Weston Ochse - Age of Blood

“Only if we call it.”

“Then call it.”

“Now?”

“No time like the present.”

Ramon started to leave.

“Where are you going?” Holmes asked.

“To track down the other skinwalker. Timing is critical. It’s already been too long.”

Holmes nodded, letting the man leave. Once Ramon was gone, he turned to Walker. “What do you think?”

“I think he’s hiding something.”

“Me, too. The question is, is it a big something or a small something?”

“My guess is it’s something big.”

“Me, too.”

Laws suddenly burst into the room. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“What?” Holmes, Jen, and Walker said simultaneously.

“YaYa—they did it! While we were gone they performed an exorcism.”

“They what ?” Holmes’s face turned red and creased with anger. “Is YaYa all right?”

“He’s good. He’s great. He’s back to normal.”

Walker, Laws, Holmes, and Jen crowded through the doorway of the monk’s cell in the basement of the castle. The walls were off-white plaster, bare except for a simple wooden cross centered above the twin bed. YaYa sat with his back against the headboard, Hoover in his lap, upside down and enjoying a belly rub. Vega and another priest stood at the head of the bed.

Holmes strode into the room. He’d put on one of the Knights’ robes and had a look of a beardless Gandalf about him.

“You okay, son?” He put his hand on YaYa’s shoulder.

“Never felt better. It’s like I’ve been sleeping for a long time.” He looked around. “If I did anything stupid, please forgive me.”

“If you mean barking and licking yourself, then we already have that up on Facebook. Don’t worry,” Laws said.

YaYa’s face paled. “Seriously? I did that?”

“What do you think?” Holmes said. Then he turned to Vega. “Why didn’t you wait?”

“It was a simple thing.” He shrugged. “No reason to wait.”

“But it was my man.”

“If it was one of my men, I’d have wanted you to do the same in my position. No reason to make someone suffer out of convenience, no?”

Holmes seemed to think about this for a moment. “I suppose not,” he said. “Still, I’d have liked to be consulted.”

“If you’d been here, I’d have consulted you.”

Laws stepped into the conversation. “You said it was a little thing. What do you mean?”

“It was a small demon that had entered his soul. It was no match for the power of the Lord,” the priest said.

“But YaYa is Muslim,” Walker pointed out.

Everyone in the room seemed to pause as they looked first at the cross on the wall and then at YaYa. Finally it was Vega who spoke.

“His belief is not what’s important. It is the belief of the demon. The demon recognized the strength of Christ and was compelled to leave.”

Holmes scratched his head. “So the demon was Christian?”

Both the priest and Vega crossed themselves.

“No, never. It was an abomination. It was a piece of something greater once, but by itself it was nothing.”

“Where’d it go?” Jen asked.

“Wherever such things go.” The priest shrugged. “All I can say now is that it is gone.”

Walker felt awkward listening to the priest’s response. He could hardly believe that YaYa’s personal beliefs mattered so little. And the idea that a random demon would automatically recognize the power of a religious symbol just seemed so… far-fetched.

Laws saw the look of mental distress on Walker’s face. “It’s a conundrum. Have you ever heard of the Jewish vampire?”

Walker shook his head. Was this a joke?

“So a vampire walks into a room and a man pulls out a cross. The vampire says that he’s Jewish. The man doesn’t care and pulls the cross on the vampire anyway. The vampire can’t get near the man because of the power of the cross. Do you know why?”

Walker shook his head again.

“It’s not what the vampire believes, it’s what the wielder of the icon believes. In this case the man believed in the cross, carrying with him the beliefs of millions that added to his own powerful belief. It’s as the priest said. He needs to believe, not the victim.”

Walker shook his head. He understood conceptually, but something didn’t sit well with him. He turned toward YaYa and walked over to him. He shook the other’s hand. “How do you really feel?”

“I feel good. Seriously, I do. I want to get out of here. I want to contribute.”

“Can he work?” Holmes asked.

“He has a clean bill of health,” Vega replied.

Holmes pointed to a new bandage that had been wrapped around the young man’s left forearm. “What about that?”

“We changed the bandage and applied our magical elixir.”

All eyes went to him.

“An-ti-bi-otic,” he said, sounding the syllables out as if they were the words to a spell.

Laws and Jen chuckled.

Holmes squeezed YaYa’s shoulder. “Get off your ass and get in gear. We have work to do.”

“Aye, aye.” YaYa started to get up, then realized he had nothing on under the thin cover. He yanked it back over him and glanced at Jen.

“I’ll be leaving now,” she said, turning.

“We’ll all leave,” Holmes said. “Let’s go to the command center. I need to speak with Billings and we have some searches we need to commence.”

Everyone left except for Walker, who lingered.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You were pretty far gone. Frankly, I didn’t know if you’d make it.”

YaYa nodded thoughtfully. “We now share something. Were you ever afraid it would come back?”

“Every day.”

“Even now?”

“Even now. And you? Are you afraid?”

“Terribly.” YaYa sat up straight and kneaded the sheet in his hands. “I can remember bits and pieces. There was a part where I remember barking and I wanted to stop but I had no control over my body. I can still feel the other being pushing me down. It was like it cut the strings of my ability to command my own body and then sat on me.”

“You’re never going to forget.”

“How do you deal with it?”

Walker laughed. “For a long time I blocked it out. I forced myself to forget it had ever happened.”

YaYa reached around and grabbed the cross from the wall behind him. “I don’t think I can ever forget.” He stared worriedly at the wooden symbol. “And this bothers me.”

“Was it what I said?”

“Yeah. You voiced something I didn’t know how to put into words. And you know what? It bothers me that my own belief has so little to do with it.”

“Well, there’s hardly any empirical data to support what Laws and Vega said. They may be right. They may also be partially right. Ever seen a man walk on hot coals?”

“At a luau in Hawaii once.”

“Do you remember how he did it?”

“Big guy. Talked about believing in his inability to get burned while firewalking.”

Walker nodded. “I think I saw the same guy. It wasn’t like he skipped across the coals either. He stepped pretty firmly and didn’t get burned.”

“And it was because of his belief,” YaYa added.

“Exactly,” Walker said. “So there is something to the idea that what we believe makes a difference. Remember that.”

“So it’s not just about what’s in our blood?”

“I don’t think so,” Walker said, poking an index finger at his head. “It’s what’s in our mind. In our soul. Even skinwalkers like Ramon can decide when to change and when not to.”

YaYa took it in. “Thanks, Walk.”

“Don’t mention it.” Walker stood, feeling the aches and pains of the mission. “I’ll see you and Hoover upstairs when you feel up to it.”