Love & Exorcisms | 18+ | COMPLETE |

- Chapter 12 -

The College of Medicine and Psychiatry, New Orleans

Damian

The cries of the damned and downtrodden will be drowned beneath the preaching of morality, of superiority, of mercy.

The words of Damian's grandmother seemed to echo within the old brick halls of the college. The brick was the color of half-dry blood, the pillars and arches that supported the sprawling building stained black and gray by decades of hands. The College of Medicine and Psychiatry was a bastion of knowledge and progress, crowned as a revolution of the modern age. No longer did the educated man rely upon religious texts, no longer did he subscribe to superstition and alchemy! The educated man could heal with the scalpel, with electricity, with innate understanding.

The path to knowledge is lined with pain.

The pain of the unfortunates. The pain of the misunderstood. The pain of the desperate.

The college overlooked Soule Asylum. At first glance, one might think the long, low brick building to merely be an extension of the college beside it. But its windows were narrow and barred, its doors were steel. It was separated from the college it clung to by a ten foot stone wall. It was filled with those who would give educated men their "deeper understanding of the human psyche."

There were many days when Damian was loathe to be associated with it.

He knew that half his colleagues thought him brilliant, and the other half thought he belonged in the asylum himself. All of them would agree he was eccentric at best, and utterly insane at worst. He had learned to filter himself unless in the presence of trusted company.

There was no room for the paranormal in science, not in their minds. The art of exorcism belonged cast to the dark ages with all the old gods.

But until Damian could bottle a cure for demonic possession in a vial, or crush it up into pill or powder, he would cling to the old wisdom. The wisdom of his mother, his grandmother, and countless witches and priestesses before them.

He knew a day would come when science could explain the existence of supernatural beings and their parasitic predation upon the human form. The day would come when the power in old runes and words would be understood. Perhaps there would even come a time when his more private desires could not be used as evidence to commit him, or earn him the diagnosis of a pervert. But until that day came, he worked in silence.

His encounter with the prostitute - the irresistibly insolent Miss Samara - had spurred him into a frenzy. Her marks were undeniable: ancient runes of power, from the Old Country, his grandmother's land of Scandanavia. How they had come to be on a young woman in New Orleans, he could only hazard a guess.

Those scars - laid deep and intricately across her skin. Her beautiful, just slightly reddened skin-

He felt like slapping himself. She could be it. The source. The roots of the dark tree that had spread its branches across his life.

Yet now she was also the source of no small amount of frustration and...he hated to think it...longing. Such a feeling should have been gone the moment he laid eyes on her scars. It was akin to a doctor lusting after his patient, or a professor his student.

But the way she had spoken: that cocky, cruel confidence. Such eager curiousity. The way her face had flushed as he watched her bend over his desk-

None of that mattered now.

He wished he had had but a few moments longer to study her scars, to draw them, perhaps. But he had known at first glance the shape of them, what the lines surrounding them meant: she had been carved with a Gateway. They were drawn and named differently depending on the spiritualism from which they hailed. Some called it a Veve, some a Pentagram. Its purpose was the same regardless of its name: it created a central point to draw in the power of foreign dimensions. It could be used to imbue something with power. It could be used to call the dead. It could be used to summon beings from deep within the higher dimensions.