Crone’s Moon argi-5

by M. R. Sellars

  Ben hadn’t even changed positions that I could tell, but Dickens had abandoned him- most likely having gone in search of a quieter place to sleep as my friend had begun to snore at a level louder than most gasoline-powered lawnmowers.

  In our own bid to escape the noise, after Felicity had cleaned up, we retreated to the kitchen. At least the distance and walls managed to dull the cacophony enough for us to talk.

  “Anyone else want coffee?” I asked, holding up the carafe. “It’s fresh.”

  “I’m good,” RJ answered.

  He had his small frame perched up on one end of our kitchen counter where it ran below the back window. His back was against the frame, and he was in the perfect spot to see anything and everything that was going on. In a way, I guess it was his designated spot and always would be.

  Following the murder of their Priestess- a former student of mine- Felicity and I had adopted this young Coven. Our intent had been to point them in the right direction, send them out on their own, and then return to our solitary practice. But, as with all best laid plans, things just didn’t work out that way. Unfortunately, I wasn’t entirely sure that it had been for the best. Looking back, I wondered if they were doomed by my presence from the very beginning as my involvement with them was born of violence on day one. And, it was a motif that had continued throughout the years.

  Until the past few months, we had held almost all of the meetings here. Each time, be it a class, ritual, or Sabbat, for whatever reason, the entire group had invariably migrated to the kitchen. And, every single time, RJ had ended up parked in the exact spot he was now, sitting in the very same half-lotus position while watching with curious eyes and drinking it all in.

  It had been five months now since I’d seen him, or anyone else from the Coven besides Felicity for that matter; something that was my own choice as my wife had been so intent on pointing out. But I didn’t regret it. At least, I didn’t think that I did.

  As time wore on, I had once again grown used to practicing The Craft with Felicity alone. I had even managed to get my energies under control and re-focus myself on some of the basics I had seemed to forget in the wake of everything I’d been subjected to, both ethereal and physical.

  But, standing here now, there was something oddly comfortable about the sight of RJ and Cally making themselves at home in the kitchen as they’d done so many times before. Felicity was correct. These people were family, and in some small way, even considering the negative circumstances, this was a homecoming.

  “I’m going to get some ice water if that’s okay,” Cally said.

  “Yeah, go for it,” I replied, breaking out of my introspective trance as her words met my ears. I turned and slid the pot back onto the base then nodded my head toward the cabinets. “Glasses are where they’ve always been.”

  “I’ll take a Jaim…” Felicity began.

  “…Not this time.” I cut her off.

  “Jaim…” she started again, adding a demanding note to her voice.

  “…I said no,” I interrupted her again, adopting my own stern tone as I stepped over to the breakfast nook and slid a cup of coffee in front of her. “Not this time. Now take the aspirin, drink the coffee, and try to relax. The caffeine will help, trust me.”

  “But…”

  “No but’s.” I shook my head. “I’ve already got Ben passed out on the couch. I’m not going to have you going in that direction too.”

  “I was gonna ask about that,” RJ said.

  “What, Ben? Apparently he tied one on,” I stated simply. There was no reason for them to know the impetus behind his binge.

  “So have you remembered anything else?” I asked, turning my attention back to Felicity.

  “Anything else?” she asked with more than a hint of confusion in her voice. “I don’t remember anything at all.”

  “Well you just told me a few minutes ago that Brittany Larson is dead,” I returned.

  “I did what?”

  “Yeah, Felicity,” RJ chimed in. “You said, ‘She’s dead. Brittany is dead.’”

  “No…” she muttered, her voice trailing off, not denying that she’d said it but still verbally rejecting that it could be true.

  Her hand was covering her mouth, and her head pitched forward as her shoulders drooped.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I told her, resting a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve done better than me on this one so far.”

  “For all the good it’s done, then,” she replied, her voice cracking slightly.

  “Mind if I use your phone to call Nancy?” Cally asked in a somber tone. “She and the twins are probably worried sick.”

  “Help yourself,” I replied. “Tell her I’ll make arrangements to get Felicity’s Jeep as soon as I can.”

  “Yeah,” RJ interjected. “While you got her on the line, ask her if Moonpie Fairybunny bolted or what.”

  “RJ!” Cally admonished.

  “Well what would you call her?” he asked with a shrug.

  “Her name is Candee,” she replied as she lifted the phone off the wall base and then disappeared around the corner into the dining room.

  “Yeah, Candee with two ‘e’s’, don’t forget,” he called after her, holding up a pair of fingers. “So, I rest my case.”

  “Moonpie Fairybunny?” I asked.

  “A seeker,” Felicity answered, speaking toward the surface of the table as she held her head in her hands.

  “She’s been to the last couple of classes,” RJ offered. “Real crystal crunching, cotton-tailed, white-lighter. Enough to make you gag.”

  “She probably won’t even ask to dedicate, RJ,” Felicity told him.

