Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Fourteen:
Theurgic Therapy

Love in its essence is spiritual fire.

― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, (c. 60)

Dr. Merl Emrys’ office was in a quiet office building a block away from the downtown health center. The interior was eclectic and disordered. A skull lay atop a text on quantum physics. A model of the Mars Lander lay on its side next to a voodoo doll. A Disney figurine partially obscured a Picasso original. Off to one side of the room was an old wooden desk cluttered with folders and loose papers. The remainder of the room held a group of eight

ordinary folding chairs arranged in a circle.

“Doctor Emrys, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Jackie Renfrew. She’s the one I’ve been telling you about.”

“So you’re Jackie Renfrew,” the man said. He was tall and thin, wearing a bespoke suit that looked like it had been made in Savile Row. He had a neatly-trimmed goatee and long, flowing hair that was startlingly white, and a ‘received’ British accent. “Sarah’s told us quite a bit about you, but she didn’t tell us how pretty you are. You two could be twins.” His eyes twinkled with amusement.

“And I see you have a bit of the blarney in you, Doctor,” Jackie said, “since Sarah’s done herself up for my benefit,” but she smiled as she said it.

“Jackie was hoping to be allowed to sit in on tonight’s group session,” Sarah explained.

“If no one objects, certainly.” Dr. Emrys turned to the circle of empty chairs and asked, “Folks, we have a visitor, someone who would like to sit in one our session tonight. Now you know, that if anyone objects, it won‘t happen. How do you all say?”

“Who is she?” A tiny feminine voice asked. Jackie’s first assumption was that she was whispering, but after a moment’s consideration, Jackie decided that it sounded more like she was shouting from far away.

“What is she?” The second voice was a deep rumble, like rocks grinding against each other. Jackie looked again, but as far as she could tell, even using her magical perceptions, only the Doctor and Sarah were in the room with her.

“Jackie, would you answer their question please?” Sarah asked quietly, adding a nod of the head to indicate that it really was all right to answer.

“My name is Jackie Renfrew. I’m Sarah’s sort-of niece, since my steady guy is her nephew.”

“That’s not the ‘what’ I meant.” The deep voice said. Jackie thought it was coming from the side of the room with the chairs, but there was nothing there, nothing visible and no auras.

“Maybe not, but it’s the ‘what’ I’m going to answer.”

“Jackie?” Dr. Emrys asked.

“Yeah?”

Sarah gave her a worried look, so she guessed that she’d sounded a bit surly.

“A group is based on trust,” the Doctor explained. “Each person in the group trusts that the others will keep private any of the confidences revealed during our sessions. This trust goes both ways. You must trust us and we must trust you.”

Jackie was torn. On the one hand, she wanted to be admitted to the group for the information she felt she would need to solve her current problem. Additionally, she admitted to herself that it would be nice to have someone to talk to about her own change. However, the nature of her change, that she was designed to be a doxy, of sorts, was a matter of some sensitivity for her.

Before she could come to a conclusion, Sarah spoke. “Please give the group your trust, Jackie. I trust them.”

“Okay,” Jackie sighed in resignation. “The question was ‘What am I?’ The answer is, I’m somewhere uneasily between a Succubus and a Cupid, and some days I don’t know exactly which side I lean toward, but I want it to be the side of light and love … most days. I was created by Lilith, and she’s … difficult to get a handle on, or to reconcile with my own former assumptions about reality and justice in the world.”

“Thank you, Jackie,” Dr. Emrys said and gave her a comforting pat on the back and waved towards the folding chairs. “Please join the group.”

Turning, Jackie saw that all but three of the chairs in use. There was a huge black man with flowing white hair. He was so huge he would have made John Henry, the “steel drivin’ man,” look puny. “Welcome,” he rumbled. His was the voice that had asked, “What?”

To his right was a redheaded woman; so slight that you could see the top of the chair back behind her head. Her feet made it barely halfway to the floor. Jackie was betting she had been the one to ask, “Who?”

