#resource guarding? in dogs? except its about his Man. losing my shit. i was so correct

[our-inspire-verse]

He was like "DON'T. look up ship art of my husband." And i said. "Ny~okAy!" And searched ship art of Our man. ❤️

[skyhooks-notebook]

Encounter

John Wick fanfiction

The wound in his side was still leaking blood. His legs had begun to feel weak and the unnamed dog was beginning to whine, trotting as closely to him as possible. He was in danger of being tripped, but he hadn’t the energy to shove the dog away a foot or two and still watch the crowds of New York for potential threats. The sun was going down, the evening growing colder, he was tired and losing blood, and he was a target.

As his eyes flicked from one stranger to another, assessing them each in a glance, he forced himself to assess his situation. His home was gone, his car was a wreck and in another man’s keeping, his professional connections were dated and largely useless in current circumstances and he was cut off from the resources of the Continental network. Every friend was now an enemy or at least a suddenly disinterested third party, likely unwilling to get involved in his sudden war. He didn’t have much cash on him, a credit card it would be dicey to use, a scavenged weapon and not much ammo. In a brutally honest thought, he admitted he was also hindered by the dog, but he knew he couldn’t abandon it.

He tried to tally his resources. He had a gun, and a little ammo. He had made much of less many times before. Though they weren’t close to hand, he had small stashes tucked away in several place because old habits died hard. He was in a city of seven million people, much of it a veritable maze. Though he was wounded, he had no broken bones. And he was the best in the business.

He hoped it would be enough.

An involuntary cough caught him off guard and he realized his mouth and throat were almost painfully dry. He paused a moment, turned his concentration on his body and realized how many hours it had been since his last food or drink. Seemingly without a thought, he turned and walked straight toward a small store tucked between two anonymous buildings, what passed for a neighborhood shop these days.

He barely paused to hold the door for his dog and before the shaggy-haired clerk at the register could finish saying, “Hey, you can’t bring that dog in here,” he had noted that except for the cashier, the shop was empty. He thumbed the lock on the door and turned the hanging sign from open to closed.

The clerk hadn’t caught the motion that engaged the lock, but he had seen the sign flip. He had barely twitched his hand toward the panic button under the counter before the man had reached the counter and grabbed his arm. The man’s face was hacked with fresh wounds, some of them still seeping through the forming scabs and his shirt was bloody. So were his hands. The clerk looked into the eyes of the bloody man and froze. Those eyes were dangerous. You didn’t argue with eyes like that.

John Wick forced himself to focus. He was standing in a crummy, dusty shop, holding the wrist of a pimply nineteen year old in a threatening grip and the kid was frightened. The young brown face had turned ashen under the shaggy hair and zits and the arm John was gripping was shaking. Frightened people could be unpredictable and do stupid shit, like push the alarm button. He heaved a breath, reached his other hand over the counter, grabbed the kid by the belt, picked him up, dragged him across the counter and set him on his feet in one smooth motion.

“Listen, kid,” he said, trying to make his voice soft and apologetic. “I don’t want to cause any trouble here, okay? I just need a few things. I’m in a bad situation. Worse than you can imagine. Just sit down right here and be nice and quiet and I’ll be outta here just as fast as you want me to be.”

The kids eyes had drifted down. He had seen the gun in John’s waistband. His knees bent and he slid to the floor, staring at the gun. When John let go of his wrist, the kid raised his hands above his head.

“Okay,” John said, willing to settle. “Will you stay right here? I have no problem with you.”

The kid nodded. He looked scared enough.

John grabbed two warm bottles of water off a cardboard display, scooped up some snack cakes, beef jerky, a soft overripe banana from a small neglected rack with a sign that said, “Healthy Snacks for Healthy Kids”. He leaned over the counter and dropped the stuff into a white plastic Thank You Come Again bag on the rack, then went over the counter in a quick glide. He spared an intense glance for the street outside, then scrabbled through the small selection of first aid supplies and over-the-counter remedies, adding Tylenol and the few packages of gauze and adhesive tape to the bag. He dragged a twenty and a ten out of his wallet, dropped them on the counter and climbed over it again, bag in hand.

The kid was still on the floor. The dog was sitting several feet away, quiet, passive, regarding him curiously.

“What ar–” the clerk began.

“Shut up,” Wick said. “Is there a back way out?”

“Yeah,” the kid said, “but it’s all locked up and I don’t have the keys -”

“Fine,” Wick said. He reached over the counter, found the panic switch and yanked the wire out of its side. He looked down at the kid with his hands in the air. The name tag on his shirt.

