Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  Gasser sat up, attempted to lick himself, and slipped onto his side, as he often did when attempting to groom his vast acreage of fur. Jamie lifted the fat cat and kissed him between the ears. “No worries, mate. Give you a hand.”

  While he brushed and bathed his cat, he tried to think of someone to whom he could delegate the fair, but his mind wandered. Gasser submitted to the bath with what Jamie perceived as grateful humility. The cat had a weakness, a character flaw in his good little heart, and he accepted the compensatory care without shame. Jamie had many flaws and weaknesses, yet he expected himself to become someone who could help run an event and figure out the plague, living up to Kate’s intimidating expectations. Did he ask too much of himself, or expect too little?

  He carried his damp, purring pet to the sunniest place in the apartment, the floor of the spare room under the southeast window, laid him on a towel, and gave him a little energy work.

  His daily practice with Gasser had begun as a way to give his unwanted gift an outlet, since he couldn’t suppress it completely. To his surprise, Gasser had seemed to like it. As Jamie cupped his hand on his cat’s head, a troubling thought popped up. What if Fiona had left some spiritual plague flea on him in the bar the other night? What if Azure had left one when he hugged her, or Dahlia had, when she touched him? He might have the plague and not know it. Azure and Ximena hadn’t felt the attack. They didn’t feel bad until they realized they’d lost their powers.

  Jamie always assumed his tune-ups did Gasser some good, but he couldn’t tell. The cat could be purring because Jamie was touching him, not healing him. Once in a while late at night, Jamie opened his vision to look at Gasser’s soul. It made him feel like a boy in a fairy tale with a magical pet. He hadn’t done it for a few days, though. He could have lost his gift and not known it.

  So far he’d avoided soul visions during the day. The doors to his spiritual perception, like the screen door on Mae’s porch, opened easily, but didn’t quite shut all the way. Closing the doors took attention and focus. Jamie excelled at neither. The outer door, which opened into a spiraling cave mouth, let in the spirits. He drove strays back into it with a song, but sometimes they sneaked back out. The inner door, which slid like a dial or a pinwheel, opened to reveal souls. The possibility of getting it stuck open terrified him.

  He had to know if he had the plague, though.

  Gasser’s light rippled pink inside his usual gold halo. The bath must have made him happy. Relieved not to have the plague, Jamie finished the cat’s Reiki and then sat in a hip-crunching meditation posture. He fought off what felt like fifty distractions per second before he could close his upper chakras and narrow the opening in his perception to a mere leak.

  He ran a finger through Gasser’s drying fur, parting it down the middle. The only thing Jamie had proven was that he hadn’t caught the plague from social contact. What if Fiona spread it though her work? Andrea was both her client and a healer. She could already have become a spiritual Typhoid Mary.

  Alarmed, he searched the apartment for his phone, found it in the kitchen, and called Andrea to ask if she’d used the skills from Fiona’s workshop.

  Andrea’s answer wasn’t much help. Not sure she was good enough to claim the role of healer yet, she didn’t tell massage clients when she sent them energy. People always felt better after a massage, so she couldn’t tell if they’d received anything.

  Jamie asked her to meet him on her lunch break. He’d have to skip yoga—bad idea, but he could try doing it on his own. He wrote yoga practice on a blank line in his planner. That might make him do it.

  As he biked through the slow, heavy traffic along Paseo toward Palace Street Healing Arts, he realized he had no idea what he was going to do when he got there. Ask Andrea to heal him of something? She was the only person beside Mae, Wendy, Gaia, and Fiona who knew he had real ability. If he explained his experiment and Andrea thought she might have the plague and damage his gift, she wouldn’t touch him.

  He should have thought this through. To understand the scope of the plague, someone would have to test everyone who’d given and received some kind of healing. In Santa Fe, that added up to a lot of people. He couldn’t go to all of them and pay for healing sessions to see if he caught something, or go looking into their souls like a TSA agent peering into luggage. He could make sure Andrea was all right, and that was all. One person. Like saving one bird while the rest of its flock got sucked into a jet engine.

