by Catie Rhodes
“Can your sister see visitors at all?”
“She can, but she won’t know you’re there.” Brad made a pained face. “They have her so heavily medicated.”
I remembered my brief stay at a mental hospital. They’d liked dispensing meds there, too. I took out a business card and handed it to Brad.
“You remember anything or even if you want to talk about…” I pulled the black opal out of my shirt and showed it to him again and shrugged. “Call me.”
Brad pushed my card into a pocket on his shorts and nodded. I figured the card would probably get trashed or washed, but it wasn’t my problem. He walked to the front door and opened it. Hannah took one look outside and hauled ass through the yard, yelling at the kids who were using her BMW as a jungle gym. I took one step onto the concrete porch, and Brad stopped me.
“Sometimes my sister has lucid days.” He let out a trembling breath. “Next time one comes up, I’ll see if there’s any more information I can pass on.”
“I appreciate it.” I gave his arm a pat and walked to Hannah’s car. We stopped for ice cream, which neither of us needed, and made the hour’s drive back to Gaslight City. I drove straight home from the museum. I was so tired my body ached.
The knock on the door surprised both Memaw and me.
“Who’s that?” She wrinkled her nose at the interruption. Odd for her. Usually she welcomed company with open arms, but the dark shadows and her haunted eyes suggested she’d had an exhausting day. She’s getting worse. The tension came mincing back, locking my shoulders into a painful, yet familiar, rictus. I need to get it in my head she’ll never get better. This is it.
“Maybe Dean. He’s giving a campaign talk to the Main Street Organization. I agreed to come since both Dottie and Julie are members. Maybe he decided to pick me up.” I set the knot I’d been making with the crochet hook and the yarn aside and pushed myself off the rocking chair I’d pulled next to the couch so Memaw could coach me. My joints ached as I walked to the door. The day had put its own kind of hurt on me, and the emotional exhaustion had seeped into my body, poison on an open wound. I wanted sleep, but many miles of hard road lay between me and that little luxury. I opened the door.
At first, I just stared at Brad Whitebyrd and the woman leaning on his shoulder. Her arm hung around Brad’s neck, his fingers white at the knuckles from gripping her wrist. The woman raised her head. I recognized a rumpled Mysti Whitebyrd from the photo on her website. Saliva slicked her lips, which tilted drunkenly between a grin and a grimace. Her glazed eyes glowed bright with chemicals and madness.
“Help me.” It sounded like she was trying to talk around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. I glanced at Brad for clarification, maybe sanity, but a wild light hardened his gaze into something almost as crazy as what I saw behind Mysti’s eyes.
“I was reading through some of Mysti’s grimoires, and there’s a spell to banish evil spirits, but it calls for a protective crystal.” He glanced at the black opal around my neck.
“This isn’t a crystal. It’s a gemstone.” I wanted my denial to make him go away so very bad. I’d run out emotional fuel several hours earlier. The prospect of a normal night with Memaw sounded nice, the perfect escape from the truth I had no way out of the craziness in my life.
“But it’s magic.” Brad’s eyes widened for emphasis. “It’s powerful. I can tell.”
I stared at him. Mysti began to scratch a sore on her arm, digging into the scab. Blood oozed from the wound. I averted my gaze, unable to watch any longer.
“How on earth did you get her out of the hospital?” I didn’t ask the real question. Would an ambulance bearing orderlies in white suits come blasting into the yard any second? The middle of Brad and Mysti’s drama seemed like a place I didn’t want to visit.
“It’s not a locked prison ward.” Brad frowned and rolled his eyes at the same time. “The facility is voluntary commitment.”
“So you checked her out?” My gut said the truth was not yet with us.
Brad pressed his lips together. “All right. I went to visit and snuck her out. But she signed the commitment papers herself, so I don’t see—”
I tried to close the door. Brad wedged in one foot. I put my weight on it, watching the pain twist his face.
“Who is it, baby?” Memaw called. “Let ‘em on in. I’m all right. Some company might perk me right up.”
