The Sword of Michael - eARC Read online

  In one, you can lose your soul. Or your mind.

  In the other, you can lose your life. Or your mind.

  You pays your fee and you takes your chances.

  Or words to that effect.

  One thing for sure, being a crazy magnet makes you appreciate the fine things in life, like good coffee and a little peace and quiet early in the morning. I wanted to linger in that, but today I needed to deal with the issues of ordinary reality like house payment, groceries, renewing my work consumables (white sage, sea salt, holy water, sweet grass, olive oil and some other unguents) and the small budget I set aside for simple pleasures like movies, Arturo Fuente 858s and a bottle of Bushmills Single Malt.

  I needed some income. I used to have a regular job. But when Spirit calls you, it calls you hard. I’d left that job and a steady income behind me on the Path.

  “Your needs will be met,” First In Front said.

  My spirit guide perched comfortably in the rattan chair beside me. He’s a tough looking man, as suits a Lakota Sioux war chief and medicine man, tall with a hawk nose and flat slab cheeks, warm brown eyes that can sharpen and narrow like a bird of prey as it strikes.

  “What about my wants?” I said.

  He laughed. “Put your intention out there. What you seek will come to you.”

  “I seek some income.”

  “You’re in the wrong business, white man.”

  “I could raise my prices.”

  He shrugged. “I took horses.”

  “You also took scalps.”

  He nodded in agreement. “There is that. You should try it sometime. Use that big knife I sent you.”

  He had sent me a knife as a gift. In the way of spirit guides he’d led me to an old antique shop in a little town called Arthur, an Amish community in central Illinois, when I’d been on a road trip. I’d gone into the shop just as an old farmer unloaded a box of junk he’d found in his grandfather’s attic. In the box there’d been a big knife, a trade knife, in a beaded sheath. I took it home for a whole twenty-five bucks. It took a razor’s edge after I’d oiled and honed it up. The knife hung on the wall in my healing room.

  “I like that knife,” I said. “I owe you one or two. Smoke?”

  He smiled.

  I went inside and fetched my last Arturo Fuente 858 from the humidor on the coffee table. When I came back he smiled in anticipation. I clipped the end, struck a wooden match and carefully fired the cigar. It’s an extravagant indulgence to smoke my last cigar first thing in the morning, but I’ve always had a problem with delaying gratification and since spirits—especially spirit guides of the Native American persuasion—love tobacco, this was the perfect opportunity to thank my friend with the gift of smoke on a fine morning.

  I puffed the cigar into life and blew smoke to the four directions.

  “I thank the Powers of the East, the North, the West, and the South. I thank the mighty Archangels Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel, you who stand at the four corners of the Creator’s throne, you who stand at the four corners of the World. I thank the Great Spirit Above, Below and Within…”

  I blew the smoke towards First In Front. The blue smoke covered him in the chair. He leaned forward and inhaled deeply.

  He smiled. “Thank you, my friend.”

  “Most welcome, brother,” I said.

  He disappeared, leaving an eddy in the blue smoke.

  Spirit guides are apt to do that.

  I finished my smoke, an enjoyable forty minutes or so, and then went in and checked my e-mail. The first in my priority queue was from Jolene, the love of my life. It was a photo of a beautiful Asian woman, naked, bound tight in white cords tied in elaborate knots, gagged with a beautifully folded white linen scarf. The Subject line said: “Do you like this? I do…”

  Nothing else.

  That’s Jolene.

  I saved that one.

  I deleted the spam which offered to extend my penis or sustain my erection or order pharmaceuticals from Canada or buy discount jewelry. My friend Louise asked me to come give a class on Basic Shamanic Journeying—that would be a few dollars in the cigar and whiskey fund—and a message from a colleague in the Chicago suburbs asking if I was free to consult on a difficult case she had going. There was a note from a potential client who’d seen an article about me in the Star-Tribune. I sent her a brief reply with my phone number and went on through the queue. I found an interesting one from my friend Troy who ran the American Ghost Society in Decatur, Illinois—one of the darkest and most haunted cities in the US—asking if I’d like to tag along with him on a ghost investigation. It would appear on the Discovery Channel and be a nice promotional effort for us.

  Not that my practice needed that, nor did I particularly want to promote it. Like everything in the Middle World and the Other Realms, the ebb and flow of business—though I don’t think of my practice as a business—was dictated by Spirit. I’m accustomed to periods of frenetic activity in between the slack time when I had no clients, no classes to teach, and nothing but time on my hands. I take those times as blessings, as well as an opportunity to cultivate patience, and trust in the Creator to see that my needs were met.

  But I was low on Bushmills, out of cigars, and down to leftovers in the fridge. So maybe it was time to pray and remind the spirits that in the Middle World we mortals needed to eat, and that required cash for groceries.

  The phone rang.

  I laughed. See how intention works?

  I looked at the Caller ID. A local number but not known to me.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hi,” a woman’s voice said. “Is this Marius Winter?”

  “That would be me.”

  “I’m Maryka Owen, I just e-mailed you about a consultation?”

  “Hi Maryka. That was fast!”

