Death Omen

by Amber Foxx

  Everyone who’d worked with Jamie had perceived his damaged hip, his ulnar nerve injury, and the rod in his shin, though none had described these the same way. Most had also detected something that paralleled the sparkles Sierra had mentioned. Mae hoped this wasn’t a sign of an infection. Not when he was leaving on tour so soon. He had ways to cope with anxiety, but a cold or flu would be hard on him, making a living with his voice as he did.

  As soon as her hands were warm, Mae went back inside. She found Jamie in the crowd around the coffee service table in the lobby, Sierra close at his elbow.

  “That was so courageous of you to share,” Sierra said.

  “Courageous?” Jamie frowned, took a slurp of his coffee and refilled it. “Sharing my broken bones? I fell. Or you mean sharing the fat? Not exactly like I can hide it.”

  He did, though. His wardrobe was calculated for camouflage. If Mae had never seen him undressed, she would think he was less overweight than he was. And he was fit enough to look good anyway, dressed or undressed.

  “Just ... your openness to healing.” Sierra drew closer to him, touching his arm. “You shared your anxiety. Your physical pain. All of it.”

  Delaying, wishing Sierra would go away, Mae refilled her steel bottle at the water fountain while still listening. Sierra annoyed her. Maybe it was because Mae had never been in therapy, but the way the other woman talked about sharing and openness sounded contrived.

  “Um ... I was being a coward, actually,” Jamie said. “Easier to be studied than to look at someone else.”

  “I still think you were brave, but I understand.” Sierra dipped a teabag up and down in her paper cup. “I’m sure I’d have been hard to look at.”

  Attention-seeking. Was Jamie going to fall for it? He moved away from the coffee carafes to let the next person in. Mae gravitated toward him and Sierra.

  “Got stuff wrong with you, too?” Jamie asked.

  “A lot. I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. And I’ve had melanoma.” Sierra ran her hand over the surface of her hair. “This is new growth. You don’t think I’d choose this hairstyle, do you?”

  “Bloody hell.” Jamie’s eyes widened. “That’s awful. Not the hair, sorry, it looks fine. I meant, arthritis and cancer. That’s worse luck than I’ve had.”

  “Not bad luck. Bad choices. Bad karma. I brought it on. You heard what Mary Kay said about disease manifesting in our subtle bodies first.”

  Mae cut in. Annoying or not, Sierra didn’t need the burden of thinking she’d made herself sick. “She said it’s like a warning that the subtle bodies feel. It can start disorganizing your energy before you get sick enough for your symptoms to show, so an intuitive can see it before a doctor can. It doesn’t mean you gave yourself cancer.”

  Far from seeming reassured by this, Sierra grew defensive, stiffening her shoulders and angling her head up to stare at Mae. “Have you read her second book? Your spiritual illness causes your physical problems. You seek it to act out some need you have.”

  “I’ve read the book and that’s not what she says. It goes totally against the ethics she’s been teaching us to say you actually made yourself get melanoma. That’s like saying Jamie wanted to break his hip. I bet you got a few sunburns when you were a little kid.” Sierra was as white as Mae. “Accidents happen.”

  “Because of holes we make in our auras that let illnesses and accidents in.”

  Jamie met Mae’s eyes. He shook his head. “That’s fucked up.” He drank some coffee and said to Sierra, “I had a cat die of cancer. A cat. Nothing wrong with his aura. He didn’t invite the disease.”

  “But he did. To deal with his past life and get ready for his next. It’s all karma. Like your injuries.” Sierra drew the tea bag from her cup and squeezed it. She had delicate fingers with pearly pink painted nails. “I can channel past lives. I know what I’m talking about.” She dropped her tea bag in the trash and walked away.

  “Jeezus,” Jamie said. “Hope she doesn’t plan to work as a healer. Can you picture her charging people to hear that crap?”

  Mae replied, “She’s got to be making herself miserable with those beliefs. That’s bad enough even without spreading it. I’ll ask Mary Kay to clarify things. See if she can straighten her out.”

  “Nah, I’ll ask. I’m the one she said has bad karma.”