  As he opened the door to the waiting room at Palace Street Healing Arts, Jamie noticed the receptionist, a slim, pale young woman named Heather, reading a novel at her desk. He reached up and stilled the little bell that should ring his arrival. Heather didn’t take her eyes off the page. In slow motion, he closed the door and glided up to her with his soundless steps.

  “Not busy enough?” He snatched the book, making her squeak. On the cover a couple in half-torn eighteenth-century garb clutched each other in wild abandon. “Heather, Heather, naughty.”

  She blushed and pushed her lank brown hair behind her ears. “It’s light entertainment.”

  He handed it back to her with a broad wink. “Entertaining all right.”

  “I need to pass the time. Once everyone’s in a massage, I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.”

  Andrea often said Heather was underutilized and too smart for her job. “They should make you the manager. Give you some real work to do.” No they shouldn’t. Jamie had a sudden brainstorm. “I have a proposition.”

  She blushed again. “You do not.”

  “Didn’t mean that. Jesus. Look what that bloody sex book’s done to you. I meant, to keep you busy. Keep me less busy. Pay you a lump sum for the work at the end of the month.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Administrative crap. Don’t look at me like that. It’s crap to me because I’m a bloody fuck-up, but you’re a stable, intelligent, organized young woman and you could whip this off like it was nothing, while it’d give me a nervous breakdown. You were a business major, right?”

  She nodded, pushing her glasses up, then put her romance novel in a drawer and sat straight, waiting. Jamie came around behind her chair and hovered over her, taking over her keyboard. He opened his e-mail and the documents Kate had sent him. Heather was quiet as he explained what needed to be done: getting commitments and deposits, running ads, and if she had web design skills, she could update the site. When the participants’ fees came in, she’d get paid.

  “This would give you a nervous breakdown?” Heather said. “It’s a piece of cake.”

  “It’d drive me crazy.” Jamie sat on her desk and picked up a pen, twirling it like a small baton. “Short drive.”

  She rolled her eyes. He made that joke too often, didn’t he? “How much do you pay me?” she asked.

  “Hourly, whatever you get here. Keep track of your time.”

  “So you’d want me to do it on my downtime here?”

  “Shh. Marigold will hear you.” The owner of the practice.

  “She’s in a massage, she won’t hear a thing. You know what those rooms are like, you can’t hear as long no one’s hollering.”

  Jamie knew. He’d been getting massages with Marigold as part of making peace with his body. “All right, then, yeah, if you can make a few extra dollars rather than read about some bloke’s donger, why not?”

  “The book’s not all sex. It’s got love in it, too.”

  “Jeezus. You’re a newlywed. You can get that at home. Do the work here.”

  “I guess I could. I have a lot of in-between times.”

  “Bet they don’t pay you shit, either.”

  She avoided his eyes. Not blushing. Walls up. Sex you could talk about, but not money. Didn’t he know it. He’d been poor not long ago.

  To ease the moment, he said, “We’ll pay you better. Give yourself the raise you think you deserve over what you get here, log your hours, and you’ll get paid once the deposits are in from the vendors, or the ticket
sales, or whatever. I don’t do money. Kate Radescu does. You’ll figure it out.”

  In the back of his mind, he could hear the dim echoes of his argument with Kate about hiring someone and realized he didn’t remember how it had ended. Hadn’t Ximena stepped in and said he had good ideas? Did that mean the board had approved it, or not? Too late to ask. He’d done it.

  Andrea, a round-faced, curvy black woman with close-clipped hair, emerged from one of the three massage rooms. She greeted Jamie and walked behind the reception desk to get a brown paper bag and a steel water bottle from a small refrigerator. “How about Cathedral Park? I’ve been inside all morning.”

  “Mmm.” That park was always busy. Other people’s energy. “Ten minutes in your room, and then lunch outside.”

  “My client is still getting dressed in there.”

  “Fuck, all right, somewhere else outside, then. We’ll trespass a little.”

