“Nothing,” she returned flatly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Nothing’s going on,” she stated again.
“I know you better than that. You’re not telling me something.”
Her voice continued to be cold and defiant. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Felicity…”
“Fine,” she spat, wheeling back to face me. “I’ve got your answer. I know EXACTLY why this is happening to me.”
CHAPTER 13:
I had absolutely no idea where my wife was heading with this, but the sharpness of her present attitude told me it was a place I wasn’t going to be happy about. I knew her well enough to tell that her temper was flaring because she had been backed into a corner, or at least that is what she perceived to be happening. The fact that those green eyes were focused so intently on me and no one else was more than just an overt clue that I was the one who had chased her there— they were a proverbial smoking gun.
I ran down a mental list of hastily formed theories but still came up empty. I simply couldn’t imagine what she could feel so strongly about keeping secret, given the circumstances. Unless, of course, she was about to issue the blame for her plight directly upon me, and by pushing I was inadvertently forcing her to voice that fact in front of friends. I hoped, however, that such was nothing more than my own insecurities about the pressure everyone had been under and that they were simply bubbling to the top at a less than opportune moment.
I heard Cally re-enter the room behind me and drop the handset back into the cradle as she announced, “The twins are bringing Felicity’s Jeep over right now. They can ride back to Nancy’s with us.”
“They didn’t have to do that,” I told her evenly without turning away from my wife’s molten stare.
“They were already… on… their… way,” she replied, voice fading into a stutter near the end of the sentence. “I’m sorry. Did I interrupt something?”
“I guess that depends,” I replied as the tension continued to swell. “Were you planning to expand on that last comment, Felicity?”
Faced with the query, my wife backpedaled. “The phone is free. Shouldn’t you call Constance,” she said. The last part of the statement came not as a question but as an instruction.
“In a minute,” I replied. I didn’t know if I was only serving to bring myself more grief, but something was telling me not to let this go without an answer. Her attempt to slam the door she had just opened a moment before only steeled my resolve to get it. “What did you mean you ‘know EXACTLY why this is happening’ to you?”
She made another verbal attempt at escape. “Just forget it.”
“I don’t think so.”
We searched each other’s faces for a long moment, and while looking at her, I realized there was something more to this than I had first thought. Something was hiding in the shadows. What I had initially taken for anger alone now held what could have been a hint of embarrassment peeking around from behind the bolder of the two emotional masks.
At the same time, I knew that what she had to be seeing in my face was stark determination. This was very simply one argument my petite, Taurus wife was not going to be able to stampede her way through.
“Okay, fine then,” she replied, turning her face away and breaking the stare. “Look in the pantry. Bottom shelf, behind the dog food bin.”
Again, I was at a loss as to where exactly this was heading, but at least it was moving forward. I sat my coffee cup on the table then turned and stepped over to the pantry. I swung the tall door open and knelt down in front of the wooden cabinet. I inspected the contents but at first glance saw nothing unusual.
“What am I looking for?” I asked aloud.
“You’ll know it when you find it,” she replied.
“Behind the dog food bin you said?” I repeated her earlier instruction.
“Yes” came her clipped reply. “On the bottom.”
I reached in and pulled a plastic kitchen organizer full of cling wrap and sandwich bags off the top of the clear food bin and set it aside on the floor. Leaning inward and tilting my head away from the next shelf up, I thrust my arm back into the recesses of the cabinet and began groping around. It didn’t take long for my hand to brush against something angular that was wedged in behind the dog food container. It felt roughly like a rectangle as I ran my fingers around in search of a place to grab hold.
Using my free hand, I slid the bin slightly forward then grasped the object and twisted it upward. When I had finally worked it around the other stored items and managed to extricate it from the cabinet, I found myself kneeling on the floor with a shoebox in my hand.
I wouldn’t have given the item a passing thought had it not been for the fact that it was purposely hidden. However, that was far from the only reason for suspicion. What immediately caught my eye, as well as my breath, was the length of bright red ribbon tied securely about its girth.
“Gods, Felicity,” I murmured as I stood. “You didn’t…”
“What did you expect me to do, Row?” she asked, blurting the words, all of which were underscored by a sharply defensive tone. “I’ve watched you go through too much these past few years. Then when I called home yesterday, and you said it was happening again… I couldn’t just stand by and watch. Not again. Not this time.”
“You did this yesterday?” I asked, surprise in my voice.
“Yes. When I got home and you weren’t here,” she said as she nodded. “But I didn’t expect it to work as quickly as all that, then.”
“Yeah, well we all know you’re a hell of a Witch. Guess this just proves it.”
“Is that what I think it is?” Cally finally drummed up the courage to ask.
“It’s some kind of a binding,” RJ interjected before I could answer.
I glanced over at her and nodded. “Yeah. I’m afraid so. And just like any other binding done where strong emotions are involved, it backfired.” I leveled my gaze back on my wife as I dropped the box onto the table in front of her. “Unless it was your plan all along to bind this crap to yourself.”
