Chapter 18

Chapter 18 of 48 · 9-minute read

The Healing Center’s Natal Sun in Eleventh House of Social Causes

Christabel screams from the passenger seat. I slam on the brakes, almost standing on them, as much as my seat belt will allow. Breathing heavily, we sit in my car in the middle of the side street on the way to the police station. We don’t speak. We’re still staring at the road as some medium-sized animal disappears into the tall grass of a vacant lot.

“Coyote,” I mutter. “Trickster energy.”

One thing I appreciate about Christabel is that I don’t have to explain animal totems or animal magick to her.

“Yeah, Miss Lauren, but that doesn’t explain why you zoned out before it walked out in front of us. Didn’t you hear me calling your name? You were having another one of those memories you were telling me about, weren’t you?”

I nod. One second, I was thrilled that the slowpoke car in front of me—the only other vehicle in sight—was turning in at the back alley to my favorite grocery store and leaving an open road. The next second, I was in the sixth grade. Seventh? Science class. One that started at 10 a.m. promptly. Fifteen minutes into the class, the door opens, and a girl bursts through. Short blonde hair, but ponytails on top of her head like horns except as thin as a toddler’s. A red sweater, the brightest red I’ve ever seen until then. White athletic jeans and white athletic shoes with jingle bells woven into the laces.

I’d forgotten this memory. The last time I thought of it was maybe ten minutes after it happened, when our science teacher was trying to give us a real-life example of how memory worked and can sometimes be faulty. He asked us to take out a sheet of paper for a pop quiz, which consisted of two questions.

“First, what did Mandy say when she ran into our room and interrupted us?”

That one was easy. Something about a car in the parking lot being on fire. Everyone rushed to the window to take a look. The second question was much harder.

“What color shirt was Mandy wearing?”

Out of the class of thirty students, only I answered both questions correctly.

The lesson for all of us that day was that we couldn’t always depend on our memories for picking out the finer details. The lesson for everyone else, that is. For me, the lesson was that an accurate memory was in my head somewhere. I merely had to access it.

If these inconsequential memories are meant to give me clues to who sent the servitor, I will need many, many more. So far, they’re only snippets of the past, disconnected from everything else.

“We’re in a bubble, aren’t we?” Christabel watches me from her seat as she double-checks her shoulder belt. “This car, I mean. You have a bubble of protection around us, don’t you?”

I laugh. I’m not sure if she sees it or feels it, but Christabel is certainly talented. Laughter gurgles out of my throat again. I must sound like a maniac, but I can’t stop. Clearly, I’ve lost my mind. All I can do to answer her is nod.

“Yes, we’re in a bubble,” I manage to say.

Not uncommon at all for witches to drive around in vehicles encapsulated in protective bubbles of energy, but I do it a little differently from what other witches do. I think of the large, whomping, concentric circles of protective energy warding my property as one giant bubble, though technically, it’s probably more of a sphere. Every time I leave my warded property, whether on foot or in my car, as I emerge from the large bubble, part of it forms around me or around the vehicle I’m driving. The large bubble begets a smaller bubble. When I reach the healing center and emerge from the car, I will have a smaller bubble around me. When I rejoin my car, the bubbles will rejoin. When my car reaches my driveway, then that protective bubble merges with the larger bubble. Not only that, but now Christabel has a bubble around her, too—all from my own energy that I’ve expanded to build the circle around my property.

I’m ashamed to admit it to myself, but I haven’t been protecting myself or my loved ones in months now. I suppose most people in most religions, creeds, and cultures do a bit of backsliding at some point in their lives. It’s not the first time I’ve failed to follow through on the practices that I know work and keep my supernatural talents strong, but I try not to let it happen often. I would be embarrassed to admit out loud that I’ve been negligent again and for so long. I let a bad few days and a natural downturn of life’s cycles turn into an almost insurmountable object.

I cannot fail again. I have to remember to take care of myself. No matter how hard the times may seem, I can’t let my magickal muscles go to waste or get so out of practice that all my wards are down. Fear for my health, losing Jesse, arguments with Quent—no matter what’s going on in my life that isn’t cheery, I can’t afford to forget who I am or what I am.

My laughter dies abruptly. “I’ll drop you around the corner at the police station. You text me later today and let me know how your uncle is doing, okay?”

All we know at the moment is that he’ll be kept in the psych ward for the next few days, as much for shooting up his house and barn as for telling the police that a horse-man had been following him all day. Christabel isn’t a minor, and she does live in her uncle’s home, so she’ll be allowed to return freely as soon as possible. For now, she’s too shaken, so she’ll stay at my house for the next few days, if not weeks.