  Jamie led the way to the walled garden of a law office a short way up the block. In a shady corner of the small lawn, a bronze abstract sculpture like a comma that had rolled over and collapsed stood on a pedestal surrounded by black-eyed Susans and coneflowers. Jamie and Andrea sat on the solitary bench facing the flowers. Andrea opened her lunch bag. “It doesn’t feel like we should be here.”

  “Following rules or picking up a bad vibe?”

  “Following rules. It feels good except for that.”

  “Right then, enjoy. So, here’s what I have to check on. Have you met a girl that hangs out with Fiona and Jill Betts, named Dahlia or Lily, some flower with an L in it?”

  Andrea shook her head, sipped her water, and set her fork, napkin, and plastic tub of salad on the bench beside her.

  “Good. If she tries to book with you, be too busy. I’ll explain that later. Have you had any clients that were healers or psychics?”

  “Not that I know of, unless some of them do it on the side and never told me. Why?”

  “Have to run an experiment.” She was probably safe, but he had to be sure. If she didn’t do a full healing, maybe he wouldn’t catch the plague if she had it. “Don’t like to make you work on your break, but can you do a little energy work with me? Just a quickie, not a whole session.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “A quickie?”

  “Jeezus. You know what I meant.”

  “It takes some time to get ready. Making sacred space. You remember.”

  He’d been skipping that step. Cats didn’t seem to mind. “Do it then. Send me a little charge. I want to feel it.”

  “This is weird. But all right.” Andrea closed her eyes, brought her hands together, and bowed her head in silence. After her prayer, she looked at Jamie. “What do you feel you need balanced or healed?”

  “Dunno. Seeing my shrink in a little bit.” He tried to think of something that felt off at the moment and the fact that he couldn’t brought out an explosive snort-laugh. “Jeezus. How about delusions of wellness?”

  “We’ll see what the energy seeks, then.”

  Andrea took both of Jamie’s hands and closed her eyes again. Her palms were hot, something Fiona said would happen to healers once they were attuned, though Jamie had always been such a furnace he couldn’t tell if his hands were hotter. Subtle warmth moved from Andrea into his bones. Unexpectedly, the inner door opened. Her soul was like sunlight under the sea, and made him feel as if he were swimming with great wise creatures in its depths.

  Andrea let go abruptly. To his relief, the door partly closed, though not enough. She studied Jamie, her brows contracted. “Did you feel that? It was like whale songs or something.”

  Fuck. When she’d said she would let the healing force decide, this was what it had chosen? Bloody hell. She’d tuned up his ability to see souls and to send energy. He’d magnified her essence and sent it back to her. “That wasn’t the experiment. I mean, it was. I wanted to see if you still had the skill. I wasn’t testing me.”

  “Seems like your power couldn’t hold back. I think you’ve got more than you know what to do with.”

  He fidgeted, brushed an ant off his flamingo-print shirt, and scanned the area for other insects, sliding a hot pink button back and forth in its hole. “I don’t do anything with it.”

  “You just did. It was amazing, and it wasn’t just feel-good healing. It was strong enough to change me.”

  “Fuck. Come on. What way?”

  “I don’t know. It takes time. Didn’t you pay attention in class? Healing’s a seed. It’s not a lightning bolt. Even when it feels like one.” She took the lid off her salad and began to eat. “You need to see Fiona again and start planning to work as a healer. That was powerful.”

  “I can’t. She’s not working. That’s why I had to see if you were still, y’know, competent. But if it’s a seed—fuck—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  On the ground at his feet lay dried bits of plant matter, long dark slivers that could be last year’s seeds from the coneflowers. How long could a seed lie dormant before it grew? “If someone gives you negative energy, it could be the same, right? Slow effect.”

  “We’re displacing the negative, not putting it in.”

  “But someone could put it in. Like a bad healer.”

  Like Jill. No, she couldn’t have. She’d destroyed Kandy, but not with spiritual power. Andrea stabbed a cucumber and a sudden image of his first lunch with Kandy filled Jamie’s mind. Uncomfortable, he pushed it away. He hadn’t thought of that silly game with the cucumber in years.

