Banish

by Nicola Marsh

  I clamped my lips shut. Yeah, like I could take it all back now.

  Angie leaped off the bed and towered over me. “Your boyfriend’s screwing with you. He’s a sick freak. Dump him.”

  I stared at her in open-mouthed shock. Not once in the last ten minutes had I contemplated Ronan could have done this as part of some elaborate, sick joke.

  I shook my head. “Ronan didn’t do this.”

  Angie frowned. “He made you the clip. Has to be him.”

  “So you believe me?” I hated how pathetically needy I sounded, my loser status increasing when Angie draped her arm around my shoulders and hugged me.

  “Aw, honey, ’course I believe you. Just because we can’t see everything doesn’t make it less real.”

  Uh-oh. Now I was being lumped into her nebulous great beyond.

  She released me so fast I almost fell off the chair. “Oh my goddess, why didn’t I think of this before?”

  She snapped her fingers, leaped off the bed and did a weird jig around my chair. “Maybe you’re showing signs of a spiritual connection? Your first link to the after-life?”

  Crap. I didn’t know which was worse: seeing a dead body or preparing to communicate with it.

  She snapped her fingers. “Let me do a reading for you.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but she bundled me off the chair and out the door before I could say a word. Besides, having Angie perform a tarot reading couldn’t be as bad as being holed up in my room with that stuff on my computer.

  I had to admit, I did feel slightly better confiding in Angie, but she’d raised a whole lot of new questions I’d rather avoid. If I wasn’t as crazy as my mom, maybe Ronan did plant that atrocity on purpose? Why? And if that wasn’t freaky enough, a small part of me had latched onto Angie’s explanation.

  My mom, who revered Wicca as the sole religion on the planet, professed connections to the dead and beyond. Angie was a high priestess urban witch. What if I’d inherited an ounce of their combined talents?

  Heaven help me.

  Or considering Mom’s demonic links, should that be Hell?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I DIDN’T HAVE the heart to stop Angie as she led me by the hand into her special room, the cordoned-off space near her bedroom where she performed her rituals. Thankfully, most of her rituals occurred when I was at school but the juniper incense lingered in the air long after, a constant reminder I was part of a magick family even if I didn’t believe.

  How could I, when the Wiccan Rede, the very heart of a witch’s belief, cited “do no harm”. So what had Mom been doing to me the last five years? Her “an it harm none, do as ye will” mantra had faded faster than her oldest spells scrawled in her Book of Shadows, soaked up by spirits, of the liquid kind.

  Mom hadn’t gone in for all the witchcraft paraphernalia once I’d hit puberty. She’d preferred to sit around in a stupor, pretending to communicate with spirits and see dead people. When she wasn’t tossing back vodka shots.

  “Over here, sweetie. Take a seat.”

  Angie thrust me onto a Persian ottoman while she bustled over to her goody box, a beautiful chest of drawers almost reaching the ceiling. I’d investigated it one day when she’d had been out, skimming my fingertips over the glowing mahogany wood, the handpainted scenes taken from the French countryside. I loved the mystery of it, though I dared not open any of the twenty square drawers. Admiring a beautiful piece of furniture was one thing: discovering it housed frogs’ legs and dried rhino horn and other things went beyond curiosity.

  “You know I don’t believe, right?”

  Angie stopped what she was doing and pinned me with a formidable glare. “Believing is knowledge. Knowledge is power. Wouldn’t you rather know if what you saw is contact with the dead?”

  Uh, that would be a resounding no. But Angie believed in me when I didn’t know what to believe myself, so I managed a mute nod.

  Appeased, she opened a middle drawer and slid out a purple silk bag. “Tarot isn’t definitive, but a little interpretation of what you saw can’t hurt.”

  What needed interpreting? I’d seen a dead girl in my new boyfriend’s music video. Pretty clear-cut to me.

  That room had been real. That blood had been real. That calendar had been real. Real enough for me to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Angie was right. Had I developed the same sixth sense that plagued Mom the past few years and drove her to drink?

