Chapter 37

Chapter 37 of 48 · 10-minute read

Transiting Mars Opposite Jesse’s Natal Neptune

For the second time in one day, I make my way down the narrow, overgrown path to the lake. Something moves in the woods behind me. Heart thumping in my ears, I whirl, ready to face the woman Jesse called Bianca.

Christabel, wide-eyed, throws up her palms. “It’s just me!” she whispers as loud as she can and it still be a whisper.

I let out a deep sigh. “Chrissy, I thought I told you to stay in the car and wait for me in case things go wrong.”

“That’s exactly why I followed you. In case things go wrong. I’m your backup.”

I smile my thanks at her. She may be young, but she’s probably the most supportive magickal friend I have right now. She’s also a fireball of supernatural talent herself, even if she lacks direction. If ever I take on a new student, it will be Christabel. Once I heal this open and bleeding wound that is Jesse, I’ll do that. I promise myself that I will, even if I don’t tell Christabel yet.

“Can you sense them?” Christabel takes several long strides to catch up with me on the path.

“Bianca? Yes. Her energy has crisscrossed this path regularly.” Like ley lines to some ancient pilgrimage. “The old Jesse, no. But his twin from the restaurant, yes.”

Others, too. Fishermen, hunters, hikers, even witches, some going back centuries, all of them travelling to the lake that’s a perfect circle and reeks of ancient magick.

“You’re going to confront her? Now?”

I shake my head. “She’s not here. I know what her energy feels like now, and⁠—”

I stop in my tracks and reach out with what Jesse joked were my “spidey senses.”

“And she’s not here. Can you tell, Chrissy? What’s the freshest wave of energy through here?”

Christabel holds her hands out from her hips, palms down. “Yes. Yes! I feel it. And it went back toward the main road. And then earlier, it was her energy heading to the lake but… but with—I’m sorry—with him.”

“You’re a fast learner. You’ll be a good student.”

She gasps. “Really?”

“Really. Soon. Maybe at the Lammas fire festival in August. Give me a little time, but the answer is yes.”

Something cracks in the woods ahead of us. A broken stick under a paw, maybe. A limb falling? Then it cracks again.

The man in the dirty T-shirt steps out of the brush and into my path. The unkempt hair. The deep lines on his face. It can’t be Jesse. It can’t.

“Dr. Jesse?” Christabel grabs my shoulder as if she thinks I might run to him.

It’s not Jesse’s energy. It’s not. Maybe somewhere under there, muddled, lost. Like stars and layers of light covered with a hot blanket of darkness. Every time I’ve reached out to him in ritual or in meditation, all I’ve found is murkiness I didn’t recognize, but this man’s energy boils and bubbles with that same murkiness. Not like water over a fire. More like bubbles from deep in a swamp.

His face lights up as he recognizes the young woman at my side. “Chrissy-bel! Our Sonnet’s little friend! How’s my groovy-licious chick-a-let today?” He bounces forward to give her a hug, but she ducks him and steps behind me.

Instead, he comes face to face with me.

I can’t tell that he recognizes me. His eyes seem to swim and focus on something in the distance, then me, then the distance again. He sways. I had a neighbor once who suffered a brain injury in a sports playoff and acted the same ever afterward.

He laughs uncontrollably. “I know you! Where do I know you from?” He raises his index finger, looks at it, then points it at me, almost touching my forehead. His hand drops a few inches, finger still in my face.

He smells as if he hasn’t showered in the last month. I don’t even know what my sweet Jesse smells like after two days. This version of him? I don’t need to sense his energy to know he’s nearby: his stench is enough.

My Jesse was always freshly showered, even right after the gym. Hair cut and styled. Freshly shaved. My Jesse always wore a manly scent and never ever let himself go.

I hold my breath. Please, remember me, I pray at the same time I look at this much older, haggard form of Jesse and don’t want it to be him.

I don’t know this version of Jesse. I don’t want to know him either.

He holds the finger in front of my face as an eternity passes. Then suddenly he pokes the tip of my nose. “Boop!” Peals of laughter ripple out of his throat. He presses his fingertip into my nose again. “Boop!”

Christabel pulls me backward and steps between us. “You smell like shit, Dr. Jesse. Look like it, too. What the hell is wrong with you?”

He can’t stop laughing. “Well, hell, little girl. If I smell that bad, I should probably take a bath.”

He pivots on one heel and heads back to the lake. He grabs his T-shirt at mid-back and pulls it over his head, then discards it in the tall grass along the tree line. He kicks off his sandals. A few feet farther, and his jeans fall to his feet, and he steps out of them and continues walking away from us, completely naked.

It’s him. Oh, Gods. It’s him. It’s Jesse.

The caduceus tattoo on his right ass cheek and my name in Gothic text across his left shoulder tell me everything I need to know and don’t want to.

Then he sprints toward the lake ahead. He’s out of our sight by the time we hear the splash.

Christabel catches me before I can fall, but still I bend over, sobbing. I need some better explanation. Like he died and this is a walk-in spirit inhabiting his body. Like he’s time-travelled to some other time and spent twenty years there losing his mind in solitary confinement before being freed and sent back to the present. Like aliens have overtaken his body and are pretending to be him. Any of those things would be more believable to me than that this lost soul in front of me is my beloved partner of the last five years.

I can’t make sense of it. I can’t.

