Homecoming

by Amber Benson

  The room was lit by the glow of the bedside lamp, and in the semidarkness the girls seemed dwarfed by the shadowy overhang of Marji’s canopy princess bed, making Dev want to scoop her babies up and hug them to her.

  Not that they wouldn’t have protested. Marji was already too old to be held or covered in kisses—and Ginny was just on the cusp.

  Instead of smothering them with her mama bear love, she sat down primly on the edge of Marji’s Little Mermaid comforter, her butt accidentally smushing the section that contained Ariel’s tail. She quickly switched positions, but to her surprise, neither of the girls commented on this blasphemy. Usually, they were hard-core about Dev not sitting on any of the important parts of the Little Mermaid or her fish friends, but tonight her daughters were unusually subdued.

  After the strangeness of the day, she didn’t blame them. They were upset about Eleanora—not that she really thought either girl wholly grasped the concept of death yet—but she knew that only time could heal their wounds.

  “If I sleep in here with you guys, who’s gonna protect your daddy from the monsters under my bed?” Dev asked them, appealing to their sense of fair play. “You guys already have each other. Daddy would be all alone.”

  Marji made a sour face.

  “There aren’t any monsters under the bed,” Ginny cried.

  Dev sighed, realizing the girls were getting too old for her silly made-up stories—her babies weren’t gonna be babies for much longer.

  “Mama, please,” Ginny said, whining.

  “Isn’t having your sister enough for you?” Dev asked, in all seriousness.

  Dev didn’t mind the girls sleeping together in each other’s rooms. They did it with some regularity, and she encouraged it, wanting them to be close. Like Dev was with her own sisters.

  “No, Marji talks to the ghosts. It’s scary sometimes,” Ginny said, shaking her head back and forth, her hair bunching around the pillow.

  “Marji,” Dev said, teasing. “Please don’t talk to ghosts while your sister’s sleeping in here.”

  Marji rolled her eyes at her mom and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “They talk to me. I don’t talk to them.”

  “Well, just don’t listen to them,” Dev said, enjoying their make-believe game. “Tell ’em to knock it off.”

  Marji bit her lower lip, a habit she’d had since she was itsy-bitsy, and Dev realized that maybe this wasn’t a game. That Marji and Ginny were being serious about the ghost talk.

  “You tell them for her, Mommy,” Ginny said. Even though she was younger, Ginny was tougher than Marji, and it’d become a habit, her sticking up for her older sister.

  Dev looked over at Marji.

  “Is that what you want?” she asked, and Marji nodded.

  Hauling herself to her feet, Dev stood in the middle of the room and lifted her arms in the air. She thought about what she could say to force make-believe ghosts to go away. She settled on something simple.

  “Get thee gone, spirits, who are haunting this house!” she bellowed in a deep voice, turning clockwise in place, her hair flying in her eyes. “Be gone, I say—”

  Both girls screamed.

  “What in the world?” Dev cried as she stopped spinning and pushed her hair out of her eyes so she could see what had spooked the girls.

  “What is it?” Dev asked, looking around the room.

  The girls were cowering together in the bed, covers pulled up to their chins, two sets of saucer-wide eyes staring back at her.

  “Mommy,” Marji whispered.

  With a shaking finger, she pointed to a spot behind Dev’s head.

  “Hair is in my room.”

  Dev noticed that the temperature in the room had dropped considerably. She began to shiver, the air around her heavier, too, somehow. Almost like it was pressing down on her, trying to grind her into the ground.

  “Hair?” Dev said, her voice sounding foreign even to her own ears.

  She slowly turned around.

  “Oh, Lord.”

  Her great-great-grandmother Lucretia’s mourning hair wreath was leaning on the mantelpiece above Marji’s fireplace. The memento mori was spooky enough downstairs above the living room fireplace, but up here in one of the girls’ rooms, with no logical explanation for its presence, it was downright terrifying.

  “Make it go away,” Marji cried, her eyes welling with tears.