  “That’s a scary idea,” Andrea said. “Fiona’s not working, and ... Do you think someone put a bad energy seed into her? And that she could spread it?”

  “Yeah. Into Dahlia, and—I’m not supposed to say who else. At least two other people, maybe more. Don’t tell anyone you do this work, or that I do. Stop doing it ’til we know how it spreads. Dunno what to do, what else to tell you.”

  “Gaia would know. A shaman can handle this sort of thing. That’s right up her alley.”

  “Fuck. Of course.” Sometimes his brain surprised him by actually working. This was what Mae had been trying to tell him, but he’d been only half-listening. “I’m a bloody imbecile. I should have thought of that. Thank you.”

  He stood and opened his arms for a hug. Andrea set down her fork and rose to meet his embrace.

  “You’re not staying? You look ready to run.”

  “Gotta see Gaia before therapy. Catcha.”

  Jamie biked down Palace to Paseo to St. Francis faster than he’d ridden in months. Gaia would see him if she wasn’t with a client. He didn’t need an appointment. A connection, a soul-to-soul recognition, had struck them instantly when they met. It had been like meeting a member of his tribe. His spirit tribe.

  When he got to the little strip of shops where she had her shaman office, he parked his bike in the rack out front and turned to the door.

  No lights. The antlers and skins and herbs still hung on the walls, but her buben, her Tuvan drum, was missing from its stand. Grief grabbed him. He knew even before he read the sign taped inside the glass door.

  Closed until further notice.

  Almost dropping his phone, Jamie called her home. Her husband Mike answered over a toddler’s babbling. When Jamie identified himself, Mike said, “You’re on my list of people to call. She had—” He paused, spoke softly to the child, and came back to Jamie. “She had a ... a shamanic emergency.”

  “Fuck. No spirits? No power?”

  “How did you know? It just happened. She left for Siberia last night.”

  “It’s happened to other people. She say how it hit her?”

  Mike took a long pause. “You were her student, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then maybe you’ll understand this. I’m a computer guy, so this is beyond me. She said she thought a new helping spirit had come. One of our lost children. One of the miscarried babies. She welcomed it, and it entered her. That was when she realized it was an enemy. Sent by
a witch to suck the life out of her.”

  Jamie gazed into the shaman’s darkened office. His flamingo-shirted reflection in the glass struck him as ludicrous juxtaposed against the Tuvan paraphernalia on the other side. He wanted to go in and beat a drum, call in Gaia’s helpers, but that was beyond him, almost as much as it was beyond computer guy Mike. “When this happened ... Was she trying to heal one of the other healers?”

  “No. It was some young woman whose parents had died. Trying to heal her grief.”

  “Was this the witch?”

  “She didn’t think so. The girl didn’t seem powerful. I thought it might be like malware.”

  “Dunno what that is. I mean, I’ve heard of it, just, y’know ...”

  “Malicious programming. It exploits the defects in your security software. Finds where you’re vulnerable and sneaks in. It’s used for stealing personal or financial information. The girl could have had some kind of spiritual malware.”

  Malware sounded evil. It came in as a fetus. What a perfect way to sneak into Gaia. Could Lily-Dahlia have been the client? No, her parents were alive. “Did Gaia tell you this client’s name?”

  “Hang on. I can look on her calendar.”

  Gaia’s husband spoke in a reassuring tone to his child, and Jamie heard the clunk of the landline receiver on a hard surface. Having Gaia suddenly leave must be hell on Mike and the kid. Maybe she’d be healed soon and come back—if her shaman teachers didn’t catch the plague from her.

  No, even if she was healed and missed her family, Gaia wouldn’t go all the way to Tuva and turn around the next day. She would stay to study, maybe to learn something that could keep this from happening again. If all went well, she’d be back in time for the performance, but Jamie couldn’t hope for help from her any sooner.

  Mike came back on the phone. “That day she had two clients. The first one was a man. The second one it just says Dahlia. No last name.”

  Jesus. A spiritual phishing scam. It was her.

  Chapter Thirteen