Chapter Six: Devil Worshiping

“Heck, no, we won’t go! Satanism and witchcraft--just say no!”

I was, like, pretending to shout along, but my voice got totally scratchy and I didn’t want to lose it completely. What if I was on my way home after dark and one of the Satanists or like gay black thugs tried to violate my pure, innocent body, and I couldn‘t shout for help? That would be like so not good. I might get pregnant and have to give it up for adoption like in that movie Juno which was way cool because it really showed that babies have fingernails just like people do, so you shouldn’t have the devil worshiping doctors kill them. And then I wouldn’t be pure anymore and I’d have to take off my purity ring that my daddy bought me and I’d be so mortified with embarrassment that I’d throw myself off a cliff or in front of a bus or just eat Baked Lays potato chips on the couch for the rest of my life until the rapture. They tell you those chips aren’t bad for you ‘cause they’re baked, but I think that if I ate sixty-two bags of them, I’d still get sick.

“Sara.”

I glanced over at my little brother. He was so annoying. Why do they act like that? He was nine whole months younger and he drove me nuts.

“If you’re not focusing on praying really loudly for the Lord to strike down this totally unholy sin den, then you should shut up and not bug me.” I turned away from Josh and waved my sign some more.

“Don’t you think we should go back to school? I have a Math test.”

I sighed and dropped my sign to turn to him for a moment. “This is like so much more important,” I said. “They tried to get you and me to do witchcraft! They probably put a spell or something on the fliers. The only way to purge the evil from our souls is to protest.”

“And it’s not ‘cause Zeke is here?”

“Start praying for your immortal soul,” I said. “Jesus doesn’t like what your wicked thoughts are implying.” I held my sign up extra high for the sake of both our souls, and so that Zeke could see I was participating like a true Christian warrior.

Zeke was in Grade Twelve. I saw him on the first day of school two years ago and I knew that Jesus wanted me to marry him so we could have sex. Well, I didn’t know that Jesus wanted me to marry him, but I was pretty sure it was His divine will that gave me the sex feelings, and since you can’t have sex until marriage or you’ll burn in hell forever, I figured that meant I was supposed to marry him.

“Heck, no, we won’t go! Satanism and witchcraft—just say no!”

I saw that totally ungodly slut, Kerri McLeod, slither up to Zeke to bat her probably fake eyelashes at him. They couldn’t be real. Even if she was wearing mascara—which is totally the devil’s gateway drug into full facial whoredom—there was no way her lashes were that long. Zeke smiled politely back at her, but I was pretty sure he saw right through to her badly dressed, demonic soul. He was strong, I knew—a true prayer warrior—but I still didn’t trust that ho, so I boldly marched up to see if Zeke could give me some tips on my sign carrying or something.

Police stood around the front of the witchcraft store, talking with some guy. Although I was really close to Zeke now and could totally butt Kerri out of the way, the guy with the police turned around and I like totally almost fell over. He was so hot. He was tall and blonde and I think that’s probably what Jesus looked like, but without the beard, and by the way, I think it’s a total lie that he was like black or brown or something because Jim Caviezel isn’t black and he played Jesus and everyone knows that Mel Gibson was divinely inspired to make that movie. So Jesus was probably white, just like the gorgeous guy talking to the police.

The guy shook hands with the police, and then glanced over crowd of us protesters. For like nine elevenths of a second that felt almost like eternity or something, his eyes were on mine and I felt way unworthy to even be in his presence. Like, his eyes were so pretty. Brown...or maybe blue...it was over quickly, and he was a few feet away, so I couldn’t really tell what colour they were. Then he turned back to the store.

I was so sure that he was going to point at the shop and a bolt of divine lightning would strike it down or something. But instead, he walked right in!

Holy H-E-double-hockey-sticks, I thought. Jesus is a Satanist!

I dragged a pair of chairs to the side of the room where Sebastian and I could sit and talk uninterrupted. After ruining some of the protester’s fun by changing their signs, they’d doubled their efforts and were shouting even louder. Liam had a couple of his little Wiccan friends show up anyway for some purchases, so he took care of running things while I did some client work.

“So I kinda gotta know some things about your skanky ex and her new boyfriend for this,” I said, pen poised to write.

“Like?”

“Her name, to start with.”

“Noelle Jean. She’s from Quebec.”

“Ah. And what brought her to Toronto?”

“Actually, I think she came here with some random tourist she met there.”

Slut, I thought, though I avoided saying anything. “She sounds...social.”

“She’s really nice and interesting,” Sebastian said. “You should meet her.”

“Let’s hope I don’t have to. So who is she dating?”

“I don’t know his name. Do you really need it?”

“At some point. I mean, if you want me to do bad things to him, I’m going to need information about him.”

“Ah. Right. So what do you need?”

“Still have any of her clothes you cut up?”

He thought on that, and I figured I already had my answer. “No.”

“Her hair? Finger nail clippings?”

He scrunched up his face, as if the guy who shredded his girlfriend’s things was horrified at something I suggested. “That would make my kinda stalkerish, don’t you think?”

I sighed. “Yeah. Welcome to hoodoo—we do all kinds of stalkerish stuff. We can’t do much without those kinds of things. I mean, we can, but it usually won’t be very effective.”

“So does this mean we can't do the spell?”

“No, it means we need to get some biological items. I’ll make you out a list of stuff, starting with the most effective and leading to the least effective. You see what you can get and try not to get arrested in the process.”

I laid out plans with Sebastian, or at least tried to. I went a little above and beyond the usual, mostly ‘cause he was willing to pay. Our first priority was some magic to open the mind of the skank—or ‘target’—and make her more susceptible to a break-up and reconciliation work. Although I tried to lay things out so they didn’t seem too daunting or creepy, I felt some of his enthusiasm wane.

“Have doubts?” I asked at last when it seemed he wouldn’t say anything about it.

“Not doubts, per se. Worries.”

“S’plainy.”

“How am I going to get her hair when she won’t even let me see her?”

God, people certainly didn’t have much forethought in the heat of a break-up. “Guess you should have thought of that.”

He threw up his hands in frustration. “It never, honestly, occurred to me to collect this kind of stuff ahead of time. Does it occur to anyone? Do you really keep around things that remind you of your exes?”

My gaze shifted to the side and a familiar face flashed in my mind. A lump formed in my throat, and I swallowed it back. “Yeah. But then it’s kinda my job.”

“Right. So what am I supposed to do?”

“Okay, we’ll skip the hair for now. We don’t really need it for this initial spell. What we need is a photo. I don’t suppose you still have one of—” He was already shaking his head before I’d even finished, but I continued anyway. “Even a wallet sized one?”

“Tore them all up.”

“Is she on MySpace or something? We could snag something from online.”

“She’s on Facebook, but there aren’t any pictures of her. She just has this skanky cartoon for her profile photo.”

“Fine. So you take a new one.”

He shifted a little, dark brown eyes narrowing. “That sounds dangerously like stalking. I thought you said I was supposed to avoid getting arrested.”

“It would probably be bad publicity for the store, and we don’t need any more protesters out there, true. But if you’re careful—”

“Can’t you just do it?”

“Wanna pay me overtime?”

And that’s how I ended up in the back of Liam’s black smart car that night with a camera pointed at the entrance to a restaurant on Front Street.