed to so resemble the dark-tinted cobwebs of a sprawling spider. Around the impersonal eldritch hung the more lively folk quite too heavily engaged in their active tourism to notice anything outside of their wonder bubble. Such occupied persons and this ghostly figure had primarily one thing in common if he contemplated this thoroughly enough, which was to ignore practically everything and everyone outside themselves, but in expression, they were vastly different.

He was as vivacious as a corpse, kinder than a cornered wasp defending an incompetent hive, and yet his talents as a doctor could not be slighted even in passing.

His knowledge as a practitioner and endless devotion were fair reasons that he, the ever nervous Emil, hadn’t left this plane of existence.

That fact may have led him to follow the serious man around like a lost puppy, in order to make his gratitude known to him again. He dared to hope for a change of heart, a tender acknowledgment in return for his tedious trials.

That was asking for too much, apparently.

It was in the way the much sought-for healer stopped in the middle of the sidewalk that alarmed the meek gentleman of his understanding that  he was more than conscious of his callous stalker.

Sweet Emil was discovered so soon that he hadn’t the time to prepare himself for a proper greeting nor the moment to come up with a plausible reason for his ardent pursuit. He was so embarrassed, he could hardly speak clearly through the mass stuttering that spilled from his quaking lips. “D-Damian! I - I-I didn’t mean no di—-disrespect, sir.” He tried to get to the point quickly before his face could reveal a powerful ruddy red. “I o-only wanted t-t-to thank you again for saving me. You’ve added yea-years to my life! M-my only right decision was choosing you for a d-doctor.”

Damian turned around at a leisurely pace to address the poor fool with eyes of sharp ruby diamonds. He mindlessly and slowly twisted the long red ribbon that held up the half ponytail around his fingers before finally recognizing the same fragile creature from a time so long ago. He stopped playing with the fine string and allowed his hand to fall back to his side.

“Yes, it is clear to see that nearly thirty years of said life have not been entirely wasted on you, Mister Graves. You get to live another blessed day.” Said Damian, grimly. “I would expect nothing more predictable than an untimely relapse if you continue to defy my sincerest recommendation. How extraordinarily prolonged your road to recovery has been when it could have been remedied in less than three months….” then he briefly thought about it with a subtle hint of a cruel smirk lighting up the tail end of his lips, “approximately.”

“Yes, erm. True. B-But, uh, in case you haven’t noticed, I am doing considerably better t-thanks to you.”

“What also fails to escape my notice is your miraculous speech impediment. If my memory serves me well, that wasn’t there before. Did something go terribly wrong? What a pity.” His sense of humor might have been uncalled for, but he continued to state his case openly with the following: “Since that is all you have to say to me, then we should consider this conversation over. I am very pressed for time and can’t afford to waste it reminiscing about a past that once was. It does nothing for me.”

Damian was not oblivious to the wooden smile on his former patient’s rosy complexion. He would not console the young man, the boy who so infamously screwed with an established health regimen he meticulously implemented on his behalf to ensure betterment and Graves showed his gratitude by squandering it due to an exceedingly weak mind. Giving in to the same old self-destructive habits that invited such maladies, lying shamelessly to his face about such cheats.

Combine not following his advice and being dishonest about it, naturally; all that made Damian a very angry and very unpleasant gnome to converse with. He wasn’t the sort to live something like that down.

And Emil knew that. “I wish you well, sir.” Was the last thing uttered to the stoic vampire as the sudden need to depart made their goodbyes inevitable. Damian said nothing in return and continued his cool promenade. The bustling around him was loud, but in his mind, there was nothing but blissful silence. Had he been just as mindful as he was earlier, he might have detected the little trouble nearby and evaded the events to come.

Not today.

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It was the beginning of a dreary day. The dusk sky shed a faint gleam over the heads of those roaming the streets, and on the stone structures surrounding them. A little wind passed through his hair to whisper a warning, and it tugged gingerly at his dark robes to make a greater point that it was best to reconsider the path he was taking. The flute hanging at his waist, adorned by blood-red tassels, bobbed gingerly as he moved through the dispersing crowd. The clump of pedestrians about the vast vicinity lessened, and Damian was left alone to browse the same old scenery with his half-lidded eyes that held no glimmer of excitement for what he saw, no amusement or interest that would cause him to gravitate in the general direction of sublime entertainment.


Everything to him seemed subpar, repetitive and colorless.