  “You’re probably right. You should have seen her face when you hit the floor,” he returned. “I think you scared the crap out of her.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Felicity asked.

  “About Fluffy?” RJ asked rhetorically. “Tell her not…”

  “No,” Felicity shot back, cutting him off and turning her face up to mine. “About Brittany Larson. What if she really is dead? Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  For the first time I could recall, I found myself standing on a very different side of the fence. It was a viewpoint with which I had more than just a passing familiarity but only when it was staring back at me. I had never seen the world from this angle, or at least not in the past few years.

  “Honey,” I began. “I hate to sound like Ben, but right now we’ve got nothing to go on. On top of that, you don’t even remember saying that she’s dead.”

  “But we have to do something,” she appealed.

  “I’m not saying we don’t,” I told her. “But at the moment, our best and only link to the investigation is soused and passed out on our sofa.”

  “Let’s wake him up, then,” she pressed.

  “Waking up isn’t the issue, Felicity. I don’t think you understand. He was trashed. And I mean trashed with the proverbial capital T. He’s going to have to sleep it off before he can even make a coherent sentence.”

  “Foicheallan. Drongair,” she spat.

  “What was that?” RJ asked.

  “You’ve heard her speak Gaelic before,” I told him.

  “Yeah, but what did she just say?”

  “I don’t know. Those were a couple of new ones to me.”

  “He’s a useless drunkard” came her retort.

  “Settle down, Felicity,” I told her, realizing that she was as in the dark about Ben’s circumstances as I had been just an hour ago. “He’s got his reasons.”

  “They’d best be good,” she remarked with a hard edge to her voice, looking up at me with anger flashing in her eyes.

  I certainly understood the turmoil and sense of urgency she was going through. It wasn’t like I had been guilty of it myself. However, I didn’t want to get into Ben’s personal life in front of Cally and RJ.

  I looked back at her without a word, hoping that the look on my face would get through to her and that sh
e’d drop the subject for now. She glared back for a moment, and I simply held her stare. I don’t know if it was my expression or just the fact that her brain had to be swimming in an untold number of directions, but she moved on, or back as the case may be.

  “Fine. So what are we going to do?” she demanded. “Sit around and wait for him to come to?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I returned, trying not to snap at her. I knew all too well how she felt.

  “What about Constance?” she declared. “Didn’t you say Ben told you she was assigned to the case?”

  With the turmoil of the evening, I had completely forgotten about the federal agent.

  I nodded assent. “You’re right. He did. I’ll try to get hold of her as soon as Cally’s off the phone. In the meantime, maybe we could try to jog your memory so we have something more to tell her.”

  She looked back at me and shuddered involuntarily. “I’m not so sure I’m ready for that.”

  I added, “I can understand that. Truth is I’m not so sure that I’m ready for you to do that either.

  “You know, something else we could do is put our heads together and try to figure out why this is happening to you instead of me.”

  Even as I was finishing the comment her face went blank. At first I thought she was about to have an episode, but instead of tensing up, she simply turned her face away from mine. In that instant, the thick ethereal walls she had constructed around herself palpably strengthened.

  My own psychic alarms began ringing in the back of my head as it became obvious that she was steeling herself not against the unknown but against me.

  “What’s going on, Felicity?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she returned flatly.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Nothing’s going on,” she stated again.

  “I know you better than that. You’re not telling me something.”

  Her voice continued to be cold and defiant. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Felicity…”

  “Fine,” she spat, wheeling back to face me. “I’ve got your answer. I know EXACTLY why this is happening to me.”

  CHAPTER 13:

  I had absolutely no idea where my wife was heading with this, but the sharpness of her present attitude told me it was a place I wasn’t going to be happy about. I knew her well enough to tell that her temper was flaring because she had been backed into a corner, or at least that is what she perceived to be happening. The fact that those green eyes were focused so intently on me and no one else was more than just an overt clue that I was the one who had chased her there- they were a proverbial smoking gun.

  I ran down a mental list of hastily formed theories but still came up empty. I simply couldn’t imagine what she could feel so strongly about keeping secret, given the circumstances. Unless, of course, she was about to issue the blame for her plight directly upon me, and by pushing I was inadvertently forcing her to voice that fact in front of friends. I hoped, however, that such was nothing more than my own insecurities about the pressure everyone had been under and that they were simply bubbling to the top at a less than opportune moment.

  I heard Cally re-enter the room behind me and drop the handset back into the cradle as she announced, “The twins are bringing Felicity’s Jeep over right now. They can ride back to Nancy’s with us.”

  “They didn’t have to do that,” I told her evenly without turning away from my wife’s molten stare.

  “They were already… on… their… way,” she replied, voice fading into a stutter near the end of the sentence. “I’m sorry. Did I interrupt something?”

  “I guess that depends,” I replied as the tension continued to swell. “Were you planning to expand on that last comment, Felicity?”

  Faced with the query, my wife backpedaled. “The phone is free. Shouldn’t you call Constance,” she said. The last part of the statement came not as a question but as an instruction.

