Love & Exorcisms | 18+ | COMPLETE |

- Chapter 36 -

Damian

In his mind's eye, his mother was a giant who glowed like the sun. Her hair was a mane of dark curls, her smile wide and eager. Her hands tickled, they cuddled, they held. Her voice, patient always. Her smell, like honeysuckle and warmth and fresh grass...

They lived in Massachusetts back then. He had been born there, but not conceived. His mother did not speak often of his father, and when she did, his name became a whisper: "Ragnarok was a good man, but a traitor. Our people would not have suffered a traitor's son to live. So your Amma and I came here, my sweetling. So that you could be free."

Mother never said what his father did, why he was a traitor. She never even said if his father knew he existed. Damian had not thought to ask much when he was 8 years old. His head was too full of new things and grand ideas and the whole world was still magical.

Mother was a healer: Damian would watch her work, in the simple stone cottage they shared with his Amma, his grandmother, on the outskirts of Salem. Those folk who still believed in the old ways - as his mother called them - would bring their ill out of the city, past the doctors with their new fangled medical ideas, and Ingrid Hearst would heal them.

At least, in Damian's mind, he was certain his mother healed them all.

He did wonder now what she would think of him: a doctor, a devotee of the sciences, having turned his face from the old ways. Even his grandmother had been more progressive in her beliefs than Ingrid. "Times change and so must we," Balthazha would say. "The old ways are simply that: old. Humans are far too stupid and fickle to assume we have already found the one true way of doing things. We must advance."

Ingrid never thought so. Damian had hazey recollections of she and Balthazha arguing, but over what he was never certain. All he knew was that his mother followed the gods of their homeland, and his grandmother did not.

"Your grandmother is proud," his mother told him. "And her pride has blinded her to her blessings."

The one thing the two women agreed upon was his teachings in the ways of exorcism. Ingrid seldom performed them, but when Belthazha called on her for help, mother and daughter became a force beyond reckoning. Damian was seven years old when he was allowed to attend the exorcism of a girl his own age. For the first time he saw the power of a demon over a human body. He watched that sweet, shy little girl hurl such viles words as her small body strained against the restraints his mother and grandmother were forced to use against her. He watched that little girl look his mother dead in the eyes, and her pretty blue irises changed to red, and she screamed, "Whore! Devil's whore, traitor's whore, bearer of bastards! Shame of your people, shame of your mother! And you will shame your own son before the end!"

He had not thought much of those words then. He had been too enamored with the power he witnessed, as he saw that little girl subdued, and quieted, and freed. Never did the faces of the two women show worry, never once did they show fear. They worked with strength, and conviction. They stood over that girl clasping each other's hands and their words were in unison.

And Damian never felt afraid. Not with them there.

But for all the healing his mother gave, she could not heal herself.

There came days when Ingrid did not smile as much. Her eyes were not warm, their light slowly fading. As she mixed her tonics and crushed poultices she coughed roughly into a handkerchief stained with blood. Her walk slowed, until she hobbled about the house and had to take rests before she ascended the stairs. Soon enough little Damian and his grandmother moved Ingrid's bedroom into the study downstairs, the same room she received her patients in. Soon after that, she was not receiving patients anymore.