“Thank you, Christopher,” Wick said. “You’ve been very helpful. But that phone call you want to make? You have a much better chance of surviving if you make that call somewhere else. There are some serious hard cases after me. They have police scanners. And you don’t want to be here when they hear my description in connection with this address. I suggest you wait until you hear the back door close, then you leave this place to make your phone call. Do you understand, Christopher?”

Christopher forced himself to focus his thoughts on the words instead of the gun. He looked up into the hard, don’t-give-a-fuck eyes, bombardier’s eyes where did I get that phrase? and saw a glimmer of … manners? He finally found his voice. “Yeah, man. I get it. I don’t want to be here.”

Wick nodded. “Good luck, Christopher.”

That was what convinced Christopher. That polite ‘good luck’, quietly passed between two men in a hard world. The shadow passed from him and the dog followed it. Christopher waited until after the sounds of rummaging, after the sound of the crowbar being dragged out of the mess in the broom closet, after the sounds of squealing, shrieking metal, after the sound of the steel door refusing to shut against its bent and abused frame. After he heard the footsteps fade away. After that, Christopher left to make his phone call, from some place far away.

He didn’t know about the money left on the counter until the police asked about it later. He could only shrug. “Yeah. He was a polite guy.”

[skyhook-sly]

Encounter

John Wick, fiction

The wound in his side was still leaking blood. His legs had begun to feel weak and the unnamed dog was beginning to whine, trotting as closely to him as possible. He was in danger of being tripped, but he hadn't the energy to shove the dog away a foot or two and still watch the crowds of New York for potential threats. The sun was going down, the evening growing colder, he was tired and losing blood, and he was a target.

As his eyes flicked from one stranger to another, assessing them each in a glance, he forced himself to assess his situation. His home was gone, his car was a wreck and in another man's keeping, his professional connections were dated and largely useless in current circumstances and he was cut off from the resources of the Continental network. Every friend was now an enemy or at least a suddenly disinterested third party, likely unwilling to get involved in his sudden war. He didn't have much cash on him, a credit card it would be dicey to use, a scavenged weapon and not much ammo. In a brutally honest thought, he admitted he was also hindered by the dog, but he knew he couldn't abandon it.

He tried to tally his resources. He had a gun, and a little ammo. He had made much of less many times before. Though they weren't close to hand, he had small stashes tucked away in several place because old habits died hard. He was in a city of seven million people, much of it a veritable maze. Though he was wounded, he had no broken bones. And he was the best in the business.

He hoped it would be enough.

An involuntary cough caught him off guard and he realized his mouth and throat were almost painfully dry. He paused a moment, turned his concentration on his body and realized how many hours it had been since his last food or drink. Seemingly without a thought, he turned and walked straight toward a small store tucked between two anonymous buildings, what passed for a neighborhood shop these days.

He barely paused to hold the door for his dog and before the shaggy-haired clerk at the register could finish saying, "Hey, you can't bring that dog in here," he had noted that except for the cashier, the shop was empty. He thumbed the lock on the door and turned the hanging sign from open to closed.

The clerk hadn't caught the motion that engaged the lock, but he had seen the sign flip. He had barely twitched his hand toward the panic button under the counter before the man had reached the counter and grabbed his arm. The man's face was hacked with fresh wounds, some of them still seeping through the forming scabs and his shirt was bloody. So were his hands. The clerk looked into the eyes of the bloody man and froze. Those eyes were dangerous. You didn't argue with eyes like that.

John Wick forced himself to focus. He was standing in a crummy, dusty shop, holding the wrist of a pimply nineteen year old in a threatening grip and the kid was frightened. The young brown face had turned ashen under the shaggy hair and zits and the arm John was gripping was shaking. Frightened people could be unpredictable and do stupid shit, like push the alarm button. He heaved a breath, reached his other hand over the counter, grabbed the kid by the belt, picked him up, dragged him across the counter and set him on his feet in one smooth motion.

"Listen, kid," he said, trying to make his voice soft and apologetic. "I don't want to cause any trouble here, okay? I just need a few things. I'm in a bad situation. Worse than you can imagine. Just sit down right here and be nice and quiet and I'll be outta here just as fast as you want me to be."

The kids eyes had drifted down. He had seen the gun in John's waistband. His knees bent and he slid to the floor, staring at the gun. When John let go of his wrist, the kid raised his hands above his head.

"Okay," John said, willing to settle. "Will you stay right here? I have no problem with you."

