by Shannon Page
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s not going to be back in my life—”
“I’m not the one worried about that!” Sebastian said, putting his hands up in a warding-off motion.
And that made me laugh. “Okay, I know, I know. Anyway, it was good to see him. His band is doing well; I’m going to a party for them in a week or so.”
Sebastian frowned. “So it’s probably not him, then. That leaves the cats.”
“I know. ‘Listen to the cats.’ When do I not listen to the cats?”
“Do you think it has anything to do with Logan’s cat? He never turned up, did he?”
“Not yet.”
We sipped our tea in silence for a while. Moonlight came through the back window, puddling on the kitchen floor in interesting ways as it filtered through the breeze-blown leaves outside.
“Well,” Sebastian said, setting his empty cup on the table. “Speaking of cats, if you’re fine here…”
“Yeah, entirely fine. Thank you for coming over and pulling me out.”
He got up; I did too, and he drew me into a gentle hug. “Of course. What are friends for?”
Life got quiet again in the following days. No more strange dreams; nothing strange at all, in fact. It almost made me uncomfortable, but mostly I was just relieved to have a bit of a break.
Pregnancy, as I may have mentioned, takes a lot out of one.
I was just beginning to think about whether I should reach out to Jeremy again when he called to me. May I return the favor of dinner, and have you to my house?
Your house? I hadn’t known he had a house. Aren’t you staying with your father? Blessed Mother no, I wasn’t going to Gregorio’s. Not if there was any way in the world I could avoid it.
I am not. I’ve lucked into a place of my own. In the Marina.
I suspected luck had little to do with it, but polite fictions must be maintained. That’s awesome, I said, inwardly cringing at my Raymond-ism. When?
If it’s not too desperately impolite to assume that you might have no plans this evening, what about…this evening?
I chuckled. Well, I have been maintaining a very busy schedule of puttering around with research that’s going nowhere, interspersed with sudden attack naps at the least convenient moments. But I think I could squeeze in a dinner cooked by someone else this evening.
Marvelous, he sent back. I’ll expect you around seven thirty?
That works.
I showed up at the appointed time and we passed a lovely, quiet evening: cocktails (and mocktails) in the gracious front room, whose bowed front windows overlooked the Marina Green and the bay beyond; followed by a delicious chicken dinner that I was pretty sure the warlock cooked himself. He served dessert in the small sunroom at the back of the house.
After dessert, he gave me a tour of the rest of the place, including his bedroom, which was extremely gracious as well. I made polite noises and returned to the front room to admire the view once more before heading home.
Other than showing me his bedroom, Jeremy made not the slightest suggestion that we revisit our former intimacy. He was obviously leaving any further moves to me—at least for now.
Which suited me just fine. I liked this comfortable balance we’d found. The future…would unfold as it would, when it would.
The Rat’s Nest was a classic dive bar, on the cusp between the inner Mission and South of Market, under a freeway overpass. Nevertheless, I decided to dress up. It was a celebration, after all.
I found a great dress in a thrift store in the Haight. After I made a few modifications for my pregnancy, it fit perfectly. The skirt was black, and very full; the fabric just skimmed the floor, the hem ending in tiny blood-red roses, leaving just the toes of my favorite ’vogs to peek out. The dress’s long sleeves were sheer black, almost net, and lace-tipped at the wrists. The bodice was also black, with a corset-like design of bright red laces which expanded over my breasts, nipped in a little, then expanded again to frame my belly.
I was taking these odd new ride-share cars all the time lately, and only occasionally needing to spell them to me; once I’d finally figured out the app thing, I found that it worked pretty well. I told myself that I’d teach my daughter ley travel once she was out here with me. For now, conserving my energy felt right.
I pushed open the dingy door to the bar and stood just inside, blinking to help my eyes adjust to the dimness. Wow, this place was even shabbier than the front room at Rose’s. There was a small, empty stage near the back, an assortment of tables on the main floor, and a long wooden bar, scarred and stained from years of serious drinking.