  Fiona announced that the break was over. Jamie topped off his coffee again and walked beside Mae to rejoin the other students, nearly touching, shoulder to shoulder. She picked up a sexual buzz from him like he’d sent out a pheromone. Maybe they were both so tuned in to energy they could communicate that way, a side effect of the workshop. But then again, Jamie’s feelings had always reached her in some way, sweeping her into his wavelength.

  They circled around to the far side of the group. Mae sat, but Jamie stood, drinking coffee, poised to be seen and heard.

  Mary Kay asked if anyone had questions.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “Do we make ourselves sick? Do some kind of spiritual thing to our bodies?”

  “Indirectly. A spiritual imbalance can lead to emotional stress, which can affect your lifestyle and your immune system.”

  Sierra declared, “That’s why I believe in taking responsibility for my illness.”

  Mary Kay held a hand up. “Be careful how you express that with your clients. There’s a difference between blaming the victim and empowering the inner healer. The mind-body-spirit interaction is complex and subtle.”

  “I disagree. It’s strong and direct. If I accept that I made myself sick, then I also dare to see that I can make myself well.” Sierra looked around at Jamie. “If you faced why you have that pain in your hip, you could make it go away.”

  “I fell off a rock bouldering. Missed the crash pad. Broke the ball off in the socket. Uninsured. Skipped PT.” Jamie slugged down the rest of his coffee. “You think I really wanted that to happen?”

  “Absolutely. You were pushing your limits. Physically and financially. But when you hit them, you decided your limits were real.”

  “Bloody hell—”

  Mary Kay interrupted. “I think we can see that telling clients the meaning we apply to their experience isn’t helpful. An intuitive tells the client what she sees, but not what she thinks it means psychologically, spiritually, or medically. It’s up to Jamie and any professionals he consults to make meaning of it. Are there other questions?”

  Jamie sat down, grousing about Sierra’s idiocy. Mae rubbed his back and quickly asked a question about her use of crystals, so Sierra wouldn’t get another chance to argue. “Am I weakening my intuition? Should I stop using them?”

  “No. In your case, it’s like a lens for focusing. But what’s right for you isn’t necessarily right for everybody. I think Fiona would agree with me.”

  Fiona stood. “It’s a good question. Mae, the crystals can help your precision. They won’t change your intuition, though, only fine-tune and aim it. If it’s strong, it won’t get weaker, and if it’s weak, it won’t get stronger. You can’t tune a radio to a station that isn’t there.”

  “Thanks. So I can tell my stepdaughters that playing with my crystals won’t make them psychic.”

  Fiona smiled, then her expression became somber. “They should be glad they’re not. Ask anyone who had this ability emerge in childhood. It isn’t fun.”

  Mae had almost forgotten this had happened to Jamie as a young child, an uncontrollable opening to the spirit world and the essence of other people’s souls. He’d been healed of it, freed of it for a long time, but it had come back. No wonder he was so ambivalent about his gift.

  Sierra spoke up. “It’s not a stressor if you’re chosen for it. I was trained to be a seer as a child.”

  With a look of concern, Fiona asked gently, “Is that when you learned these ideas you’ve been sharing?”

  “I didn’t learn them,” Sierra snapped. “I’ve known them for thousands of years.”

  Jamie made an angry-bewildered face, holding his ha
nds up in exasperation. As the lesson resumed, Mae whispered to him, “I wonder if anyone really trained her when she was little.”

  “If they did, they fucked up. Jeezus. My parrots have better people skills than she does.”

  *****

  The students broke up into pairs again, scattering around the room for further practice. Jamie watched, postponing choosing a partner, looking for someone he felt safe with. When they had experimented with tuning in to their own bodies, the images had made no sense to him: a mix of bell-like tones, static and howling, and a shifting gray-and-white light. It was the noise in his head, he suspected, or the general quality of his being, nothing as detailed as Sierra’s view of him. The condition she had reported as sparkliness had come across as swarming to one person and hundreds of small flashes of heat to another. He hadn’t detected it at all. What if he wasn’t capable of medical intuition? He wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on his pets’ health. He needed to test his skill with someone who could give him reliable feedback.

