“His,” I put in bitterly and her face became pinched.
“Someday you will understand my motivations. Feelings are nothing. They are fleeting. Power lasts. Power makes a difference.”
I had very little in common with this alien being. I wanted more answers though, and making her mad wasn’t going to get me them. “Okay, so you two got together to create a powerful creature. I won’t ask how disappointed you were when you got one who hated what you made her. I want to know how he died.”
“The sirens and the vampires had been aligned for a long time. One day, the vampires rose up against the sirens. The sirens fought back by calling the vampires to the sun. It looked as if the sirens would win.”
“But?” I prompted as she went still.
“But then we woke one morning and the sirens were all gone. Your father, all of them, just gone.”
“How did you know that the vampires won?”
“The vampires let it be known to all who had known any of the sirens. Basically they contacted witches, who tend to befriend them, and the witches told others and before long we all knew. So, the vampires were avoided from then on.”
“Nobody did anything about it? How did you know? Who told you?”
“His name was Randolph, I remember that much. He came to me one night and said that your father was dead—that he had killed him and wanted to know who survived him. I said no one. He looked at you and asked if you were his daughter. I laughed and told him to smell you. Everyone knew sirens smelled of the sea. He smelled you. He smiled at me and left.”
“So, my father was murdered.”
“No, he was killed in a war.”
“So, my father was murdered,” I repeated.
“If you want to be dramatic about it, yes. However, if the sirens hadn’t tried to control the vampires, the vampires wouldn’t have killed them.”
“Did my father have anything to do with controlling the vampires or was he murdered for the acts of others?”
“Oh, where do you come up with this crap?” she snapped. “Don’t martyr your father. He was no saint. He helped make you, and the whole point of that was to control the night and day world. I am happy he didn’t live. I would have hated to see what a disappointment you would have been to him.”
Her eyes flashed in anger at me, and I found a well of cold deep within me and cloaked myself with it. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing her words cut me. I would never let her know that for years, things said along those lines made me bleed. I merely nodded. “Thank you for coming over, mother. It means a lot to me that you finally told me all this.”
She sniffed at me, haughty, cold. I failed to see how sirens were supposedly cold. My mother wasn’t a siren, and she was by far the coldest person I had ever met.
I ran a bath in the big black tub. I lit the candles and wondered if Mia would ever be back to light them again. I poured something from a beautiful glass bottle that smelled of flowers into the water. I took off all my clothes and sank under the bubbles, face below the surface, and held my breath as long as I could.
I had read somewhere that sirens were supposed to be tortured souls.
I wished I wasn’t so close to the mark.
~
I awoke when Vickie landed on the bed, smelling of snow and little girl.
She curled up with me. “Mom, Sven said you had to go to some circle thing tonight and that you probably wouldn’t care if me and him, since tomorrow is Friday and we don’t have school because of that teacher day thing—”
“He and I,” I corrected automatically. I ignored the run on sentence.
“Yeah, he and I took my friend Jordan to the new Pixar movie.”
“Any homework?” I kissed her head and vowed I was never, ever going to tell her I was disappointed in her. I don’t care if she grows up to be a hobo, I will tell her that she was the best hobo I ever met.
“No, I did it at school.”
“Lemme see the backpack.” She obediently fetched it, and I crawled out of bed. I was becoming a night person, sleeping in the daytime and running around with dead guys at night.
Refusing to believe she was dead, I knew I had to find Mia. Somehow it seemed I would know if she was gone, like the world would be a little darker if she weren’t in it.
Vickie showed me the work she’d done at school and, after dinner, I waved at her, Sven and a little blond girl as they left for the movie. While I still had the front door open, Julia appeared across the street waving. I went back upstairs, re-bagged all of the munchies and carried them downstairs.
I flipped the sign to closed, locked the door, and crossed the road to join Julia in her car. She had a nice car. I pulled on my seatbelt. “Is it okay, do you think, to close Odd Stuff early?”
“Mia always closes it for the circles. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
I nodded. “Where are we going anyway?”
“The beach.” She hummed to a song on the radio.
“Aren’t we going to freeze?”
She laughed. “Eat this and you will be fine.”
She passed me a granola bar looking thing. It was soft and looked like it had chocolate chips in it. “What is it?”
“A potion of sorts. Just eat it.” Well, last night I drank a shot from a vampire bar, so this probably was considerably less harmful than whatever that was. I ate it, and she pulled into Walnut Beach. On the sign that read Walnut Beach, a smaller sign had been posted saying the park was closed for the season, yet it looked like someone plowed the driveway free of snow.
I shifted in my seat, suddenly hot and pulled off my coat. Still warm, I pulled off the sweatshirt I had on over a T-shirt and was still warmer than I wanted to be.
I looked at Julia. She wore a coat, but pulled it off now that we had parked to reveal a bikini top.
“What is in that protein bar? I feel like it’s summer, but I see snow—”
“Magic. Told you, sweetie, we’re witches. It will wear off in a couple of hours.” With that, she got out of the car and I followed. We went down what was probably the boardwalk, but was invisible from all of the snow. The wind cut off the lake, but it only felt cooling to my over warm skin.
