A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1

by Shannon Wendtland

  I focused my gaze on the crystal in the window, and the rest of the room faded away. The chime sounded in my head. “Ask,” I said aloud at the same time as the velvety voice spoke in my mind.

  “Why can I feel the energy of the obsidian and Tara can’t?” said Melody.

  The voice came to me, and I repeated it to Melody. “The Sage is the Fullness. The Light is a torus. Their functions differ, yet they are of a compatible nature.” After the words, I saw an image of two circles, at a distance, one nestled inside of the other. The image pulled in close and I could see that the inner circle was more like a donut that folded in onto itself, and the other circle was a never-ending loop. A spiral that wound upon itself.

  “I don’t understand, what is the Fullness?”

  “The Fullness of knowledge of the beginning and the end, the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning.” The outer circle, the spiral, became a speck of light in the darkness that blossomed into a four-armed galaxy that flared for a moment before spiraling in on itself.

  “What does that have to do with feeling the energy of a piece of obsidian?”

  “Nothing at all, and everything.”

  Vaguely I heard Melody sigh, but I did my best to push the stray thought away. I could maintain a sort of soft focus when the information was not coming in a stream, but if I wasn’t careful, I would fall out of the transcendental moment and lose contact. I framed my own question and asked it aloud.

  “Who is the Sage?” I asked.

  “You are,” said the voice while I repeated it for Melody. The nested circles were beginning to fade.

  Melody rustled as she sat up, suddenly alert. “If Tara is the Sage, then who is the Light?”

  “Melody Ann Walker,” I said in time with the voice in my head. I tried not to get excited – even though I could tell we were on to something. The circles were gone now, and the slate of my mind was active, yet empty.

  “What is the function of the Light?” I asked carefully.

  “To complete the circuit,” the voice said and I repeated. A burst of light focused itself in my mind’s eye, with Melody at the center. She was the energy – it pulled up from the ground, through her feet, and shot out the top of her head like a fountain. As the light rained back down around her, it fed back into her feet again.

  “Holy crap,” said Melody. “That’s what Gramps said.”

  “Your grandfather is the Light.”

  “But you just said I was the Light.”

  “You are the Light.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “There are many stars in the sky, there are many grains of sand on a beach. There are many who complete the circuit.” The image of Melody as a fountain of light was replaced with an image of the night sky, each star in the inky darkness, a fountain of light. I gasped.

  And then I lost it, not so much a ‘zap! Game over’ kind of feeling—more like a deflated balloon. I blinked a couple of times, my eyes dry, and turned to look at Melody, who wore an inscrutable expression. Now was not the time to tell her about the pictures swimming around in my head, especially not the image of the night sky – that one I wanted to keep to myself, like a treasure.

  “Maybe we should go talk to your grandparents?” I suggested.

  “You think?” She seemed stressed and uncomfortable.

  “I always knew you were special,” I said, pretending to be serious. It only took a moment for Melody to grab the pillow from my bed and wallop me with it. And just like that, the awkwardness disintegrated into fits of laughter. I was glad to have this version of Melody back. That feeling in the pit of my stomach hadn’t gone away, but maybe I could ignore it for just a little longer.

  38. MELODY

  Gram and Gramps were sitting on the patio, Gramps in his wheelchair, Gram on a deep-seated teak chair with big white cushions. The shade from the live oak fell across them, keeping their skin cool in the late summer sun, and they had tall iced glasses of sweet tea garnished with lemon to keep their insides cool. I suddenly wanted a glass of tea for myself. “Tara, you want?”

  “Oh yeah, that sounds good. Your Gram makes the best sweet tea.”

  I grinned, because she was right. I had been plenty of places that tried to pass off colored water for tea, but you couldn’t accuse Gram of that. She said her tea was “southern style,” meaning dark and very sweet. With the appropriate amount of lemon, it was just about the best thing you could drink on a hot day.

