Seeing Too Much
“Miss? Will anyone be joining you?”
I barely glanced up at the hostess in the breakfast room of the Castle Hotel. She was probably Dru’s age but looked older with her hair pulled back in a tight blonde bun. She paused expectantly and as soon as I shook my head and looked out the window, she picked up the empty chair opposite me and hauled it off to a crowded table of breakfasters under the broadsword on the wall.
The overly large room doubled as a pub in the evening and a buffet hall in the mornings, but only a few tables in my nook were full at this hour as the dark turned to light outside the windows. The closest to me were two couples: a short-haired thirty-something with a brown beard half-way down his chest and a female companion with even shorter hair than his, and an exceptionally pretty twenty-something couple with reddish-blond hair and more gold hoop earrings in their four ears than I could count without getting caught staring. Half of each couple gazed into their companion’s face and whatever was said through quietly moving lips made their companions blush and giggle.
So that’s what happiness looks like.
Not wanting to be so obvious with my envy of either couple, I dropped my chin and concentrated on my plate. Scrambled eggs from the farmer down the road, freshly baked croissants, sausages from a different local farm, orange juice squeezed within the hour, Atlantic salmon caught yesterday, potatoes grown nearby, brown bread, and Irish butter. It all looked and smelled and tasted so good, but I had no appetite for it. I’d picked over it for the last hour.
“Are you unwell?” The hostess was back, not to borrow another chair but this time with concern in her eyes. “Whoever made your eyes red like that doesn’t deserve you. You remember that.” She smiled, patted my hand, and glided off to meet a new family of diners at the door.
I didn’t bother to hide how I felt. It was obvious to anyone who bothered to look at me that I’d bawled most of the night. Raven had pressed his mark of the dead god Daegan into the Hagalaz scar on my left wrist and I’d seen everything.
Everything.
It had come in a whoosh of feelings and images, more than I could decipher so quickly, but the dark feelings had stayed with me. All the old things I’d buried and the new things I wanted to bury came hurtling at me.
I saw myself through the eyes of the woman Mommy had left me with on the quick trip to Europe that had never ended. She’d been a relative of a father who’d died before I was born. She’d thought I’d had my daddy’s green eyes and she’d worried about the pain in her side and chest and why she’d lost contact with my young mother and whether her son could care for me for a few weeks if the medical tests came back bad.
I saw myself through my kidnapper’s hungry gaze as he asked me to help him look for a kitten lost in the cellar that would become my home—for weeks in reality but an eternity in my own head. He didn’t think of himself as a kidnapper or the monster who would destroy my life. He saw me as a pre-adolescent brat, some distant cousin he didn’t want in the home he shared with his mother, a nosy kid who’d asked too many questions about a mewling sound in the cellar and didn’t understand the pressure he was under.
I saw myself through the eyes of something darker and more powerful than my kidnapper, moving toward me, shivering as it entered my body and promising to both protect me and devour me.
I saw myself through the eyes of Ford, my first real love. Strange that I had such little recollection of someone who had seemed so important to me at the time. He saw me as entertainment and nothing more. Piece of meat.
The flood of images had shifted from past to present, and I saw myself through Jakin’s eyes in one flash of darkness. The way he looked at me, thought of me. He was lost and sad and trying to make sense of his mistakes and the dreams he’d lost. I saw him looking at me from a distance with Charlie, regretting how he’d treated me but knowing it was too late to rectify it. I was unexpectedly part of something bigger, something apocalyptic that was coming, and he’d missed his chance at having me by his side because I was somehow the key to his highest ambitions, his most lost desires.
I saw myself through Dru’s eyes, her deep love for me mixed with occasional frustration. Heh. Frequent frustration. And regret. So much regret. Things she wouldn’t let herself dwell on, things she blocked out, things about me.
I saw myself through Charlie’s eyes. Charlie, wistfully wanting me, trying to get through my defenses, watching me falling in love with Jakin, watching me realize how it was Charlie who was good for me and that Jakin was too full of darkness and manipulation. I saw Charlie thrilled to win my affection after being friend-zoned for so long.
