Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  Harold placed his phone on the coffee table and brought up Lily’s picture again.

  “Fuck me dead.” Jamie stared. “That’s Lily?”

  “One of her modeling jobs.” Hope crept into Harold’s voice. “Do you know her? Is she in Santa Fe? That’s the last place we heard from her.”

  “She’s there.” Jamie drank, looked down at the picture again. “At least she was.”

  “When did you see her?”

  “March. Once. At Yoga Space. For about ten seconds.” He shivered and reached into the bag of fries, having finished the ones on Mae’s plate. “Haven’t seen her since.”

  Mae sensed Jamie was glad he hadn’t seen Lily again. Something about his ten-second encounter had bothered him. Harold didn’t notice, his gaze on the goddess of the grape.

  “Guess I still need a psychic, then,” he said. “I don’t have anything of Lily’s with me for you to work with, though. I do have my cat—”

  “You do that, too? Tour with your cat?” Jamie lit up, then ducked his chin, seeming to realize he’d interrupted. “Sorry.”

  Social skills. Mae rubbed Jamie’s back. “Was Lily around your cat a lot? I’ve picked up information from people’s pets before.”

  “We had Cara for four years before Naomi and I got divorced last year. Naomi got the house, and I got Cara. That was our custody battle. Lily was going to college then. She quit right away, couldn’t see why she needed an education when she was earning money modeling, but anyway, it seemed like the right time for us to split once she’d moved out. Lily hasn’t been around Cara since then, but I reckon the connection wouldn’t wear off.”

  Jamie nudged Mae gently. “Give it a whirl. Good chance for me to talk with the band. See if they’ll do a gig in Santa Fe next month.”

  “We already are,” Harold said. “We do a lot of the Indian casinos. We’ll be at Buffalo Thunder near Santa Fe on our way back from Colorado.”

  “Perfect. Add this to your plan. Spirit Fest Music Festival and Psychic Fair. Huge outdoor venue.”

  “Can’t. We’d be competing with our own show. It’s not like hitting some cozy little spot like Sparky’s and then Casino Apache. If this is a big event we’d be splitting our audience.”

  “Nah. ’Cause you’d be singing old Southern gospel.”

  Harold broke out in a surprised laugh. “You kidding me?”

  “Serious, mate. Spiritual music festival. I was thinking of that song on your solo album.”

  Harold nodded and sang softly:

  “Come to your father’s arms like the prodigal son,

  He’ll take you back no matter what you’ve done.”

  Jamie joined in on the chorus, singing harmony. “Like the prodigal son, like the prodigal son, like the prodigal son.”

  The band members sang along from the other side of the room, whooping and clapping, joking about getting that old-time religion.

  “We’ll think about it.” Harold stood. “I’ll have to talk with our manager, but it’s possible. Let me introduce Mae to Cara and I’ll be back.”

  As soon as Harold opened the door to his bedroom, a smooth black cat leaped onto his leg. She climbed him like a tree and wrapped herself along the back of his neck. He attempted to remove her but Cara dodged by moving to his other shoulder. When he sat so Mae could get hold of the cat, Cara clung as though landing on the bed would be traumatic. In some way she reminded Mae of Jamie when she’d first met him. She tried to grab the cat. Cara hissed, squalled, and wriggled, and then leaped to lodge on Mae’s upper back, pacing from shoulder to shoulder.

  “Can I say she’s a little weird?”

  “Always has been. But it’s a long tour. We’d miss each other.”

  Mae reached back to pet Cara and earned not a purr but the cat’s muscles tightening for a spring. Cara jumped back to Harold. “I hope she’ll settle long enough for me to focus and see something.”

  “She might hold still once I step out. She gets excited to see me.”

  Mae suspected more going on with Cara than just excitement, but she said, “Thanks. That might help.”

  Harold managed to put his cat on the bed and then tossed her a catnip mouse, distracting Cara long enough for him to open the door. “Naomi would be thrilled that I’m getting help from a psychic.”

  “You don’t sound like you are.”

  “I’m not. No offense, but it makes me feel like I’m kind of desperate.” He stepped out and shut the door.

  Through the wall Mae heard the gospel song again, the whole band and Jamie in four-part a cappella harmony. His voice soared. It was good to hear him so happy and healthy.

