Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of 48 · 11-minute read

Christabel’s Natal Sun in the Eighth House of the Occult

We both walk barefoot through the thick grass, Christabel and I, back toward my house and safety. I would have preferred not to tax my strength further with the long walk, but the police would not allow Christabel to retrieve her bike from the porch or her uncle’s car from the garage tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. She’s over eighteen but with nowhere to go, so I suggested she spend a few days with Sonnet and me until everything could be sorted out. The walk isn’t far, under normal circumstances when I’ve not had surgery only hours before.

We take a slightly different course home than the one that took me to Unk’s, one that leads through fewer briars and over fewer barbed-wire fences. Swinging my blister-raising sandals by my side, I keep my thoughts to myself. Christabel, too, has been silent since we slipped away from the commotion surrounding Unk’s. She walks ahead of me, faster and faster, and I can’t keep up.

“Can we—?” Heaving in breath, I press the heels of my hands into my knees and bend over. My body rails against action.

She doesn’t hear me at first. She’s almost out of sight before she stops abruptly and spins to look behind her. “Miss Lauren!” She runs back to me. “Are you all right?”

“Can we slow down?”

“Oh.” In the faintness of a streetlight ahead, her cheeks pinken with embarrassment. “Sorry. I was lost in thought.”

She hooks her arms through mine, and we walk together this time, very slowly. Though she squints ahead at the roadside as we turn from a trail to a better traveled road, I scrutinize her face in profile. Christabel looks so much like her mother, even though she’s still fifteen years younger than Yelena had been when she died. Christabel is tall and slender, like her mother, much taller than I am. Yelena would have approved of the pale blue hair with pink streaks, but I know Unk barely tolerates it.

“It’s okay, sweetie. I know your head must be swirling right now.” I pat her arm.

Christabel nods. “Yours, too. I can feel it.”

“My phone stopped working. I can’t reach Sonnet, and I’m worried. Hey, does your phone work?”

“No.” Her eyes widen. “It died on me after I called 911.” She reaches into her pocket and checks her phone to show me the blank screen. “That’s weird. I had plenty of battery, and the phone’s not that old. Is there some kind of electromagnetic field around us? I’ve never had this happen before.”

“No idea. Yours stopped working back there, and mine quit on me at my house. Shouldn’t be physically related.” Under normal circumstances, but it seems more than a coincidence to me.

A brick wall, probably six decades old, rises beside us as we amble along the road. The bricks appear gray in the dimness, but I know their exact shade of dusty-red, the way the wall crumbles on the far side of the enclosure, the deteriorating grout that barely holds the wall upright, the roots of the grandmother oaks that disrupt the lower bricks. Ignoring the vine-encrusted sign on the wall that warns that the site closes at sunset, I pause at the black iron gates that are high enough to keep out ghost-hunters and wide enough to allow in hearses and grave-digging equipment.

“We don’t have to stop here, Miss Lauren. I mean, if you don’t want to.”

Together, we stare past the bars of the cemetery gates. The streetlight above us and several inside the perimeter disperse most of the shadows inside, but not all. A flurry of white mist takes the form of a young woman with a 1960s bouffant and yellow minidress. She smiles broadly at us and waves as she meanders among the gravestones in the older part of the cemetery.

My companion waves back.

“Christabel! You can see her?”

“I told you already. I see everything now.” She waves goodbye to the lingering spirit, who vanishes into the shadows beneath one of the largest, but more distant, oaks. “Were you here earlier today? This is your day to visit, isn’t it?”

Hmm. I guess everybody knows I bring yellow roses once a week. “I couldn’t manage it today. Big appointment.” With Sondra.

Christabel’s eyebrows shoot up. I sense surprise, but not that she’s judging me for missing a day for the first time. Most people think I should have canceled these weekly visits long ago.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I tell her, though it’s more to reassure myself than Christabel. I’m not a person who lets go easily. “Come on. Let’s keep moving. Sonnet may be waiting at home for me.” Hopefully.

