‘Business trip? What’re you gonna do?’ The girl asked sullenly.

She really wanted some peace at that moment and not discussion about business again. But Daniel was not a person who would abandon himself to girlish caresses and osculation. It couldn’t be said about Victoria.

‘To set things straight in company’s business’ he smiled in response, got up to put on clothes.

The girl was silently looking at him, at the way he zipped his trousers, put the shirt on, buttoned it up, combed his hair.

He did it in a way as if they’d been living together for many years already. He wasn’t interested in anything about her. All of her joys weren’t worth of his attention.

Another girl would obviously take offence, throw a tantrum, just do something. Victoria didn’t care. She knew Daniel not to be her person and there wouldn’t be any future. That was matter of time. They had sexual relationship and attraction and the girl didn’t like the prologue to it. She didn’t like the young man who stopped being interested in her, she hated to ask him because his own initiative was done at work. She didn’t like the young man who took her for granted.

But Victoria said nothing.

Saying nothing she saw him out, wished a great journey and felt free with joy for next week and a half. As the doors closed, she felt relieved!

It was about 1 am, she was sleepy, but she was going to study philosophy, nevertheless.

9

^th

June 2013 (Sunday)

It was Sunday. The morning.

The sun was shining through the closed curtains. The girl wanted to smile. It was so cool to wake up and understand her mood was skyrocketing. Everything around was so light, airy and you were just being torn into pieces because of happiness.

Olga Vladimirovna had to come back in the evening. It meant the girl had the whole day to do nothing. She never did anything on Sundays and the final exam wasn’t obviously going to break that practice.

After staying in bed for some time, Victoria got up and went to the bathroom. She noticed the book in the hall which had been left there the day before yesterday. The girl drew a deep breath: if her mum had noticed the book there would have been a straight talk to evaluate her daughter’s competency to stand trial. Without thinking, Vic took the book.

The bath was full, and Victoria was looking through the piece of paper dropped out of the book. What did that mean? What was Kharon? There was nothing written. There were no similar names in the book. Vic was looking for it by means of symbols depicted on the paper, but there was nothing still. The damned piece of paper haunted her mind.

Victoria put the book aside, turned the towel around and ran to the laptop to find online-dictionaries. Suddenly she realized she could understand the meaning of the text. If she had took the meaning, probably it would explain what Kharon meant.

Wet, semi-turned in the towel, the girl tapped at the keyboard, looking for Latin words meaning.

After two hours of attempts Victoria got upset: there was a text before her, addressed to a Kharon. She got something surely, Kharon wasn’t it but him. But there was not a word about who he was and what he did.

The magic text was too much even for Victoria! She was a non-believer by nature. It was one thing to read myths and legends just for the fun of it and the other was to believe in it and try to raise the queen of Spades.

She believed that all the curses, diseases, spells, the evil eyes, attraction spells worked just because a person believed in them. The girl believed in autosuggestion power and thought materiality. She couldn’t be cursed or spelled because she didn’t believe in it. А person who believed to be cursed, really got ill just because he attracted rubbish. He was walking, then tumbled, then fell down and if he was a superstitious person, he would be sure that he fell because of a strange-looking old witch who had cursed him. Victoria would think that she was an awkward log and she needed to be more careful.

Who knew what happened to the girl but at that moment she was interested in depths of her mind? What if Kharon would come to her and she would be able to know who he was? One part of her was waiting for an adventure, the other was laughing aloud. If Vasilisa had come to Vic and said that she was going to raise a ghost, Victoria would never miss the opportunity to laugh at her friend.

Finally, the girl tore herself off the laptop and got dressed. Suddenly she stopped in tracks like a statue. The girl was preoccupied with a heap of questions, prowling her mind. The first question was how to call a thing if you didn’t know anything about it? What was he? A deuce? A vampire? A demon? An angel? What was he? The second one was what you needed to use to summon him? Maybe to do that obeah you would need a glass frog leg or an oarfish fish-maw… Vic didn’t know anything. She didn’t even know how to read in Latin that text written on the medieval parchment. Fortunately, the Latin reading issue could be resolved with the help of a dictionary and unfortunately things were worse with gills and legs.

Vic was gazing at drawn circles and symbols for a long time and then her subconsciousness gave a hint – that picture had to be re-drawn on the floor! Yeah, sure! That’s what it had to be. But what to use? Highlighter? If Olga Vladimirovna saw it, she would send her daughter into an asylum with no delay, and, perhaps thanks to good connections, she would be placed into a good ward. Maybe chalk? But there was no chalk. That was okay, where would the chalk come from?

Why did the circle have to be on the floor exactly? It could be minimized…

The girl took an ordinary pencil, sat to the table and re-drew the even circle onto the table, in size of 30-40 centimetres. She put into it all the symbols, drew more circles inside of it, placed signs, numerals and, being satisfied, started to wait.

She had to read the spell! It could take a lot of time to sit and wait, for life even, for something to happen. Vic took the paper and started reading written words with underlined stress.

She read the text several times, but nothing changed: not the weather, nor voices, neither lightning… Having sighed Vic declaimed the text slowly and started waiting again. Nothing happened. What did she expect? She should forget it, she just wanted to have fun.

The girl rose from her chair, covered the shamanistic circles and she would have gone to the kitchen to have breakfast, doing magic she quite forgot that she had eaten nothing, but she failed to leave her room as she bumped into a man, stumbling against his chest of steel with her forehead.

You might have said that the man scared the crap out of Vic – but it would have been nothing. She sweated, felt sick, her legs were shaking… She was backing slowly, keeping her eyes locked on the man. She had never been so scared before! There was a reason for the fear. There was a man in her flat, in her room, near her bed… The girl could hardly breathe, she seemed to be almost choked. She wanted to ask what the hell he was doing in her room, but her tongue was stuck. She wasn’t able to get if the tongue was in her mouth. The fear went right through her. The horror reached her legs, Victoria almost didn’t feel her heart beating. It didn’t just leave her cold feet, but it seemed to leave her body at all…

But the great horror began next. Shitted blue lights, her mind was about to guess what the man was in the room!

‘…It can’t be’ her whisper held an edge of fear, while she was backing with no understanding that there was a wall and radiator behind and no way to escape.

That was impossible! Even in that exact moment she could not believe her eyes: the man could not appear from nowhere just because a text was read. Someone was kidding her. Someone who knew about the book and the note in it, and someone was putting her on. That was Daniel!