Sister Margaret

“Charmaine?” My voice echoed around the chamber, adding to the prickling feeling of unease that had settled around my shoulders like a scarf the instant I walked into the temple.

She turned slowly, sinuously. Dark purple robes fluttered around her, gradually drifting back to her sides like leaves caught in a sudden updraft and then forsaken. Her unfathomable blue eyes drilled into me. If I live a hundred years, I’ll never see another pair of eyes like hers. They were the bright blue of a hot flame and they seared me to my soul.

“It’s Margaret now.” I noticed her voice didn’t reverberate through the chilly air like mine, but then her eyes drew my attention and nothing else mattered. ”Sister Margaret.”

That’s right; she was Sister Margaret now, a priestess in the order of Rakkir. Of course, it didn’t matter what she called herself. Margaret, Leif, or Fairy-Dumpling, she’d always be Charmaine to me.

We’d had less than ideal childhoods. We’d confided in each other and shared our pain. Then, when she turned thirteen, Charmaine ran away from home and became a whore. When I asked her about it, she said she might as well get paid for it because someone or another had been taking it for free for years. Poor Charmaine, I couldn’t even imagine dealing with that. We lost contact soon after that because my father took to beating me extra hard if he heard I’d been seen with her. After several beatings, I stayed away. Even though I’d done it against my will, I continued to torment myself for abandoning her.

Hell of a way to treat a friend.

I guess it must have been five years later that she found religion and abandoned her name to become Margaret. Sister Margaret became an institution in Haven—a priestess of the God of Deception. She made it her mission to aid other street children and bring them in out of the cold, as it were. Cynics said she merely wanted to boost the number of Rakkir’s followers. I think part of her motivation was to help those who were as lost as she had been.

“...didn’t hear a word I said, did you, Michael?”

Her sharp words and the sound of my name brought me out of my reverie. Tearing my gaze from her eyes, I studied a statue over her left shoulder.

“Of course I was listening. You need me to take care of a pimp who is harassing one of your girls.” I’d taken a guess, a wild shot in the dark, but some God was looking out for me because my aim proved true—this time.

“Yes. Xaphan has been terrorizing all the girls who work in the Dregs, threatening them with unspeakable consequences if they don’t work for him and hand over most of what they make each night.”

She paused, looking at me to make sure my mortification matched hers, so I sculpted my face into a mask of outrage and held her gaze while spitting, “That bastard.”

Of course, I did think him a bastard for using the whores that way, but I didn’t see why Charmaine involved herself. Surely there had been a lot of pimps who’d come and gone over the years, but she’d never called on me before, never requested my services.

“What’s so special about this one Char...Margaret?” I wanted to hear her say it, though I already suspected the answer. Xaphan made quite a name for himself. I knew what he was, and Charmaine must as well. After twenty years, you don’t ask the childhood friend who turned his back on you to deal with a pimp. No, Charmaine must have known what Xaphan was, and that was why she needed me. The question remained: would she tell me about it? Forewarned is fore-armed, so they say. Would she arm me or send me out after this creature, assuming him to be merely another man?

“He’s brutal. He’s murdered at least two girls because they refused to pay him for protection, and he’s kidnapped one of my girls who left the streets to join the Order.”

Ah, true to her God and his teachings, Charmaine wasn’t going to tell me all she knew; she would let me find out for myself. I wondered then if she realized the sort of danger she was sending me into on her behalf. After one look at her steely blue eyes, I knew that she did. She knew, and a part of her probably wanted me to perish at this creature’s hands—the part that was still furious at me for abandoning her so many years ago.

I understood; a part of me remained rather pissed about it too. If only I’d stood up to my father a few years sooner, maybe then I could have talked her off the streets. Who knows how many beatings I’d have saved her, how many men she could have avoided sleeping with? Who knows what would have happened, if I’d had the guts to tell the old man no and mean it? So no, I didn’t blame her, but that wasn’t going to make the job any easier.

“Okay, Margaret. I’ll do it.”

I thought I saw a flicker in her eyes—fear, perhaps, or relief. Whatever it was, she quickly masked it once more. You don’t serve the God of Lies without learning a thing or two about keeping secrets.

She nodded, pulled her robes tighter against herself and knelt at the altar to complete her prayers. As I moved to go, I noticed how the candles around her made my shadow flicker and morph as it crossed the floor. It shifted with each step, at one moment looking positively demonic, at another quite mundane. Strangely enough, when I glanced back over my shoulder at Charmaine, bathed in light from the flickering flames and lost in her prayers, she was wholly bereft of a shadow of her own.

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