The kid nodded. He looked scared enough.

John grabbed two warm bottles of water off a cardboard display, scooped up some snack cakes, beef jerky, a soft overripe banana from a small neglected rack with a sign that said, "Healthy Snacks for Healthy Kids". He leaned over the counter and dropped the stuff into a white plastic Thank You Come Again bag on the rack, then went over the counter in a quick glide. He spared an intense glance for the street outside, then scrabbled through the small selection of first aid supplies and over-the-counter remedies, adding Tylenol and the few packages of gauze and adhesive tape to the bag. He dragged a twenty and a ten out of his wallet, dropped them on the counter and climbed over it again, bag in hand.

The kid was still on the floor. The dog was sitting several feet away, quiet, passive, regarding him curiously.

"What ar--" the clerk began.

"Shut up," Wick said. "Is there a back way out?"

"Yeah," the kid said, "but it's all locked up and I don't have the keys -"

"Fine," Wick said. He reached over the counter, found the panic switch and yanked the wire out of its side. He looked down at the kid with his hands in the air. The name tag on his shirt.

"Thank you, Christopher," Wick said. "You've been very helpful. But that phone call you want to make? You have a much better chance of surviving if you make that call somewhere else. There are some serious hard cases after me. They have police scanners. And you don't want to be here when they hear my description in connection with this address. I suggest you wait until you hear the back door close, then you leave this place to make your phone call. Do you understand, Christopher?"

Christopher forced himself to focus his thoughts on the words instead of the gun. He looked up into the hard, don't-give-a-fuck eyes, bombardier's eyes where did I get that phrase? and saw a glimmer of ... manners? He finally found his voice. "Yeah, man. I get it. I don't want to be here."

Wick nodded. "Good luck, Christopher."

That was what convinced Christopher. That polite 'good luck', quietly passed between two men in a hard world. The shadow passed from him and the dog followed it. Christopher waited until after the sounds of rummaging, after the sound of the crowbar being dragged out of the mess in the broom closet, after the sounds of squealing, shrieking metal, after the sound of the steel door refusing to shut against its bent and abused frame. After he heard the footsteps fade away. After that, Christopher left to make his phone call, from some place far away.

He didn't know about the money left on the counter until the police asked about it later. He could only shrug. "Yeah. He was a polite guy."

[sending-the-message]

Withdrawal by Ilunibi

It wasn’t always just me and Dead Coyote. When not practicing magic, we were usually in the presence of his regulars who, sadly, were the only people aside from me who ever seemed to visit. There was Brian Wilcox, who dressed like a lumberjack and was more interested in what new DVDs Dead Coyote had pirated as opposed to what new drugs had come in. John Boy was the scariest, a wiry and effeminate tweaker with a hidden kill-switch that seemed to go off if you looked at him the wrong way. Turtle was a strange and quiet guy who would sit and talk to me in pill-induced hazes about the secrets of the world, government conspiracies, and how Dead Coyote earned his name by killing the man who smuggled him over the border.

Which is funny because Dead Coyote was born in Maryland.

The most important of these regulars, however, was Cheryl James, a short, kinda pudgy brunette with a pack-a-day habit and a mismatched wardrobe collected from Goodwill donation bins. She never had a lot of money but figured out pretty early on that she could make trades with Dead Coyote, usually in the form of food and pills, to get her weekly fix. At least twice a week, she’d pop on by with pizza and a Marlboro hanging out of her mouth, her and Dead Coyote would sort out their business in the kitchen while I inhaled a couple of slices, and then they’d both come out high as kites, flank me on either side, and we’d just sit and watch trashy television and talk about our lives.

To Cheryl’s credit, she was always very invested in what I had to say. It was kind of empowering to listen to her scream “Bullshit!” every time I told her how unfairly teachers treated me and how Jessica Schneider bullied me. Her tirades about how much people sucked were inspiring.

I wasn’t the only one who liked her. Her and Dead Coyote eventually stopped trading pizza for drugs, opting instead to settle their payments with sex. And dates. And cuddling on the couch. I won’t lie and say a part of me wasn’t jealous--Dead Coyote was my only friend for a long time and, as much as I liked Cheryl, I really disliked the idea of sharing him--but it was good for Dead Coyote. As nonchalant as he came off, he was an extremely lonely person, ditched by his family and all of his worthwhile friends because of the way he lived.

Even occultists want to feel loved, I guess.

