Chapter 16

Chapter 16 of 48 · 8-minute read

Sonnet’s Natal Moon Conjunct Lauren’s Natal Ceres in Synastry

Servitor. The word itself haunts my dreams. More than a thought-form or an avatar or a messenger. An entity with a specific purpose meant to serve its creator. Dragon hadn’t sent it, but she knew exactly what it was.

I awake to pounding, but I can’t tell if it’s inside my head or outside my bedroom. I hug my knees, then realize that my cervical pain has subsided, replaced by a dull ache of awareness but little more.

I squint at the clock on my nightstand. I don’t remember coming to bed, but at most, I’ve had six hours of sleep.

The last thing I remember is a dream of Dragon following me in circles around my firepit, tut-tutting me for not being as smart as I thought I was. Usually, I can tell the difference between visitation dreams and fear-based dreams, but this feels like a little of both, plus me beating myself up for not being a more resourceful witch.

The last thing I remember before the dream is standing in front of the firepit and watching an almost transparent form of Dragon fading into nothingness. Maybe I walked to my bed under my own will.

One thing I’m certain of is that no one carried me here. Jesse used to do that whenever I would fall asleep on the sofa, but Jesse isn’t here anymore.

The grief hits me hard, just as it does every morning when I open my eyes and remember all over again how I lost Jesse. The pain never numbs from that anguish, unlike from my surgery. Maybe it’ll get better in time, but I’ve found that with grief, it takes as long as it takes, and there’s no short-cutting the process.

I pull myself into an upright position just as Sonnet bursts through the door and dives under the covers next to me. She wraps her arms around my waist, then presses one ear against my heartbeat and whimpers. She should be in school right now, getting ready for the end of the academic year, not here in bed with me in the late morning, her entire body trembling.

“Mom? Mommy?”

I curl my arms around her shoulders and bring her in even closer. “Sonnet? What’s wrong, baby?” I hear knocking again. This time it is louder, more determined, and I realize that it’s on the front door. I pull back the covers to stand and find my bathrobe, but Sonnet pulls me back to bed and squeezes tightly.

“No, Mom. Don’t answer the door.”

“Baby, I⁠—”

“No, Mom! You can’t tell anybody I’m here!”

I grab Sonnet’s shoulders and push her away from me to look into her face. “Sonnet, what’s happened?”

My brain is still fogged by the multiple doses of painkillers and exhaustion, as well as the servitor stalking us and some witch who isn’t Dragon trying to make my life and the lives of those closest to me into a living hell. I’m too sleepy to recall everything in an instant, but I’m gradually remembering. Sonnet explained it all to me last night after finding Jan and Christabel and me sitting in our backyard ritual.

To make an exceedingly long story short, Quent had called the ice cream shop where Sonnet works—worked, past tense—and told her to meet him in the parking lot and that it was an emergency because I was in trouble. There was no other reason why she would have left the ice cream shop, especially during a busy shift. She had run outside to meet her dad, where he told her to get in the car and he would take her to me as soon as possible. He had flat-out lied and told her to come with him because I was going to die. She cried all the way to what she thought was going to be a trip to the hospital but ended up being a trip to his house. Once he got her inside, he took her phone, purse, and keys, then locked her in what he called her room—a guest room that had been designated as her bedroom for the one or two nights that she stayed at his place every year. He kept the room empty specifically so he could tell the court he kept a proper home for his daughter should he be granted full custody.

At some point during the night, Sonnet had pried loose the lock, tiptoed across a slanted rooftop to the fieldstone chimney, and climbed down it to the ground. From there, she scaled the eight-foot fence around his backyard, did the same over the gated community’s security fence with the barbed wire on top, and then walked five miles to my home.

Sonnet is physically fit and a rock climber, but she hates walking and running. Normally, she balks at a hundred-foot walk, but she had run and stumbled her way home through poorly-lit streets, rocky terrain, tall grass, and scraggly woods. She had persevered both because she was afraid her dad would find her and because she really didn’t know if I was okay. Also, she had sworn someone or something was following her the whole way home, but whatever it was stopped when she reached the boundary of my warded property.

“Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Please don’t let them know that I’m here.”

I hug her even tighter. She and I argue more than Rhiannon and I do, but fear of her mom being taken away trumps all the little annoyances we have with each other. Her adventures last night terrify and anger me, not for anything she did but for the situation she was put in.