  Dev hurried over to the fireplace, plucking the frame from the mantel. She gasped. It was like touching something that’d just come out of a deep freeze. The cold bit into Dev’s fingers with a burning sensation, and she dropped the frame. It crashed to the floor, one of the corners hitting the hardwood floor with enough force to split the frame into pieces.

  The crash of breaking wood and glass made the girls shriek.

  “Sweetheart,” Dev said to Marji, as she knelt next to the ruined memento mori. “Could you go get me the broom and dustpan from the kitchen, please?”

  Marji looked uncertain, but the need to please her mother outweighed her fear, and she crawled out of the warm bed, leaving Ginny alone under the covers.

  “And put your shoes on,” Dev added, pointing to a pair of Pepto-Bismol-pink Crocs someone had kicked haphazardly onto the floor beside the bed.

  Marji did a little hop and slipped her feet into the shoes. Then she took off for the kitchen. Dev watched her eldest go, a fleet-footed almost adolescent.

  “Mommy,” Ginny said, climbing out from under the covers so she could crawl over to the end of the bed. “Will they do that to my hair when I die?”

  “Probably not, sweetie,” Dev said as she collected some of the bigger pieces of glass into a pile. “This was something people did a long time ago.”

  Ginny nodded, splaying out on her stomach. She didn’t seem the least bit scared now that Marji was out of the room. Instead, she rested her chin in her hands and watched Dev work.

  “You were spinning, Mommy,” Ginny said, kicking her feet in the air. “And the tall lady brought it.”

  Dev froze, a long shard of glass in her hand.

  “What?”

  Ginny started kicking her feet even faster, sensing she’d unsettled her mother.

  “The tall lady, Mommy,” she said. “She was in the picture at Auntie E’s house.”

  Dev racked her brain, trying to think of what picture Ginny was referring to—and then suddenly she knew. Knew like the knowledge had always been there, nestled inside her brain.

  Hessika.

  “Not a drawing or a picture, Ginny,” Dev said, “but a photo? In the bookcase?”

  Ginny nodded, enjoying the guessing game.

  “The tall lady from the picture. She brought it.”

  Dev felt a trickle of wetness on her wrist, and she looked down—she’d forgotten about the glass she’d been holding. She opened her palm, and the glass dropped to the floor, one of its razor-sharp edges smeared with her blood.

  “Damn,” Dev said, staring at the line of scarlet standing out on the plane of her palm. She gently made a fist, and the gash split apart like a hungry mouth, more blood flowing down her wrist.

  “Stay right there. Don’t get off the bed,” she said to Ginny as she stood up and, holding her hand at waist level, headed to the door.

  She almost collided with an out-of-breath Marji, who was carrying a broom and dustpan in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other.

  “Don’t try to clean it up,” Dev said to Marji, scooting past her daughter in the doorway. “I’ll do it when I get back.”

  Marji stood at the threshold to her room, grinding her jaw with tension, but she nodded.

  “Okay, Mama,” she said, taking a step back into the hallway, leaving Ginny as the sole occupant of the bedroom.

  “I’ll be right back,” Dev called over her shoulder as she mo
ved down the darkened passageway.

  At the end of the hall, the bathroom door stood wide open as if it were waiting for her. She slipped inside, flipping on the overhead light.

  “Shit,” she whispered when she saw how deep the cut was—deep enough she almost thought she might need stitches. Instead, she grabbed a hand towel from the cupboard and wrapped it around her palm.

  Immediately, the blood soaked through the fabric, leaving a line of dark red in the material. She cinched the towel even more tightly around her hand, hoping this would staunch the flow.

  “Okay, on my way back!” Dev yelled as she left the bathroom, turning the light off and shutting the door behind her.

  She shuffled down the hallway, her woolen house shoes making shushing sounds on the polished hardwood floor. She could already see now that Marji hadn’t waited in the hall like she’d asked.