The third person was huge too, but compared to the black man, this pasty-skinned man seemed only normal sized. Where the others were well dressed, he wore a ragged and stained raincoat over worn pants and mismatched shoes. His long white hair was tied back in an unkempt ponytail and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in at least a week, although he seemed otherwise fit and athletic. Ignoring Jackie, he continued manipulating a clear white diamond the size of a coin, like a magician, flipping it over and over as it moved from finger to finger.

The next-to-last person wasn’t even human, and rather than sitting on the chair he was lying on it. It had scales and a snout that looked a lot like it could breathe fire, it was a small, silver-colored dragon. As Jackie watched, it hiccoughed and belched a puff of grey-black smoke, which answered her speculation. There was a tinkling sound and within the ringing Jackie thought she heard a child’s voice say, “Excuse me.”

The final person was a normal sized, or more accurately human-sized, black man with a huge belly that made one think of a Buddha. He just nodded and said nothing.

Sarah and Dr. Emrys took the next two seats, leaving the last one for Jackie. With a hundred questions yet wondering why she felt these sessions were going to be helpful, Jackie sat.

“As we have a new member today, I’d appreciate if everyone took a moment to introduce him, her, or itself and tell a little bit about him, her, or itself. I’ll start.

“My current name is Merl Emrys, although I’ve had many others. I am best known as a royal advisor and magician, but in reality I am a Muse. As such, I lead others to truth, creativity and self-understanding. I can utilize most of the skills I help my students learn — although I daresay I might have a bit of trouble with Jackie’s — and I feed on self-satisfaction and knowledge.

“Dross, would you introduce yourself next please?” Everyone turned to the white-haired giant.

“Name Dross Scoria. Am troll. Work with metals. Feed off energy in earth.”

“You mean like Vulcan?” Jackie asked innocently, only to have the troll jump to his feet, roar in anger and rush toward her.

His second step found his foot landing on air. He was floating, suspended in the air before her, but still struggling to swim toward me. That was when Jackie noticed that he had no hand below his left wrist.

“Dross,” Merl’s voice was quiet, but commanding. “Please stop. She doesn’t know.” Turning to Jackie, he continued. “Please apologize to him. I can only hold him so long and then one of you is likely to get hurt.”

“I apologize, Dross. I don’t know what I said, but I assure you I had no intention of insulting or hurting you in any way.”

Merl explained while the struggling slowly stopped. “The more technically accurate term is Titan, although ice giant, hobgoblin and dwarf have also been used for different clans. Vulcan was a peer of Dross’. Because of Vulcan, Dross was punished by the loss of a hand, which has made it impossible for him to work with metals.”

Aghast, Jackie turned back to Dross. “Dross, I really am sorry. I just didn’t know.” Dross turned his back to her and she could feel his mingled anger and anguish seething beneath the surface of his impassive stance.

“Don’t worry, Jackie,” Sarah assured her niece, patting my arm. “Dross will get over it. He’s really a very nice Titan.”

Beside Dross is Colleen O’Herlihey,” Dr. Emrys continued. “Sadly, she is among the last of a dying breed — a leprechaun.” Colleen was a beautiful, if tiny woman, about four feet in heels, yet perfectly formed, with flowing, fiery red hair, and green eyes, the color of grass.

“Amazin’ it is, too,” Colleen explained. “Normally, we survive on the emanations o’ moonlight on gold, but I were a sickly one. Me parents feared for me very survival. The luck o’ the Irish bein’ with me, I found I could survive off other than the emanations o’ gold. Woe be it for me fellows as they could not and have been slowly starvin’ to death since the world went off the gold standard and the price o’ gold went through the roof.”

“Couldn’t they too feed off whatever you’re feeding from?”

“Aye, were they not too proud to break from the old ways and learn from the likes o’ a ‘pervert’ like me.” She grinned and laughed.

“Moving on,” Dr. Emrys quickly intervened before Colleen could work herself into a bitter passion. “Next, we have Tris Magister, a man of many parts with a very long history behind him.”

The man scowled. “I’m a gambler and a thief, sometimes a spy and go-between, but I’m doing all right as a translator for people who need official forms and stuff, and I used to be the God of commerce, so I still get a quite a bit of action from Wall Street types. I don’t like to be tied down, though, so I usually sleep rough and keep moving.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Tris?” Emrys gently prompted.