“Of course not.” She shook her head at me quickly and then screwed her face into a scowl as if I had just made the stupidest comment she’d ever heard. “It was only supposed to bind you from the ethereal. It wasn’t supposed to bind anything to anyone.”
“Well, let me ask you this: If you wanted this to all go away, then why didn’t you just do a banishing instead? That would seem more appropriate.”
“That was my original plan after we got off the phone,” she answered. “But then the thing happened with Brittany Larson, and I started thinking… And, I couldn’t be sure… And, if I had done a banishing, that could be far more permanent, and…” She kept halting, searching for words to explain. Finally, she gave up trying and simply said, “I just didn’t want to close any doors, that’s all.”
“Even so, Felicity, of all people you know better than this,” I admonished.
“Don’t lecture me, Rowan Linden Gant,” she returned. “It’s nothing you wouldn’t have done yourself and you know it.”
“That’s not the point,” I told her.
“It is as far as I’m concerned,” she countered. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s allowed to do the protecting?”
She had me there. I shook my head and glanced around the room in resignation. “I never said that. But, to be honest, right now I don’t want to argue about this. I know why you did it and I appreciate it, really I do. But,” I reached out and pushed the shoebox closer to her, “undo it.”
“What if I say no?” she contended.
I sighed. “You know as well as I do that there are ways to get around bindings, especially now that I know about it.”
She didn’t reply. She knew I was correct.
I pressed forward. “Look, we’re both just going to be wasting our energies with this, and that won’t do anyone any good. Undo the binding, and let’s get back to normal.”
She let out a ‘hmph’ then told me, “In case you haven’t noticed, Rowan, our lives haven’t been normal for a few years now.”
“All right then, status quo or whatever you want to call it, Felicity. Just break the spell. Please?”
She stared back at me in silence for a moment then turned her head slightly to the side and looked past me.
“Cally,” she said with quiet resignation. “There are some scissors on the altar shelf in the living room. Could you bring them to me and a book of matches please?”
I gave my wife a thin smile and then said, “Thank you. I’ll go call Constance now.”
* * * * *
“Mandalay.” The federal agent’s businesslike voice issued from the earpiece on the telephone amid a rumble of indistinguishable background noises.
I had parked myself in the bedroom so that I wouldn’t disturb the magickal workings in the kitchen. On the way through the house, I had taken notice that Ben had finally slumped over to the side and was now snoring at a somewhat lower volume.
Cally had been taking pity on the unconscious cop and was covering him with an afghan at about the time I was making the turn into the hallway.
“Hey Constance, it’s Rowan,” I replied, as I finished picking up some of the items the cats had scattered. I piled them back on the nightstand before taking a seat on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, hi Rowan.” Her voice brightened a notch but remained all business. “I’m just a little busy at the moment…”
“I know, Ben told me you were working the Larson abduction,” I interjected before she could rush me off the line. “I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t important. Can you talk?”
There was a brief pause then she replied, “Hold on a second.”
I heard shuffling noises, some voices— hers included— and then footsteps. A handful of moments and a few more unidentifiable sounds later, the background noise dropped noticeably.
“I’m back” her voice came again, and then she barreled straight into questions of her own. “So have you talked to Storm recently? He missed a seven-thirty briefing and that’s not like him. I’ve been trying to call him all evening, but I keep getting a message that his phone is turned off and no one picked up at his house either.”
I hesitated for a moment before answering. I guess I’d been the lucky one when I got hold of Allison. “Actually, he’s passed out on my couch.”
“Passed out?”
“Long story.”
“Is that why you called?”
“I wish it were,” I replied.
“Okay, so what’s up?”
“Nothing good I’m afraid.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Your kidnapping just became a homicide,” I offered succinctly.
“How do you…” she started. “No, forget I even said that. So fill me in, what’s going on?”
“Well, it gets a little complicated.”
“Un-complicate it for me.”
“Okay, in a nutshell, Felicity had two ethereal episodes tonight and…”
“Felicity?” she interrupted. “Felicity did the woo-woo stuff? Not you?”
“That’s the complicated part.”
“Okay, I’ll catch up on that later. Go on.”
“Well, she had the two episodes, and just before she came out of the second one, she started telling us that Brittany Larson is dead.”
“Us? You mean you and Storm?”
“No, me, Cally, and RJ.”
“So what about Storm? Was he there or not?”
“He was already passed out,” I replied. “That’s pretty much why I’m calling you.”
“Why is Ben passed out, Rowan?” Her words were more of a demand than a simple question.
It was obvious that him missing the briefing was a sore spot for her, and what she had said was dead on— Benjamin Storm didn’t shirk his responsibilities. Unfortunately, this new little tidbit of information just added another layer to my worry over his situation.