“I don’t understand,” Christabel blurts out after thirty minutes of walking in silence.

“Which part?” I chuckle in frustration.

“You were there with me—or some part of you was—in the barn, and you stopped Unk from hurting me. He was out of his mind, and you just materialized out of thin air and stopped him. And you didn’t even do it consciously. I’m just so⁠—”

“Surprised?” I shrug. “Me, too. I didn’t know I could do that.”

“No, I’m not surprised about that. Just confused. You have such incredible power, but all I can sense from you is your nervousness that the best of all the years has gone by you.”

I swallow hard. My young protégé is reading my thoughts.

“I just don’t understand what happened to you. You went from being a mouse—um, sorry—to being the most powerful witch I’ve ever met. You manifested so many amazing things, and then you just walked away from your power.”

“Not exactly.” Shut them down, maybe. What good were supernatural talents if they couldn’t make a difference in the lives of the people I loved? Although they’d certainly made a difference tonight.

“I was at the healing center earlier today.” Christabel kicks at a yellow bitterweed next to the sidewalk, but it catches between her toes. “Not for, um, any reason. Just wanted to be there and remember how great the energy used to be. How special. I just don’t understand how someone so powerful as you—a witch who can send her astral self to save my life!—could lose the Center of Light. It was your dream and Jesse’s. Mine, too. A dream for a lot of us with no place to connect with like minds. People came from all over Florida to see the healing center. All over the country. To see you. Now it’s just gone. Couldn’t you have stopped it? It seems so much easier to keep the doors to the center open than to astral into a barn and save me. And Jesse? Couldn’t you have astralled in and saved him?”

Her words sink into my being like the pain of an arrow through my heart that doesn’t kill but cannot be removed. It’s not like I haven’t asked myself the same questions a billion times. I berate myself every single day for my failures. It doesn’t matter how so-called powerful I am if I can’t protect the people I love most.

“Jesse’s gone, baby.”

“Do you, um, do you think it was that thing that caused what happened to Jesse?”

I inhale deeply as we make our last turn toward my house, even though it’s not yet visible beyond the woods adjacent to my subdivision.

“Honestly? I don’t know. Some things were going badly before that. Jesse rebuffed one of our healing center visitors for getting handsy with him, and she threatened to shut us down, said he was the one handsy with her. Then she dropped it abruptly and never came back. That was in, um, January, I think. I’ve kinda lost track of time.”

I’d still been healing from my last cervical surgery and hadn’t been around the healing center much in the winter, except for the annual Solstice celebration that I always opened to the public. After Jesse said she’d stopped coming, we had a good month or so of peace and quiet. Until⁠—

“You believed him?”

“Of course!”

What was wrong with Christabel to even ask! Jesse was sweetly faithful, and I’d never had any worries about him cheating on me or doing anything inappropriate with a patient. If anything, he was terrified of doing something that might cost our marriage. I’d been his lifeline after his depression and anxiety combo reared its ugly head, and I’d convinced him to go back on his meds, which had been a godsend. He’d do anything for me. So, of course, I believed him. I may have had a blind spot with my first husband, but my Jesse had always been everything I could want in a man, even with his human vulnerabilities.

“And I sure wouldn’t believe her,” I add quickly.

I hadn’t been at the center much in December and January, but I’d already caught her lying about having paid for a guided meditation class only days after the Solstice event. On top of that, we’d had a few reports of minor thefts from vendor booths she’d visited that week. By New Year’s Day, I installed security cameras and spotted her a few times in early January before a vandal broke the cameras on the rear of the building. Jesse had promised to put up new cameras, but they’re still in a box in my office at the center.

Funny thing about that footage. Every time she was captured on the video anywhere near Jesse, she was touching his arm or his hair and he’d be backing away or, if sitting, stiff as a board with the hand opposite her jammed into his pocket and the one nearest her crossed over his chest away from her like he was rubbing his shoulder or maybe had heartburn. Always, always, always leaning away from her like the Tower of Pisa.

