The Medium's Possession

by Elle Beauregard

  Beneath the comforter, was Zander.

  She was sprawled out on her back, her head turned to the side with one hand by her face and the other laying on her chest. Both wrists were wrapped in gauze that was fraying at the edges and needed to be changed.

  “She got the stitches yesterday?” Wren asked, keeping her voice very quiet.

  “Yesterday afternoon, yeah,” was Callum’s low-voice response.

  Okay, so the gauze might be worse for wear but the wounds underneath should still be safe. That was good news, at least.

  She stepped closer to the bed, measuring every rise and fall of Zander’s chest. From sight alone, it would be easy to think she was sleeping, but Wren could feel that wasn’t the case. The air felt like the sound a radio made when you tuned it between stations, static and garbled voices, only a feeling instead of noise. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

  “You feel that?” she asked Callum quietly.

  “The cold? Definitely.”

  Huh. She hadn’t noticed the cold, but now that he mentioned it, if she zoomed out her awareness, it was colder in here. Maybe that’s how he was interpreting this energy.

  Wren leaned and placed her hand on top of the one Zander had sitting above heart.

  “You’ll wake her up,” Callum hissed.

  “It’s fine,” Wren breathed. “She’s deep asleep.” She could feel it now that they were touching. Zander’s body was sleeping deeply—and Zander wasn’t home. She wasn’t close to the surface of her own consciousness. She’d retreated deep into her psyche for protection.

  That was another bit of good news. At least Wren thought it was.

  “I’m going to sit behind her, okay?” She glanced at Callum, who just gave a nod in return.

  Slowly and carefully, Wren climbed up onto the mattress. She stepped over Zander’s sleeping body and put her back against the wall at the head of the bed. Then she slid down until she was sitting. Next, using all of her training on how to move patients without injuring them, Wren slid her arms beneath Zander’s shoulders. She braced herself and lifted Zander’s upper body just enough to cross her legs. Then she laid Zander back down so her head was in her lap.

  All while Zander slept.

  Wren breathed a sigh of relief. Now she could really get to work.

  She drew a deep breath and as she let it out, she brought her hands to Zander’s shoulders, bare above her tank top.

  Zander’s energy was terrifying.

  It was so garbled, so quiet in a sea of mess, Wren could barely sense it. She stretched herself, just as she’d done those months and months ago when they’d been drunk at that bar, but this time, she didn’t bump into the edge of anything. This time, she was swimming through a choppy sea and the horizon was rising and falling from view.

  She began slowing her own breathing, matching it to Zander’s slow inhales and long exhales, trying to fall in sync.

  “I’m surprised she’s staying asleep,” came Callum’s voice, quiet. He’d stayed in the room, and Wren had to respect that. She’d have done the same thing if the tables were turned.

  “I’m keeping her that way,” she said, pausing her breathing just long enough to respond.

  Usually, Wren could match a person’s wavelength in silence, the vibration and hum something she could hear and match inside her mind. Even when she’d matched Zander that night in the bar, when it had been a real challenge, she hadn’t needed to make a sound to do it.

  But she wasn’t silent now. Though she hadn’t been aware of starting, she could suddenly hear herself.

  Humming helped her find the sweet spot. Like finding the right pitch of a note, it helped her identify and control her own wavelengths more precisely. It gave her more focus on the wavelength she was trying to match. It was a beginner’s trick that most experienced wavelengthers didn’t need to do—Wren included—but today, it was the only thing keeping Wren in step with Zander’s muddled, arrhythmic vibration. The only thing that was letting Wren predict when the sea would rise up and let her see the horizon again—the only thing letting her keep her bearings.

  That said, she was expending all of her energy staying afloat and in sync. With a desperate clarity, she realized she didn’t have any extra energy to spend on bending the waves to her will, to try and make Zander open the cloak let alone to attempt to expel the Shadow that was trapped within it.

  When Wren had taken her place at Zander’s head, she hadn’t done it with the plan of finishing the job right here and now. No, this was about exploration—trying to suss out how bad this really was—if her hypothesis, inspired by Beth’s advice, was correct.