This is so weird.
I looked out over the water and could see a lighthouse in the distance. Lighthouse meant rocky shore, and I wondered if my father ever lured some ship into sinking here. Okay, maybe I was still sort of depressed from earlier. Sleep didn’t cure all ills.
Women gathered along the break wall. Lit candles melted into the sand and the women all wore either swim suits or T-shirts and shorts. I was the most dressed woman in my jeans and tee, and I was far too unclothed for the beach in snow. I wondered mildly what anyone would think if they saw it. There certainly wasn’t a rational explanation. What do witches do anyway, besides hang out on the beach in the dead of winter in swim suits?
I caught Julia’s arm. “What exactly are we doing again anyway?”
“A circle. Okay, here is the quick definition of Wicca. Wicca is a nature oriented religion rising out of Alexandrian witchcraft. We believe in harmony with the earth and with our nature as humans.”
Oh, well, I am kind of human-ish.
“We have rituals to celebrate many things, like equinox, and the changing of the moon. We also celebrate the power we have inside us. We celebrate the power of man, or God, and the power of woman, Goddess.”
I thought, well, that sure is a lot of partying, but kept my mouth shut.
“Tonight is just us girls,” she continued. “We are celebrating being women, creators, and the power of the Goddess.”
“Okay, how do we celebrate? Do we chug beers and swap labor and delivery stories, or what?”
She laughed and it was as husky and whispery as her speaking voice. “No, we do honor Maiden, Mother and Crone, though.”
Who?
I must have looked thrown off, because she added, “Women have three cycles in their lives. Maiden is the young virgin. Mother is t
he mother, like you. Crone is when our bodies can no longer reproduce.”
“Okay.” Young, fertile, and old. Made sense. Youth is growth, rebirth. Fertility is creation. And with old age comes wisdom. I could be okay it, so far.
“You have a lot of other stuff on your mind, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Do you have a potion for that, too?”
I was kidding, but she nodded and pulled out a small vial of liquid from her purse. She dabbed some on her fingertips then put the two wet fingers on my forehead. “Sun by day and moon by night, let all dark thoughts be put to flight.”
And it was almost weirder than the granola that made you not-cold. Suddenly, I wasn’t worried about anything.
That there was one neat spell. I wish I had known Julia before every job interview I had ever had. I looked at her and paid more attention to her explanations. “There are eight here tonight, counting us. That is half of our coven, plus our priestess. If the men were here, we would number sixteen. We make a circle and—well, you will see from there.”
I nodded and followed her to join the other women, who greeted us with lots of hugs and, “Blessed Be.”
I smiled at them, trying not to look too confused or out of place. They probably all knew I felt that way, anyway. I mean, they were witches, right?
One of them took a small black handled dagger and began drawing a circle around us once we’d all joined hands in a circle. Another person rang a bell.
The person standing to the east raised her hands above her, palms up, and called out, “Watchtower of the East, I call you. By the power of Air, that is mine to call, let this circle be a barrier separating inside from outside, so that nothing may pass except by our will. As this circle meets, so mote it be.”
Someone rang the bell again. The wind seemed to pick up and make what seemed to be a wall around the line cut in the snow and sand.
Emma, the one I thought of as the Amazon, stood to the north, and she raised her hands. “Watchtower of the North, I call you. By the power of Earth, that is mine to call, let this circle be a barrier separating inside from outside, so that nothing may pass except by our will. As this circle meets, so mote it be.” The very ground beneath our feet trembled.
The older woman—Delores, I think her name was—raised her hands. “Watchtower of the South, I call you. By the power of Fire, that is mine to call, let this circle be a barrier separating inside from outside, so that nothing may pass except by our will. As this circle meets, so mote it be.”
The candles flickered and the scent of bayberry grew stronger in the air. I had the unrelated thought that it must have been magic that kept them lit anyway, since it is very hard to keep candles lit outside.
Standing next to me, Julia raised her hands. “Watchtower of the West, I call you. By the power of Water, that is mine to call, let this circle be a barrier separating inside from outside, so that nothing may pass except by our will. As this circle meets, so mote it be.” Unlike the other three reasonably mild responses from the elements, Julia’s words caused water to flow over the break wall and come at us. It flowed around the circle, but didn’t cross into it.
Everyone stared. Julia dropped her arms. “Wow, and we aren’t even having a water ritual. Why did it do that, Delores?”
Delores looked at me, rather than Julia. “Water is a tricky element. And maybe we have someone with an affinity for it.”
I shifted my feet and looked away.
“In the name of the Goddess, we come here to—”
I drifted off into my own thoughts for the rest of the circle. I wondered how much I really had to do with the water coming toward us. I wondered, since the sun was setting, if Vance was waking up. I wondered if I concentrated on what they were doing, would more water was going to wash up, and decided I would not pay any more attention to the ceremony, just in case.
Before long, they called the elements again, closed the circles and gathered up their tools and miscellany and began pulling out food. Conversation shifted and turned to the sort of things you expected to hear when women were gathered—food, family, work, children.
