“What?” Larena’s jaw dropped and she let the door shut. The bells that hung on the inside jangled like the thoughts in her mind. “You intend to lease stores inside my shop?”
Sibeal’s mouth curled at the corners. “The Kilfoyle Corporation’s law firm said they’d contacted you and asked me to help smooth over the transition.”
“What transition?” Larena’s voice wavered. “I don’t want any part of this. It’s my family’s land, our store. You can’t take it.”
The seer pursed her lips and shook her head. “Of course, you’ll be able to keep your business.”
Larena planted her back against the door, as if to protect the building. “I’m not selling.”
“Accordin’ to the lawyers, you don’t have a say. Your mama’s in charge.”
“I haven’t heard anything about this from High Priest Logan.”
Sibeal wrinkled her long nose. “If you’re wantin’ to keep your business here on the property, I can arrange to have a favorable lease drawn up. But that’s only if you don’t fight the eminent domain, which I wouldn’t do.” Several strands of hair crackled with static electricity as they worked loose from her bun. Her eyes narrowed and bored into Larena. “Them lawyers mean business. And so do I. They have an eye for what’s right for the coven. I’m glad to have their guidance. There’s big things I can help this coven achieve.”
Larena stared at Sibeal, dumbfounded. Though she didn’t want to believe, it seemed clear the old witch was using her new position on the Council for her own advantage. Larena had respected this woman. As an Earth witch, Larena didn’t possess half the skills of Sibeal, a learned woman from a wealthy family. Larena envied them; she didn’t have their advantages. Although she did have her dad and uncles, now all gone, who taught her the magic of listening and communicating with trees and their wood. All she had was her family. That was slipping away. She needed this five acres of their magic and memories and didn’t care about what was right for the coven. Very few had stepped up to help Larena cope.
What Mom had said a few minutes ago shot through Larena’s mind. A shortened, twisted version of one of the mottos her mother always followed. Life’s not about whether you’ve stood near the great, but whether you’ve sat with the broken.
Larena flattened her palms to the door, the dense oak solid at her back and silently asked it, “Will you stand with me?”
“Till the end,” the door answered with a creak that shuddered along the front wall of the barn-like building.
“I won’t sell,” Larena declared, head high.
“Best you change your mind soon…or you’ll lose this property and plenty more,” Sibeal hurled the words one at a time at Larena’s face. The seer paused, her pulled-down nose almost touching her creased lips. She huffed and stomped to her car.
Larena clutched her keys to her chest and watched the sleek sedan glide away. She wouldn’t stand with people who called themselves great, and like hell she wasn’t going to be broken. She owed her parents, who’d worked hard building this business, more than that. Selling it now might destroy what little remained of her mother.
Chapter Two: A Fun Game
A chill from the young woman blew colder than Sibeal expected. She drove away from Lockwoods’ Antiques and pulled her black shawl tight around the back of her neck. Get a hold on yourself, Sibby. You’re a councilwoman now.
While stopped at the end of the driveway to check for traffic approaching around the road’s tight turns, she gathered her wits about her. She clamped her jaw and stomped on the gas pedal. That forced her hulk of a sedan to toss up gravel, along with a spray of magic sparks she added for extra drama. To affect nonchalance, she denied herself the reassurance of a backward glance, or a peek in a mirror, to see whether Larena witnessed the intended threat and cowered appropriately. Instead, Sibeal used her magic to enhance the screech from her Studebaker Commander’s fat, white-walled tires against the macadam. Even inside the building, the shrill sound would shake the girl’s eardrums and hopefully her soul, too.
Sibeal didn’t anticipate such intense opposition from Larena, what with the letter from the law firm stating the legal course of action that lacked any apparent loopholes. Left without any kin to help her run the shop while caring for a mother plumb-batty with senility, the girl should have bent like a spring willow twig. Under all that stress, Larena must be running on sheer grit, a strong will to survive, which Sibeal admired, almost envied.