Not this kind of company.
Brad shoved open the door and stepped over the threshold, shoving me aside with one arm and dragging Mysti with the other.
“Hey,” I yelled. “Don’t you push your way in my house.”
Brad ignored me and made a beeline for Memaw. She stood an inch at a time, her face going blank at the sight of Brad and Mysti. I decided then and there I’d kill both of them if this made her get sicker than she already was. I’d douse them with kerosene and burn them out back at the ruins where Luther Palmore’s house once stood. I stomped across the room, came up behind Brad and poked him hard in the back.
“I’m not a witch,” I said to his back. “I’m just a clairvoyant, medium, whatever you want to call it. I see ghosts. That’s it.”
“What’s going on here?” Memaw directed the question at me.
“This is a witch someone hired to contact my daddy’s ghost.” I wished right away I could take back the words. This was too much for Memaw. “Something got into her. She’s…” I gestured at Mysti. She didn’t need a description. Seeing her was enough.
“Then you have to help,” Memaw said. “My mama would have helped them.”
Brad turned to me, his face alight with victory. He was lucky Memaw was here. I’d have jammed his nuts up into his sinus cavity had we been alone.
I staggered backward a few steps, thinking maybe I hadn’t heard right but knowing I had. How could Memaw, who’d taught me all my life to stay away from magic, to deny what I was, tell me to use magic to help Mysti? It was like being rag doll caught in a tug of war between two huge, angry kids. They pulled me one way. They pulled me the other way. They snarled and bared their teeth at each other. Meanwhile, one of my seams broke, stuffing began to leak out, and I began to break.
I wanted definite answers about what to do and when to do it, and I didn’t know how to find them. Every time I thought I had things figured out—no magic in front of Memaw, no mention of paranormal in front of Dean, anything goes with Hannah—the rules changed. Fatigue fuzzed my vision and loosened my resolve. I flopped down on the couch, tempted to take up my ball of yarn knots and pretend to crochet, ignoring them all. I’d seen Memaw do it enough times I thought I could pull off the act convincingly.
“I’m not a witch,” I said to nobody in particular.
“It doesn’t matter,” Memaw and Brad said together. Memaw gave Brad her you’re not the boss here look and sat back down on the couch next to me.
“Why don’t you take your…” Memaw stared at Mysti.
“Sister,” Brad supplied.
“Your sister.” Memaw gave him a big smile. “Into the kitchen and sit at the table. If you’re thirsty or hungry, look around and take what you want. I need to speak to my granddaughter.”
Brad shot me another triumphant look. I stuck up my foul finger. Memaw slapped me on the arm and held up one finger in my face as a warning, the way she had when I was a kid. In the pleasantest of voices, the one she’d have used to ask someone if they wanted a sugar cookie, she spoke to Brad. “Now get on in there, or I’ll make you leave without any help.”
Brad hitched up Mysti on his shoulder and took off, mostly dragging her behind him. Memaw and I watched them leave.
“You can do spells and hexes and whatever else,” she said to me in a low voice. “Mama did them all the time, said her mama taught her. She said it’s more of a practice, not a talent like you being a medium.” I started at her words, having never heard her call my ghost-seeing by its proper name. “Of course, like anything else, some practitioners have more talent than others, and it�
�s a skill to be learned.”
But I didn’t want to. I wanted to find Hooty and Rainey’s belongings, stop whoever killed Eddie from killing anybody else, marry Dean, and spend the rest of my life being as normal as oatmeal. You won’t, a soft voice whispered in my mind. You can run, and you can hide, but I’ll always be here to fuck up your life, to make it hard, to make it scary, to put you at risk. I tensed at the thought.
“You have to do this, sugar,” Memaw said. “I’ve taught you, even when it costs you something, we help others. What does Lulu at the coffee shop call it? Karma.”
“But you’re a Christian.” I hoped the reminder would put a stop to this craziness.