  I thought kids were supposed to change once they hit puberty, but somehow the opposite had happened in our family. I’d been okay. My lovable, eccentric mom had changed into a nervous pacer who muttered under her breath and talked to air. She became moody and aloof and skittish, constantly watching me like she half-expected I’d show similar symptoms.

  I’d debated calling in a mental health team but had nixed the idea pretty quick. They would have carted her off to an asylum and where would that have left me? In a foster home? Away from Broadwater and my friends?

  Nah, I’d coped. Until Noah’s death when it all seemed too hard. Mom hadn’t wanted me staying with Angie but wouldn’t elaborate why. I assumed it was a case of wannabe Wicca sibling rivalry, what with Angie being high priestess and Mom a lapsed witch.

  Angie wouldn’t answer my questions either. She’d nod, her secret smile infuriating, as if she knew something I didn’t, muttering about other powers at work and being chosen and the importance of believing.

  I never knew whether the voices drove Mom to drink or the drink drove her to hear voices but whatever the cause, I didn’t want any of it. I wanted my mom back. The mom who fostered my curiosity but never forced her beliefs on me. The mom who shared my love of old musical films and green tea and Oreos. The mom who hummed off-key Rolling Stones hits and danced around the kitchen while preparing fajitas and impulsively hugged me when I least expected it.

  I didn’t know how or why it had all gone wrong for her but I missed my mom something fierce.

  Angie sat cross-legged on a matching ottoman and slid the tarot cards out of their silk casing. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  Silence stretched taut, punctuated by the occasional horn of a heavy-handed midnight taxi driver outside, as she handed me the cards.

  I shuffled, not needing instruction. I’d played with the cards as a little kid, had snuck them out of Mom’s dresser, loving the colours and patterns. Later, when I’d learned to read, I’d become fascinated with the names: the Fool, the High Priestess, the Challenger.

  Then I’d made the mistake of showing off with them in front of my friends one day, predicting Cosmo model shoots and hot guys and top grades via the One Great Voice, my imaginary muse I’d invented for the occasion. Mom had walked in on us, her shock and subsequent freak-out scaring my friends. Later, when I’d asked why, she’d forbidden me to talk of tarot. Next time I’d gone to sneak the cards, they’d vanished.

  “Take your time.” Angie’s subtle way of saying, “Hurry the hell up”.

  I handed the cards back and Angie laid out the first on the low coffee table between us, the soft snap of the card sending a shiver tiptoeing across the back of my neck. I might not believe but there was something about being in this room with my aunt that raised the hairs on my arms.

  “The Magician.” Angie stared at the card for ages before raising her curious gaze to mine. “An upright Magician suggests an ability to recognise one’s own potential.”

  I knew what her loaded stare meant: she’d connected this stupid card to me seeing that dead body and some nebulous link to the afterlife.

  Yeah, right.

  When I didn’t speak, she turned over the next card from the top of the deck. “The Fool.”

  Huh. Didn’t need a card to tell me that either.

  “The beginning of a journey, possibly mental or spiritual, the start of a new life cycle.”

  Sheesh, she had to be making this crap up in another blatant attempt to convince me witchcraft was all it was cracked up to be.

&n
bsp; “Could also mean overturning the status quo by unexpected happenings.”

  Next she’d be wiggling her eyebrows and yelling, “See, told you the cards knew all.”

  She flipped the next one and my heart stuttered.

  Death.

  I’d had enough of that in my life without seeing it as part of my phoney destiny.

  My dad had died when I was five months old. Heart attack. Then Noah last year…A physical ache spread through my chest, suffocating me, and I dragged in several deep breaths before it eased.

  Mistaking my reaction for fear of the card, Angie touched my hand. “It’s not a bad thing. Upright Death indicates the beginning of a new life. Major changes. An abrupt and complete change of circumstances due to past events and actions.”

  Now she was seriously spooking me.

  “One more and we’ll discuss, okay?”