I wanted desperately to cover for my friend, and so I tried to think of a feasible way around answering her without telling an outright lie. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say other than the cold truth, and before I knew it, that was exactly what came tumbling out of my mouth. “He’s drunk, Constance.”
There was a spate of silence on the line, and then her voice issued again, this time with a hard edge. “Wake him up and get some coffee into him, Rowan. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Knowing the way she drove, I suspected it would be more like fifteen minutes.
“Okay, but listen, Constance,” I appealed. “Go easy on him. He’s got just about as good a reason for this as anyone can have.”
“Yeah, well he’d better, Rowan because I had to throw some Federal weight around to get him back on the MCS for this investigation.”
“Yeah, I think he knows that,” I replied. “Or he suspects it at least.”
“Well, if he makes me look like a fool then he’s going to have someone besides Lieutenant Albright after his ass,” she snarled. “And I can be a hell of a lot nastier bitch than she can.”
That was it. I’d had enough arguing. I already felt like I was perched atop an inordinately narrow balance beam eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. Between Felicity’s binding spell, Ben’s marital problems, and now Constance being on the warpath, I felt like what little normalcy I had left in the world was crumbling away beneath my feet, and I wasn’t ready to fall quite yet.
My own voice adopted an angry edge, and I replied candidly, “Listen, Constance, I understand where you’re coming from, but I seem to remember a certain city homicide detective going to the mat for you when you assaulted a suspect during an interrogation.”
There was no way for me to retract the statement, but I’m not sure that I would have wanted to if I could. I had been a witness to her loss of control as well as having been her confidant when she needed someone to talk to about it. I hated to slap her in the face with an incident from the past, but Ben had gone so far as to lie for her, and that was no small gesture from a man who valued honesty as much as him.
Sometimes, I suppose we all need to be reminded of the debts we owe and to whom we owed them.
I could hear her breathing at the other end, but not a single word was spoken for the span of a half-minute.
“Listen, Constance,” I finally said. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to…”
“No, Rowan, you’re right,” she replied, her voice a mix of emotions. “See if you can get him sobered up. I’ll get out of here in a few minutes and head over.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I replied. “Thanks, Constance.”
I hung up the phone as I stood and then started out the door on my way to the kitchen to enlist some aid in getting Ben up and about. Whatever curiosity I’d harbored regarding how the process of the un-binding was going was immediately eliminated the moment the rasping pain raked across the back of my neck.
The wall before me became a psychedelic whirlpool spinning at an ever-increasing velocity. My body tensed then jerked as my knees gave way. The burning agony drew itself across my neck once again, halting, then biting anew as it dug deeper into my upper spine.
I was trying to call out for help when the floor suddenly filled my field of vision, only to be replaced almost immediately by indigo darkness.
CHAPTER 14:
I was floating.
Or maybe I wasn’t really floating. I had no visible point of reference in the darkness, so I couldn’t really say for sure. All I knew for certain was that it felt like I was floating, and I was happily willing to accept that as fact.
I blinked for no other reason than to make sure my eyes were actually open. Again, it felt like they were open, so I took the sensation at face value.
There was little else I could do, and the truth was, I didn’t really care.
I was comfortable.
In fact, I don’t think I’d ever b
een this comfortable in all my life.
Since I couldn’t see anything, I decided I would just listen.
Actually I wasn’t any more interested in listening than I was in seeing, but I did it anyway. Why? I had no idea other than the fact that there was this little nag in the back of my head.
It told me it needed to know something. I don’t know what information the nag was after, but it wanted something, and it wanted it now. I tried to ignore it, because after all, I didn’t see any point. It wanted to know something, not me.
The nag was on a mission. It told me I needed the information too.
I tried to reason with it. Given that I couldn’t see, and for all intents and purposes, I couldn’t feel, I didn’t really know that I could hear either. So, why bother trying?
The nag wouldn’t listen. It wanted me to try hearing in the worst way, and it wasn’t going to give up until I did.
I told it no.
It nagged harder and became an annoyance.
I told it to go away.
It wouldn’t. Instead, it just kept growing beyond annoyance and became a pain.
A real pain.
Physical.
Tangible.
Now I was no longer comfortable.
I gave up and listened. I doubted that it would do any good, but I did it anyway. I was willing to do just about anything to make the nag go away.
Had I cared, I would have been chagrined when I started to pick up the faint sounds around me, fading slowly in from nowhere to eventually fill my ears with ambient noise. But, I didn’t care about such things. I just wanted the nag to go away, so I kept listening.
Cicadas warbled out their song, the buzz rising and falling, fading away, then starting anew.
Okay, I could live with that. Why the nag wanted me to listen to cicadas I couldn’t fathom, but if it made the nag leave me alone, I was happy.
But, the nag didn’t want to hear the insects. It wanted to hear something else, so I listened harder.
Metal scraping against earth sounded softly in the darkness. How I knew it was metal against earth I couldn’t begin to say. I just knew it as simply as I knew two plus two equaled four. It was a fact.
Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation Page 11