Cheryl was also good for him in another way, though what was good for him was the end of her. On October 14, 2012, a “concerned neighbor” reported to the housing project’s office that they hadn’t seen her so much as open her blinds for two days and that her television had been blaring for forty-eight hours straight. The supervisor did a wellness check, and lo and behold, Cheryl was found stiff as a board on her bed with a halo of vomit. The gossip that followed was absolutely brutal, from hypocritical drug-buddies talking about how trashy she was to high-and-mighty single moms sticking up their nose and saying she deserved it. A few people blamed Dead Coyote for it, and the aftermath of that day was the first time I saw the man cry.

He blamed himself. He also decided that enough was enough and was seeking help the next morning.

I was sixteen at this time, and had moved out of my mom’s apartment because I hadn’t really seen any point in staying, not out of a lack of love more than not wanting to use anymore of her resources. I’d also lost my apartment after losing my job once I stupidly admitted to a secret shopper at the corner store that I was too young to be selling cigarettes, let alone alcohol, but was too bullheaded and embarrassed to go crawling back to my mother. Without her knowledge, I spent the remainder of my high school years on Dead Coyote’s couch and had a front row seat to watching a guy who’d become my anchor lose his goddamn mind.

Withdrawal isn’t pretty. I was probably too young to be holding his hair while he puked into his kitchen sink and trying to find ways to calm him down when he was shaking in a corner, trying to pull said hair out. His memory was shit, his temperament was scattershot. I couldn’t really be mad at him for snapping at me, but it seemed like his moods swung from nearly kicking me out one minute to crying in his kitchen floor out of a mixture of pain and guilt the next. He was a puddle of a man, and I had nightmares for months after he locked himself in his bathroom threatening to kill himself because “the methadone ain’t shit” and his belief that he was a murderer. Still, no matter how young I was, I couldn’t even count how many times he’d been there for me through all of my petty bullshit and I was resolute in my decision that giving up on him wasn’t an option.

Unfortunately, withdrawal is also absolutely terrifying when the person withdrawing is a fucking warlock.

It was, suitably enough, Halloween. I had thought of ditching school that morning because I couldn’t get Dead Coyote out of bed even after trying to drag him off of his mattress by his legs, but he’d woken up enough to tell me that he was fine, just queasy, and that his upset stomach wasn’t worth my grades. I was really struggling at the time so I decided to listen for once, lest I ended up redoing my Junior year and having to camp in his living room for an extra twelve months that I probably wasn’t welcome.

But, I spent the whole day worrying anyway, and when the school day ended I bolted for the bus like a bat out of hell. It was all I could do to keep from screaming at the driver to floor it. I sat, nervously trying to drown out my thoughts by thinking every Disney song I could remember as loud as I possibly could, but there was a sinking feeling in my gut the closer I got to home. This burning, aching, empty feeling like my stomach acid was trying to eat its way out.

Dead Coyote was, and is, one of the most important people in my life, and I won’t shy away from saying that I got so fucking attached to him that I damn near had a sixth sense specifically for him. And feeling empty? I had my fears, because none of the reasons I could think of to explain that hollow pain were comforting. The only thing to explain a feeling of absence would be that he was gone in some way, or at least that’s what I told myself over and over again atop my brain’s incorrect rendition of “Be Prepared.”

The bus finally pulled up to my stop. I shoved my way to the front and jumped from the top step dead to the sidewalk, hitting the ground in a sprint that I would have otherwise been unable to keep up. But adrenaline propelled me, like rocket fuel, straight to Dead Coyote’s door. Every muscle in my body shook with nerves as I nearly tore down his stoop light to get the spare key hidden behind the glass, and it was all I could do to get the key in the lock and remember the way the lock was supposed to turn and push the door open because there was something blocking it.

It was the couch, as it turns out, thrown haphazardly in front of it and flipped on its back, but not because he was trying to barricade me out. No, illuminated by candles in the middle of the floor was a shakily drawn Pentacle of Solomon. Beside that, drawn even more haphazardly, were a barrage of Goetic crests and a splash of blood.

The drawings were everywhere, written in everything: blood, sharpie, dry-erase marker, chalk, salt, sand, and (as ashamed as I am to admit it) Roseart crayons. They called upon Marchosias, Buer, Orobas, Eligor, and everyone in between. There were marks for the planets, the stars, and things he’d never taught me. They ran from the walls to the floor to the ceiling, from the kitchen to the downstairs bathroom and through the living room all the way up the stairs. Bloody handprints curled around the edge of every step, the walls thrumming and groaning as I grew closer and closer, creeping up the staircase like a stalking cat.

