“Are you sure?” Sally put her hands on her hips. “I can’t be sitting awake all night ready to kick your ass again.”
“No, I’m good now, I feel it. C’mere.” She held out her arms. Cautiously, but needing the comfort, Sally came to her and let herself be hugged.
“Just what exactly did you do out there?” she asked finally. “Where did you get that Mogen David?”
“You’re still a helpless goy,” Lavinia teased and eased them down onto the stone floor. Sally sadly realized that she could not let Lavinia hold her all night; in a few minutes she’d be shivering again.
“Was my Mom’s,” Lavinia offered.
“You’ve got your mother’s Star of David?” It still didn’t seem like Lavinia.
“Yeah. I didn’t want a Bat Mitzvah, thank you so much, only way she’d a got me in a synagogue was if Patrick Califia was the rabbi, but Mom wanted to give me something. Never wore it and for years I had it in the window of my camper, part of a display with a pentagram and a rubber shrunken head. Then the gum holding it together disintegrated and all the shit started sliding around, so I stuck everything in the glove box. I forgot I even had it.
“Then when I saw that Mogen David in Rainbow’s shop, I remembered it. I dunno if you saw but I took it out of the glove box that morning we left. Shit, that was just yesterday morning.” In the dark, Sally saw her head shake. “I swear I’m only Jewish by culture, but I just suddenly feel this ache in my heart when I look at it.”
Sally remembered how hard Lavinia had struggled. “And it helped you like the raven emblem helped you? To resist the vampire call, whatever it is that makes you lose your humanity?”
Lavinia’s head turned sharply. “Naw, you don’t get it at all. It helped me resist those fucking Christians. That shit that pushed me out in the dark, I thought it was for being a vampire, but it was for being a Jew. It was the Christian Church I was resisting, all the evil it’s done. And I won. I held out this thing and I said, ‘I’m a Jew, baby, and I’m coming in, you bastards don’t own the world.’ And then I did it. And here I am.”
“But that’s – the magic didn’t push me out and remember I’m a Heathen Chinee. And a kinky bi/pan whatever.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Well, yeah, okay, prob’ly why I got pushed out and you didn’t was vampire shit. Cause I did go vampire again and I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Sally said, even though she was still shaken. “It’s part of what I signed up for when I said I’d be with you.” Until the day I accidentally throw you out!
She still saw the monks of long ago, simple men patiently building those houses and those fairy tale stairs. They’d been good men and their faith had been a good faith.
The pitting of good against good, she thought sleepily, and knew that was the reason for the laughter she had heard. Lavinia thought she’d won but she’d only pitted good against good and that voice which screamed every time they inched toward truth had laughed instead.
But Lavinia was a good person and at least now she was inside where she had every right to be.
And she was now asleep. Sally reluctantly moved away from her and as she tried to warm up enough to sleep herself, she remembered the pentagram in her coat pocket. Why had it resonated for her, as the Mogen David had resonated for Lavinia? She had never had the slightest interest in witchcraft and when Jessica Rainbow had explained the symbols of knife and star and cup, she had felt no stirring.
And yet there was something.
At last, blearily awake even after everything, she sat up and fished it out. She hunched over as she turned on the flashlight so that it wouldn’t wake Lavinia up.
For the first time since she’d acquired the pentagram, she studied the arrows and little people with which it was decorated. This was her talisman somehow, as the Mogen David was Lavinia’s.
At each of the five points was an elegant little stick figure doing something different. At the top, it peeped from the branches of a tree. A tiny arrow pointed to the next vertex where the person cooked over a fire. At the other vertices it tilled soil, held a shield and sailed on a swirling sea. At each vertex an arrow pointed on to the next one clockwise.
Here was another weird thing: there were arrows along each of the edges in the exact sequence she remembered her kindergarten teacher using when she taught them to draw a star: bottom left to top, top to bottom right and so on around. (Had Ms. Tremayne known she was teaching them to draw a witchcraft symbol?)
But her connection to this thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with witchcraft or modern paganism. It seemed to have something to do with her old lover Callista.
She was warming up at last and getting sleepy, thank goodness. Her mind drifted over that brief, intense, tender and abusive connection. Callista had dated a witch before her and still had lots of pagan mementos. But as her head nodded and jerked up, the image that burned in her eyes was herself dressed in the Chinese silks she wore back then. She’d been so over-the-top into her family heritage at that point, now that she was away from her father. She cringed to think of that time: she’d been Callista’s “exotic Asian doll” and bought that Hokusai print thinking it was Chinese just like the stupidest gweilo.
She put the flashlight and the pentagram away and lay down, confused and exhausted sleep creeping over her.