Emma came over and took my arm. “I want you to meet our priestess. She is a close friend of Mia’s. I think you will like her.”
CHAPTER Eleven
Mia told me before about a woman everyone called Old Mother. If Mia knew her actual name, she’d never mentioned it that I remembered. She would write, Old Mother said, and what would follow would generally happen.
I was curious, and expected something along the lines of crinkled old woman, one milky eye, with knotted hair, resembling the witch from every movie ever made. Instead, Old Mother looked like a grandma. Her hair long ago went gossamer silver, and she wore a large ring on one slender, wrinkled finger. When she reached out to catch my hand in hers, her skin felt as soft as a baby’s though it was wrinkled and worn. Her short hair framed eyes yellowed by time, but she was easily one of the most beautiful women I had ever met. Peace flowed in the very air around her, and a sense of reverence similar to that of an old church.
She reclined on a slab of slate created by the beach side of the break wall, and I knelt in front of her in the snow. I don’t know why I knelt, but it seemed right. She smiled at me. “What power you have been given for one so young!”
Usually I would have protested, but it didn’t seem right to do so with Old Mother, so I simply nodded.
“It is good that the power burdens you, and you don’t take it for granted. What a hard lesson that must have been for you.”
I nodded, again. I tried not to remember just how hard the lesson had been…once I =realized what I was and how very badly things could go, but it all came flooding back anyway. Like a movie playing in my head, I remembered it sitting there in the sand.
Barely seventeen, Mia and I thought it would be fun to go to a bar. We were amazed that they had let us in. We giggled and some guys bought us drinks. Looking back, I would call them sick old men, but at the time we thought it all a blast.
We’d hung out with them for a few hours, then Mia and I decided to sing karaoke. I remembered the song had been Love is a Battlefield, picked because of some movie about a girl with short blond hair who rebelled, which seemed fitting because we’d snuck out, at a bar, rebelling. I sang. We were too young, too stupid, to notice everyone had gone quiet. We were too busy singing and laughing.
Then I closed my eyes and let go.
I didn’t notice Mia stopped singing. I hadn’t drained them, not knowing that was even a possibility, but what happened was worse, somehow. I opened my eyes as the man closest to me started clawing at his eyes, drawing blood. I screamed and more people had torn at themselves. I was alone, even Mia trapped by a spell I neither knew how to use or undo. I yelled, “Help, somebody, help! What is happening?”
No one had answered. Like a waking nightmare, all of the adults, the people who were supposed to help when an overgrown kid did something stupid, now stared at me. Blank faced except for the tortured ones, the ones who still clawed at their ears, their eyes. I had stopped singing, but it didn’t stop whatever I had already done. No one helped, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
I had tried to run away, to run out of the bar, but the people reached out to touch me, eyes dead and blank. They had reached for me, tried to get to me, and all I wanted was away. I pushed off their hands and weaved my way through them, a sea of gripping zombie people, who moments before had been normal. They pulled at my hair, my clothes, anything they could reach. I pushed on until I made it to the door.
I screamed on the street and eventually help came. Most of the people were okay. Later, they’d say they didn’t know what had happened. The cops said it was some gas leak, far below ground which made everyone go mad for awhile. They always find some way to explain the unexplainable.
But I knew. It was me. Two men who had stood close to a speaker, they never recovered. One later committed suicide. The other become a drug addict and eventually ove
rdosed. Both claimed to hear a voice in their head. The authorities said that they suffered the most oxygen deprivation to the brain or something...
The voice in their heads was mine. I killed them as surely as if I held a gun and pulled a trigger. I swore never to sing again. Never. My voice was the most terrible, horrible thing—what could be good about being able to destroy like that? For no better reason than to have fun.
I was a monster. I knew that and tried so hard to make up for it. I worked to be a good person and mother, hoping in some small way to make up for one night when I destroyed two men. All of it came back so vividly that tears leaked out of my eyes. I wondered if the old woman caused me to remember it.
Old Mother stroked my head. “How hard it must be now to have to break all your own rules to help one you love.”
I looked at her. “Am I doing the right thing?”
She sighed. “What is right? We are what we are, and I don’t see anything in all of Creation made evil. There is better and there is worse. I think you are trying to make things better, but know this—anything that goes against its own nature for too long goes sour. If you continue to try to be something you aren’t, you are going to destroy yourself.”
“Who is the bad guy? I mean, who is the one who is causing all of this?”
“You are, to a point.”
Now I looked at her, confused. “How can I cause it? I just got here. I’m not making people kill people because of Vance. I haven’t kidnapped Mia. How does any of this mess have any—”
“Child, hush. Time and space are a lake. The tiniest thrown stone causes ripples that splash to the far shore. You will, soon, betray your friends, and you will save them. There is one who will love you, that, had you accepted him years ago, would have been able to stop this all from happening, but you didn’t and now things will go differently. Time is not linear, it flows like a river and cuts a path now that no one can stop. It is not a bad path, and I think that things will work out in the end. It is, though a bumpy path. You will hurt and you will err, and you will grow and you will love. And love makes everything worth it. Love is a more powerful magic than any we can cast in a spell.”
Odd Stuff Page 15