  With the pain of losing Noah fresh from remembrance, ripped open like a festering wound, I didn’t want to discuss anything. But the faster she finished the sooner I could escape to my room.

  My body tensed as she slowly turned over the last card. I glimpsed the noose first and my throat constricted.

  She hesitated, darting a concerned glance my way and I nodded imperceptibly. I couldn’t change what had happened with Noah, what he’d done, and some bogus tarot couldn’t change it either.

  Angie cleared her throat. “The Hangman. Meaning transformation, but this one’s reversed.”

  I couldn’t speak past the lump in my throat so I raised an eyebrow, urging her to continue. We’d come this far, what was another outlandish proclamation?

  “This card implies loss.”

  No shit.

  When Noah had hanged himself the day after I’d dumped him, I’d stopped functioning, unable to comprehend the news. I hadn’t found him. That had fallen to Sammy, my nemesis at Broadwater High. And even that added to my guilt, like it should’ve been me who made the shocking discovery.

  Sammy hadn’t returned to school for a week and when I’d approached her to express my sympathies she’d turned on me, screaming vile obscenities in Main Street during the after-school rush hour, blaming me, tormenting me. More than I was already tormenting myself.

  The horror still lingered eight months later, something I’d never recover from but was trying to forget.

  Angie pointed at the card. “It also signifies ‘better the devil you know’. A failure to move forward.”

  Bull. I’d moved forward. I’d moved here, left the only home I’d ever known, got better grades, new friends—okay, one friend counting Seth—a new boyfriend.

  Screw Death and the Hangman and their dumb prophecies of doom.

  I leaped to my feet. I didn’t want to hear any more. “Thanks.”

  As I’d suspected, tarot was a waste of time. It hadn’t answered any questions about the dead body and Angie had given me some nebulous crap about the past and dealing with it to move forward. But I kept my annoyance to myself, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

  “Don’t dismiss what we did here,” she said, her tone grave.

  Although I hadn’t said anything, my derisive expression must have been a dead giveaway.

  Angie tapped the cards with a peacock blue painted fingernail. “Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it can’t help.”

  “Help what? Help me decide whether I’m as crazy as Mom?” The bitterness spilled out in a torrent, tainting my words with a brush of truth.

  “Aurora’s not crazy.”

  “Yeah? What about her midnight chats with thin air? Her senseless chatter to the walls? Her—”

  “She hasn’t got a grip on her talent yet, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  Hysterical laughter bubbled up from deep within me, erupting in a harsh cackle. “She talks to imaginary friends, she believes she’s possessed by spirits. You can’t say ‘that’s all’!”

  “Calm down.” Angie had never snapped at me before and the fact she did now acted like a slap to the face.

  Drained, I knuckled my eyes, embarrassed by the slow burn of tears.

  She slid the cards back into a drawer, her narrow-eyed gaze fixed on me. “We get it, Lyssa. You don’t believe in Wicca or spirits or otherworldly phenomena, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

  What hope did I have, coming from the same gene pool as them? I might as well sign my own admittance forms to the nearest funny farm.

  Desperate to get out of the room, I deliberately subdued my belligerence. “I respect your beliefs, I just don’t go for all that stuff.”

  Foreboding slithered through me like an insidious parasite as she muttered, “You will.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I WAITED UNTIL I heard Angie’s bear-like snores before slipping out the front door. Traipsing the deserted streets of Broadwater at one o’clock in the morning would have given me the creeps but New York City teemed with life—people heading home from late night shows, grabbing late suppers, going out to clubs—and the noise comforted me: cars honking, people laughing, sirens in the distance. I didn’t feel so alone, buffeted by the city sounds. Even the mingled smell of cigarettes, flowers, garbage and Chinese take-out reassured me. I loved the vibe, and could happily live here once I’d graduated college—if I ever decided what I wanted to do with my life.

  No career interested me. Ironic, considering how hard I’d worked on my grades since I’d arrived here and my higher marks would open more college doors.

  If Angie had anything to do with it, I’d be studying ghost-busting.

