Witches

by Christina Harlin

  She smirked and tossed the keys to him.

  Milo said, “I thought maybe with all that Othernaturals money, you’d upgraded your car.” Once in the driver’s seat, he savored the fine leather interior, then lifted his fair face up, eyes closed, to soak in the sunshine. “It’s done nothing but rain in Boston since February. This is amazing.”

  He took them out of the garage and onto the highway, talking as he drove. Eventually he wound the talk back to her paranormal adventuring. “So how is the show going, anyway?

  Kaye didn’t quite know how to answer. “Amazing. Confusing. Dangerous. Scary. Fun.”

  “I finally caught up with all the episodes. Why don’t you guys hire a cameraman? Where’s your sound guy holding a boom mic over your head? Why it is always someone on the team with a camera stuck to their face?”

  “The previous sound guy was killed by a Bigfoot. They’ve had trouble filling the position.”

  “Right.”

  Kaye barely considered such things; she wasn’t involved in the production side. “It’s just the way they do it. Don’t you think it looks more realistic than having a bunch of crew hanging around? Greg calls it something, find-the-footage style? No. Found-footage.”

  “Where is the show going next?”

  Kaye frowned. “Well, they’re going to Jefferson City for two different episodes. Its state penitentiary is famously haunted. Then there’s some lake outside town that has a reputation for drowning fishermen.”

  “They’re going?”

  “I’m having a hard time making a decision on whether I want to renew my contract for another year.”

  “You’ve already started the season! I just saw your season six premiere last night.”

  “Yes, but my contract actually renews this month, because of, oh it’s complicated, the first two episodes I did last year were on a trial basis and it’s based on calendar months or something. Anyway I’m thinking of quitting.”

  “Quitting!” He was visibly dismayed. “Why?”

  The noise of the wind as they drove was making it hard to hear, so she excused herself from answering until they had taken the off-ramp to Kaye’s neighborhood. By then she’d gotten her thoughts ordered. She asked, “When I told you I was going on a ghost-hunting show, what did you think I’d be doing?

  “Hunting ghosts,” he said and they chuckled together. “That mission statement turned out to be different than we thought, didn’t it?

  Kaye explained, “We’re touching on some really dangerous things. You know, Rosemary and Greg are your age – oh, I guess Greg’s a little older, but I think Rosemary only has a couple months on you. They’re young and they don’t have your level-headedness. They don’t seem to think things through. Rosemary thinks nothing can harm her, or us, so long as she’s around, and I think that cockiness is going to bite us all in the ass one of these days. I’m afraid someone’s going to get hurt. Or killed.”

  “Are you still worried about Clancy? You know that woman’s death was not your fault.”

  “I know.” She hoped she sounded convincing. But now she had some unpleasant business to tackle with her son. “If you watched ‘The Curse of the Preta Demon,’ episode, you know that I was bitten. By another human being. A sick human being.”

  “Yeah, you ended up in the hospital.”

  “Well. I’m not supposed to discuss it; Rosemary says that episode has already gotten us into enough legal snares without my saying anything, but I was bitten badly. My throat was torn open. I nearly bled out.”

  Milo checked his blind spots and then pulled the car over so he could look at her straight. “You almost died? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It didn’t seem like a telephone thing. ‘Oh hi, Milo, guess what I almost died today.’ You’ve got so much to deal with already, and of course I was fine in the end. You know how fast I heal.”

  “Because you healed yourself.”

  She couldn’t help looking a little proud.

  “Did you request copies of your medical records? I’d like to see them.”

  “You wouldn’t see much. By the time I was checked in, I was suffering from nothing but anemia.”

  “You really were bleeding out? How can you be sure?”

  Skeptical know-it-all, her son. Kaye had to resist arguing; she was the one who had taught him this behavior after all. He wasn’t going to truly trust anything but an official record. Ha, too bad Greg had been too frightened to remember to film the scene. Eyewitness testimony, including a patient’s of her own injury, could be highly unreliable. Instead of replying with a list of credentials qualifying her to give a medical opinion, she said, “Milo, it was a very bad bite and I was in trouble. Can I say for certain that I would have died? Of course not. But I was barely conscious and my friends were all pretty frightened.”

