Chapter 12
Transiting Uranus in Sonnet’s Fourth House of Home
My baby’s home. Safe. Shaken, but safe.
It’s 2:05 a.m. I can’t sleep. Even though I’m exhausted. Even though my knees are weak with exhaustion, and I’m still bleeding heavily from my surgery, just not quite enough to call it hemorrhaging and call an ambulance to take me to the ER. It’s the end of a hellish day, but the best ending I could hope for, short of Jesse being here with me. Christabel keeps saying that I’m glowing with relief, and she’s right.
I lounge on the overstuffed sofa in my living room. Candles and dragon’s blood incense burn on the main altar. The lights are low, maybe fifteen- or twenty-watt bulbs, or what I like to call “temple lighting.” In my arms is my younger daughter, sound asleep but whimpering now and then. She curls up on the sofa with me, her head in my lap as I stroke her forehead and long braid of hair. Christabel sits cross-legged on the round area rug in the middle of the living room. She thumbs Tarot cards from one of my favorite decks onto the floor in front of her. No matter how many times she casts the Celtic Cross spread, she shakes her head and reshuffles.
Jan, on the other hand, stands as a sentinel at the front window. Every few minutes, she peeks through the blinds and announces, “It’s still out there. At the corner of your property. It’s still waiting for you.”
For now, we are safe inside my circle. When I venture out later, I’ll take a subset of the circle with me for protection. Inside my circle, the dark messenger can’t hurt me or anyone I love.
Sonnet whimpers in her sleep and squeezes my hand. I lean down to kiss her forehead in the same way I did when she was a baby. Funny how you never feel that your children are completely safe. When Sonnet was a baby, I would gaze at her just like this, scared to death she would stop breathing. It’s no different now that she’s almost eighteen, except that I fear different things for her. The reasons for worry evolve as she gets older, but the level of worry has never changed from the first time I held her in my arms.
Sonnet sits up in my lap. She pulls her knees in tightly to her chest and hugs her ankles. She whimpers, but when I brush the hair from her brow, she settles down and falls asleep again. When she was a newborn. I would sit for hours at a time and watch her sleep and wonder if she had stopped breathing. Then I would reach my hand out to feel for breath or the movement of her chest, my entire palm as large as her torso. The second I touched her, I knew she still breathed, but she would startle, both arms flailing before she sank back into sleep. She is so like that now. Seventeen, still just a baby. Still traumatized by her father’s porn collection. Still distrusting of any man.
I twist to plant another kiss on her brow. “Hush, now. Mommy’s got you.”
Then I turn to Christabel. “Shouldn’t you be going to bed now? After all you’ve been through tonight?”
She doesn’t answer me at first. She casts another round of Tarot cards in a semicircle in front of her, then shakes her head and scatters them with one hand before putting them back in the deck and shuffling.
“Don’t worry, Miss Lauren. I’m going to figure this out for you. I’m learning how to listen to my guides. They’re so talkative, but I’m starting to filter out the noise to let the important stuff come through.”
“Sweetie, you don’t need to prove anything to me.”
“Maybe not, but I need to prove it to myself. I should have seen the trouble that was coming to me tonight.”
I want to tell her that there is no way she could have known, but that’s not true. No more so than it was true that I couldn’t have known what was going on with Jesse. Some people, even non-magickal people, are able to shield things about them that they don’t want others to see. Not even for devious reasons. Sometimes they’re simply embarrassed or afraid of judgment. And then there are the times when we really do see what’s wrong but cannot accept it.
Instead, I say to Christabel, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“Why not? You’re that hard on yourself.”
Christabel shuffles one more time and places two cards upright in front of her. “As much as I hate to admit it, I knew—in a way—that this was going to happen. I just wasn’t listening to my intuition because I didn’t want to believe it. I mean, I didn’t have visions of Unk shooting up everything or hunting me like a varmint in his barn, but I did have inklings of something being wrong. I don’t know if that was psychic ability or just watching him become more and more anxious in direct proportion to his financial problems. I mean, I tried to help out financially, but if it hadn’t been for me needing a home, he might have moved in with his girlfriend or maybe found a roommate who could pay more than I could. I watched him get more and more on edge every single day, and I saw where it was headed, but I didn’t really do anything. I mean, I could have done more. Not sure what, but more.”
My chest hurts at the thought of Christabel, still a baby herself at barely eighteen, trying to take on adult responsibilities equal to those of a middle-aged man. In my heart, I could easily grant her absolution that I can’t grant myself. She’s still a kid, but at forty-eight, I know better. I should have seen what was happening to Jesse, even without psychic powers to guide me. I just hadn’t wanted to see.
Christabel taps both cards with a long, purple-painted fingernail adorned in stars and crescent moons. “These two cards keep coming up in every single spread I cast. The High Priestess Card and the Fool Card. Do you know that story of Ragnal? I think it comes from Chaucer’s story in his Canterbury Tales, ‘The Tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady.’ The bride is an ugly old woman by day, but at night, she sheds her skin and becomes a beautiful young woman. The trick is that everyone sees her one way and doesn’t know, except for her husband, how she looks up close. That’s the vision I’m getting, except that it’s in reverse. Everyone looks at her as the beautiful young woman, but in private, she sheds her skin and becomes something old and ugly.”
I understand Christabel’s point, but why does old have to be synonymous with ugly?
Christabel seems to read my mind. “It’s not about age. It’s about perception. This is someone who takes great care to make sure she’s perceived as something she isn’t.”
Jan whirls around. “Did you say the High Priestess and the Fool? Is that two people or one? Sure sounds to me like the leaders of the last two covens you were a part of.” She turns and peeks yet again through the blinds. “Still out there,” she mutters under her breath.