He wasn’t an escapist that would seek out the sort of temporary and addictive pleasures that would draw him back again and again like so many others. His life revolved around scheduled visits, record-keeping and continuous study.


A monotonous routine for others, a gratifying regime for Damian. But plans, much like rules, could be made fragile until breakable by just one grossly overlooked factor or two.


He saw not the scurrying form of a young man and heard not the mystical scribbling initiated by the little demon from before that snickered with audacious glee. The clever boy had chosen the most opportune time to strike when he did because it was at this moment when the vampire’s guard was down and nothing in his environment enticed genuine concern.


Then, as he lived and breathed, a flash of emotion and a dash of delayed thought.


Damian had the look of a man stepping in a warm, foul-smelling heaping pile of wyvern dung when a brilliant blaze of purple flared a perfect circle around him. In those few seconds he found himself staggering under the mixture of lights and the shadows dancing ominously upon his snowy countenance and gloomy attire. The simple action of moving one rebellious step forward triggered the outlandish sensation that he might have been treading through drying cement until both of his feet were frozen in place.


With the impeccable likeness of a puffed-up raven perched upon the gnarled branches of a burning tree, ruffled feathers and all, he refused to make a sound.


Foolish pride wouldn’t permit him to be so lenient with his ego, to ask for help or to allow a pinch of fear to bleed through his mask of fire and brimstone; this, at least to Damian, was no different than exposing his soft belly like some pitiful street mutt. He was not a docile man.


Chills traveled from his neck to his spine as he felt something foreign climb up his legs and still them into place.


Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes? Magical or not, he indiscriminately despised them all with a passion. He’d stomp their heads flat if given the chance, but he would endure the humiliation. A minuscule bead of sweat would trickle down the side of his face as he continued to mask his hidden discomfort and extreme disdain for the situation.

What broke his running streak was the unimpressed eyebrow rising above its usual place as he caught sight of a scrawny rat child making the silliest of breast-grappling motions before an agitated-looking customer who seemed to be in need of his services.


Damian silently hoped that this teenaged charlatan wasn’t his ballsy idiot of a captor.

Why.

“May your obituary be written in weasel’s piss,” he snarled, a rare embarrassment striking him dead in the chest. He couldn’t even get another word out, for he was secretly reeling over this new-found shame.

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In the course of that uneventful day Damian St. Clough had experienced a quiet stroll, looked into small shops, and listened to the ramblings of a former patient.

What he never expected up to now, even in his wildest dreams, came to pass and floored him.

It infuriated him more than he cared to admit.

Damian stood inside the glowing circle, the lines on his face deepening into a rather pointed scowl as the carve of his furrowed brow implicated the horrors the vampire would unleash upon the clever eldritch if he did not abjure his death wish.

He knew nothing of the scrawny boy’s noble intentions, and had no curiosity strong enough to learn of them; only knew that the fellow was an outlandish mixture of unexpectedly cunning and mortally foolish.

“Ah, yes,” he said softly, his baritone voice rich with irony, “my — captor. I do not take cheek from anyone, especially not from a conniving, breast-juggling neanderthal like…”

A faint chill of apprehension struck through him like a sword to the chest. His heart began to pound in his chest with fierce resistance to the blooming tightness in his throat. With no air to propel his wording, his gaudy tone of deep-rooted defiance seemed to have escaped him, and, with it, all recognizable speech.

There was a look of constraint in his watery eyes.

If he had an audience they certainly would have fancied him a rabid equestrian as he whipped his hair back and haltingly guided a trembling hand to his mouth. He tasted no blood to determine if it was an organ he was trying to expel from the tender swell of his neck, but it frosted his bones with staggering concern to think that such an outcome could happen. This caused the acids in his stomach to turn.

What absurdly and understandably startled him more than the slightest suspicion of a detached innard crawling out of him was the sensation of floppy limbs scraping against the inner walls of his throat and the soulful croaks flowing from the wriggling lump in his mouth.

Flying past his parted lips was an ugly wad of spit and a poor frightened frog landing on all fours with a wet resounding plop.

The look on his face was flooded to the forehead with consternation as he witnessed the amphibian covered in his own drool fleeing from sight, and he jeered unintelligibly at the merchant with no regard to the consequences of his anger.

“Aren’t you as sharp as a beach ball? You must fancy yourself a chancer, favored by the graces of good fortune, to so boldly request my services after engaging in such absurdity— it is pitifully admirable of you.” He sneered after he was asked by the witch for his help.