Raymond and his band and various hangers-on had pushed a couple of tables together in the center of the room. Seeing me, he grinned and waved an arm, calling me over. “Callie!” He made room between himself and a redheaded woman, pushing aside beer bottles. “This is Christine.”
“Nice to meet you.” I shook her hand, blanking for just a moment on who she could be—surely he didn’t have a new girlfriend he’d failed to mention?—before remembering that this was his sister. I gave her a big smile. Right, now I could see the family resemblance. The red hair should have been a clue.
Christine was dressed as casually as the rest of the group, but on her it looked respectable and mature. Her jeans were clean, her T-shirt white and unadorned by any rude words or gory pictures. A silver pentacle on a chain rested at her collarbone, and she wore a fabulous pair of black boots. Her long red hair sparkled with life; it almost looked like witch’s hair.
She smiled back at me warmly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you too. Can I get you something to drink?” Her eyes flickered to my belly; I remembered that Raymond had said she was a midwife. And a Wiccan.
“Not right now, thanks,” I said. “Sorry I’m late,” I added, to Raymond.
“It’s cool,” he said. “We were kind of waiting for the guy from the studio to show up before we started, but he’s not here yet. Maybe…”
“Dude, let’s give him another ten minutes,” Dave the drummer said.
Oh no, I thought. It’s falling apart already… The music industry and its notorious flakiness.
But then Raymond said, “Here he is!”
The whole band and several girlfriends (or tambourine players) sprang to their feet and rushed over to greet the TCA rep and offer him a beer, a sandwich, a shot, a young virgin, whatever he wanted. Christine and I were suddenly alone at the table. Her eyes filled with amusement as she said, “God, I’m so relieved, I thought he was making the whole thing up!”
“Who, Raymond?” I said, with exaggerated seriousness.
After we’d collected ourselves, she said, “That’s an amazing dress, by the way.”
“Thanks. Secondhand special.”
“I never thought of actually emphasizing pregnancy like that, but it’s gorgeous. It really works.”
“Yeah, thank goodness for modern society,” I said. “I’d never have been allowed out of the house in earlier times, much less dressed up—in any way.”
“So true.” She paused a moment. “It’s nice of you to come tonight. I know it means a lot to Raymond, even though you’re not with him anymore.”
“I’m hoping he and I can still be friends,” I said. “Things got a little chaotic in my life for a while there, and we lost touch…but he seems like he’s doing well.”
She sipped from a beer bottle, thinking. “He’s okay,” she said after a minute. “He puts a good face on it.” Now she smiled. “The record deal helps.”
“I’ll bet!”
“Especially since it seems to be actually real.”
We both laughed. I was really liking her.
“Are these seats taken?”
We both looked up to see a group of four guys standing over our table. Young insurance salesmen or realtors trying to seem hip, by the look of it. “Yes,” we both said in unison.
A minute later, we chased away another group of strangers, but then we realized that the ba
nd was now setting up onstage and wouldn’t be needing their seats back. “Just as well,” Christine said with a wicked grin, “none of those guys were nearly cute enough. Ooh—maybe that one wants to come sit. Riiight here.” She patted her lap as she frankly appraised a guy standing at the door, but he didn’t notice.
Barely moving my be-ringed right hand (I might as well get some good use out of the awful thing), I sent the guy a nudge. He was by Christine’s side in moments, offering to buy her another beer. They began an animated conversation while I studied him. Blond, and somewhat cute, I supposed. Not my type.
By doing Christine that favor, though, I had just deprived myself of her company. So I watched the band warm up. I did love to see Raymond with his bass guitar…he handled it lovingly, appreciatively, rather like…hmm, no, that wasn’t such a good idea either. Yes, there were definitely things I missed about him.
I turned back to Christine and whatever-his-name-was, and now saw that she didn’t like the guy after all. Which didn’t take magic; her body language said it all. With another flick of my finger under the table, I put the idea in his head that he needed to be on the opposite side of the room from her for the rest of the evening—and the rest of his life. He fled.