The floor shook like somebody dropped a weight. I heard glass shatter and, glancing up at the cracked bathroom door at the top of the steps, I saw a glint of light from the scattered remains of the mirror. After that, it took every ounce of my courage to turn the corner to Dead Coyote’s room. The door was pulled closed, a gigantic “X” keyed into the paint, interspersed with vandalistic rambling carved by a shaking hand.

I DON’T WANT TO BE DEAD COYOTE I AM NOT DEAD COYOTE DEAD COYOTE DEAD COYOTE DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DOG DEAD DOG DEAD DOG DEAD DOG NO NO NO NO NO

Seriously, adrenaline gives you superpowers. I was shaking and terrified and could feel my stomach churning, but even though every single ounce of me wanted to run back to my mom’s and call a priest, I found myself grabbing the hot-cold doorknob and throwing his bedroom door open so hard that it punched a hole in the wall. Heat, like hellfire, spilled out of the room and there, sitting in the middle of his mattress on the floor, cross legged and scowling, was Dead Coyote.

His room was pitch black, except for those goddamn candles. Everything the light from the hallway touched was a mess, from shards of the mirror that had been on the back of his door to posters ripped straight from the wall and black-out curtains shredded to ribbons. Still-functional ribbons, I realized, because despite the fact I could see slivers of sunlight behind them, nothing was coming through. My feet crunched against the glass as I took a step in, and a loud pop behind me launched us into further blackness as the lightbulb in the upstairs hall exploded inside the fixture.

“DC?” I called in. He didn’t even twitch.

“DC, it’s me. It’s Seymour. I--”

“Get. Out.”

His voice was low, sinister, and almost growling. Dead Coyote sounded, quite literally, like a coyote. I tried to puff myself up thinking that if I showed that I was unwilling to back down that there was a slight chance he’d lower his guard. Instead, he shifted positions on his bed, twisting his head, climbing up on his toes, and arching his back like a predator ready to pounce. My shaky confidence shattered, but I struggled through the trembling hands and wobbly knees to fake an expression of determination.

“Get out! GET OUT!”

I shook my head and told him that, no, I wasn’t leaving and if he wanted me gone, he’d have to make me leave. It took a lot of nerve to say, and a lot more nerve to stand by it when I heard glass shatter downstairs.

“This is my house, this is my space, and I want you out!”

I dared him to move me. I berated him for acting like a child when he was twelve years older than me. I guess I didn’t fully understand just how deep the drugs had sank their claws into him and I was plain ignorant as to just how fucked up withdrawal made you feel. I just knew that everything in the apartment was broken right down to the paint beginning to peel off the walls, and I was scared. I was terrified. I honestly thought Dead Coyote was on his last legs.

I mean, even if he was physically okay, I couldn’t account for how he was mentally. Or, hell, spiritually. I thought back to all the broken, haphazard sigils scrawled on every inch of the walls and floors and back to his lessons about how precision was key and overdoing it would end badly. He could have ended up possessed or haunted or god only knew what and, of the two of us, he was the refined master of this artform. I didn’t know how to reverse massive fuck-ups. I would have been powerless to help him.

He cursed at me, mostly in Spanish, though he switched to English whenever he wanted me to be perfectly aware of what he was calling me. I told him, again, that I wasn’t leaving. He feinted a lunge at me and I, being a genius, told him to get over himself. That I wasn’t afraid of him, which was a blatant lie.

The air went cold and Dead Coyote stood, perfectly straight and statue-still. His expression became neutral. I twitched, he tilted his head, and then my confidence slipped. He wasn’t calming down. No, there was a maliciousness in his eyes that told me that he was planning something.

So, I ran. I turned and ran down the stairs, with one thought on my mind: Dead Coyote had to have been possessed and I had to get to the kitchen. He kept the holy water under the sink with the Mr. Clean and Fabuloso (because, honestly, what is holy water aside from another cleaning product?), and I knew that was the only way this was going to end in my favor. If it could sear the shit out of Glasyalabolas, then maybe it could burn the crazy out of Dead Coyote.

It took me about three jumps to get down the stairs and I slid on a fallen curtain and knocked the wind out of myself on the couch. Behind me, I heard him galloping down and yelling, so I pulled together all of my strength and clambered over the top. I hopscotched over candles, left shoe prints on sigils, and kicked salt everywhere as I hopped awkwardly across the kitchen.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Seymour! Don’t you--!”