  I grabbed a glass for each of us, each one half full of ice, got the box of vanilla wafers from the pantry, and headed out to the patio where Tara was already asking probing questions. No ever accused Tara of being shy.

  “Melody showed me how to feel the energy of the earth, you know, after you showed her. That is really cool.”

  Gramps grinned at Tara and motioned to me to hand over the box of cookies. “Isn’t it now?” He wiggled his naked toes in the grass. “You two are just beginning to venture down an amazing road. It will get much more interesting over the next few months, until your bodies dial in on the energy… then it will feel like it’s fading – but it’s not, trust me. Instead you will just become more precise with your ability to feel things.”

  “What do you mean?” I was excited that I could feel the earth and the obsidian; I could hardly imagine it getting more interesting than that.

  “It’s like the difference between sensing when a light is on or off and instead, being able to tell what color the light is, how bright it is, and where it’s coming from.”

  “A lightbulb, naturally,” said Tara.

  We all chuckled a little bit, but Gramps went on. “Melody can feel the obsidian. It is a low vibration stone, which means it vibrates at a lower frequency – slower – than something else, like quartz, or diamond. At a certain point she will be able to feel all the frequencies of all the stones, and then when she’s ‘dialed in’ she will be able to tell you which stone she is holding without even looking at it – because instead of just a vibration, she will feel it specifically. Like a signature.”

  “So what, you mean eventually I will be able to feel Tara’s quartz the way she does?”

  “You may even be able to feel it now.”

  “Will I be able to access the Akashic records too?” My brow wrinkled, because the impression I got earlier was that Tara and I were similar but different.

  “Probably not – at least, I have never met anyone who could do both.”

  “Why is that?” Tara asked, tilting her head out of the sun.

  “We’re not sure,” said Gram, wistful. “There’s so much we don’t know or understand about how it all works.”

  “How what works?” I asked as she stole a glance at Gramps, who shook his head slightly.

  “That’s too heavy a discussion for a day as beautiful as today. Ask me some other time. Maybe next time it rains.”

  “Oh, come on, Gram. You can’t leave us dangling like that.”

  “Yes, she can,” said Gramps, painstakingly picking his feet up and putting them on the footrest of his wheelchair. “Besides, it’s time for my physical therapy. You girls enjoy the day. Gram tells me we’re having barbecue for dinner.”

  I looked at Tara, who shook her head.

  “I can’t stay,” she said. “I promised my mom I would help her with some chores.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to come by after that if you like, dear. I did make a lemon meringue pie for dessert.”

  Tara grinned in that impish way she had. “Maybe I could come by and have some pie… while you’re telling me and Melody how to protect ourselves when we use the Spirit Board.”

  Gram’s brows rose, and Gramps whistled between his teeth. “Did you actually tell them that?”

  Gram’s eyes narrowed. “I did indeed.”

  “Well, then you better tell them over pie, before they get the idea they don’t need any advice and get themselves into a heap of trouble.”

  “Yay!” said Tara as she clapped her hands
.

  I was excited, too. The whole event at the river boat had left us hanging. And with the information we got from the Akashic Records being so cryptic, I really thought our best chance at finding another clue was to reach out to my brother’s ghost again. Man that sounded weird. As if ghosts were real. Were they?

  It was 8:00 p.m. before Tara was able to make it back over for pie and the Spirit Board safety talk. I had to admit to being more than a little serious. All this talk had me stewing all day long. If I had to admit that my brother’s ghost was a real phenomenon, if I had to admit that I could feel the freaking Schumann Resonance in my feet… what else did I have to admit? What else was real that I always thought was make-believe? Fairies? Dragons? Martians?

  “Man, this summer has got to be the weirdest on record for me. Maybe for anyone.”

  “What do you mean, dear?” asked Gram, her back to us as she sliced the pie across, then across again. She put one thick slice on each plate and brought them to us. For herself, she just had a small sliver and another glass of sweet tea.

  “All this stuff, this…magic stuff.”