Sibeal negotiated a turn a bit too fast. When she righted the old Commander’s course, its suspension creaked and groaned. The grand sedan looked impressive on the outside with a fresh dark green paint job and yards of chrome. In truth, it needed more repairs under the hood than her dwindling income could afford. Just like the tomb of a house she lived in alone, which had been left to her after immediate family either passed away or wandered off from coven life. The impressive red brick Victorian with its white-painted gingerbread belied the buckled floors and drafty windows.
All five siblings in her family were gifted with witchcraft skills by either mother’s or father’s kin, who were still free and interactive as empowered spirits. The three oldest boys hadn’t worked at their crafts, not taking a liking to their father’s familial necromancy aptitude. They left the area after squeaking through the coven’s high school. Besides their childless Uncle Clarence and Aunt Viv, who lived in the coven’s eldercare home, only Sibeal and her screwy brother Gilman remained in Coon Hollow.
Sibeal’s life lurched toward a turning point with one of two possible outcomes. Either she hung on the precipice of the wealth and power her parents had known, or she was about to collapse into the ruined laughing stock of the community. Regardless, she needed a sounding board. The difficulty with Larena, the last of many bad straws Sibeal had pulled lately that cost her friends and allies, made her feel more alone. She missed Adara, her confidante and best friend since childhood. They’d both come from long lines of strong witches who controlled the coven through positions of power. As founding families of the coven, the Tabards served as priests and priestesses, and the Soots as augurs of both future and past. As a seer Sibeal had watched the Tabard family’s sad fate unfold. Abruptly, her visions ceased when their future crossed her own life through the loss of her dear friend.
While Adara served as Coon Hollow coven’s high priestess, a battle at the Mabon autumn equinox celebration obliterated her energy. No one had seen her since. Now two months past, folks still talked, or whispered, about her, contemplated whether she lived. Sibeal wished their guesses were right. No matter what she did to learn the truth, any future that wove through her own life remained closed to her Sight. Considering how her own family’s destiny was spiraling downward, now seemingly out of control, like the Tabards had, it would be a good time for Adara to make herself useful. Sibeal thumped a palm against the steering wheel. “Damn you, Adara! No sign of you as human or badger, or of your familiar, that nasty crow I almost miss.” Sibeal’s voice cracked. “And, if you’re dead, then show yourself as a spirit. At least to me.” Tears welled. She needed to let them loose.
Almost home, Sibeal choked back her emotions, turned around in a driveway, and drove back to Salt Lick Road toward Gilman’s. She hadn’t been to his home since right after Adara disappeared. Sibeal’s wide tires crunched along his lane of gravel tracks. The surrounding trees still held their leaves, as if colluding with the cloudy December sky to transform daytime into night. The abundant oaks in the forest retained their leaves until new spring growth would force out the old ones. If only she could manage new growth that way and force out the memory of her recent mistakes from coven members’ minds.
She parked in the turnaround in front of Gil’s tiny, square-log cabin and gave the horn a toot to hopefully draw him out of whatever stupor afflicted him at the moment. Regardless of his present state, she needed to talk and he was all she had, even if he only half-listened.
Gilman had received an odd mix of their parents’ abilitie
s, being continually torn between past and future, never able to connect to the present moment. He conversed nonstop with spirits trapped by wrongdoing in their deceased bodies or some other limiting vessels. Many of those spirits had no one else with whom they could talk, which made her little brother popular. That was why at age forty he remained a bachelor.
Sibeal stepped out of her car and crossed the cabin’s small porch. She knocked and the screeches of the peeling paint that housed tortured souls made her skin crawl. Would her ill deeds leave her in this situation when she passed? She squared her shoulders and adjusted her wrap. Don’t be a half-wit. Your Sight will prevent that. She dismissed any doubt, pushed the door open, and called out, “Gil, it’s Sibby.”