Too late. In a less-than-graceful fashion, I hit the ground in a slide, less like a baseball player running for home and more like an awkward toddler on ice. I ripped open the cabinet, picked up the glass bottle Dead Coyote kept his elixir in, struggled to my feet, and turned to see him standing--seething--in the middle of the kitchen floor. His shirt was torn, though I didn’t know how he had managed that, and somehow his nose was bleeding. Was it whatever was inside of him or did he just run into a wall?

I don’t know and he still won’t tell me.

“Put it down,” he warned. I shook my head.

“Seymour, put it down!”

I shook my head again and huddled down. He stared at me, bewildered, until I ran at him screaming like a goddamned lunatic.

Believe it or not, I was not and am not a small girl. Well, I’m short, but I’m also built with the skeleton of an old Norse god. I’ve always been more than a little self-conscious about it; I’m not that delicate waif or petite cutie that men want to be with and women want to be. I am, essentially, an ox with boobs who could potentially be scary if her hobby wasn’t watching trashy talk shows. In that moment, though, I was downright thankful that I could be a linebacker, because I was more structurally stable and significantly heavier than the raging, magical tweaker who had me cornered in his kitchen.

I knocked him clear off his feet. For all the fights I saw him win, he went down like a bitch. I don’t know if it was because whatever had a grip on him was taken by surprise or if he was actually in there and just didn’t want to hit me, but at the time, I figured I was running on pure luck and had to act fast before he got the upper hand. I sat on his chest, I tilted the bottle, and I poured every last drop on his snarling face.

Silence.

He wasn’t struggling anymore, so I took that as a good sign. Still, I was a deer caught in headlights, sitting there on top of him with an empty bottle in one hand and a fistful of his shirt in the other. He stared back, blinking, soaked and confused. I felt his chest rise and fall in a heavy sigh under my butt.

“DC?” I squeaked.

“Princess, did you just pour all of that out?”

I told him I had.

“What the fuck.”

Not even a question. Just a statement of exasperation.

It took a few moments for me to agree to let him up, but when I did, we just ended up sitting in the floor in silence for a while. He needed a good, long time to gather up his thoughts so he could explain himself, but it boiled down to the fact he was miserable. He was sick. He was in pain. He got carried away. But mostly, he was grieving. I had never even stopped to consider that option.

Honestly, the whole mess started with him trying to contact Cheryl. He just wanted to feel her presence or hear her voice and just have the chance to apologize. But the spell wouldn’t work. He’d never tried to summon the spirit of a specific person before and apparently wasn’t good at it, and so he started appealing to everything he possibly could until he finally ran out of space to write. He called something, alright, judging from the amount of damage done to his apartment, but he kept trying to pass it off as a personal poltergeist born from his own suffering.

Something big, something angry, and something that would die off if he just stopped feeding it, just like I had done to mine.

But I didn’t believe him, and at his core, I don’t think he did either. I had seen Dead Coyote angry before, but the whole experience was so off-the-wall and terrifying and unlike him that I couldn’t believe that it was him. Maybe withdrawal makes you a different person and drugs are a demon in and of themselves, but--more likely in this specific case--withdrawal makes you miserable enough to invite something bigger, scarier, and more murderous because you’re an occultist who isn’t thinking straight.

“I’m still smudging the shit out of this apartment,” I warned him.

“Fair enough,” he conceded.

That night was not a fun night. Neither of us slept. Armed only with what sage he had stuck back in his cabinets, we tried to bless every corner of his home two, three, four times. When we ran out of sage, we used salt to bless it all again. When we ran out of salt and couldn’t scrape anymore off of the floor, I found an ancient cannister of rosemary in the back of a neglected closet and tried my best with that; it’s a weak alternative, but an alternative nonetheless. The sun went down, the sun came up, and we were scrubbing sigils off of the floors and walls and replacing lights and sweeping up shards of glass.

Needless to say, I didn’t go to school on November first. Instead, I spent that afternoon curled up on the couch, too exhausted to move, sweaty and nauseous and shaky and scented like a spice rack. And, as I dozed off with Dead Coyote passed out flat on his back on the floor, snoring like a lumber mill, I wondered if this was really the last of it.

It wasn’t. Heroin is an evil fucking thing and there were relapses and withdrawals and arguments and tears and Cheryl’s name--may she rest in peace--came up more than a few more times in the following years, but at the very least he never magically trashed his apartment again. Though, in the end, we both guessed that it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had.

He definitely wasn’t going to get his deposit back anyway.