  The thought of ghosts had me picking up speed. I needed to get to Ronan, needed to figure out what the hell he’d been playing at with that music clip. For as much as I wanted to believe he was innocent, no other explanation made any sense.

  He had to have planted that footage.

  But who was the girl? And why would she pose like that, with all that fake blood? It had to be fake. The more I’d thought about it, the more I wouldn’t accept any other rationalisation.

  I’d texted Ronan; said I’d meet him at the Starbucks two blocks from his place. He’d been surprised but hadn’t baulked. That was the cool thing about older guys. They didn’t question why you wanted to meet in the early hours of the morning on a school night.

  I practically ran the last few blocks, eager for answers. He was waiting for me outside the cafe, rubbing his hands together to keep warm. My heart did a funny little jig before I slapped it down with a hard dose of reality. The hot musician boyfriend could be a raving lunatic.

  “Hey.” He opened his arms wide and I hesitated, hating the tiny frown that appeared between his eyebrows. By the time I slipped into his hug the damage had been done, our embrace stiff and stilted.

  He released me. “What’s up?”

  “Can we talk?”

  “Sure.” He didn’t miss a beat, but I caught him sneaking glances at me as we entered the warm steamy surrounds, the tempting coffee and cinnamon and chocolate aroma I usually liked doing little to calm my nerves.

  I paused for a second, recoiling when he laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, inadvertently shrugging off his hand, mentally cringing. “Coffee?”

  He shook his head. “I’d rather you start talking.”

  “Right.” Only problem was where did I start? The part where I thought he was a psychopath playing games, or the part where I might have inherited more than the strawberry blonde hair from Mom and Angie?

  “I thought you were coming over because of what happened earlier tonight. That kiss was too soon…?” Confusion clouded his eyes and I hated myself for thinking he could be a damn good actor.

  “I had fun earlier, it was what happened later.”

  He dropped into a chair and I took the one opposite. “Did your aunt go ballistic because you went to a club? Because I can ring her and explain.”

  “She’s cool.”

  F
rowning, he rubbed the back of his neck. “Then what?”

  There’d never be an easy way to say this and if I didn’t blurt it out in a rush, I’d stutter and ramble.

  “The song you wrote for me? The one you played? It was amazing and I loved it, but then I saw that other stuff and it freaked me out.”

  His frown deepened. “What other stuff?”

  I puffed out a long breath, floundering out of my depth. “The room, the girl, the…uh…dead body.”

  He jack-knifed out of the chair, shock etched into every angle of his face. “Are you nuts?”

  That seemed to be a common consensus tonight.

  I sighed. “I know it sounds crazy, but I saw it, and I wanted to ask you about it—”

  “You think you saw a dead body in my music clip?” He stared at me like I’d lost it. Like how I stared at Mom, an analogy that shook me to my core.

  “I’m not making it up, I saw it.”

  “Where? Which part of the song?”

  I gnawed on my bottom lip, hating how crazy this would make me sound but needing to solve this mystery. “At the end. After you finished playing.”

  “This is bullshit.” He grabbed my hand and tugged me out of the chair. “Come with me.”

  “Let me go.” I snatched my hand out of his and he stared at me like I’d morphed into a monster.

  Condescendingly calm, he folded his arms and eyeballed me. “There’s only one way to clear up this mess, and that’s if you see where I work.”

  Made sense but the last place I wanted to be right now was alone with him, in his apartment. Until I remembered I knew this guy. Had enjoyed spending time with him the last few weeks—albeit for school. Had believed in him enough to head to his place hours ago. Had trusted him enough to let him kiss me.

  He radiated resentment. “If it makes you feel any better, ring your aunt. Tell her where you’re going and that you’ll be home in thirty minutes.”

  I hated the disillusionment clouding his eyes, hated not trusting him, hated how our memorable evening had ended like this.

  “I’ll text her.” I pretended to tap at my cell’s keyboard, knowing Angie would put a curse on both of us if she knew I was about to enter Ronan’s apartment.