Gilman’s laughter coming from the direction of the kitchen sputtered out. “Hold up there, Ebby, I hear someone.” His heavy footsteps drew closer until he peeked around the corner of the doorway into the sitting room, his eyes widening and mouth curling into a surprised smile. “Sibby. Have a seat. Take the rocker, or the chair, but not the loveseat. Ebby and Tom are going to sit there.” Gil strode to the ratty couch and gently laid a yellowed human forearm bone on one ripped cushion and a vintage sardine can on the other. He threaded his tall, thin frame between them as he sat down, an arm around each. The two cushions pouched upward from where he sunk low into the crack, his knobby knees chest-high and showing through threadbare jeans. His silly grin reminded her of how he had looked as a free-spirited and simple boy, despite his head of straggly shoulder-length hair, now more gray than dark brown.
Avoiding the chair with steep springs jutting through its cushion, Sibeal attempted to perch primly on the rocker. Unsuccessful, she splayed her black ankle boots and old stockings prominently forward—scuffs and rips be damned—to keep the chair from taking control and tossing her backward. She sneered at what appeared to be two inanimate objects on either side of her brother and had no desire or need to speak to the bound souls. She dismissed their weak vibrations, finding them at best useless, and at worst, boring.
Thankfully, her father’s spirit kin had seen fit to gift her with the handier ability to call upon specific dead souls at her request, not theirs, as poor Gil must do. Her ability to open communication with spirits, empowered or not, augmented her keen talent of predicting the future. That skill she’d gladly honed to become one of the best seers in her mother’s lineage. Those deceased relations, who still existed in what was now her house, had been so pleased with her augury aptitude as a newborn that they named her with a twist on the word sibyl, another name for a seer.
Mother had worked to no avail with Sibeal during grade school to help enhance her ability to see her own future. That ability seemed to be what she lost from having Dad’s connection to the dead. Sibeal often thought her parents made a strange pair, but their slice of happiness lay in the present, which they enjoyed together without any need for magic. She envied their bliss that still lived on through their real connections as empowered souls. Sibeal had long ago given up on that sort of match for herself. Not that she could attract a man anyway, at her age.
Jabbering to each object, Gilman abruptly looked across the room to the front window and pointed. “A jay! A sign of talkativeness. That means we’re all gonna have a great visit.” His smile flattened and a thin line creased his brow. “Or a sign of determination? Does that tie to the bobcat track I saw this morning?” He pulled a pad and pen from the pocket of his faded flannel shirt and scribbled notes. In the midst of her brother’s constant chatter with tormented spirits, omens bombarded him to signal future events. Gil couldn’t resist the temptation of trying to piece together the disconnected fragments. He seldom succeeded, and Sibeal wondered why he didn’t ignore that sense. Especially when his house looked like a dump and cleanliness clearly escaped him, as evidenced by his stained clothes and body odor. His thinness indicated he wasn’t eating properly either.
“Gil, I need to vent. Will you,” she paused, in order to capture his attention away from his dead pals, and offered some bait, “and also your friends please oblige me and listen?” Begging for this audience, she felt even more alone and desperate.
“Course, we’ll listen.” He put his pad away and angled the bone and sardine tin in her direction, his big brown eyes fixed on her. “What’s on your mind, Sibby?”
She eyed him. “Well, keep this quiet, just between us. I know this may sound crazy, but I still want to emanate Gramma Forsaith, when she was the head seer in the coven, untouchable, revered.” The words floated from her tongue as she remembered Gramma’s all-knowing iron stare with a power to bend the toughest witch.
Gil chortled. “That’s no secret. You’ve always wanted to be her when you grow up.”
“I am grown up, Gil, and so are you.” She wondered why she bothered saying that since he had no awareness of present time. With a sigh, she continued. “I intend to carve my mark on this coven, like she did. And I’ve taken a good step in that direction gettin’ elected to Coven Council. A definite position of power, since I can see what actions people are going to take before they happen. Knowin’ that, I can push passage of regulations to secretly alter consequences they’ll face accordin’ to my wishes.”
“Sounds like a fun game. Can Ebby and Tom play?” he asked, his tone child-like and sincere.