  A pause. “I’d like to see you as soon as I can.”

  I looked at the last short stub of my cigar fuming down into the gray of ash.

  “How ’bout right now?”

  Chapter 3

  My healing room is a spare bedroom down the hall from where I sleep. It would have been the master bedroom; I use it for my healing room because there’s a bathroom in it for clients and a big walk-in closet for storage. I covered the wooden floor with a Persian wool rug with a teal blue motif, and on top of that I put a Peruvian prayer rug that was gifted to me from a Peruvian shaman friend. Two big pillows double as chairs if I sit on the floor. I keep a folding massage table in there so I can stand and work on my clients. A few low tables line the walls with crystals: lots of amethyst, several large geodes, a small statue of Mother Mary and directly to her right a small statue of Michael the Archangel.

  There are two armchairs in there, and I moved them forward as most new clients liked to sit for their initial consultation. I lit a small bundle of sage in a blackened abalone shell and wafted the smoke with a harvested hawk feather into all the corners of the room, in all four directions, then above and below and all over me from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. I picked up my favorite rattle from the side table and stood in front of the second altar I maintained in the healing room. Two altars might seem like conspicuous consumption, but I want and need as much protection as Spirit might muster on my behalf, so keeping an altar where I slept and another one where I worked makes perfect sense.

  Besides, both altars were beautiful works of art in their own right. This one was a plain table of polished oak, with an altar cloth of brilliantly colored Guatemalan fabric with all the colors of the rainbow and the colors of platinum, gold and silver woven through it. These are the ancient colors of protection, the colors of the flag flown in Atlantis over the Sons of Light when they marched out against the Sons of Belial.

  The Sons of Light were the Good Guys. The Sons of Belial were the Not-Good Guys.

  Both sides are still very much around.

  That’s what keeps me in cigar and whiskey money.

  I bowed my head and closed my eyes and began
to chant the ancient Lakota power song given to me by First In Front, long ago…”Hey-ya, hey-ha-ho…”

  I shook the rattle, a ball of dried leather, filled with corn and maize kernels, mounted on an antler handle. The steady rhythm of the rattle fired off deeply grooved synapses in my brain and put me into a light trance, the first step in crossing over into non-ordinary reality, as some modern shamans like to refer to the Spirit World, or the Other Realms.

  The basic tool of the shamanic practitioner is the journey. That’s when I send my spirit into the Spirit World to negotiate with the spirits, to fight, to heal and, right now, to gather information. I always like to know something about the clients that are coming to see me. I once neglected to make a preliminary journey and that lapse nearly cost me my life in this incarnation. I’d opened my front door to a drug addict possessed by a demon I’d crossed swords with in the spirit realm; that demon sent a possessed human with a knife to finish me. One of the lessons you learn early in the Work is that you must protect yourself in this World as well as in the Next.

  Which is why a Glock 19 lived under my bed and I cultivated certain other self-protection skills as well.

  From behind closed eyes, I saw with my inner shamanic vision. My spirit rose up out of my body and flew through the air to my favorite portal into the Spirit World. It’s a beautiful old oak tree, with a small hollow in it, on the shores of Lake Harriet. It’s a tree that stands watch, over all those who pass by, on the shores of a lake sacred to the Lakota. I flew into the hollow and then went down, down, down…through the roots and then further down through a tunnel of earth that grew broader as I approached a pin prick of light that grew and grew and grew into a portal. I stepped out onto a grassy hillside overlooking a broad expanse of forest and mountains and lakes beneath a brilliant blue sky.

  This was the Lower World, the world of Nature and spirit animals; home to the power animals that walk with all of us, whether we see them or not, from our birth till our passing into the Light.

  An enormous white tiger sat on her haunches beside the portal.

  “Hola, Tigre,” I said.

  “Hola yourself,” the white tiger said. “What have you brought me?”

  I pulled an ornate ivory comb out of my pocket. “For you, my beauty.”

  She bared her gleaming white fangs. “Would you?”

  “I would.”

  I ran the comb through her immaculate and perfect fur, as only the fur of a white tiger in the Lower World can be. She’s a feminine spirit and she likes her beauty aids. I never argue with the Divine Feminine, especially a spirit that embodies all the power and the wisdom of a white tiger.

  She purred a deep rumble in her throat.

  “So,” she said, after savoring the pleasure of her combing. “What is your intention?”

  “A client,” I said. “Coming to see me…”

  A voice behind me that sounded like he’d spent a lifetime in the Bronx making book on the horses said, “Owen, Maryka, female human type, thirty two years old, divorced, a child, what else you wanna know?”

  I turned and grinned up at the big black raven perched in the lower branches of the oak tree beside the portal. “Hey, Burt. How you doing?”

  “Doing? How you doing, Marius?”

  Tigre stretched her back. “He’s doing for me.”

  Burt laughed a raven’s laugh. “You remind him of the wife he’ll never have.”

  “Oh, don’t go there, man,” I said.

  They both laughed.

  “You have the makings of a good husband in you,” Tigre said. “It’s that which you resist the most that you should examine.”