  “Marji!” Dev said as she rounded the doorjamb and found her older daughter kneeling over the broken glass. “What’re you doing? I said not to touch it!”

  Marji looked up, caught by the sharpness in her mother’s voice.

  “I found something,” she said, holding up a square of faded brown paper for Dev to see. “It’s for you.”

  Dev crossed the room and knelt beside her daughter, taking the folded paper from Marji’s fingers. Its fragility and age were only noticeable once she had the note in her hands.

  “Open it, Mama,” Ginny said from her perch on the edge of the canopy bed.

  Dev turned the note over and was shocked to see her own name scrawled across its back in a flowing, calligraphic hand.

  Dev looked over at Marji, who was trembling.

  “What’s wrong, Marji?” she said, slipping an arm around her daughter and pulling her close.

  “I don’t know,” Marji said, her brown eyes large with fear.

  “Does this note upset you?”

  Marji shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said, still trembling.

  Dev slipped the paper into her housedress pocket, and Marji seemed to relax a little.

  “Go get in bed with your sister,” Dev said, helping Marji stand.

  “Sleep with us, Mama,” Ginny said as she crawled back up to the top of the mattress and slid under the covers, waiting for her sister to join her.

  Dev guided Marji to the bed, and once she was tucked safely inside, Ginny was there, clinging to her older sister like a limpet. At first Dev mistook the action, thinking Ginny was holding on to her sister out of fear, but then she realized her mistake.

  Ginny wasn’t scared.

  She was protecting Marji.

  From the time they were infants, she’d instinctively known this about her girls: that Marji was her sensitive one, and Ginny was her scrapper. Still, it always surprised her how this disparateness manifested itself more and more as the girls grew older.

  She knew it was both a blessing and a curse—as glad as she was that the girls could rely on each other, their strengths and weaknesses jibing so perfectly, she also knew that at some point, their relationship could become too symbiotic.

  It was her job to make sure they were each their own person and they could survive without each other, creating their own separate lives . . . because one day the house, and possibly a role in the coven, would go to Marji, and she would need to be strong enough to handle it without her little sister’s protection.

  “How about we compromise?” Dev said as she picked up the broom and dustpan from the floor and began to sweep up the broken glass. “I’ll take everything down to the garbage and make myself some tea. Then I’ll come back up here and sit in the rocking chair until you guys fall asleep.”

  Ginny and Marji conferred, whispering together.

  “Okay, Mom,” Marji said, speaking for both of them. “But don’t be gone too long.”

  “I’ll be back up here in a few minutes,” she said, picking up the bag, the broom, the dustpan, and the larger pieces of the broken frame. “Can I turn off the lamp for you guys?”

  “Can we sleep with it on?” Ginny asked.

  “As long as when I come back up here all eyes are closed.”

  Both girls nodded vigorously.

  “Okay, okay, I believe you,” Dev said, laughing. “Now close your eyes and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  When she left them, they were all snuggled up together like two bugs in a rug, the light from the bedside lamp casting a pale yellow glow over their entwined bodies.

  * * *

  She set the water to boil on the eye of the stove, a mug filled with chamomile tea ready to go on the counter. Then she pulled the piece of paper from her pocket and sat down at the kitchen table. Still feeling unsettled by the episode in the girls’ room, she’d turned on all the lights in the kitchen—but now she felt vulnerable and exposed to whatever was lurking in the darkness outside the windows.

  She set the folded note down on the tabletop and stared at her own name, written on the back. It was freaky. So freaky she’d almost woken Freddy up, but she’d stopped herself. He was out of the house for work at six, and he didn’t need his sleep interrupted for something as silly as a ghostly piece of paper.

  As much as she and Eleanora had their differences, she’d come to rely on the older woman’s strength and force of will, and Dev dearly wished she could pick up the phone and call her now.

  She knew Eleanora would tell her there was nothing to be scared of—Just open the damn thing, for God’s sake—and as she thought these words, she could hear Eleanora’s voice in them, and even this small remembrance was a consolation.