And then the download from Raven’s bind rune against my scar shifted to the future. I saw myself through Charlie’s eyes still but looking at me from across the floor of the St. Augustine Special Collections Library, sadness tightening in his throat because he knew he’d lost me forever. I saw him watching me as I shelved books and refused to look at him. I saw him staring at my left hand, lost in thought, and that I wore Dru’s ring and not a diamond.
And then for a split second, I saw myself through Raven’s eyes, felt the euphoria, and—
I’d broken the seal of the Walking Lightning bind rune and Hagalaz.
It was too much. All of it. Raven had offered me quite a gift, but I couldn’t accept it, so I’d shut it down.
I’d driven back to Dublin in the storm, sobbing all the way. Charlie had left a note in my room, but he never came back. The little box he’d hidden under the mattress was gone.
If that’s what it’s like to be psychic, I’d told myself, then I want no part of it.
Sometimes I had wanted to know what’s going to happen next, what to be prepared for, but knowing everything was just too much. Overwhelming, no choices. Seeing the results of every single choice so far in advance left me paralyzed with inaction. Seeing it all at once was what the Daeganeans called “all time is now,” as I’d learned from Jakin. Not necessarily knowing every little detail but remembering the big things that hadn’t happened yet just as I might remember the big things of the past.
I was used to being an empath. I’d been an empath since I was ten years old, probably younger and hadn’t known it. I knew what it was like to feel the emotions of others, whether those emotions were happy, angry, raging, murderous, dark. I knew how to sense the feelings of others to the point where I couldn’t tell if they were my feelings or someone else’s.
The harder part for me had always been feeling the feelings without knowing their source. There were times when Charlie was distant, and I immediately went to that dark place in myself where I wondered what I had done wrong to push him away. I could tell something was wrong, something horrible. While I was empathic, I wasn’t psychic, so I didn’t know what caused the awful feelings. Now I did but refused to believe it.
Raven’s momentary gift of a psychic boost had been well intended, but it wasn’t something I wanted. I shut it out.
I needed to believe in Charlie. Dru had once told me that when it came to men, my picker was broken. Fortunately, Charlie had picked me, not the other way around. Everybody knew that Charlie was a good guy. How often had I heard him described that way by everyone around me, all people with better picking skills than I had.
Unlike Jakin, unlike Ford from years ago, Charlie would never intentionally hurt me. He had pined for me for months. I hadn’t taken him seriously until after Jakin’s spell work had awakened something new and emotional in me. Without his priestly charms, my affection for Jakin probably would never have happened. It’s hard to tell a good man that you nearly passed him up in favor of someone who wanted to kill you because he’d used enchantments and ointments to deceive you into falling in love with him.
That spell was broken now, but like all wounds, it left scars for both me and for Charlie. He had said he’d forgiven me because I’d needed him, and he could lift my sadness. He’d asked to be my champion, and I had sat and cried, embarrassed at myself for letting him see that side of me. No one had ever been my champion before. No one had ever offered. I’d always had to be my own champion, even if that meant reaching deep down to the monster inside myself.
I was lousy at being my own champion.
The idea of having a good man as my champion, let alone one who wanted to be, had touched my heart. There was still a part of me that didn’t believe I deserved a champion, or a good man, or a partner, or anyone who really loved me. Even worse, a few nights ago, while holding The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks in my hands and losing myself in a meditative trance in its inked knotwork and illustrations, my truest thought had been that I would always be alone.
My phone buzzed inside the safety belt I wore around my waist and under my heavy sweater. I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. The message was from Emry, and it had come through my Fourth World messenger app. The single line of text offered congratulations but didn’t say for what. She’d added several exclamation marks, but nothing else. Not even emojis. If she was congratulating me on retrieving the book from the senator, she was late. Dru had already told me that she had briefed Emry on our status and the fact that the artifact was in a safe place, thanks to Raven.
Raven. Emry had mentioned a priest by that name on a couple of occasions, and that was far more than coincidental. The gushy feeling I sensed when she had mentioned his name, and yesterday when Raven had mentioned hers, made me think there was something more than just a love of old books and esoterica between them.