  “Magic!” said Tara around a mouthful of lemon meringue. She had fluffy white blobs stuck to the corners of her mouth as she ate much too large a bite for her mouth to accommodate.

  “What else do you want to call it? We’ve got weird vibes, energy from the earth, a Spirit Board, a positive orgone generator that scares away evil entities… come on Tara.”

  Her mouth full of her second bite, she just shrugged. “Magic, I guess. Sort of sums it all up.”

  It was then that we noticed that Gram was trying not to choke on her tea as she smothered a laugh. “Oh, my children. You talk about magic like it’s some elusive, mysterious thing.”

  “Well, isn’t it?” Tara asked since it was my turn to take a bite of pie.

  “Of course not. Magic is just a catch-all word for science that can’t be explained yet.”

  “No, it’s not the same, it’s…”

  “Think about it,” she continued after a sip. “If you took a television and a Blu-ray player back to the Spanish Inquisition and showed a movie to those evil, backwards monsters, what do you think they would have done to you?”

  “Burned us at the stake,” I said quickly.

  “For being witches,” said Tara more thoughtfully.

  “Precisely.”

  “But, it’s not witchcraft… It’s, it’s science,” I spluttered. “It’s not the same.”

  “Really? Then what about alchemy then? You know what an alchemist was?”

  “A scholar who was obsessed with the idea that he could transmute lead into gold.”

  “A gold star for the kindergarten answer. You’ve both had chemistry, haven’t you? Organic chemistry?”

  We nodded. Neither one of us had particularly liked the class, but yeah, we’d taken it.

  “And did either one of you notice there’s barely a difference between the atomic numbers of gold and lead?”

  We both shrugged.

  “I suggest you look it up sometime. Transmuting lead into gold is not only possible to do, it has been done, in 1951. If you had been able to show that to men from the time of Archimedes, you would have been labeled as some of the most skilled magicians of the world. And really my dears, all along, it was just science.”

  I rebelled at the idea that the word magic was interchangeable for science. It was almost too much to think that all this stuff was real, and then to have Gram shrug at me, to my face, and say “Yeah so?” Suddenly I lost my appetite for pie, for Spirit Boards, for weird stuff altogether. “I think I’m tired,” I said. “Too much for one day. And all this science talk is just making me…”

  “Cranky?” Gram put her hand over mine.

  “Yeah. I was going to say bitchy, but yeah.”

  “Okay,” said Tara, not sure what was up, but she knew me well enough to know when I was about to go from zero to bitchy for no reason. “Hope you feel better tomorrow, Mel,” she said. “Is it okay if I stay to finish my pie?” she looked at Gram.

  I left the kitchen before I could get waspish. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me, but it probably had to do with too much mumbo jumbo in too short a timeframe. First Matthew’s ghost, then Matthew’s secret stash, and now magic. Magic!

  I tried not to slam my bedroom door behind me and flopped on my bed. After an irritated second, I shimmied out of my shorts and shoes and emptied my pockets onto the bedside table. Last to go was the necklace with the pog on it. I fingered it for a minute, pulled it off roughly, and threw it across the room. Dark entities be damned; I’d had enough magic for one day.

  39. G.

  I walked around Sam’s new wheels. It was beautiful. Three thousand pounds of steel and chrome, rag top and leather seats. I whistled between my teeth.

  “You want to go for a spin?” he grinned at me from the driver’s side as he swung the coupe’s long door open and slid in.

  “Yeah, man. Let’s take this baby for a ride.” The leather felt like butter beneath my fingertips as I ran my hand over the backrest and then put my ass in the seat. “I can’t believe your mom let you buy this.”

  “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he said and put a tape into the cassette deck. There was something strange about that, but I shrugged it off. Of course he had a tape deck.

  We cruised out of the neighborhood and down the highway, building up speed as we eased into traffic. There was a long stretch of empty road ahead of a few cars, and Sam stepped on the gas pedal to fill it.