  She hadn’t expected to find an ocean’s worth of bad, and a tidal wave of the worst way to be right.

  Zander was so far within herself, Wren could only sense her as an echo, like radar. She couldn’t see or feel the real Zander at all, but only the signature left by her absence—except for those split-second moments when a wave crested with Wren on top of it and she could see the shore. So instead of matching herself to Zander’s wavelength, Wren decided to match herself to the rhythms of the waves—and that’s how she finally locked on to Zander’s energy.

  The connection was gossamer thread, but it was enough.

  It had to be enough or Zander was lost.

  Eyes stinging with tears Wren refused to let fall, she pushed her vibration upward, attempting to push Zander’s along with it.

  It was like pushing against a semi-truck.

  So Wren pushed harder. There was no way she was saving Zander alone—no way she could do the work she needed to do without pulling from other energy around her and there just wasn’t enough of it in this room. But if she could move Zander’s energy by just a breath, at least she could prove to herself that Zander wasn’t truly lost. Just one budge. That’s all Wren needed, was one fraction of a metaphysical inch, then at least she’d know saving her best friend was even possible.

  ⫷⫸⫷⫸⫷⫸

  Callum pressed his shoulders back into the wall until he could feel the plaster’s texture biting into his skin through his T-shirt. His arms were crossed over his chest, his muscles wound tight and aching.

  Cecily and Scott had left some time ago with a sordid shopping list in hand, and very specific instructions from Wren on where to go and whom to ask for at a small store front not far away. The store front, she’d explained, was just that—a tourist-friendly front for the real business that went on behind it. She’d told Scott and Cecily to give the person working there her name—she’d said that was important.

  Callum drew a breath and let it out in a whoosh.

  Were they out of their fucking minds?

  Across the small bedroom, perched at the head of the bed he and Zander had shared for almost a year, Wren sat with Zander’s head cradled in her lap. Her eyes were closed, her head downturned so a curtain of spiral curls hid her face from view, the color fading from a dark chocolate brown to deep caramel at the ends.

  And she was humming.

  No, maybe humming wasn’t the right word for it. The sound was tuneless, like inflections on a single note uttered low, coming from deep within Wren’s body. It was so quiet, it had taken Callum time to recognize the sound—and longer to identify where it was coming from.

  It was a focused, peaceful sound.

  It made Callum want to scream.

  He wanted to rage. He wanted to take the boxes stacked along the wall beside him and throw them to the floor. He wanted to launch one of them through the bedroom window, splintering glass down into the flower beds below it.

  He wanted to punch the wall behind him and kick a hole through the bedroom door.

  He wanted to let all this anger loose—but if he let it all out, if he wasn’t angry anymore, what would animate him? He was running on a couple of hours of broken sleep and anxiety. If it wasn’t for the rage, he wasn’t sure he’d be standing, let alone functioning.

  So no, he didn’t know what Wren meant when s
he said she was keeping Zander asleep, but if he opened his mouth to ask, he didn’t know what would come up his throat: words or acid. So he kept it shut, drowning in his self-hatred.

  How could he have let Zander suffer like this?

  How could he have abandoned her when she needed him most?

  It had been a kid—a fresh, new high school senior—who’d seen Zander slit her wrists in the park. Who’d called 9-1-1. Who’d stayed nearby until help arrived. The nurse had told Callum that when he’d been at the hospital with Zander.

  What if that kid hadn’t seen her?

  He heard Wren draw a deep breath, and it wasn’t until then that he realized her humming had stopped.

  Wren’s face lifted and her brown eyes met his, vacant at first but then coming into the present with a couple of quick blinks.

  “I can’t do this,” she said simply, her voice reedy and inflectionless.

  As Callum’s chest went cold, he watched Wren touch the tips of her fingers into the tiny crescent of dark red that was just beginning to drip from her nose—and come away smeared with blood.