“Mom, he kidnapped me! Just don’t tell anyone I’m here. Please?”

The knocking stops, and I hear voices inside the house at the front door.

I kiss Sonnet on the forehead. “Stay here in my bed, baby doll. And stay very quiet.” I settle her into the warm spot I leave behind, then reach for my robe. The poor kid doesn’t know yet that she’s lost her job.

Just as I reach the living room, I tie my animal print bathrobe over my pajamas. Everything’s been cleaned up since last night. I’m not sure if that was under Jan’s supervision or if Christabel and Sonnet did it this morning, but the blankets where Sonnet slept on the sofa have been put away and the pillows where Christabel fell asleep are back in their proper spaces. The kitchen smells of bacon and eggs. Christabel holds the front door firmly in position as she talks to someone through the six-inch space the security chain allows. Thankfully, I recognize the voice as friendly to neutral.

“Christabel,” I whisper as I close the front door in mid-conversation, “wait outside, please, in the backyard. Check the firepit area for me to make sure everything has been put away.”

Christabel frowns, reading not only the room but my thoughts. She nods and heads towards the back door, pausing to tilt her head as she looks back at me. “I made breakfast for everyone this morning. Sorry if yours is cold. I was just about to do the dishes.”

I thank her as she rushes out the back door.

I reopen the front door, this time without the chain. “Tom! Please come in.”

My lawyer steps over the threshold and gives me a quick once over. “Uh, sorry, Lauren. I didn’t realize you weren’t up yet.”

Warm liquid runs down my inner thigh. I’ve not made it to the bathroom in hours, and I have no idea what I’ll find when I do, but I make sure I don’t turn around just in case my robe is wet with blood. I apologize and tell him that I’ve been sick.

“It’s not the flu, is it?” He takes a step backward instead of walking through the door.

I throw the door open wide and shoot him a grin that’s sure to make him think twice about hanging around long enough to catch a glimpse of my frightened daughter. “We never really know what we’ve been exposed to, do we?”

Tom takes another step back and screws up one side of his face. His bushy white mustache contrasts starkly with his deep brown skin and bald head. “Eh, I think I’ll stay out here then, if you don’t mind. I can’t afford to catch whatever you’ve got.”

I grit my teeth to keep him from seeing the smirk beneath my thin smile. With some sleep and my surgery pain diminished, I’m definitely starting to feel better. Not a chance that he’s going to catch what I’ve got!

“I left you a whole passel of messages last night, Lauren. You didn’t call me back.”

I’d meant to call Tom first thing in the morning. I hadn’t meant to be up almost the whole night conducting magickal detective work.

“Sorry, Tom. I wasn’t feeling well, and I⁠—”

He waves away my excuses. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. You’re sick. Well, no matter. I told you in my last message that I would catch up with you today. Now, I don’t want you to worry, Lauren. We’ll get all this taken care of. I’m really hopeful that as soon as your youngest is of the age of majority, you won’t have to worry about losing custody anymore, and I can finally retire. There’s a fishpond over on the back side of my property, and that pond’s calling my name almost as hard as you keep calling my name to let me know about the next problem with your ex-husband.”

I apologize even though I’ve done nothing to bring Quent’s ire down on me except breathe. Tom doesn’t want to retire from dealing with Quent any more than I want Tom to be able to. In the six years since my divorce, I’ve paid Tom slightly more than the equivalent of one year’s pre-tax salary. To date, we’ve won every trip back to family court, but Quent keeps thinking that he will somehow get out of child support and force me to pay back everything that Florida law has already required him to pay. It’s not even that much, especially for a man of his wealth, and I still pay more than half the girls’ expenses. I’ve never asked for nor received alimony, but he’s even suggested I owe financial maintenance to him now that he takes his salary in non-cash commissions and lives off the money he borrows against their rising value.

Sneaky bastard. Though, really, it’s more about revenge than about the money.

I take the large brown envelope that Tom hands me. “What’s this?”

“Nothing official. Not yet.” Tom sinks his hands into his pockets and kicks at a spot on the front porch floor. “Quent’s attorney, Justine, works in the same building I do, so we’ve learned to give each other a heads-up about you two. Quent called her last night and had her draw up papers to get full custody of Sonnet after he was forced to pick her up. He wants emergency child support due him, too. Something about you abandoning your daughter yesterday and putting her in danger.”

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