Lost in thought, I stroke Sonnet’s hair. I’m not sure how much time goes by, but Christabel watches me in silence.
“Why don’t you confront them, Miss Lauren? You are so much more powerful now than you were when you left either group. You can definitely hold your own against them.”
“I can.”
“But? I’m pretty sure I heard a ‘but’ after ‘I can.’”
I laugh. “Yeah, you caught me. I can confront Lady Dragon and the whole Grand Coven. I can confront Donna and all the Elders. And I can hold my own with both. Maybe even at the same time. But here’s the problem: I don’t know if they’re responsible for sending the thought-form to stalk me. If they are, fine. If not, I’ve just alerted them that I’m focused on them. That means they may pile onto what’s already a not-so-easy time for me. I have only so much energy to handle even mundane life right now, let alone magickal enemies. I’m already in one witch war with whoever sent the thought-form. I don’t want to end up in three witch wars at one time. That, I don’t have the strength to confront and beat.”
Jan screws up her face the way she always does when she’s craving cigarettes. “No, no. There’s got to be a way. Can’t you just—I don’t know—look in on them to see if they’re causing trouble?”
I laugh again. This is no laughing matter, and I’m beginning to sound like I’m losing control. I swallow my laugh. “Jan, the people you want me to confront are all very powerful witches. They are High Priestesses of their own covens. These are not neophytes with a lot of learning to do to control their powers. These are dominant witches who believe that a witch who cannot kill cannot cure. And believe me, any one of them—including me—have that ability.”
“There’s got to be a way.” Christabel shuffles the two cards back into the deck. She shuffles several times to dislodge any energy left attached to the pair.
I think about it for a few more minutes. “There may be something I can do. I don’t have everything I need here, though. It may take a few days.”
The pilot light in the core of my body is back, burning as fiercely as before.
“Christabel? Please bring me a glass of water and one of the pills in the bottle on the kitchen table.”
She scrambles back a few minutes later, and I swallow the painkiller as quickly as I can. I’m trying to stay ahead of the pain. So far, it’s been on a discernable schedule, but I can’t take one before the other starts to fade.
Christabel studies me as she returns to her spot on the rug. “I hope I’m not being too personal, but what kind of surgery did you have?”
I press one finger to my lips and then point at Sonnet, still sleeping.
“Oh!” Christabel whispers. “She doesn’t know?”
“No one does. Except Jan.”
“Not even Rhiannon?”
“I don’t want to upset Rhiannon when she is taking her finals. I’d never forgive myself if she damaged her grade point average because of me or what’s going on here. As for”—fearing that uttering her name will wake her, I only point at Sonnet— “she’s terrified something will happen to me before her eighteenth birthday, and she’ll have to go live with her dad and webcam-ready stepmom. I promised her a long time ago that I wouldn’t take any risks unnecessarily until both she and her sister are no longer minors.”
“But the—” Christabel doesn’t say the word but mouths it. Surgery.
“I’ll know in a few days if it was successful. And yes, I will let you know, too. Promise.”
“It’s female surgery.” Jan glances over her shoulder at the three of us and then turns back to the window.
Christabel slides the Tarot deck back into the purple velvet bag, handsewn for my favorite cards. “I’d love to stay up and help you figure out all this, but I am really tired.” Christabel frowns up at me. “Do you think your surgery is related to everything else that’s been going on? When did you first have, um, symptoms?”
“I think it’s related to something that happened a long, long time ago. It takes decades to become cancerous, but that’s the problem. I don’t know exactly when it started. It may have started even before I married Quent, when I was with my first boyfriend, or during my marriage to Quent or during my marriage to Jesse. I just have no idea. What I do know is that I had one of those intuitive feelings that something was wrong, and I went to several doctors and they all basically diagnosed me as being ‘over forty.’ One of them very wrongly told me that there was no need to have pap smears anymore after forty and certainly not after I hit menopause.”
“What did Dr. Jesse say?”
I wince. “I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to bother him. When I finally did, he sent me to one of his colleagues, and she’s the one who diagnosed it. So far, I’ve been able to stay one step ahead, but I can’t seem to get clear margins on the lab specimens, which would mean my new doctor is reasonably satisfied that all the potentially cancerous cells are gone.”
Christabel hangs her head. “I’m so sorry this is happening to you. Do you think it might have been the same person who sent—”
“No, sweetie, sometimes bad things and worrisome things happen that don’t have a source in magick.”
“But can’t you heal it yourself?”
I smile. “I’m trying, sweetie, I’m trying.”
“By the way, I meant to tell you,” she says, curling up on several floor pillows and staring up at the ceiling, “I was over at the Thai restaurant off of Circle Lake Circle. You know the one? Directly across the lake from the healing center? It’s the hole-in-the-wall with the big pink orchids painted over the front windows. I saw somebody there who looked a lot like Dr. Jesse. Twice.”
It’s a punch to the gut.
Christabel yawns and closes her eyes. She has no idea how much those words hurt, no matter how well-intended. Jesse always loved Thai food, but the restaurant Christabel references isn’t one he and I ever dined at together. As much as I hate myself for it, I’m certain that I will have to dine there soon.
Jan watches me from the window. “I told you he would bring you pain. I told you.”
My entire body stiffens at Jan’s words. Yes, Jesse had brought me pain, after five years of joy. I wanted that joy to go on forever, but I’m willing to take the pain now just to have had that joy with him. Jan had been both right and wrong.
I exhale slowly. It’s past time for me to pick up yellow roses from the florist and take them to the cemetery.
“Would you watch the kids, Jan? I need to go perform a ritual now. Alone this time.”
“I’ll join you if—”
“Alone.”
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