Even if I hadn’t trusted Jesse, I’d trust what I saw in their body language. I couldn’t tell from the footage if she was trying to pick his pocket or offering him a hand job. I knew nothing was going on between them, but then rumors started that hurt his medical practice and hurt our revenue from the healing center. People in the community clammed up around me, even people who worked in the clinic office. The bank threatened to call his loan, and Jesse started taking on extra shifts in emergency rooms anywhere within fifty miles for extra income. After that, everything just snowballed straight to hell.

Christabel only frowns. I can tell she wants to say more but doesn’t. Then finally, she clears her throat. “That thing just showed up in the last few… how long? Hours? Days?”

I’d seen it only since leaving Sondra’s clinic, but Jan had seen it for weeks.

“I’m not sure. The past month?”

“Did anything bad happen before that?”

Bad? Oh, hell, yeah. My abnormal pap smear. The first surgery. Margins that weren’t clear. The promise of the second surgery. But that’s more information than Christabel needs to know.

“Six months ago. Some things just over a year ago. Not related to that monster, though. Just something related to, um, something that happened years ago that my last doctor missed.” Seeing the look of concern on Christabel’s face, I add, “All fine now.”

Hopefully, in a few days, I’ll have test results back to prove me right.

But had something been following me for longer and I’d missed it? Since I’d sued Quent for divorce six years ago, everything else has been great. By comparison, anyway. Even while dealing with handsy little thieves, life with Jesse had always been wonderful. We’d had our ups and down, and the general ebb and flow of life that was both positive and negative, as life always is. Dealing with our miscarriage had been tough for both of us, driving Jesse to needing stronger antidepressant pharmaceuticals than he’d wanted, but together, we’d gotten through it. You can still be happy in a relationship even when you have tough times. Before Jesse, I’d escaped both the Grand Coven and the Elders’ Coven and their desperate need to control me. After Jesse and I started seeing each other, I endured a major argument with Jan, plenty of custody fights with Quent, way too many power struggles with the girls over homework and boys, a second knee injury after trying to run a marathon without enough training. But that’s just life—a series of moments of joy and grief—and I’d been as prepared as I could be to manage the hard stuff.

Healing, I’d discovered, isn’t linear. Not only that, but sometimes the later picking-at-old-wounds is more sensitive to the touch than the earlier, bigger attempts. There’s not necessarily one big epiphany with merely small aftershocks tapering off into perfect stillness after deep consideration. The major healing can come years after the healing begins. Or maybe healing is never completely done.

Being Elevated to the level of Third-Degree High Priestess in the Grand Coven had unleashed a steady crescendo of psychic talents that had made all the difference in my world and set me free of the lifelong abuse that had held me back. My Initiation and First Degree had been about learning who I am, and my Second Degree had been about turning my world upside down to get me to reorder my life into what I want it to be. The Elders had been right: my Third Degree was the launching pad for a series of First- and Second-Degree moments in life, that constant readjusting course to make my path its happiest and most fulfilling. Regardless of less-than-peaceful people trying to create conflict for me, I’ve been quite happy with my life as a Third-Degree High Priestess, and all the things that used to frustrate me roll off my back with little attention.

Until a few months ago, when everything with Jesse changed.

It’s like I’m going through my world-upside-down Second Degree again. They say that you shouldn’t try to hold on to anything during your Second-Degree year—or years—because you’ll probably lose it while you align your life with the new you. It feels like that now.

Beside me, Christabel nods. “It’s like you’ve forgotten that you’re a Third Degree,” she says. “Or that something has kicked you backward in your life’s progress.”

She’s reading my mind. Again. Until tonight, that’s a talent I didn’t know she possessed.

My ears pop, and I shake my head to lessen the discomfort. The insect and bird noises from the nearest patches of grass and woods grow sharp and clear as if I’ve only now emerged from walking through molasses.

From deep inside my pocket, my phone chimes.

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