It took me less time than I expected to gather up everything directly related to the ritual that bound Cindy to both this world, and to me. She and I had taken a couple cloth shopping bags I had lying around, added a couple of old empty jars to make transporting loose material easier, and made our way to the scene of the crime on the other side of the building. Letting ourselves in, I shut and locked the door behind us, and we then set about methodically gathering everything Mycah had used to summon a Sin Demon to this world.
Despite having performed the final steps of the ritual myself, I realized that I didn't actually know what several of the materials set in various bowls were made from. Cindy did, however, and I was surprised - and a little disappointed - to discover that most of them were quite common and readily accessible in the modern age. It turns out the bowl of yellow circle things I had cast into the air, only to watch them dissolve into nothing were eye of newt. It also turned out that eye of newt is an archaic term for mustard seed, and you can just order it online.
Diamond powder was likely one of the hardest ingredients to source when the ritual was first recorded in the tome Mycah used, but you could buy enough to complete the ritual five times over from a jewelry supplier for less than forty dollars thanks to the miracle of industrial diamonds. Apparently, the magic didn't care whether the diamond was grown underground or in a lab.
That said, I felt suddenly unclean when Cindy pointed out one bowl as powdered corpse teeth. I had to pause to go and wash my hands, even having showered less than thirty minutes before, just to get the sensation of having touched
that
particular ingredient out of my head.
The candles weren't special in any particular way, so those I just stacked up on the closest shelf, before using my boot to smear the pentacle of salt into an unrecognizable mess on the exposed flooring.
When we were done, we had two bags that clinked with jars of random substances in them, and the room was still an utter mess, but it looked much more like the actions of a destructive tenant than the scene of an occult ritual.
Satisfied with that result, we did a final sweep of the apartment, only to discover that we had missed a bag when we were gathering up the clothes Mycah had purchased for the demon he planned to summon. This one was labeled Frederick's of Hollywood, and while I didn't poke around in it, Cindy didn't hesitate to dive in and begin pawing through the contents. She didn't pull anything else out to show me, but that bag joined the other two we took back to my own apartment.
********************
The next few weeks passed by in a blur. As fun as it might have been to take an extended period of time to get to know Cindy - both in the modern, and the biblical sense - my bank account wasn't robust enough to support that.
Instead, I alternated between delivering food to people, and people to food. And, whenever I could, leveraging my gift to make money.
Finding wealth directly was something I could manage with my magic occasionally, but much more of the time when I used it, it was on someone else's behalf. When someone like Manny had me peer into the future of a new business venture, I could provide them with a broad glimpse of the probable outcomes. This mostly meant that I could help him avoid picking any paths that were nothing but bad outcomes. Only rarely did I manage to discover a choice which lead to nothing but good, since business involved the wills and choices of many humans, but just being able to avoid throwing money away was a valuable service.
I knew that if I could somehow get myself positioned in the ranks of the wealthy, I would likely be able to make dramatically more money than the paycheck to paycheck life I eked out for myself on the outskirts of the city. A multimillionaire who knew of, and trusted my gift could probably pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid losing millions, and consider it a good business deal.
I had never even tried to pursue that, however, for a couple of reasons. The first and easiest was that I had no idea how to worm my way into the ranks of the rich. The second was that I wasn't sure if I was comfortable with the idea of my talent being known by those with that much more power than myself. Finding a wealthy business owner and partnering with them to both become richer was one thing, but accidentally brushing up against a billionaire and costing them enough money for them to become vindictive was a possibility that I had considered, and that kept me up at night from time to time.
I could potentially use my own talents to avoid that, but business dealings only became more complex the larger they were, and there was always the chance that the tiny sliver of red I saw would lead to my ruination in ways that became inevitable once I started down the wrong path.
Inevitability had always been one of the things that kept me up at night.
********************
Cindy occupied my time between work.
We fucked.
A