“It will be an excellent game.” Sibeal licked her lips, then pulled her black skirt free from the rocker’s splintered seat. “But on the down side, the other coven seer, Keir, has started takin’ my clients since he returned from his studies with that Cherokee shaman. Also, Keir havin’ his two best friends, Rowe McCoy and Logan Dennehy, as a new councilman and high priest, doesn’t hurt. My Council job pays only a nominal fee, two hundred dollars per monthly meeting, with an annual maximum of forty-eight hundred. Our parents’ old house is fallin’ apart. I have to keep it in repair it so I have a place to live. The bills are mountin’.”
“You can always stay here with us.” Gil turned to first the bone, then the fish tin, and patted the shredded cushion. “You can sleep here tonight. It’s okay with them, and we’re certain the others will agree.”
“Thanks. I’m not that desperate. Yet.” Sibeal flushed at the way he took her dilemma literally. “It’s just embarrassing not to be able to keep the place decent since it’s always been one of the premiere homes in the coven.”
“It looks good to me, Sib.”
She twisted the hem of her skirt, unable to meet his innocent gaze when she felt anything but innocent. She had to get the knot out of her stomach that’d been there for nearly a month. She parted her lips and worked the tightness up her throat until words formed. “I tried to make some money with Oscar Burnhard runnin’ a gamblin’ ring. I predicted the players’ future bets. Oscar, who’s better at black arts than me, cursed the transactions so no one involved could trace the magic back to us. That worked well for a while. I had the house trim repainted, porch and garage repaired, car painted, even got some new clothes custom made at Shireen’s Dress Shop. Then it went sour when information leaked. I narrowly escaped getting’ caught. Oscar’s in jail for killin’ a lady who learned what we were doin’.”
“Murder’s wrong, Sib. Don’t do that. You’ve studied hard to become empowered, but after you die, your soul won’t be allowed to be free if you do murder.” Her brother rooted through a bookcase and spoke to a ceramic pot. “Sondra, you tell her your story. Set her straight.”
Sibeal felt a slight vibration coming from a brown crock that must have been speaking, but had no idea what it said. She fidgeted until the air calmed. “I do have a new idea that should bring in some money, though.”
Gil’s head jerked her way, eyes wide.
“Don’t worry. It’s legal. I’m workin’ as a liaison between a coven property owner and a law firm who intend to help an outside client buy the land. If I secure the deal, I get a five percent commission of the sale price and two percent of the property’s annual income from the new landowner. Isn’t that great?
” Sibeal flashed her gaze at him, hoping he was at least a little impressed.
“Sounds like you’ll make a lot, but can coven land be sold to outsiders?”
“Technically, no; however, I’m on the Council now,” she snapped. “The Council can own the place, since it will be used to make money for the coven through sales of goods and services. A new mall just outside of Bentbone will go over well. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Your Sight can tell you. You should use it.”
“Umm, since I must be involved somehow in the process, I can’t see the results before they happen.”
“Then, I’ll watch for omens for you. Wonder if I’ve already seen something.” He pulled out his pocket note pad again and flipped through pages.
“That’s sweet of you.” She chuckled, lightened by telling him her load of worries. She joked, “If you find a clue that tells me how to convince the stubborn witch to sell her property, that’d help.”
“What’s her name?”
Sibeal laughed, but in case there was any merit in her brother’s methods, she replied, “Larena Lockwood.” No sooner had Sibeal stated the name, when the rocker won their ongoing battle. It swung her backward, off balance, and caused a curly strand of peppered hair to work loose from her bun and brush her shoulder.
Since she was only forty-three, the unwelcome sight of her own graying hair triggered a mental image. A tableau, where in this squalid, three-room cabin, she sat dressed in ragged clothes at the stained and littered kitchen table while hand-feeding her invalid brother. Both of them were gray and wrinkled with advanced age. Never able to see her own future, Sibeal doubted the truth of this vision. Yet, it startled her, and clung to her thoughts. Had mentioning the name to Gil made that scene visible? And real? Could she have set in motion a destiny where he’d unknowingly expose her as a council member guilty of taking a bribe?
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