  A fit, slim white man in his sixties was approaching with a smile, hands open in a “shall we?” gesture. He looked like a lot of people his age in Santa Fe, glowing and energetic. Aside from thinning hair and wrinkles, he could have been forty.

  Before the man reached him, a small damp hand wrapped around Jamie’s wrist.

  “I’d like to entrust you with seeing me,” said Sierra. “We need to rebuild our trust.”

  What the fuck? They’d never had any to rebuild. “Sorry. I was going to work with ... Is it Dan?”

  “Don,” the man said, “and don’t worry about it. We can work as a trio. There’s an odd number here.”

  Sierra lay on a blanket. Jamie didn’t want to deal with her. She was aversive, a personality like the taste of raw rhubarb.

  “Go ahead.” Don sat cross-legged at Sierra’s feet and rested his hands on them. “We can both work at the same time. I’ve done this a lot before.”

  “No,” Sierra spoke sharply, and Don let go. “That’s too much for me. Just Jamie. You can work with him later.”

  Jamie knelt beside Sierra. Was there some tactful way to refuse to touch her? He couldn’t think of one, but maybe it was just as well. After all, he was here to learn, and since she had arthritis, he would see if he was capable of detecting disease.

  His mind went blank. “Jeezus. Where do I start?”

  Don’s voice was steady and reassuring. “Ground your energy.”

  “That was always a problem for you,” Sierra said.

  “What are you talking about?” Jamie asked. “Always? We just met today.”

  “Just met in this life.” She closed her eyes. They darted around under thin, blue-white lids. “Don’t you recognize me from other lives?”

  “Nah. Can’t. I’m all new material, not recycled.”

  “Still facetious?” Sierra’s eyes flew open, big and blue and angry. “You need to remember. I was your abbot at Lindisfarne. You were irreverent even then. I put you in charge of the brewing and the baking, and you forgot about God.”

  Jamie sat back on his heels. “Come off it. Maybe we’re all reincarnated, I have no bloody idea, but there’s no way you could know I was a monk or that we met in some past life. Yeah, you could take a good guess I like bread and beer now, but you can’t know what I did centuries ago.”

  “Then why does it bother you so much? Is it because of our last life together?”

  “No. Jeezus. It’s because you’re so bloody aggravating.”

  She reached her hand toward his face. He jerked back. Sierra crooned, “I was your mother—”

  “Stop. I can’t read your health, now. I’m pissed off.”

  Don started to speak, but Sierra sat up, interrupting him. “This is our karma, Jamie. We need to finish it. We found each other again for a reason.”

  Jamie strode off, swearing under his breath. Spiritual frauds enraged him. He’d met a few in his years in Santa Fe and seen a friend disastrously exploited by one. Maybe Sierra was merely a nutcase, but this wasn’t beginner-level training. She might be peddling her lies.

  Don caught up with him. “I can’t blame you for being annoyed. That was a little peculiar.”

  “A little? Even if I believed we could remember past lives, I’d think that was crap.”

  “I think we can recall previous incarnations. When I was only three, I had dreams about places I couldn’t have known about. I never forgot them, so when I was in my forties, I went to a hypnotist who specialized in past life regression. She said that except for early childhood dreams like I had, it’s hard for people to remember, and that it takes a lot of time and effort to reconstruct a whole life, let alone a series of lives. I doubt Sierra’s honestly recalling anything between you. Did she tell you about her health problems?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I suspect there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “What?”

  “Look at her skin. She’s in her early thirties, I’d guess, and has no sun damage. I doubt she had melanoma. She’s been careful. And her joints are healthy. Look at her hands, her wrists. Watch her move. I think that’s why she didn’t want me to read her body.”

  “She knows you’re that good with medical intuition? And that I’m not?”

  “No. But she might have guessed, based on things we said. I’ve been studying with Mary Kay for a while, and I was one of the first doctors to invite her to participate in my practice fifteen years ago. I’ve learned to compare her intuition, and mine, with test results, and I have a good idea what it means when I pick up certain kinds of images.”