He threw up yet another frog and gagged. What a revolting feeling this was! So demeaning! So wretched! And with each magical frog he strived to push out of his mouth, he looked uglier and even more disheveled than before.

Not wanting to confess his dwindling will to endure this curse for the rest of his life, he tried to stifle the watery cough that threatened to reveal the audibility of his weakness, and remembered the peculiar air quotes with a cloud over his eyes. He was detail-oriented, analytical, not trusting, as he decided to look into the eyes of the boy who would eventually become the bane of his existence and consider the little bit of what he had been told.

“Do I detect the overwhelming stench of your desperation from here?” he sneered, wearing beastly and disgrace like a dreary gown, leaning in as much as he could to assert dominance over the situation that left him knee-deep in embarrassment.

What gave him away wasn’t necessarily something he could see with his own two eyes, for if he relied on this ability alone, then he would have been led to perceive a lavish ego and, perhaps, a good reason to gloat, for chaining down an old vampire like himself was a suicidal feat.

He measured him based on the sheer tenacity of his ambition to garner his attention by employing the most unnecessary extremes, to have methodically ensnared him in this very nearly savage manner could only be fueled by a very strong purpose and a desire to help himself, or more accurately…someone else?

“I reserve the right to deny you my services,” he threatened, not a smile to be seen on his face. But then his curiosity surfaced for the very first time, and he held up a finger to ask that he not make him spit out another frog.

“What is the severity of your illness, or could it be that, perhaps, this isn’t about you?” he asked. He would reconsider helping him if played his cards right and chose his words carefully and wisely to ensure his cooperation. “Do not lie to me and I will comply with your demands.”

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He wrinkled his nose. The smell from that pen was utterly putrid.


Without acknowledging the thinning voice of the witchling Damian began to breathe in the warm air, his hands peeling off the outer layer of his robe to wipe his glistening face, his bright eyes peering down the set of snake-like bindings as he suppressed a shudder. At length he listened and stood tall before him.


“Have you the gall to believe I harbor a semblance of pity for your plight?” he asked in a cool abrupt voice.

He nodded.

“Your mother and sister,” he echoed reflectively then, carrying his words with him. “Their salient lives hang by such a delicate thread, and with no cure to slow the grim hands of time.”


The mocking tune in his wording died down and in turn it was momentarily replaced with sincerity that almost seemed accusatory. “You’ve made no mention of your father,” he noted casually, allowing his eyes to gloss over the feather and the boy’s paling complexion.

There was a strangeness in the pattern of his breathing, and the way he looked did not offer a very good impression, which caused Damian to prolong his staring. His hand lingered so close to the feather, but his eyes were quite glued to the presented oddity. Was this truly desperation? It could be. He also could have been looking too deeply into this and lowered his gaze to the pen with some finality.


“Understood,” he said compliantly, though he trusted the youth not. At last, Damian pinched the pen between his fingers. Whatever contract he was about to sign, he would be sure to thoroughly read the fine print. He was the annoying sort to do so.

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Unfeeling as his expression was, the old vampire was moderately empathetic that he should abstain from mentioning the little witch-rat’s father, for at that very moment, he remembered his own.


“Tut, tut — bold of you to assume my standards could be so low.” He sneered, elaborating on the remark so seriously, it was almost ridiculous. While he wasn’t expelling another slimy frog just yet, something just as humiliating came to be, and, with the wretched pen still in his hand, Damian rolled his eyes to the sky and let out a tired sigh.


What clued him in to this foolish mistake was the forthright pleasure the small one took in uttering the words ‘agree’ and ‘started’. Damian wanted to grab the insignificant creature by the neck and deprive him of the air he so clearly needed to survive. “Allegedly!” he snarled in protest to the haughty declaration of victory. Upon the ashy-white wrist Sage snagged was a visible feather tattoo. He couldn’t have been any more insulted than now, not even if he thought back to that short while ago—- back to when he was doing nothing but shooting frogs out of his face and decorating the floor with copious amounts of spittle and liquid suffering. He must have looked like a branded pig. He could not stand to tolerate this circus any longer, but before he could do anything remotely useful and advantageous to his cause, he was a trifle satisfied with the termination of his serpentine binds. What came next, or, more like, what he saw next made him think he was staring into the opal eyes of the damned.


Why him?