A vision flashed in my brain and was gone just that quickly, but the knowledge it gave remained. Emry. Raven. Then, the image of him kneeling over a young, pretty woman who was not Emry, performing some kind of resurrection ritual and unsuccessfully begging Emry to come back to him. Raven was older, his face a little wearier, more… worn. A girl of maybe eighteen or twenty stood behind him. Her pink and brown hair had the gold of sunlight in it, and white veins of energy moved across her skin like lightning. Behind her, a shadow of two huge, black wings was waiting in the ether to join her flesh.
I pulled myself out of the vision, shut it down, shoved it away while dragging in a loud gasp. Both couples at the nearby tables turned to look at me. I hunched over my plate, heaving in oxygen. I’d stopped breathing, but for how long? Raven had given me this gift so I could see the truth behind Charlie’s actions—know why he was feeling what he felt instead of guessing at it and always blaming myself. I couldn’t do this, though. It wasn’t a gift I wanted. It was too overwhelming, and I had to believe in Charlie.
I knew in my gut that something was wrong in Charlie’s world, but I had to trust him. I had to ignore the vision Raven had given me. Had to.
When you love somebody, you trust them, right? Or is it that you love somebody because you trust them?
Charlie was a good person, a better person than anyone else I knew in the whole world. He was the most compassionate and caring person I knew. Always there, ready to help no matter what the personal cost to him. He was the guy that a perfect stranger could call at midnight, in the middle of a thunderstorm, with a flat tire, three hours from civilization, and Charlie would hop in his car and drive dangerously fast to get there to help. Even if he had to be up and at work for an important meeting at dawn. He was thoughtful and selfless and generous with his time. He loved to do good for others and sacrifice as often as necessary. I had to trust him because he was a better person than I was.
I typed furiously into Fourth World messenger app. Two minutes later, Emry responded.
Phone in hand, I looked for a quiet spot and settled on a tiny garden on the north side of the hotel where daylight was still dim. It was raining again, though compared to Florida rain, this was no more than mist. Still, it was enough that I would get wet if I stood in it for too long. I followed the narrow stone path through an arbor covered in vines past freshly planted bedding plants and stone benches and found a completely dry spot under the dome of the biggest cedar tree I had ever seen. It was cozy underneath and still dark enough that I felt I could hide there.
Emry answered on the first ring. “Hey, hon, congratulations. I want to hear all about it. Drusilla told me right after you left home, but I thought you were gonna wait until later in the week to go to the Cliffs of Moher.”
I pressed the phone to my ear. “What are you talking about?”
“About you and Charlie! I’m so excited! I talked to him a few hours ago and he didn’t say a word about it, except that he was in the middle of a crossroads.” She laughed. “I guess he got out of the crossroads and got down on one knee, huh? Was it a sunrise proposal? Are you still going to the Cliffs later this week? I want to hear all about that, too. How do you feel, hon? Are you happy at last?”
“Emry, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh.” She went quiet for a few moments. “I didn’t spoil things, did I? I was in meditation, doing a little work for Charlie like I offered to him, and I saw him going down on one knee, looking up. He had a diamond ring in his hand, and he was putting it on your finger. You’d even done your nails to get spiffed up for him. I thought I was seeing something that had already happened. I guess, maybe, that’s later in the week? But I saw the status change on his Fourth World profile just now, so I thought—”
“Emry, slow down.” I pressed the phone harder into my ear, but her news didn’t make any more sense than it had when she first started babbling. I stared at my nails, chewed to the quick from anxiety. A manicure hadn’t crossed my mind.
“Hon, Charlie told me a few hours ago that he had some major life decision coming up and that he was in the middle of a crossroads and had to decide whether to go forward or not. I offered to help. I did some work for him to give him the nudge he needed to make up his mind. I checked all my social media as soon as I wrapped up my meditation and there it was, in the feed, that Charlie’s engaged.”
“Charlie’s what?” My face warmed. The breakfast I’d barely touched turned to lead in my stomach.
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