  “I’ll examine that another day if you don’t mind,” I said. “So Maryka?”

  “Do you want to see or do you just want me to tell you?” Burt said.

  “You know she’s possessed?” Tigre said.

  “From her family,” Burt said. “There’s attack, past, present and future…someone close to her. There’s a cloud around it…professional. Karma and past life issues, too.”

  “When isn’t there?” I said. “What travels with her?”

  Tigre tilted her head. “It’s not with her now…one or two steps removed. This is the first step towards something hidden.”

  “She’s looking for help,” Burt said. “She read that article in the paper.”

  He cawed with amusement. “Not much for being down in the weeds are you, Marius? Better watch out for that self-aggrandizement…”

  “It’s not self-aggrandizement if it helps educate those who need,” I said.

  “Yes,” Tigre said. “And you’re getting more clients…”

  “More people who need help,” I said.

  “Don’t smoke so many cigars,” Tigre said. “You want to be more careful with that.”

  “Sacred herb and all that,” Burt said.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, laughing. “I thought I was supposed to be pure, but not too pure?”

  They both said at exactly the same time in two different voices: “We never worry about you being too pure, Marius. It’s the other we watch for.”

  “Thank you, my friends,” I said. “Is there anything else I should know right now?”

  “Yes,” Tigre said. “This is more than it appears.”

  “And…?” I said.

  “Just remember that.”

  Burt cawed and tilted his head. His eyes flared briefly with the white Light of the Spirit within him. “I’ll remind you if you forget.”

  They always did.

  “With love and gratitude, my allies,” I said.

  “He’s always so formal, huh?” Burt said.

  Tigre laughed. “See you on the Other Side, Marius…”

  Yes. They would. I entered the tunnel and flew back to my body, settled into it and opened my eyes in my healing room.

  This would be more than it appeared.

  It always was.

  Chapter 4

  Maryka Owen was tall and willowy in a granola way. Long blond hair pulled into a ponytail, a muslin blouse over faded jeans and bright green Birkenstocks. Her big toes were each painted blue with a gold star in the middle of the nail. The other perfectly formed toes were tipped with standard red. I notice those kind of things. Small details are essential in my work. It had nothing to do with how attractive she was. Really. I serve the Divine Feminine, the Goddess in all Her incarnations, and there is a Goddess in every woman.

  Really.

  “C’mon upstairs,” I said.

  She smiled and followed me upstairs to the healing room. I waved her to the armchair on the south side of the room. I sat in the chair facing east, where I wasn’t aimed directly at her. My senses work well both directly and indirectly. Having her in my peripheral vision helped me see her energy more clearly. She eased into the chair, graceful and tall, about five ten or so, the same as me.

  She had nice energy around her. Her auric colors were full and fluid. Very open, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. Most of the time it was a little of both. Being so open meant she was receptive, intuitive, maybe a little psychic; it also meant she was easily influenced and extremely sensitive to energy permutations around her, whether positive or negative.

  I let her settle for a minute.

  “So what can I help you with?” I said.

  “I read that article about you in the Star-Tribune,” she said. “It seems…strange…that you’d be so open about what you do and what you believe. I mean, this is a big city that’s really a small town, you know? I’ve seen you around in Lyn-Lake and Uptown, even sat by you once in Gigi’s.”

  “Gigi’s? I love that place.”

  She tilted her head to look at me. She had cornflower blue eyes with long natural lashes. No make up at all, not that she needed any. Distracting to say the least.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Next time I’ll recognize you,” I said.

  I felt rather than saw the shift in her energy as she studied me with a su
dden intensity.

  “Does it bother you that people know what you do?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I believe in what I do. I serve the community. The more people who know what I do and what I can do to help them, the better.”

  She nodded. “I believe that. It just seems…strange…to be talking about demons and ghosts and lost souls like it’s just a regular thing.”

  “It is a regular thing,” I said. “It’s part of the natural order of life.”

  “That’s a good way to see it.”

  “That’s just how it is,” I said. “So what about this part of life can I help you with?”

  She took a deep breath. “It’s my father.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s come back from the dead.”

  “Oh,” I said. “How do you feel about that?”

  A blank look. “How do I…feel about it?”

  Asking the right questions is an essential part of learning on the shamanic path. Education is part of my job. It’s not all casting out Dark Forces or being the finder of lost children.

  “Yes,” I said. “How do you feel about him coming back? Assuming it’s him. Is he invasive? Has he come back to tell you something he didn’t tell you before he passed? Is he unwanted? Do you have unfinished business with him? How do you feel when he’s there? Is it cold, or warm, or nothing at all? When does he come…”

  She cut me off. “I get your point.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If I sound testy, I don’t mean to be.”

  I had to check in with myself about that. Was I being cranky? Was there something else leaking in around the edges of this conversation? I sent my senses out, whispered “Tigre” and felt my white tiger’s presence and the ghost of a whisper, “Gone…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to rush you…I just felt something.”

  She looked around. Her eyes were wide in alarm. “Is he here?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re safe. There’s nothing here.”

  “Now…” Tigre whispered. “Something brushed through here, past your protection…”