  The sky was dark down the road; a heavy thunderhead filled the sky from horizon to the sliver of moon overhead. Flashes of lightning, occasional booms of thunder and not much else filled the deserted stretch of highway. I looked around for the other cars but they were gone – not left in the dust, but gone as if they had never been there in the first place. I rubbed my eyes, feeling like I was missing something.

  “Hey, will you fast forward to the next song? I hate this one.”

  The feminine voice startled me, and I turned to see a slender girl with dark hair and lots of eye makeup grinning at me from the back seat. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, only red vinyl hearts over her nipples. I knew her, but I’d never seen her before. As our gazes locked, she gave me a long slow blink, and then she winked.

  “Sure, babe,” said Sam, pushing the fast forward button on the tape deck.

  I looked over at him, and he was making eyes at her in the rearview mirror. Suddenly, there was a semi-truck looming in front of us, its yellow light cutting through the dark haze of the incoming storm. I freaked out a little and grabbed the wheel, afraid that Sam hadn’t seen the truck.

  “Not cool, man!” he yelled, grabbing the wheel away from me and slapping at my hand. “I got it under control.”

  I didn’t think he did. In fact, I could feel something at the edge of my consciousness, warning me that something bad was coming. Something not just on the horizon, but something coming from the sides, from the back, something just out of view. It was dark and shadowy and slick.

  A lightning bolt burst from the sky and illuminated everything in the sudden darkness; harsh blue-white light made the bones in Sam’s face stand out as if he were emaciated and malnourished. I looked behind me to see Lily in the back seat and her eye sockets were dark with only shiny pinpricks where her eyes should be. My heart thumped and the adrenaline spread like a hot wave through my veins. Another lightning bolt and I looked ahead again, at the vast nothingness of West Texas desert, at the road stretched before us, blacktop with yellow lines, at a dim line of mountains in the distance. As that bolt came slamming down to earth, another one rose up from the ground to meet it.

  There was a tremendous clash of thunder that made me flinch, despite my heightened state of adrenaline. I looked wildly about, trying to assess the threat. It was then that I noticed the glow – off in the distance – a yellowish glow low on the horizon.

  “We’re almost there,” said Lily in
my ear. “Not even a quarrel can fly this far,” she grinned slow and sly.

  “What? Where?” I yelled over the sound of the wind and driving rain that had begun to slash us with its icy drops. I peered at her over my shoulder.

  “Orla,” she whispered.

  I woke with a start. My heart was pumping, and my body was sweaty. I looked around my room, sure that something was there with me. There was a darkness in the corner, intense and black, with a presence that could not be mistaken. There was something there and it was watching me.

  I lurched out of the bed and rushed across the room, ready to put my Muy Thai to use, but when I got to the corner, the lightning outside flashed again, and I could see that it was only my dad’s golf clubs leaning up against the wall.

  I clenched my fists and scanned the room for another moment, but with each additional lightning flash I could see there was nothing there, probably never had been, and the dream combined with a real-life Texas thunderstorm had just given me a really bizarre hallucination. A chirp from across the room sounded, and it made me jump—my phone. I picked it up and saw a text from Sam.

  Dude, you awake?

  40. SAM

  Hell, yes. Storm giving me some creepy-ass dreams, was G.’s text in reply.

  That almost made me laugh, except I had a creepy-ass dream of my own and he was in it. Coincidence?

  Me, too. You were in mine. We were driving down the highway in a retro convertible.

  There was a really long pause before I got a return text. Calling you was all it said.

  The phone rang and I answered. G. was freaking out.

  “How the hell do you know what I dreamed?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t mess with me, man. How did you know I dreamt about us riding around in your new car with Lily in the back seat?”

  “I – what?” My mind raced over the visuals of the dream I’d just woken from and then rewound and fast-forwarded again. There was no Lily in my dream. “I had the same dream – only mine didn’t have Lily in it. It had Melody.”