  She sat in the big armchair near the window, took the velvet pouch of crystals from her purse, and chose a clear quartz point for intensifying her abilities. After a few random charges around the room, Cara ran up onto the back of the chair, made an attempt to play with Mae’s hair, and then settled.

  Mae turned to look into the cat’s bright green eyes. Cara’s body held still, but her skin was jumpy. “Hey, Cara.” Mae kept her voice soft. “You still connected with Lily?”

  Cara twitched. Mae petted her and leaned back again, letting Cara’s tail drift over her head. It would do for contact as long as the unpredictable creature stayed there. Mae quieted her mind and concentrated on the energy from the crystals in her hand and from the cat, seeking Lily through her connection with Cara.

  The vision that signaled a psychic journey began, a tunnel that pulled her through to emerge in a new scene.

  In the spacious kitchen of an old house, teenaged Lily practiced a dance routine. Cara, a tiny kitten, chased something imperceptible on the floor, perhaps a bit of dust. Lily executed a series of jumps and turns, frowning in concentration. The kitten began chasing her feet. Lily lightly kicked her aside. Cara hesitated, watched, and sprang again, this time launching onto the top of Lily’s flying foot, attacking with all four paws and biting.

  “You stupid little wretch.” Lily seized Cara and threw her. The animal’s fragile-looking back struck the sharp edge of the drawer on the stove with a thud that almost shocked Mae out of the vision. Cara, miraculously unharmed, ran from corner to corner in terror as Lily chased her and kicked at her. “That’ll teach you to chase me!”

  Ears back, Cara finally escaped. Lily resumed her practice with a furious energy.

  Mae’s vision moved through the tunnel again to open in a different room. Lily lounged on a living room couch watching TV. The sound of Blues Ridge rehearsing filtered in from another part of the house. A woman Mae guessed was Naomi, with a round, rosy face and hair similar to Lily’s but halfway to gray, sat in a cozy chair. She held the kitten against her chest like a baby, chattering in cute-animal talk, stroking the thin fur on Cara’s belly.

  “Mom, that is so sickening,” Lily snapped. “Can you cut that out?”

  “She’s my new baby,” Naomi crooned to Cara, not looking at her daughter. “You’re all grown up.”

  “What a hypocrite. You should have just had a cat instead of a kid.”

  Naomi flushed. Her mouth opened and closed, no words coming out.

  “It’d be nice,” Lily continued, “if I had a TV in my room, so I wouldn’t have to sit with you.”

  Naomi replied in a shaky voice, “We’re trying to make sure you spend some time with us as a family. But if that’s how you feel, stop talking and watch the show.”

  Lily stretched her legs out. “I could go down to Daddy’s studio and listen to the band practice.” She paused and smirked. “Or you could. The new bass player is hot. And young. You’d like that.”

  Naomi turned redder, stood, and left the room, shedding the kitten onto the floor. Lily picked up the remote, poised to throw it. Tail fuzzed out, Cara shot past her like a little fur rocket. Lily increased the volume and nestled deeper into the couch with a satisfied sigh.

  Enough. Mae pulled back from the scene and reconnected with her body. She used snow quartz to clear her energy field, and then turned
and touched the cat. The sleek black back vibrated under her hand. No wonder Cara was afraid to be on the floor. Lily must have terrorized her.

  A knock sounded on the door. “Come in.”

  Mae put the crystals in the separate pouch for those that needed cleansing and tucked both pouches in her purse. What would she tell Harold?

  The door opened and Jamie walked through, beer in hand.

  “Yeah. Not Harold.” He sat on the bed. “You find her?”

  “No. Only her past. It was awful.”

  Cara contracted and launched onto Jamie, making him slosh beer onto his shirt “Jeezus. Like a fucking mountain lion. Straight for the neck.”

  He put his drink on the bedside table, pulled the cat off with a twisting reach to his upper back, and held her out and studied her, making prolonged eye contact. She went slack like a feline rag doll, oddly peaceful. He hugged her to his chest and rubbed her shoulders. “Did Lily hurt her?”

  “Yeah.” How did he know? “She kicked her, and I think she threw things at her. Poor Cara was terrified of her.”