After Christabel exits my car—bubble intact—I sit in the parking lot of the police station and try to figure out where to go next. If I take a right turn out of the parking lot, I can head straight to the florist for my regular weekly bouquet of yellow roses and take them directly to the cemetery. My surgery this week has forced me off schedule. Normally, I would have visited the cemetery yesterday, left the flowers as usual, and then sat for a little while on the grayish-pink granite bench beside a matching granite headstone and graves.

If I take a left turn instead, I can drive directly to the healing center where I’m supposed to meet up with someone from the bank, provided Tom delivered the message as instructed. Or I could cross the highway, go straight.

My stomach rumbles with hunger, a reminder that I didn’t eat the cold scrambled eggs Christabel had left on the plate for me, though I didn’t let the cold, soggy strips of bacon go to waste. Straight ahead, across the highway, leads to the Thai restaurant where Christabel had seen someone who looked a lot like Jesse. This moment isn’t the time, but I know in my heart, I won’t be able to let it rest. I’ll go later today, or tomorrow, or sometime next week to see this man who resembles the love of my life. I’m not sure if that will soothe an ache or make it worse. All I know is that I would do almost anything to be with Jesse again.

To an outsider, the healing center looks unchanged from a few months ago, except that the parking lot is empty. To me, its energy has changed entirely. There’s a sense of despair about the place. Maybe a sense of abandonment. Where there had once been the energy of light and hope, now it hurts to look at it. My chest is heavy.

I’ve a few boxes inside my personal office unit where I could load into the car to take back home, but until my cervical surgery has healed, I won’t be lifting anything heavier than my purse. I’m not bleeding as badly today as I was last night, but still I’ve overdone it and don’t want to take a chance on any permanent damage.

Looping my purse strap across my chest, I brace against the grill of my car and stare at my beautiful Center of Light. I breathe deeply, slowly, trying to calm myself. Am I possibly a strong enough witch to bring back everything I’ve lost or stand to lose? Can I perform a ritual in my head to manifest its return? Or even simply to keep my home? So much loss these past few weeks.

Determined, I try to visualize it as it was before the first of March, and as I will it to be again. A bustling, exciting energy. Full of life. Hardly a space left in the parking lot. Saturday festivals with booths and tents for Tarot readers, rune readers, spiritual coaches, craftsmen, and artists. Six years ago, Jesse and I dreamed of a healing center. Jan, too, before that. Plus many of our friends who prefer the esoteric side of life.

Before we married, Jesse took out a loan to build a clinic on this very spot. The small one-story building of exam rooms and reception areas is at the epicenter.

In the first concentric circle around it is a garden filled with flowers and stone benches for meditation.

The next concentric circle comprises so-called tiny homes, most of them smaller than four hundred square feet. For years now, the circle of tiny homes has been rented out to hypnotherapists, tiny shops, life coaches, astrologers, jewelry-designers, and one of the larger ones for my non-clinic-related work of creating courses on magick. All the sixteen tiny houses are gone now except for mine.

The fourth concentric circle is another garden, though more grass than flowers and more hedges than stone. This is where groups meet—or met—daily for yoga classes as well as larger meditations and guided visualizations.

The outermost circle is for tables and tents and regular public festivals. The first Saturday of every month, it was used as a neighborhood farmers’ market—organic and homegrown only.

The plot adjacent to the healing center is all grass with a bonfire pit at the dead center. This is where we hold our public and sometimes private rituals at the cross quarters—the Solstices and Equinoxes—and the fire festivals—Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain.

Sometime after my first surgery, maybe as late as December, Jesse made his last payment to the bank. Not his last scheduled payment, but the last one he decided to pay. He missed his payment for January, and every installment after. By March, he had stopped going to the healing center every day, stopped taking patients. He screwed up in a major way, and the entire community turned against Jesse overnight. I’d been too caught up in my own health worries to notice what was happening to Jesse or that he was hiding something.

I could have kept the Center of Light open a while longer. The bank hadn’t forced me to shut it down, at least not yet, but I no longer had the resources to run it or fight public opinion about Jesse’s part in it. I kept the water and electricity on, but nobody wanted to visit us, and one by one, our vendors stopped coming, our tenants stopped paying, and every psychic associated with the healing center ran like hell in the other direction.

Maybe I had shut down some of my psychic gifts because I found it too difficult to face my grief. Better to be oblivious than to take a hard look at what I couldn’t bear to see.

A car horn beeps behind me. I jump as a red Jeep pulls into the space beside my car. I groan inwardly. If there is anyone I don’t want to see today, it’s Lisa, and considering how many people I don’t want to run into today…

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