  “Okay,” Dev said out loud. “I’m just gonna open it.”

  She carefully unfolded the square, but even with her delicate fingers, bits of paper still flaked off onto the table.

  “Damn,” she said as a chunk of the paper tore away in her hand.

  She finished unfolding it and set the note on the table, putting the torn bit back in its place. Her eyes scanned the spidery cursive, the looping letters dancing across the page. Age had blurred some of the words, making the note hard to decipher in places, but, with context, she was finally able to piece it together:

  My Dearest Devandra—

  When you read these lines I will be dead, my corporeal body no more than dust. It is with a heavy heart that I have asked my daughter, Purity, to entomb this letter with the mourning wreath they will create upon my death. It will then be passed down from eldest to eldest, always in the keeping of the Montrose women, until, one day, it will come into your hands.

  I wish the news were not so grave, but time and time again, as I draw the cards, the spread is always the same: Terrible things await you, my darling. A great evil is upon our world, waiting and biding its time. It will reach its zenith during your lifetime—and only you and yours will have the power to stop it.

  But you must choose the right path: The World, The Magician, The Hierophant, The Devil, and The Fool.

  Trust in the spread. It will guide you.

  All my love,

  Lucretia

  The letter made Dev’s blood run cold. It was Eleanora’s spread—and it concerned the last Dream Keeper.

  Daniela

  Daniela enjoyed the feel of the wind on her cheeks as she walked through the silent neighborhood. She pulled up the collar of her jacket and picked up her pace, so that she was almost jogging, the syncopated tap of her feet on the asphalt calming her frenetic mind.

  Sometimes she just needed to move—and the time she spent walking around her neighborhood was like a balm for her soul.

  When she was a kid, she’d been incapable of sitting still for longer than a few minutes at a time. There was just so much to think about, so much to do . . . her brain was always running in fifth gear. Unless she was passionate about something—like painting—she just couldn’t focus for ver
y long.

  Even as a kid, if she was bored by something the teacher was saying in class, she’d just get up and roam around the room, looking at stuff. Add in the strange seizures and then, later, the odd leather gloves she was forced to wear, and she knew she must’ve driven the already stressed-out and time-strapped public schoolteachers crazy.

  The last Dream Keeper. Under my protection.

  These words haunted Daniela.

  Until the last few days, she’d felt torn. Her mother, Hessika, Eleanora . . . they’d all believed the girl would come. Daniela, on the other hand, hadn’t known what to believe. Not until she’d come to Echo Park, and Eleanora had introduced her to Lizbeth. That was when she’d felt the first glimmers of possibility, a thing she’d long thought extinguished inside her.

  Now there was actually something to hold on to. Someone real to believe in, so that the promise she’d made to her mother could be kept in good faith.

  The sound of a car idling up ahead caught her attention, and she slowed down, instinct warning her to be cautious. It was a Lincoln Town Car with black-tinted windows, and the exhaust from its tailpipe curled around its metal body, creating a ghostly fog that caught the glow from the streetlights and reflected it.

  As she came even with the car, the back passenger window rolled down, and, against her better judgment, Daniela stopped, curiosity getting the better of her. A pale white head appeared in the frame of the window, and Daniela let out a low whistle, her nervousness giving over to relief as she realized that she knew the man.

  “You scared me,” Daniela said leaning into the window. “What’re you even doing here? I thought you were in New York?”

  The man shook his head, his wrinkled face breaking into a smile.

  “We heard things were afoot here, and the Greater Council decided it was time to send in the big dogs,” the man said, shrugging.

  “And by big dogs, they mean you,” Daniela said, grinning back at him.

  Other than Eleanora, Desmond Delay had been her mother’s closest confidant, and Daniela trusted him implicitly. Though he wasn’t a blood relative, he’d always treated Daniela and Marie-Faith like they were family—and Daniela often wondered if he’d been in love with her mother.