“Oh, yeah. I’m a liar and a sorceror, not necessarily in that order, but Jeez, Emrys, we could sit here all night if we all listed our complete biographies.”

Dr. Emrys nodded, but said, “I think, in the circumstances, those last two items might be germane, Tris.” Then he looked toward the tiny dragon. “Dragon has no name, at least not one that can be spoken with a human tongue. He has graciously allowed us to give him a name pronounceable in a human tongue and so we now call him Tinelle.”

There was a tinkling sound in Jackie’s head that she somehow knew to be the dragon agreeing with Dr. Emrys.

“I was going to ask how he speaks if his language is so foreign to ours, but I think I see.” Another tinkling sound, but this time it translated as a giggle.

“Tinelle is actually here for medical help, not counseling, but since there are so few of his kind about, we’ve been exploring the memories of others to see if they can help. If no one in any of the groups I run can help, he’ll have to try the convention.”

“I doubt I can help, but I’m willing to try. What’s the problem?”

“Much like birds, dragons can’t chew food. They have a gizzard and swallow hard objects that grind their food up for them. Unfortunately, Tinelle doesn’t know what to put in his gizzard.”

“I gather stone is not an option?”

“It crumbles to dust before a single meal is finished.”

“Geez, what does a dragon eat?”

“Iron. Preferably iron with small traces of nickel and molybdenum.”

“You mean steel?”

“Uh, I hadn’t thought about it, but yes, it is steel. How did you know?”

“My … boyfriend’s an engineer,” Jackie said. “I help him study sometimes for his tests. You pick things up along the way. I know they use diamond bits and tools to work high-tensile steel, but corundum might be cheaper, and easier to come by, since you can buy corundum grindstones at almost any hardware store, and just break them up. The clear stones, of course, are much more valuable, because that’s what rubies and sapphires are, just colored clear corundum in large crystals, although they can grow them in a laboratory now, so they aren’t as pricey as they were a hundred years ago. Anyway, who’s this last gentleman?”

Emrys was amazed. “Wait a minute, Jackie. You may have just solved Tinelle’s problem, or at least given us a line on solving it. Do you have any idea how large they should be?”

Jackie blinked. “Not a clue. You’d have to ask my boyfriend, ’cause he’d know a lot more about it. I just know what I’ve picked up haphazardly, but materials science is one of his concentrations.” Then she thought of a possible hitch. “My boyfriend’s mortal, though, so we might have to be subtle about the questions.”

“But it’s very hard and durable?”

“Oh, yeah. Because it’s so hard, it weathers out of rocks as streams cut through deposits, so they used to collect the gritty bits from beaches as ‘black sand’ and the stones by sifting through the sand along the banks and bottom. You can find it in many places around the world, because it’s just aluminum oxide, but it’s almost as hard as diamond, a nine instead of a ten on the Mohs hardness scale.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that corundum can scratch almost anything except a diamond, which is Mohs ten. Impure varieties of it are called emery, like you use for filing your nails, or in sandpaper, but emery is softer than corundum proper.”

“Thank you so much, Jackie,” Dr. Emrys said. “It explains a lot, when I stop to think about it. Tinelle’s ancestors and relatives must have been able to find mineral deposits in the lands they inhabited that contained natural abrasives, but you say they’re common, and used in human industries, so that might explain why they often lived in caves as well; perhaps there were veins of this stuff deep underground that they could use without human interference.”

“Make sense to me. If it works, I’m glad to help, so no need to thank me at all, so who’s next?”

“The man beside Tinelle is Jumbe Mungu. It means Chief God in Bantu or Swahili, and he’s originally from Zanzibar, off the eastern coast of Africa. He used to be a lot bigger, but he’s running out of believers.”

A scowl briefly crossed Mungu’s face, but then he nodded politely to Jackie. Dr. Emrys rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

“Very well, shall we begin? I believe last week Dross was just about to tell us what metal he was going to specialize in and why. Dross, would you continue please?”