  “Not alone,” she went on, glancing at the blood and blinking hard again like she was clearing her vision. When she spoke again, her voice was stronger. “With help, I can. But we need to act fast.”

  “She’s awake,” Callum remarked as he watched Wren set a small army of supplies onto the dining table. A wallet, a couple of vials, the leaves of some plant pressed between what looked like wax paper.

  “Yeah, I thought I heard that,” Wren replied, distracted. “She was really deep asleep before, though. It will take her a minute to get her shit together enough to come out here. Which should give us enough time.”

  “To what?”

  Wren spared him a glance, but didn’t respond, instead continuing to pull items from the messenger bag she’d stepped outside to get a few moments ago—presumably from her car.

  A candle, matches. Prayer beads?

  What the hell?

  “You said you drove all night,” Callum said, needing to fill the silence so his brain wouldn’t fill it for him. “Where were you coming from?”

  “Philadelphia,” Wren replied simply.

  “Damn, that’s a trek,” Callum remarked. “Did you take I-81 to 59, or did you go I-85 all the way?”

  Wren looked up at him with a questioning smirk like she was surprised at his question. Honestly, he wasn’t sure why he’d asked, it had just seemed like the right thing to say.

  “81 to 59 was shorter according to Maps, so I took that, but I’m not sure I buy it,” she said, returning her attention to the task at hand.

  Callum gave a humorless chuckle. He’d done that drive a couple of times before—well, they’d started in Maine each time, but he and his mom had stopped in Philadelphia so they could go to this occult shop she liked. The last time they’d done it, they’d stayed in New Orleans for a about a week, and then they’d headed north. They’d been in Shreveport when they were intercepted by Child Protective Services.

  Or maybe his mom had been contacted by them in New Orleans—they’d left in a hurry. He’d always wondered about that.

  Callum watched as Wren took a small sheet of tissue paper from what he had assumed to be a wallet, but turned out to be some sort of booklet. She laid the sheet on the tabletop.

  “Wait, how did you know where we live?” She’d never been to their place, at least not that he knew of.

  Why hadn’t he thought to ask her that sooner?

  “You registered your website to your home address,” Wren replied simply as she studied the contents of a vial she held between her fingers.

  Oh. Okay, well that was less creepy than it could have been, Callum decided.

  Or maybe it was more creepy?

  “By the way, thanks for letting the Bridgette conversation lie,” Wren said quietly. “I saw it when you remembered that. I assume Zander told you.”

  Yeah, not one of Callum’s better moments. “I should have remembered sooner.”

  “You have some other, more pressing shit to think about right now, I think.” Wren carefully tapped the side of the vial, evenly dispensing a line of the contents—some kind of ground herb—onto the paper before resealing the lid and putting it back into her bag. Then she picked up the paper between her fingers, bent and rolled it like she’d done it a hundred times.

  Or maybe those hadn’t been herbs at all. “A joint? Did you just role a joint on my dining table?” Callum asked, his tone coming off more indignant than he actually felt.

  Wren cocked an eyebrow at him. “Are you going to try to tell me you haven’t? You and Scott seem pretty down to party. And I know Zander is.”

  Callum paused before answering, not because it was any big secret—he just wasn’t sure the why behind what he was about to say were any of her business. “We don’t keep substances in the house.”

  Wren looked at him for a second, then seemed to make the connection—albeit likely one that was a little off the mark. “Oh, man. I didn’t realize. I’ll clear this stuff out asap—”

  “We’re not dry addicts,” Callum said, cutting her off. At least not really. Well, he wasn’t, at least. “There’s just... ya know, it’s fine. It’s not important.”

  Not like this chick needed a history lesson on Scott’s idyllic childhood or early adult life.

  Scott wasn’t here in any case.

  “So what’re we doing with the joint anyway?” he asked, mostly to change the subject. “Are we gonna get baked before we smoke this shadow bastard?”

  Wren made a face like that wasn’t totally off the mark.

  “Not quite,” she said as she tapped the end of the hand-rolled on the table. “It’s not for us.”