“My god,” Christine said. “Incel special. He was so much better from a distance.”
“Well, he’s at a distance now.”
“Good thing.” She swigged her beer and grinned. “I’m sorry. This is selfish—you can’t drink.”
“Oh, that’s fine, I don’t even like beer. But it makes me happy to watch you enjoy it.” And that was true.
She gave me a thoughtful look. “I see what Raymond likes about you. You’re a good person. I’m sensitive to people’s auras and energy.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can see that.”
“You’re sensitive too,” she went on. “I could tell you noticed that Steve was an asshole, even though you weren’t talking to us. And as soon as you noticed, he was out of here.”
Interesting, I thought. Christine was pretty sharp. Maybe too sharp. “It wasn’t a huge challenge,” I said. “You were practically squirming and rolling your eyes at the ceiling. I was hoping you weren’t packing a knife in one of those boots.”
She snorted with laughter, then shook her head. “Callie, I’m so sorry we didn’t get to meet earlier.”
“Me too,” I said. Raymond had mentioned his sister to me a few times, but I’d had no idea she was so cool. Though I should have known. She was related to him, after all.
“We should get lunch or something together. Do you work in the city?”
“Yes—at home, actually.”
“What do you do again?”
Before I had to come up with an answer (because I didn’t know of many molecular biologists who had labs at home), the band launched into a screamingly loud opening number. Christine and I laughed and pointed at our ears. I shrugged, she mouthed “LATER,” and we sat back to enjoy the music.
The concert was great. The band had really matured since the last time I’d seen them—apparently their time on the road had sharpened them considerably. There were several very tuneful new numbers, intermixed with revved-up versions of songs I already knew. They also covered some perennial rock favorites.
Most importantly, the TCA rep sat right up front, smiling and tapping his feet for the whole set.
“I don’t know which songs to vote for,” I said to Christine when the last number was still echoing in my ears. “They were all great.”
“But they can’t put out a CD with twenty-five songs on it.”
“People still make CDs?”
She grinned. “Retro bands do. They’re even talking about vinyl, if you can believe it.”
The band in question was still onstage, breaking down; one of the hangers-on had passed out pens and little slips of paper. Instead of ranking songs, I wrote down my name and cell phone number and gave it to Christine. “Here. I gotta run—tell Raymond bye for me. And call me, if you’re serious about that lunch date.”
She dug a business card out of her jeans pocket. “I am, and I will. Here’s mine, if I flake.”
“I don’t imagine you flake much,” I said.
“Hmm.” She smiled. “No, not often.”
— CHAPTER EIGHT —
Time passed. My belly grew. I slept a lot, and didn’t get much work done.
On a Tuesday a few weeks after Raymond’s band party, I stepped into the coven house for the regular dinner and Circle, then stopped, just inside the door. What was different? Was Gracie back? No—I could tell that at once. But something was off.
Elnor, in my arms, sensed my alertness and began sniffing the air, then turned her golden eyes to mine.
“What do you see, kitten?” I asked. She just blinked, so I set her down.
I could hear several of my sisters moving about—in the kitchen, the schoolroom, bedrooms upstairs—but I didn’t detect Leonora’s presence. Not all that unusual.
I walked through and into the kitchen, and that’s when I figured it out. Leonora’s study, just behind it, was missing something.
Organza was chopping zucchini on the big kitchen island. “Where’s Logan’s body?” I asked her.
She looked up. “Hello, Callie.”
“Sorry. Hi. Where’s Logan’s body?”
“Gregorio Andromedus was here, meeting with Leonora. They’ve agreed to take it to his clinic for further study.”
At the mention of the warlock’s name, I went rigid with alarm, even as I tried to hide my reaction. “Oh,” I managed, striving for casual. Yes, now I could tell—it wasn’t just the absence of her body, but it was also the odd essence of warlock still in the air. Warlocks only entered the house on special occasions. Gregorio came here even less frequently. “Did she say why?”
Organza shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s easier for him to study it there than to ask us to let the wards down again.”
“Has he been here before today?”