  Jamie sighed. He cuddled Cara a while longer, then flattened her against his legs with a firm stroke down her back. The bedside lamp turned on. No clicking sound, only a gradual glow from the bulb. Mae wanted to ask if he’d seen that, but Jamie was absent in some way. He massaged the cat, pausing at the part of her back that had struck the stove. His fingers moved to the top of her head and stayed a while, slid to the space between her throat and her heart and paused there, then rested at the juncture of her spine and tail. To finish whatever he was doing, he held her paws and touched her nose, intimacies most cats wouldn’t tolerate, and placed her on the bed.

  She looked at him, then began to lick herself. He picked up his beer, frowned at the lamp, and switched it off. Cara jumped down and wandered over to Mae’s feet and sniffed.

  Had Jamie’s spiritual gifts come back? He’d had healing and visionary abilities that troubled him and scattered his mind too much. Twice, he’d needed to have a healer or shaman shut them down so he could function.

  “What’d you do, sugar?”

  His shoulders squirmed, a right-left shrug. “Mm. Little something.”

  “Harold’s gonna wonder what happened when she acts like a normal cat.”

  Jamie’s face clouded. “Fuck. He won’t mind will he?”

  “Of course not. I’m sure he’ll be happy. But are you gonna tell him? Explain anything?” Mae wanted the explanation herself.

  “Nah. He’ll think you did it.” Jamie bent down with a little mff, petted Cara, and stood. “Guess we’d better get back out there before everybody thinks we’re—”

  Harold knocked and opened the door a few inches. “Hey. Figured you were done if Jamie was in here.”

  Mae told him to come in. “I’m sorry. I didn’t find Lily. I only picked up her past with Cara.”

  Jamie scooped the cat up and carried her to the window. Mae could swear he was hiding the fact that he’d healed her. Harold entered and asked, “Did you really see anything?”

  “Of course I did.” She didn’t know him well enough to know how he’d handle what she’d seen, though.

  “Guess that came out wrong. I saw such a boatload of fakes going through Naomi’s store on their book tours, it’s a reflex for me to get skeptical.”

  “It’s okay. You weren’t there for what I saw, so you wouldn’t know if it’s true, and Jamie could have described the house to me if that’s where Naomi still lives. I could be fake for all you know.”

  “Not necessarily. Naomi redecorated when I left. What’d the place look like?”

  Mae described the kitchen and the TV room. Harold fell silent for a while, then took his wallet from his back pocket and walked over to hand Mae a few bills. She declined. He held the money out again. “You did your work.”

  “But not what you asked for.”

  Harold put the money on the table. “Can you see the future?” He frowned, his mouth going crooked. Mae suspected he couldn’t quite believe he’d asked this. “See if she gets in touch with us?”

  “Sorry. All psychics are different. I see the past and the present, but not the future.”

  “Then the present will have to do. I’m gonna have Naomi send you some of Lily’s things. If it’s her own stuff, you sure you can find her?”

  “Things she wore or used a lot, yes. I don’t think she was very attached to Cara.”

  “Well, my poor baby is a little hard to take.”

  He appeared to have no idea Lily was responsible for his cat’s strangeness.

  Jamie released Cara to the floor. “Mae tell you she’s a healer?”

  Cara trotted to Harold for an ankle rub. He stared for a moment before crouching down to pet her. “That’s amazing.” His eyes met Mae’s. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Mae gave Jamie a look. He hadn’t quite lied, but he’d squeezed the truth into a funny shape. He blinked a few times, offered her a smile.

  Still watching Cara walk on the floor, Harold straightened up and took his phone out, pressed a number, and waited. “Lily’s always loved her things. I’m sure Naomi can find something to send you. Give me a way she can get hold of you.”

  He began talking to his ex-wife’s voice mail. Mae wrote down her mailing address, phone number, and e-mail address and gave it to him. She hoped the work would be fast and easy. The less she saw of Lily Petersen, the better.

  Chapter Four

  Branches of the small mesquite tree at the edge of the driveway scratched like claws on the roof of Jamie’s car, a sound he felt along his spine. How could Mae listen to that every time she came home? Fuck. He’d have to hear it—no, would gladly hear it a thousand times. It was the guardian at the gate of paradise, paradise being Mae’s pea-soup-green converted trailer.

