Silver Nitrate(100)
“Where is it? Why, you stupid…”
López kept muttering, and Tristán shivered again, his fingers wrapping around the pen. He felt nauseated and pressed one hand against his belly. He closed his eyes.
“Tristán?” Montserrat said.
He blinked a couple of times. The nausea was dying down, but there was a sharp pain in the back of his skull, as if someone was inserting a needle there. His hand twitched. He wrote down a word and glanced down at the letters. He clutched the edge of the table with his free hand.
“Momo,” he said, quickly looking up and staring at her. She stared back at him in confusion.
“What?”
“That’s not my handwriting.”
Montserrat looked at the pad where he had written “Abel” with clean, neat strokes, the letters in cursive in a style that was very much unlike his own. López looked down at the paper and sat down, nodding.
“Keep at it,” López said.
“How? You said he’d speak to me, but this isn’t speaking. I’m not hearing anything.”
“It’s fine. Give it a try.”
“Okay, sure…ah…Abel, is that you?”
He wrote down the word “yes.” López nodded and motioned for him to continue. López had been right: this was different from the times he had seen Karina. The sharp stabbing pain in his skull was new. Tristán wetted his lips.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you. We are trying to end Ewers’s spell, but we need your help. There were runes he wanted to project during the credits, do you remember that?”
Yes.
“I need the runes and the sequence in which they were going to be projected. Can you help me?”
I’ll try.
“Go ahead,” Tristán said, not knowing what else to say.
His hand moved across the page as if of its own volition. He traced a triangle and two lines, adding smaller strokes to the sides.
“The first one. This is the first one,” Tristán said.
“Air,” Montserrat said.
Earth and water came next. Then there was a rune López identified as life. “The opener” was the fifth. Neither Montserrat nor López had to identify the last rune for him: he recognized it as the vegvísir. Funnily enough the symbol for fire had not been called. He’d expected it to be part of the sequence, seeing as they’d started with an element. He felt something was subtly wrong but could not pinpoint what, exactly. His fingers trembled.
“Is there something else?”
Yes.
His fingers trembled even more. Even if Abel couldn’t speak to him Tristán felt something had gone askew. A cloud of anxiety wrapped around his brain.
Yes.
“What is it?” he asked, the sensation that Abel was trying to warn him was thick and almost tangible.
His hand twitched against the page again.
You are afraid, Tristán.
The words bloomed before his eyes; the pen was harsh against the page. Those letters…that handwriting…it was different than what he’d been writing moments before. This was very compact, the letters pressed against each other, tiny.
Every day of your life you are afraid, Tristán.
“It’s Ewers’s handwriting,” Montserrat said.
Tristán watched as his hand descended upon the page, almost slashing it apart with one violent stroke. He swallowed.
“Yes, it’s Ewers,” López said. “Crafty bastard, what do you want?”
Fear me.
The candles wavered, and Tristán felt a wave of terrible cold. It was as if the cold pressed against him, and he tried to slam the notebook shut, he tried to lift his hand away, but instead his fingers closed around the pen with an iron grip as his stomach churned.
Follow me into the night, Mont—
Tristán knocked the notebook off the table with his free hand, but the pen dug into the white tablecloth, staining it, drawing the rest of the letters.
—serrat.
“Make it stop,” Tristán told López.
“You miserable bastard,” López said, reaching for the box with salt and tossing liberal amounts of it across the table. “Leave. You are not welcome. My wards repel you.”
Tristán bent over the table. Something had shoved him down, something of great strength, and for a moment he feared it would crush his spine. The candles sputtered, and they were plunged into shadows. He felt Montserrat’s hand, clutching his wrist, as his chair squeaked and seemed to shiver. His mouth was coated in bile, and he clenched his teeth.
“My wards repel you,” López said again. Tristán could hear and feel the salt being scattered around the room, blindly tossed in all directions.
He dropped the pen and shoved a hand into his jacket pocket, his fingers sliding against his lighter, producing a dim flame.
“Light those candles again,” López ordered. He had thrust one hand inside the box with the salt.
Tristán obeyed, attempting to press the flame against the wick, but the tablecloth slid forward, slick as a snake, toppling with its motion both candlesticks and the glass. It launched itself against López with such force that the man was flung back. The box he was holding fell to the ground.