  He did not look appeased. “I’m just glad you’re all right now, then. I’m glad you have superpowers.” He meant that without sarcasm.

  She told Milo, “We have Stefan to thank, for giving me the wherewithal to do it. I don’t know what would have happened without him. He saved my life.”

  “Sounds like you saved your own life.”

  “Ah, that’s what Stefan said too.” She smiled fondly, wondering if she’d ever get the nerve to introduce the two of them. She’d postponed and postponed, harboring some silly fear that they would dislike each other. There was no reason to assume that. Now she said, “Back when I joined this show, I thought the worst danger I’d ever face would be rickety staircases or mold.”

  “Do you like being on the show?”

  “Yes,” she said before thinking, and surprised herself. “Yes, I enjoy it very much.”

  “Because of Stefan?”

  “Not just because of Stefan. In fact, it’s weird having a relationship that some faction of the public is watching, and commenting on rather freely, too. But yes, I enjoy everything about the show, more or less.”

  “Do you think this incident was just a fluke?”

  “Huh. I wish I could say it was.”

  “If you’re afraid for your life, then yes, you have to quit.” He waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he continued, “But you don’t seem afraid for your life.”

  “I’m afraid for – well, I feel like a drama queen for saying this – but I’m afraid for you. I don’t want to get killed and leave you with nobody. I realize that you’ll have your own family someday soon, and that you don’t need me like you used to—”

  “Mom. Seriously stop that. I need you as much as I ever did, plus you’re my best friend, plus I love having the hottest mom in the world, so give it a rest, you freaking drama queen.” Without fail, he could make her laugh. “You saved lives. You and your group did, in Colorado, and at that thing in Houston too. That means something.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “And you always told me that you believed that there’s a higher power that has a plan for people. Maybe this is part of yours.”

  In the years following Martin’s violent, unexpected death, Kaye drifted away from the proper church and embraced a hungry agnosticism and a fascination with the supernatural. Martin’s description of an afterlife – “different and bigger and stranger” than she could imagine, a place where she wouldn’t “need to” find him – made her crave understanding. Othernaturals had given her more information than anyone else had, as imperfect as that information may have been. She had seen denizens of the afterlife. She had learned some of their rules. She wasn’t afraid of a big, different and strange afterlife; she was only afraid of leaving Milo behind when he was still so relatively young, with the wry understanding that to her, he would always be relatively young.

  Kaye had been quiet long enough to make Milo peer at her with concern, so she explained, “This is a heavy talk for a convertible.”

  Milo blinked, as if only then recalling that they were sitting in a car on a suburban street. He checked around at their location. “What time is it? Is it too early for me
to buy you a drink? Is our place open?”

  It was just about 11:00 a.m. Kaye grew giddy with pleasure again: her favorite guy, taking her out for a beer and some cheese fries. Milo drove them to a sports bar that they had frequented in the past, for the tournament basketball games or for the excellent selection of pinball machines that Milo had always loved. She remembered many an evening spent searching the house for quarters before they left, and many plates of cheese fries.

  Once inside the bar, he still stopped to look down at the bright flashing pinball machines, grinning to himself. “Forgot my quarters,” he said.

  They were the first customers of the day but the bartender didn’t blink an eye when Milo offered Kaye a stool at the bar and then ordered beers for them. Somehow Kaye felt like they were skirting the lines of the law by having beer before noon, and like she was setting a bad example before her son – well, basically like she was sinning – you can take the girl out of the church, she teased herself, but it’s hard to get the church out of the girl.

  “Don’t you dare,” Milo said, stopping her hand as she reached for her purse. He slid a debit card to the bartender and then gave Kaye his full attention. They clinked beer bottles together.

  “All right. So, does Mom stay on Othernaturals or not?”

  “Do you want me to quit?” she asked him.