“Honey, there’s a hundred ways to cook biscuits, and not a single one of them is completely wrong.” She gripped my arm. “My mama was a Christian, but she also did stuff like this. All ways exist together if we let them. The nature of God encompasses more than we could ever imagine.”
The bottom line was I didn’t want to do it. It represented the bud of another leaf on a branch I wanted to prune out of my life. If it did this, it was an admission I’d surrendered myself—what I wanted for my future—to this. On the other hand, Memaw had her mind made up. She wanted me to help these people, saw it as my duty to them as a fellow human being. She might back down with some arguing, but what would the effort to be angry cost her?
Here’s the real question. Will it be easier to live with doing something I don’t want to do, to help Mysti, or to have another bad memory of my last months with Memaw? The decision made itself. It wasn’t like I ever had to do anything remotely resembling this again.
“I’ll help them on one condition. You go to your room and don’t come out until it’s done. I can’t worry about saving someone and worry about it hurting you at the same time.”
“Honey, there’s not much left that can hurt me. Each day is just me prolonging the inevitable.”
I chose to ignore the last part. It was better than facing the inevitable. I depended on Memaw to act as my compass too much. There were still things I needed to ask her, jokes we needed to share. The unchangeable future of her lying pale and still in a coffin scared me stupid.
“Will you stay out? Or should I send them away?”
Memaw answered with a harrumph and stood, using my shoulder for balance and holding onto the back of the couch, and left the room. Brad came to the kitchen archway separating the kitchen from the living room.
“Please. Let’s do something soon. She’s hurting herself.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could disappear, go somewhere else where life was easier. Then I opened them and got up to do what life demanded.
9
I followed Brad into the kitchen and had to struggle to keep from reacting. Mysti had raked bloody rows down her face with her fingernails.
“You’ll have to tell me every single thing to do.” I averted my gaze and stared at the worn linoleum. Mysti creeped me out too much to look at her for long.
“Of course, of course. I couldn’t help overhearing. It really is like your grandmother said. Anybody can do this, anybody, but you have a little something extra already inside you to make it work even better.” He gently pulled Mysti’s fingers away from the raw mess of her skin and held her hand in his, ignoring her struggles to get it away from him.
Memaw was right. I couldn’t send Brad and Mysti away, no matter how much I worried their weirdness might be contagious. The blight on my conscience would haunt me more than any ghost could.
“What do we do first?”
“Normally, Mysti and I would banish a spirit from the place where it manifested. But this evil spirit—might even be a demon—follows Mysti around. While we sat in here, she saw its form reflected in your toaster oven. It seems to get stronger and stronger.”
I glanced at the toaster, curious but not really wanting to see. “Maybe it feeds on her energy or her fear.”
Brad nodded. “Before Mysti got really sick, she told me contacting Priscilla Herrera—the witch—went fine, but it was when she contacted your father’s spirit that she had trouble. Have you ever had issues contacting him?”
“I’ve never really tried.”
Brad made a puzzled face.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid this stuff. I’ve seen a lot of ghosts I never wanted to see. My father wasn’t one of them.”
Brad shrugged off my answer. “I’m thinking if we can be near something, especially a mirror of your father’s, maybe we could have an easier time drawing him out so we can do the spell.”
“I’m not sure if we—”
“The dresser your daddy and uncle shared is still in the barn.” Memaw’s voice came from the back of the house.
“You’re not supposed to be in this,” I hollered.
“Don’t smart off to me,” she returned.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll do what we need to in the barn.”
The barn sat a good hundred yards behind Memaw’s house. I led Brad and Mysti into the stale night air and deep darkness, hands shoved deep in my pockets. Humidity cloaked us, dampening my skin almost immediately. The barn loomed ahead, a squatting monster in the shadows.
My hand shook as I unlocked the padlock on the rolling door. I avoided this place, especially after dark. A ghost once tried to kill me here. I gathered my courage, gripping the rough wood, and rolled the door open on its track. A wave of pent up heat rushed into my face, the intensity of it almost knocking me backward. I reached inside and turned on the overhead lights, waiting for them to hum to life, before I crossed the threshold.