He sighed through his nose. The deepest of sighs, the greatest of eye twitches. His day went from average to below average in a span of a few minutes, all because of this miserably uncouth child, and every second reeked of pure loathing and irritation.

The intensity of the light had not only nearly fried his poor, sensitive retinae. The luminescent shape in the distance was also starting to blind both himself and Sage, and when the two were so delicately and mystically tossed out of the crow’s mouth, Damian saw unpleasant spots of green and white, such sour patches of color fluttering across his vision. He was too disoriented to throw a critical remark, too dizzy to rationalize crawling out of a bird, and too weak to wear the composed facade.


Nearly as blind as a star-nosed mole at this point, he was determined to follow the sound of his captor crumpling to the ground. From what he could hear, the boy was out of breath, and turned his head in the direction of the fallen figure. Seeing the unsightly patches behind his eyes no more, he allowed his gaze to drift easily away from the near airless fellow to the impressively miserable town littered with crows, every single one of them echoing the dismal air through their shrill, unattractive cries and jittery hops.


There was more field and swamp than actual civilization here. His sister, Aurora, would have pitied the devil child for the condition he was in—along with the state of what Damian figured was his home, but he was not so much in tune with his caring side as he effortlessly moved past the witch with his head high and expectations muted.


He didn’t lend a hand to the dark-haired street urchin, not after everything he put him through and purposefully refused to ask him if he needed medical attention. If the pitiful rodent died, then perhaps the mark on his pasty wrist would vanish along with the symptoms of his amphibious maladies. He heard the grass fold stiffly beneath Sage’s nimble feet and was more than disappointed to learn of his gradual recovery.


He followed him home sullenly, and after a time of having privately berated the irksome frail-looking insect, he happened upon a humbling sight that cut off his drier-than-an-old-branch supply of sass.


He wasn’t the right amount of sympathetic, even as the haughty witch exhibited a gross switch of mood, and only then did something in the pit of his cold heart sink when the child asked for his mother’s loving reassurance.


Where a twinge of softness should have glimmered in his eyes, there was hardly anything. His pacing, however, changed quite drastically. He strode across the room and stopped precisely beside the woman, examining her eyes with haste. Her pupils were harrowingly large and unreactive, her skin was cold, but he didn’t cease the common procedure just because the temperature wasn’t ideal.


There were plenty of instances of poorly determined deaths in the field of medicine and health, only for those supposed corpses to rise miraculously from the dead hours later after being, well, pronounced dead. Faulty work and misapplied steps of incompetent practitioners, indeed. One had to be thorough even when the signs were stupidly obvious.


He followed up by checking her for a heart beat, and the last bit was her breathing. There was nothing to indicate life, Damian mentally noted as he hurriedly accompanied the emotionally distraught Sage to visit what he actually hoped wasn’t the next tragedy of the day. He might have not allowed himself to experience the sadness of her passing, but the fact that he wasn’t being openly rude about everything was a sign that he was touched by something.


He refused to see his own reflection in this situation, having lost his mother so many centuries ago; it was easier to turn a blind eye to his own losses and jump to what he could get done in the present, which could bring about a much needed game changer. He didn’t react unfavorably to Sage’s desperate cries; in fact, by the time he called for his assistance, he was on it before he could finish his plea.


It was definitely a very lifeless ‘say no more’ moment.


“I already am.” He replied briskly, not one to embellish his words, for his focus lingered entirely on the witch before him. She could be salvaged if they did things quickly, so he brought out a small glass jar from the pocket of his robe filled with an odd mixture of apple cider vinegar, procured by an otherworlder and given to him as a strange gift, 15-year-old lavender, freshly minced garlic, 3-year-old sage, peppermint, rosemary, thyme and black pepper. Ordinary ingredients, but the timing was everything and so were the sources of such herbs.


“Look…at…me,” he growled with a frosty intonation, tearing his eyes away from his sister by gripping his shoulder with a strong hand. The pressure was meant to ground him back to their gruesome reality, not to inflict actual pain to an already emotionally wounded boy. “The circumstances are lamentable at best, nevertheless, you must discipline your mind if you wish to save your precious Cici.” He released his shoulder without a second thought, opened the fragrant jar, and mercilessly plucked one small lock of hair from each sibling. He slid the freshly-picked strands into the jar and quickly closed it back up.


“Take the jar. Give it ten shakes, click your heels three times and be sure to say the word repaid backwards.”

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