“Miss Lauren? Are you okay? Raven?” Christabel wraps her arms around me and holds me while I bawl into her shoulder. “My spirit guides told me last night that you never processed your grief, but that one day, you’d be ready to deal with what you’ve lost. My nana said we couldn’t rush it because it has to come when you’re ready. She said you could deny it and shut everything out, but eventually, you’d have to confront Dr. Jesse and his demons to get your answers. You came here to do that. Well, now you know.”

Only I hadn’t. I’d come here for something else. And maybe to unearth a few clues on whether the haggard shell of a man was Jesse or someone else before I submitted myself to a releasing ritual.

What if I release a man who still loves me?

But this man didn’t even recognize me. And I still have to deal with Bianca and⁠—

“What’s wrong, Miss Lauren?”

My own patterns trouble me. I hang onto things that have already left me, like staying too long in my marriage to Quent because I refused to see what was right in front of me. I refused to quit or to give up hope until I’m certain there’s no hope left. I’ve done the same with Jesse this year. I remember all the good times and have refused to see the bad. It’s easier to think of him as dead than it is to accept that he walked out on me without a word. I’ve waited too long to admit it and move on smoothly.

Six years ago, Jesse and I fell in love at exactly the right time for both of us. Neither of us had expected to find a new love just as we were divorcing our long-term partners. Despite his sunny public temperament, he’d hidden away his own suffering from the outside world. He’d had bouts of discord that he’d secretly self-medicated with alcohol and drugs in his early twenties, all long in the past by the time we married, but always a lurking danger beneath the surface. I’d walked away from the Elders, Jan, and any naysayers to cleave to him and him to me, and our partnership had been smooth except for one rough spot in the first year of our marriage.

I’d miscarried at sixteen weeks. Because of my “advanced maternal age” at forty-three, my obstetrician had run oodles of tests, only to discover that this baby had the same rare genetic disorder that Jesse had passed along to his stillborn twins with his ex-wife. The loss of their twins had ended their marriage, and Jesse was caught in a spiral of despair over our miscarriage, over blaming himself for passing along a genetic anomaly yet again, and over his abject terror that he might lose me, too.

When it comes to patterns, one of Jesse’s was that if he lost hope, he would run away before the consequences showed up. While I rarely abandoned hope, Jesse assumed, if things were bad enough, that hope was already lost.

I never grieved the loss of that pregnancy. I didn’t have time to, not if I wanted to keep Jesse anchored. It didn’t help that the town gossips were constantly asking about the pregnancy and that neither of us wanted to share information with them.

A few days later, I found Jesse sitting on the back porch, staring as if he’d left the earthly realm. I’d grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to his feet, all the while yelling at him, over and over, “Don’t you leave me behind! I need you here with me! I’m not giving up on you!”

After that, I hauled him to a therapist Sondra recommended to me. Jesse changed medications to something stronger and more effective that seemed to work after a matter of days. He started feeling better, more at peace with himself. Then, he was always by my side. Loving, gentle, devoted.

And then in late January, maybe early February, he started acting weird. I’m not sure if it was right before or right after the day I delivered pizzas to the clinic and found him backing away from the woman in the red blouse.

And then a month later, he suddenly crashed his car and walked away. Just walked away. He never came home. Then all his hidden disasters since the Winter Solstice came tumbling down around me—the missed payments, the gossip, the malpractice threats.

And I was the last to know, partly because no one in the community wanted to tell me and partly because I’d been taking care of my own needs and didn’t have the energy to take care of anyone else.

I’d missed the growing anxiety and low moods. He could hardly sit still before my first surgery, and after Solstice, he’d become more and more withdrawn and agitated. If I’d taken more care of my own negative patterns and paid more attention to the change in Jesse’s pattern, I might have saved myself a lot of grief.

I pull my damp face out of Christabel’s shoulder and frown into her concerned eyes. “I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in patterns, whether in the seasons or in human nature. I believe that your being here with me now is part of a greater pattern in our lives. Your mom helped me more than once when I was struggling to confront Quent and leave that misery of a marriage. No questions asked. No judgment. And now Yelena’s little daughter is here, helping me when I need it most!”

Blushing, Christabel shrugs. “You’d been helping each other since Sonnet and I were little. Now I can help you. It’s what friends do. My guides say, I’ll be the megaphone for everything you’ve taught me, and I’ll expand your teachings and healing centers in ways you’ve never dreamed. I’m gonna be Raven’s legacy!”

I’m not sure if it’s wishful thinking or news from her spirit guides, including her beloved grandmother, but if the heart can conjure miracles, then Christabel’s heart is endowed with the best kind of magick. The Old Gods once gave me a sacred mission to create a network of healing centers that would support witches everywhere and teach non-witches how to manifest for themselves. Dragon had been given the same mission and failed. My own Center of Light is closed now, despite it being lauded across the magickal community as a prototype for all healing centers. What if this is where my sacred mission ends, and Christabel is meant to take up the torch and finish the work I started?

Christabel, stepping away, hands up like a shield, looks around nervously. “We’re still in one of your protection bubbles, aren’t we?”

I can’t help but smile at my legacy. “Always.” Or more accurately, always since I took my power back only nights ago. “I’m not sure I can keep the servitor away if I fail again. I have to know Bianca’s true identity before I confront her, and that takes precedence, even over my own feelings right now. But first, I have to take back something she has of mine.”

“Dr. Jesse?”

The thought of taking him back as he is now hurts too bad to consider. I’m not sure it’s possible. Nor am I sure I want this Jesse back. This Jesse is not someone I ever would have chosen for my partner, my lover, my husband.

“Raven’s Legacy,” I say to Christabel, “follow me.”

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