  “There’s the possibility that you could get hurt. Neither of us want that to happen. On the other hand, a person can get hurt doing anything. Most people injure themselves in their own bathrooms. What happens to Stefan if you quit the show?”

  “I think he’d be disappointed, but I’ve talked to him about my misgivings. It’s not like it would break us up. It might just become harder for us to see each other because we live in different states.”

  “People manage long-distance relationships all the time. How does he feel about your misgivings?”

  Kaye grimaced. “Well, you’ve got to understand something about Stefan. You know he’s had some tough problems and a pretty difficult adulthood until about seven years ago. Rosemary Sharpe was the first person to ever really listen to him, or who believed that he was, you know.”

  “Carrying a ghost in his head.” Milo finished, taking a long drink.

  “And so, he’s utterly devoted to her. You can’t convince him that anything she does is wrong-headed or risky. He wouldn’t break up with me if I left, but he wouldn’t leave the show for me, either. I don’t think I’d ask him to anyway. There’s no reason to make it a contest between how devoted he is to her and how devoted he is to me.”

  “How do you feel about his ride-along-friend?”

  “It isn’t as if he’s a split personality or anything. Brentley is just always in his mind, sort of the way you’re always in mine.”

  “I don’t think it’s the same.” Milo clicked his tongue, the way he always did when he was about to say something his listener might not like. “I looked Stefan up, just did a little checking. You’d do that too, if you found out that I was dating someone who’d spent most of her adult life in a mental hospital.”

  He was right. In his position, she would have checked everything.

  Milo said, with some care, “You know this Brentley guy, the one he calls his best friend – you know that’s his twin brother, right?”

  Kaye wasn’t surprised that Milo had discovered this. Anyone could. Anyone who knew Stefan’s name and his hometown could go online and look up the local high school yearbooks, sports reports, or the awful articles about the fatal wreck that had taken Brentley’s life. This was how Kaye had learned the truth herself, on a dull night when she’d wondered just how serious she intended to get with her sexy auburn-haired honey. In a newspaper article about the wreck, there was a family photo of the McCandless twins that showed them heartbreakingly young; for fraternal brothers, they did not look much like each other, yet their facial expressions were identical.

  A sane and gentle man in all respects save this, Stefan simply refused to recall, or admit, or acknowledge, that Brentley was his brother. Often correspondence came to the Othernaturals about the connection from yet another viewer who thought they’d discovered something that no one else knew. Rosemary and Greg did what they could to keep these things from Stefan’s awareness although Kaye doubted they were always successful. If the word ever did get through to Stefan, apparently he would rationalize or ignore it somehow. Brentley’s brotherhood was the show’s open secret, upheld without question.

  Practicality was most often Kaye’s behavior of choice, yet this bit of delusional whimsy seemed harmless enough. Kaye knew from personal experience that secrets are kept for all sorts of reasons, even if the keeper himself didn’t fully understand why. In her opinion, the one who should bring it up to Stefan was Brentley himself. When she thought things like that, she realized that she had long ago accepted Brentley’s existence.

  She told her son, “I know that they’re brothers, sweetie. We all do. But I think it’s between Stefan and Brentley, to work that out.”

  “I’d be a lot more stubborn about his quirks except that he seems to make you so happy. Your face lights up when you talk about him.” Milo held up a finger. “Now, there’s another thing we need to consider, and it may be the most important. You have a superpower and an obligation to use it.”

  She thought he was joking with her. “It is fun to be a little bit famous.”

  “You were famous already,” Milo corrected her. “First the nursing journals and now you’re on this show. People know about you and gossip goes around. I’ve had a few patients ask for me, specifically because they think I can heal them the way you can.”

  She was both dismayed and flattered. “Oh my. I had no idea.”

  “But I don’t have the gift.” Milo held up his hands and examined them, front and back, they were long-fingered and exquisite and Kaye was saddened by his disappointment in them. “I wish I did. I remember the time my friend Derek and I were farting around with those golf clubs.”