“Dross work diamonds,” he said, challenging any one to question his decision.

“Diamonds be not metal, me boyo,” Colleen said.

With a roar, Dross was out of his seat and lunging at the leprechaun. Before anyone could react, he was crashing into the chair. As the noise of the chair flying across the room ended, it was replaced by high-pitched giggling. Colleen was perched on Jumbe’s shoulder.

“You’ll not be catching me that easy, me boyo,” Colleen giggled and jumped off his shoulder before Dross could grab her. Making a high arch as she flew through the air, Colleen looked like a ballerina as she lightly landed on Dr. Emrys’ desk.

Much faster than one would expect of someone as large as the titan, Dross charged the leprechaun again. He made it to about a foot from the African God and disappeared.

“Jumbe, please return Dross from wherever you’ve sent him,” Dr. Emrys requested. Before he had finished, Dross was back in his chair, shivering and looking like he’d seen an army of ghosts.

“Dross, dear,” Sarah said quietly. “I’m glad to hear that you’ve finally chosen and I’m sure you’ll do wonderful things with them, but I too would like to know why you chose diamonds.”

Dross was again out of his chair, this time charging at Sarah. I jumped in front of her, placing myself between my Aunt and a very angry troll. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do, maybe make him love me so that he wouldn’t hurt Sarah or me.

I was still debating as Dross rapidly closed the few feet between us. A ham-sized fist rose into the air above my head and then down to crush me. As I tried to force my talent into overdrive before my head was crushed, I was suddenly pushed forcefully to the side. Twisting as I fell, I saw Sarah had been the one to push me. She had stepped forward to stand calmly where I had been as the troll’s powerful arm continued to speed, ever faster, downward. Even before I could take a breath to scream, the hand struck Sarah with what had to be a killing blow — and passed through her.

Dross stumbled, falling into Sarah’s chair and then over it. He landed hard, but was up and lunging at Sarah before I could rise to my feet. Just a foot from the woman, the troll’s momentum stopped and he floated in the air again, arms still scrabbling madly to reach Sarah.

“Dross, I must ask you to act civilly.” Merl spoke quietly, but it was clear he expected Dross to listen. Unfortunately, the troll had a different opinion and continued to snarl and struggle as it tried to reach Sarah.

“Dross? Dross!” Merl’s words had absolutely no effect. It was as if the troll could not even hear him.

Finally, after watching the huge man struggle in vain, Jackie turned to Sarah and said, “We might as well go now. If we don’t, someone might get hurt.”

“Aye, lass,” Colleen agreed. “Once he gets like this ‘tis best to get far away from him ‘til he can calm down.”

“How long will that be?” Jackie asked.

“None can say. Hours, days, mayhap years. Why I once knew a troll….”

Dr. Emrys cleared his throat. “May we dispense with the tall tales for the moment, Colleen? I expect to see you all at the convention. Remember, mixing with others and learning more about yourselves is an important part of your therapy.”

“Dross, dear, please calm down and talk to me,” Sarah beseeched. Nothing happened.

Sarah was about to try again, when the air popped twice as Mungu and Tinelle disappeared. Colleen stayed just long enough to jump onto the troll’s head, give him a sloppy kiss and jump away before he could grab her. Standing in front of the troll, she gave him a big grin and tipped an imaginary hat at him. Then, she disappeared too. Taking Jackie’s arm, Sarah slowly led Jackie out of the office. They could still hear the troll’s snarls and growls from the street.

“This is going to be an interesting convention, isn’t it, Jackie?” Sarah said.

Jackie just nodded and bit her lip. She still didn’t know anything more about when the convention would be or where the convention would be held.

“Oh,” Sarah added as if reading Jackie’s mind, “Doctor Emrys says the convention will be held at Calaca E. He said it was customary for the eldest supernatural in the area to host it and Lilith, of course, is eldest of all, aside from the angels, of course, but they usually stay away, since they make some of us uncomfortable.”

Jackie sighed. ‘God, Lilith could be such a pain in the butt sometimes.’

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011 by Levanah