  “For Zander?” Callum surmised.

  “Exactly.”

  “What is it?” Because it definitely hadn’t been pot she’d rolled into that joint.

  “It’s tobacco—” A pause. Her gaze met his. “Laced with opium.”

  Callum felt his eyes flare wide. “You’re gonna give Zander heroin?!” Fuck no.

  “It’s not heroin,” Wren corrected him calmly. “It’s opium. There’s a big difference. It will put her into a malleable state, which we need if we want to convince her energy to cast the Shadow out. And no. I’m not going to give it to her.”

  She held the joint out to him.

  “You are.”

  The door to the bedroom opened with the telltale click Callum knew so well before he could respond. He couldn’t get words up his throat as he heard Zander coming down the hallway, slow like she was still unsteady on her feet.

  Which made sense—those sedatives they’d prescribed were some serious shit. More serious than he’d let on to Cecily—and especially to Scott. The nurse said they wouldn’t keep her asleep for long, but she’d be slow for a while after she woke up.

  Listening to Zander draw closer, he looked to Wren.

  Who looked squarely back at him with that goddamned joint still held between her fingers and her dark, perfectly arched brow raised.

  Fuck it.

  Callum plucked the hand-rolled from Wren’s fingers, turned and rounded the corner just as Zander reached the end of the hall.

  She stopped in her tracks, swaying slightly like a leaf in a soft breeze.

  Her short hair needed to be washed; her tank top and boxer shorts hung from her frame like she’d lost weight in the last two days, which Callum knew couldn’t be right. She was pale, even her lips were lighter than their usual rosy pink.

  She stared at him for a number of heartbeats. Then finally, “I’m leaving.”

  He knew it wasn’t her saying it. But goddamn him, it hurt anyway.

  “I thought we were past the front,” Callum said. “You’re not Zander—don’t pretend to be.”

  Zander’s lips sneered, her brows furrowing. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Callum’s own brows were the ones furrowing now. “We just—Do you not remember the ent
ire conversation we had in the bedroom?”

  Zander just stared at him like he was crazy. Her sarcastic headshake and shrug were as good as a “fuck you.”

  Lost, and more confused than he cared to admit, Callum shot a look into the dining room behind him, where Wren was standing, staying out of sight.

  “If you spoke to the Shadow alone, Zander might not remember it,” Wren whispered.

  “This isn’t Zander,” Callum hissed.

  “It’s an amalgam of the two of them.” Wren’s whisper was somber. “Zander’s energy and the Shadow’s intention. It’s like a third person.”

  Callum’s breath left his body like she’d kicked him in the guts with those words.

  “Who are you talking to?” Zander spat, but she didn’t move.

  “Don’t tell them I’m here,” Wren hissed.

  He forced a single nod for Wren’s benefit and turned his attention on Zander, who looked more alert with each breath. “Nobody.” Callum swallowed down the bitter flavor rising in the back of his throat—bile, lies, terror in some ratio he couldn’t even begin to tease apart. “So you’re leaving, huh?”

  “Yes. I’m leaving. Don’t stop me.”

  “I’m not stopping you,” Callum replied, shaking his head.

  No, he wasn’t going to stop her—he was going to save her. He stood by what he’d said to the Shadow—he would save Zander even if he had to destroy himself to do it.

  “So, how about one last smoke before you go? Figure that’s the right way to see us out.” It was how they’d started—their real beginning. If this had been a real goodbye, that was how he’d have wanted it.

  But this wasn’t a real goodbye, he reminded himself.

  She stared at him again for a set of heartbeats.

  “You owe me that much, right?” he said when she didn’t move.

  Another pause. Then, “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  Callum fished his lighter and a cigarette from the pack he kept tucked up under the eve at the front of the house. Then he sat on the top step beside Zander—where they’d sat many times to smoke late night cigarettes when the world was upside down. He held the hand-rolled to his lips and lit the end, careful not to inhale the smoke, but only pull it into his mouth where he immediately let it bleed from his lips.