My coven sister glanced up at me. “A few times. Just in the last week or so.” She scraped the zucchini into a mixing bowl and started peeling garlic.
I stifled any further questions. “You want some help with that?”
“Sure.” She passed over a head of garlic and a knife.
“What else has been going on around here?” I asked, as I smashed cloves with the flat of the knife, breaking the papery skin.
“Oh, the usual,” Organza said. “You know.”
I supposed I did, but I was also squirming with curiosity. I wondered if Leonora would tell me anything. If I dared to ask her. No, I shouldn’t ask; she would just shut me down. Maybe I should spend more time at the coven house. “Yeah,” I said, after probably too long a pause. But Organza didn’t seem to notice; she was concentrating on her own garlic. “Nothing…else unusual, I mean?” I tried.
Now she put her garlic bulb down and turned to me. “You’d have to ask Leonora.” Her tone was kind, but she went on: “Perhaps you’ve forgotten what it’s like living here. Our coven mother has not begun consulting the rest of the house about her business.”
“Of course not.” I smiled at her. “I must have lost my mind there for a moment.” I smashed another clove. “Can I plead pregnancy brain?”
“That seems reasonable.” She smiled and turned back to her work. “Though what do I know? I am two hundred years older than you, but I have never borne a daughter.”
Was that sadness in her voice? She still looked relaxed and gentle, even kindly disposed toward me. She’d been my coven sister for twenty-five years. I’d have said I knew her well—as I knew all my sisters—but the truth was, I so rarely interacted with the older set in anything but rituals and other formal events. It wasn’t like we’d ever had a heart-to-heart. “Did you want a daughter?” I asked.
“We are all looking forward to Rosemary Leonora’s arrival,” Organza said. Then she went to the stove and stirred a pot, not meeting my eyes.
At dinner, Leonor
a was testy and short. I tried to find a way to sort of casually ask about Logan’s body, or even to bring Gregorio into the conversation, but there was just no way. She asked the table at large if anyone had heard anything from Gracie—even though if anyone had, certainly they would have told her, and everyone, at once.
“Calendula, please give a report on your current research findings,” she said, once she’d exhausted the topic of Gracie.
“Um,” I said, stumbling for an answer that didn’t involve I’m still fruitlessly searching blood samples for evidence of hybrid human-witches. “I’m still not seeing the methodology that Flavius Winterheart used for essence extraction, but I’m sure I’ll find it eventually.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
I glanced down the table. Everyone was paying really close attention to their meals, even the witchlets, who usually giggled and made faces at one another when they thought their elders weren’t watching. “Because I won’t stop looking until I find something,” I said, trying to keep my tone humble and earnest. “There has to be something.”
“Perhaps you are going about it the wrong way. Or better still, perhaps it is time to begin your maternity leave; your energies would undoubtedly be better focused entirely toward Rosemary Leonora now.”
I opened my mouth to protest—I was already listening very carefully to my body and my baby, and did not enjoy being scolded about this—but she abruptly turned to another sister. “Liza, have you and Peony found those books yet?”
“No, Mother,” Liza said, “we, um, we’re trying to…” She stammered to a halt.
Peony, sitting next to her, at least managed to show calm poise—no matter what she might actually be feeling. “We have a lead on a bookseller in New York,” she said. “He only accepts handwritten and hand-delivered correspondence, however, so we are in the process of arranging for that.”
“Hmph,” Leonora muttered. “Very well.”
The younger students fidgeted, while clearly trying not to. The rest of the meal passed in silence.
At last, after cleanup, post-dinner digestives and canasta in the second parlor, and the witchlets fleeing upstairs to let their hair down, it was time to formally gather. The front parlor was big enough that not much rearranging was needed; the red, black, and gold Persian rug had to be rolled up and moved aside, and some couches and chairs were repositioned in order to reveal the dark pentagram inlaid into the hardwood floor. Our familiars drifted to the corners of the room as we dimmed the lights, spread the salt, lit the candles and incense, and settled in, seated on the floor in our traditional order.