  A warm quivering filled him, so intense he couldn’t tell if it was hope or anxiety. He imagined her bare skin, her lips, her gentle touch, ecstasy upon ecstasy all afternoon. Then all night, they’d be curled together in post-coital bliss, her perfectly proportioned snow-white body against his not so perfect chocolate-brown one, a yin-yang ball of love.

  He parked behind her gray Focus, turned around to the back seat, and collected the bags of Hatch chile products he’d bought on the way out of town, then got a plastic zipper bag containing a toothbrush, a little tube of toothpaste, and a box of floss from the glove compartment. He’d been eating green chile pistachios on the drive, and their lingering presence would taint a kiss.

  He froze with one foot out the door. A kiss. The prelude to all that would follow. Jamie’s pulse accelerated. His heart felt full of tiny seeds, ready to explode. A nuclear pomegranate. He wanted her so badly it hurt—but they’d never done this before. Fantasy slammed into reality. He hadn’t made love to a woman for well over a year. Closer to two.

  Mae’s sweet-tea voice came through his fog. She was out of the car, waiting for him to move. “Let’s go in. It’ll be kinda hot since I’ve been gone all day, but it’s a nice place. Niall put a couple of his sculptures in here—the ones he thinks he can’t sell. You’ll like it.”

  She held her hand out with a playful little come-here gesture, and started for the house. Jamie thawed enough to follow.

  The big shaggy-barked mesquite tree that shaded the tiny porch groaned in the wind. Its strange curly beans crunched underfoot, and its thorny branches snagged in Jamie’s braids. If he took a step the thing would pull his hair out. He dropped the bags and grabbed his head, lifting his hair up to reduce the feeling of being dragged by the scalp. Anxiety rattled his body like the tree’s leaves in the wind. “Fuck—fuck—fuck!”

  Mae stopped and looked at him. “What in the world ...?”

  His hands trembled as he tugged at a stuck branch. “It attacked me.”

  Smiling with her lips together like she was trying not to laugh, she helped untangle him.

  A thorn pricked his finger and he jumped up and down. “Ow. Fuck.”r />
  “Take it easy, sugar. Hold still and I’ll have you free in a jiffy.”

  “Hate stuff in my hair.”

  “Okay. But get your hands out of the way so I can see what I’m doing.”

  “Sorry.” Feeling small and embarrassed, he stood still while Mae finished the job. “Thanks, love.” He gave her a quick squeeze and picked up the bags, then stopped at the bottom of the steps. He could see why the tree was moaning now. “Fuck. Your tree’s rotten.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah.” He gave the mesquite a shove, opening its flaw wider for Mae to see. What he’d initially taken for a curve in its rough shape was a crack down the center of its trunk. It creaked like a hinge, half the tree swaying out over the carport at the end of the driveway. If the wind blew hard the tree could split in two. He took a fallen branch from the ground and stuck it in the crack, plunging it in about eight inches deep. The crevice was full of a soft black powder of rot or fungus. “Jeezus. Looks like the devil’s arse crack.”

  “Sure does.” Mae peered into the crack. “That’s so strange I never noticed. It’s still growing all these fresh leaves and beans. I’ll have to ask Niall about a tree surgeon.”

  She sounded more intrigued than worried, but the tree was bad. Scary. Jamie dug the stick in and wiggled it. Some of the rot fell out. He shuddered and jumped back, shook invisible dirt off his pant legs. Lily Petersen. Jamie dropped the stick. The fucking tree was like Lily Petersen.

  Mae touched his arm. “You ready to go in?”

  “Dunno.” He sat on the porch steps, elbows on his thighs, bags at his feet. Everything he hadn’t told her pushed against the inside of his skull. Seeing Lily’s soul. And the reason why he could. “I’m stumped. Sorry. Wasn’t a dead tree joke. I mean—dunno. I’m—” He raised his eyes to hers. “Stumped.”

  “About coming in or not?”

  “Sort of.” Looking down at his feet, he noticed a mesquite twig had stuck its prongs into his ankle. Suppressing the cringe reflex, he pulled it off and flung it away. Stupid how something so small could scare the bloody crap out of him, but thorny plants, like anything that could sting or bite, sent him to the edge of panic. “I had all these fantasies, y’know? About seeing you again. What we’d do. Who I’d be.”