“How are you going to find the dresser in all this crap?” Brad eased Mysti onto an upended crate.
I peered into the gloom. Covered furniture lurked in the shadows, ghosts of lives past and lost, sentenced to this raw purgatory. My gaze settled on a familiar shape.
“Right over here.” I strode over to it and pulled off the sheet.
Brad put his hands on his hips and surveyed the room, his nostrils twitching at the smell of old horse manure. “We’ll set up the spelling area here in this open spot. I’ll help you drag the dresser to the edge of where we’ll spell.”
“It’s your show.”
We spent the next hour putting together a makeshift spelling area, using a black drop cloth with a white pentagram painted on it. Brad helped Mysti to her feet and walked her onto the drop cloth.
“Would you bring the crate in here? It’s unorthodox, but I don’t think she can stand.”
I obeyed, and he settled Mysti on the crate again.
“Okay, I think we’ve got everything we need, so I’m going to cast the circle.” Brad grabbed a funky little dagger with a shiny handle, pointed its tip toward the ground, and walked around the drop cloth, scattering salt in a circle.
“I’m going to let you set the candles. One at each point of the compass.” He held out the candles to me. I walked around the circle, setting them down in the appropriate spots.
“No,” he said. “You have the north and south reversed. North is brown. Pick them all up and start again. Go clockwise around the circle.”
“What does it matter?” I grumped as I picked them up.
“If you don’t take your setup seriously, how can you expect your request to be taken seriously? Come on.”
He walked with me around the circle, directing me where to set each candle.
“You drag your father’s mirror over here while I cleanse myself. Then we’ll cleanse you.”
“I don’t need it,” I said.
Brad snorted. “Yes, you do. You’re brimming with negative energy. Come here.”
I grumped my way through moving the mirror and finding it something to lean on. Soon as I finished, Brad held his fingers over the incense then over a white candle he already had lit. He crumbled salt through his fingers and dunked them in a plastic bowl I’d filched from the kitchen and filled with water Brad claimed was blessed. He finished by raising his arms toward th
e barn’s wood plank ceiling and then performed the same ritual on his sister, who’d never quit picking at herself. He turned to me, obviously ready for me, and I shook my head.
“Do I really have to?”
“Look, the fate of my sister is at stake here. I’m begging for your help. I’ll owe you, okay? We both will.”
I hunched my shoulders in a shrug, wanting to say no and knowing I couldn’t. This pushed my comfort level right into the red. It made me feel stupid and inadequate, to boot, made me ask myself what I’d spent the last thirty-one years learning. For all the stuff I knew how to do, I didn’t know a damn thing about this part of me who did things science couldn’t explain. I’d thought it a small thing, something like a birthmark, but I was slowly realizing it was more like skin tone or blood type—just what I was. I didn’t want to use it too much because I feared it would grow like a muscle, getting bigger with use, and one day I wouldn’t be able to turn it off and leave it behind so I could live the perfect life I always wanted.
“You going to let me cleanse you?” Brad asked. “Or no?”
Mysti, who seemed to be overcoming the narcotic cocktail the mental hospital had her on, twisted on the wooden crate to see my answer. The naked fear in her eyes shone almost as bright as the kerosene lanterns Brad asked me to light because the place was creepy. I trudged over to Brad.
He walked me through the ritual even though I remembered most of it from watching him. I raised my hands to release negative energy, and something I didn’t expect happened. I felt lighter. The feeling almost buzzed in its intensity, filling my head with a high vibration. The black opal around my neck came to life. For the first time, it hummed in unison with my spirit, the two of them twining together like lovers basking in each other.
“Wow,” Brad whispered. “I’ll cleanse the spelling area, and we’ll start.” He worked quickly, lighting the candles and sprinkling his blessed water, going in a clockwise motion around the pentagram. The energy I felt inside hummed to life in the room, and the kerosene lanterns seemed brighter and the shadows dimmer. I bathed in the perfect energy, feeling content in a way no chemicals, sex, or love had ever given me.