  “Oh, I remember it too.” She’d never forget the screams of pain that had awoken her on a Sunday morning, nor how she’d dashed outside barefoot in her nightshirt to find Derek bent over, spitting blood as he wailed, and her own son grey-faced with horror, stammering that it had been an accident.

  “You saved my ass that day. I would have never gotten over it. His parents could have sued us. The kids at school might have been, well, God knows what, you know what assholes kids can be. If I could heal people the way that you do, oh my god.”

  “You do heal people. You’re a great doctor, and getting better at it every day.”

  “It’s not the same and you know it.”

  “That’s utterly ridiculous,” Kaye chided him. Milo couldn’t deride her favorite person on earth, even if he was referring to himself. She wouldn’t stand for it. “I’m not going to let you discount your brains, your talent or your education just because I have a little, sort of, thing that—”

  “A superpower,” interrupted Milo.

  “It’s not a superpower.”

  “It is, and you make the world a better place with it.” He saw her preparing to balk at his praise and cut her off. Suddenly the bartender slid two plates of cheese fries in front of them. Kaye didn’t even recall having ordered them. She began to eat them because, well, she’d never in her life met a plate of food she couldn’t be friends with. Milo watched her with knowing smile, his gentler humor returning.

  “Sorry I got a little emphatic,” he said, starting on his own fries. His eyes rolled heavenward as he took the first bite. “I have missed these. The hospital cafeteria thinks we’re all hamsters, and that place is my only source of food these days. Anyway, my point is that with your superpower—yes, don’t argue—it’s good that you’re working as a nurse and having some contact with paranormal studies. You’re with gifted friends and they seem to need you. You’re helping other people. Plus you get paid sweet money and you’re in the middle of a celebrity romance. It seems to me t
hat the only drawback is the danger. The danger is real, so the question is whether you and your people can handle it.”

  Kaye admitted, “So far, we have handled it.”

  “You can count pros and cons all day, Mom, but I know you. If you really wanted to leave the show, you would have done it already. You wouldn’t be running it by me.”

  Kaye irritation at his perceptiveness was tempered by pride. “You sound just like me, you smart-ass.”

  *****

  Milo spent five days in Oklahoma City, to Kaye’s delight, for she’d half-feared he’d be called back to work on some staffing emergency. They celebrated his 27th birthday. She let him sleep in late each day and then took him to do things he hadn’t had time for: seeing a movie, shopping for clothes (good Lord, his socks and underwear were threadbare), even a trip to Frontier City where they could whoop it up on the rides.

  Kaye sent him back to Boston in better shape than she’d received him, the dark shadows gone from beneath his eyes, his color improved thanks to those afternoons in the mild spring sunshine. She figured she’d fed him enough calories to put at least five of those missing pounds back on his frame.

  Later that month, Kaye and the Othernaturals went to Jefferson City, Missouri and spent the night in the old State Penitentiary. On that outing, Kaye fixed three different ankle sprains, because the Penitentiary was decrepit and poorly lit – but twisted ankles were not what she’d consider “danger.” They were in fact exactly what she’d always expected out of an Othernatural adventure.

  The prison was a mire of bad psychic energy thanks to its layered years of suffering, from its pitifully small, inhumane cells right down to the deceptive simplicity of its often-used gas chamber. Rosemary and Judge did all right; they were the only ones. Well, to be fair, Kaye was simply irritated that the authorities couldn’t set up some proper lighting in the place. But Stefan spent the whole night worried about Brentley, whose ghost was highly susceptible to the ugly energy - hell, it seemed to want to show off for the 18-year-old ghost, to suck him into its corruption. Sally fed off the unhappy energy of the group and looked constantly near tears. And poor Greg - who could see ghosts - saw nothing at all, which seemed inexplicable in such a place until psychic Andrew explained that, first, he would be delighted to get the hell out of this place, and second, it was nearly impossible to pick any single loathsome detail out of the thousands of them. The group was too sensitive for a place of such intense, centuries-old misery; they did better with their horrors visiting only a few at a time. They were happy to see the end of the night.