  A doctor and a seer. “What would you call what’s wrong with her, if she’s making this stuff up?” Jamie tried to imagine a DSM entry for her, a diagnostic category. No, it would be a culture-bound illness, an anthropological rather than a psychological construct. “Santa Fe Syndrome. ‘A pathological craving to be spiritually special, either in one’s need for healing or capacity to deliver it.’ ” He snorted. “Jeezus. Wish I’d partnered with her after all. I could have told her how fucking healthy she was.”

  “I didn’t examine her, so I can’t say for sure that she is. Now, would you like to practice on me?”

  “Yeah. Thanks. I’m sort of nervous about it, though. And she threw me off. I might have a hard time.”

  Don led the way to a quiet corner and reclined on a blanket. “Can you concentrate here?”

  “Think so.”

  “Take your time. Ground your energy. And just receive. Don’t try too hard. Once you’re in the right head space, if it stays empty, you’ll see what you need to see.”

  Jamie held a musical tone in his mind to clear it, a middle C, then moved his hands in the aura an inch above the doctor’s body. The man was bright, melodic, symphonic, and orderly, with a quality like Handel’s fireworks music. Compared to the grayness, static, and howling in Jamie’s body, overwhelming the clear tones and white light, this man a little past his father’s age seemed healthier.

  Jamie withdrew from the imagery and reported it to Don. The doctor sat up. “I love it that you hear music. I wish I could have tuned in. I am pretty healthy. You picked that up. But you didn’t notice a touch of osteoarthritis in my spine. It’s definitely disharmonious when I’m playing tennis.”

  “Guess I’m not too sharp at this. Wonder if I get your personality or your mood, don’t even read your body.”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself. My dominant physical trait is wellness. You found that.”

  “Bloody oath. If I am accurate, I’ll be lucky to be crawling when I’m your age, after what I found in myself. And all those people found something weird in me. The sparkles. The swarms. What are they?”

  “I don’t know. I can do an intuitive scan, but you've had quite a few already, and one more wouldn't give you a diagnosis. If you’re worried, you should see your doctor. That’s the real value in medical intuition. It can pick up things that cause no symptoms yet in people who wouldn’t go in for tests otherwis
e. Catch problems early.”

  Jamie was going on a long tour in another week. He hated his doctor. She was gloomy and negative and wanted to run unnecessary tests, as if a vegan could have high cholesterol or a man who took no drugs, not even over-the-counter pain killers, could have a liver problem. On top of that, she always kept him waiting forty-five minutes. He hadn’t been to her for so long she probably didn’t count as his doctor anymore. Now he would have to ask her to run tests, when he’d always refused them. It would be like letting her win. “You taking new patients?”

  “Sorry, no. I’m retiring at the end of the year.”

  “Why?”

  “To volunteer where I’m needed. I’ll be at a clinic in Haiti for a while, then we’ll see what’s next.”

  “Admirable. You’re a good bloke.” Jamie did some volunteering, but healing timid stressed-out cats at the shelter or playing music for patients at the hospital seemed small compared with a medical mission. “Guess I’ll put up with my doc, then.” He stood, and Don followed suit. “Wish you the best in Haiti.”

  Don handed Jamie a business card. “Keep in touch. If you don’t like your doctor, I might be able to refer you to someone more compatible.”

  “Thanks.” Jamie read the card and laughed. Don’s specialty was family practice and his last name was Gross. “Sorry. Guess everyone laughs at that, don’t they? Dr. Gross?”

  “Children do.” Don grinned. “And a few adults who think like them.”

  Mary Kay called the group to assemble for a wrap-up of the day’s studies. Jamie sat as close to Mae as possible, eliminating the air space between them. He wanted to merge molecules and feel her stability and confidence. His anxiety levels were rocketing. He hadn’t put Sierra in her place. And he was going to have to get a checkup.

  Chapter Four

  At the end of the day’s sessions, Mae looked forward to some active time outdoors and was glad she had brought her bicycle. Steady rhythmic activities like swimming and cycling eased Jamie’s anxiety, and just being near him, she could feel his stress. She left him for a moment to go thank her partner from the last practice. When she turned back, he was on his way out of the room already, with Sierra tagging along, talking at him like a reporter chasing a star. Mae couldn’t see his face, but the speed of his stride and set of his shoulders made his irritation clear.