  “In a minute,” I replied. I didn’t know if I was only serving to bring myself more grief, but something was telling me not to let this go without an answer. Her attempt to slam the door she had just opened a moment before only steeled my resolve to get it. “What did you mean you ‘know EXACTLY why this is happening’ to you?”

  She made another verbal attempt at escape. “Just forget it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We searched each other’s faces for a long moment, and while looking at her, I realized there was something more to this than I had first thought. Something was hiding in the shadows. What I had initially taken for anger alone now held what could have been a hint of embarrassment peeking around from behind the bolder of the two emotional masks.

  At the same time, I knew that what she had to be seeing in my face was stark determination. This was very simply one argument my petite, Taurus wife was not going to be able to stampede her way through.

  “Okay, fine then,” she replied, turning her face away and breaking the stare. “Look in the pantry. Bottom shelf, behind the dog food bin.”

  Again, I was at a loss as to where exactly this was heading, but at least it was moving forward. I sat my coffee cup on the table then turned and stepped over to the pantry. I swung the tall door open and knelt down in front of the wooden cabinet. I inspected the contents but at first glance saw nothing unusual.

  “What am I looking for?” I asked aloud.

  “You’ll know it when you find it,” she replied.

  “Behind the dog food bin you said?” I repeated her earlier instruction.

  “Yes” came her clipped reply. “On the bottom.”

  I reached in and pulled a plastic kitchen organizer full of cling wrap and sandwich bags off the top of the clear food bin and set it aside on the floor. Leaning inward and tilting my head away from the next shelf up, I thrust my arm back into the recesses of the cabinet and began groping around. It didn’t take long for my hand to brush against something angular that was wedged in behind the dog food container. It felt roughly like a rectangle as I ran my fingers around in search of a place to grab hold.

  Using my free hand, I slid the bin slightly forward then grasped the object and twisted it upward. When I had finally worked it around the other stored items and managed to extricate it from the cabinet, I found myself kneeling on the floor with a shoebox in my hand.

  I wouldn’t have given the item a passing thought had it not been for the fact that it was purposely hidden. However, that was far from the only reason for suspicion. What immediately caught my eye, as well as my breath, was the length of bright red ribbon tied securely about its girth.

  “Gods, Felicity,” I murmured as I stood. “You didn’t…”

  “What did you expect me to do, Row?” she asked, blurting the words, all of which were underscored by a sharply defensive tone. “I’ve watched you go through too much these past few years. Then when I called home yesterday, and you said it was happening again… I couldn’t just stand by and watch. Not again. Not this time.”

  “You did this yesterday?” I asked, surprise in my voice.

  “Yes. When I got home and you weren’t here,” she said as she nodded. “But I didn’t expect it to work as quickly as all that, then.”

  “Yeah, well we all know you’re a hell of a Witch. Guess this just proves it.”

  “Is that what I think it is?” Cally finally drummed up the courage to ask.

  “It’s some kind of a binding,” RJ interjected before I could answer.

  I glanced over at her and nodded. “Yeah. I’m afraid so. And just like any other binding done where strong emotions are involved, it backfired.” I leveled my gaze back on my wife as I dropped the box onto the table in front of her. “Unless it was your plan all along to bind this crap to yourself.”

  “Of course not.” She shook her head at me quickly and then screwed her face into a scowl as if I had just made the stupidest comment she’d ever heard. “It was only supposed to bind you from the ethereal. It wasn’t supp
osed to bind anything to anyone.”

  “Well, let me ask you this: If you wanted this to all go away, then why didn’t you just do a banishing instead? That would seem more appropriate.”

  “That was my original plan after we got off the phone,” she answered. “But then the thing happened with Brittany Larson, and I started thinking… And, I couldn’t be sure… And, if I had done a banishing, that could be far more permanent, and…” She kept halting, searching for words to explain. Finally, she gave up trying and simply said, “I just didn’t want to close any doors, that’s all.”

  “Even so, Felicity, of all people you know better than this,” I admonished.

  “Don’t lecture me, Rowan Linden Gant,” she returned. “It’s nothing you wouldn’t have done yourself and you know it.”

  “That’s not the point,” I told her.

  “It is as far as I’m concerned,” she countered. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s allowed to do the protecting?”

  She had me there. I shook my head and glanced around the room in resignation. “I never said that. But, to be honest, right now I don’t want to argue about this. I know why you did it and I appreciate it, really I do. But,” I reached out and pushed the shoebox closer to her, “undo it.”

  “What if I say no?” she contended.

  I sighed. “You know as well as I do that there are ways to get around bindings, especially now that I know about it.”

  She didn’t reply. She knew I was correct.

  I pressed forward. “Look, we’re both just going to be wasting our energies with this, and that won’t do anyone any good. Undo the binding, and let’s get back to normal.”

  She let out a ‘hmph’ then told me, “In case you haven’t noticed, Rowan, our lives haven’t been normal for a few years now.”