Magick

The body is weak, but the spirit is strong. Two spirits are twice as strong.   Ray Mankiller is a Two-Spirit Native American. Two-Spirits are people whose bodies contain not just one soul, but two, usually a male and a female spirit. He has known this since he was a child, but it is only recently that the dreams have begun. In these dreams he sees the ancient past. He sees a Two-Spirit like him, but unlike his modern world, the ancient world was dangerous for a Two-Spirit who was also born of a witch. In this tortured world, Deer Tracks, the Two-Spirit of his visions, has visions of her own. She sees the death of the one she loves at the hands of a hated shaman, Lazy Duck. She knows he will stop at nothing to possess her, even though in body, she is a male. It is said that a Two-Spirit brings great power to the one he or she marries. The visions are not enough to distract Ray from the problems he is facing in his own life. A newly hired professor of Ceramics at the University of Mississippi, he soon finds that one of the faculty members hates him and wants to destroy his chances of ever becoming tenured. He seeks shelter in the strong arms of Angus Tanner, a professor of Anthropology who is fascinated with Ray’s story…and with his body. When the tendrils of the past start to snake their way into the present in the form of a cursed figurine, Ray is faced with the most terrifying visions—only they are of the present, not the past. He must find a way to destroy the evil ghost of Lazy Duck before history repeats itself. Is he dragging Angus into a trap he himself set in another life?

If you had to do something really good for someone else to remove a curse, but no one could see you, where would you start?   Think how much fun it would be if you were a puff of smoke. If you were a naughty ten year old, you would look at your sister’s diary. If you were a teenage boy, you could drift into the girls’ locker room. If you were a man, wait, if you were a man who had been born centuries ago, and you and your brothers had done a thoughtless deed to a sweet young girl and had a curse put on you, well, drifting around as smoke could become something else. It did not help if the witch who put the curse on you let you form a small part of your body now and then. You could talk, but that often scared people away, a voice from nowhere. You could produce a hand, maybe one foot, and, yep, that impressed people. Then, after all the centuries of drifting with forest fires, and campfires, and wherever the wind sent you, there was a woman who closed her eyes and only smelled cinnamon and sandalwood. But you needed to do more than just pleasure her with a hand.  

Any curse has to have a good side along with the bad, or it will come back to bite the one who placed it.   The mists that swirl within the highlands of Scotland give a different feeling to each person who sees them. Some find them relaxing and calming, as well as a tie to the past because the mists have been in these valleys longer than man can remember. To some, they were frightening, a reminder of ghosts and demons and those things that go bump in the night. To Breadon, they were what he was now made of; the curse of a witch had transferred him into Moisture until he performed a selfless deed. But since he could only speak, or form a hand, most of the time, he just scared people and floated with the wind and rain, waiting for his chance, waiting centuries for Bethlyn.