“Maybe I’m just returning to normal,” I replied, pushing my plate to the side and cradling my mug of coffee.
“Yeah, well, you know what I have to say about that.”
“I know, Ben,” I said with a nod. “According to you, I ‘ain’t normal.’”
“So, whaddaya got planned for the rest of the day?” he asked, sharply veering the conversation onto a different course before shoveling more food into his mouth.
“Not much. I’ve got a potential new client who needs a quote on a custom database, but that’s about it,” I told him then embraced a sudden tickle of suspicion at the back of my skull and asked, “Why?”
He shrugged, swallowed, and then answered, “Just makin’ conversation.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“‘Cause you’re paranoid, I guess.”
“When it comes to you I have good reason.”
“Bullshit,” he huffed. “You know better’n that.”
“Who’s shoveling it now?”
“Truth? From what I can tell, both of us.”
I contorted my face as I shook my head. “What did I do?”
“Fed me a line of crap about bein’ retired.”
“That wasn’t crap, Ben. I’m serious.”
He gave his head a quick nod in my direction. “Yeah, well the way it looks ta’ me I think maybe your mouth is writin’ some bad checks, Row.”
Upon hearing the words I shot him another confused look, but before I could ask what he meant I noticed that my hand had returned to my neck of its own accord. How long I had been massaging the area again I didn’t know, but it seemed my friend was at least partially correct-someone on the other side of the veil wanted my attention.
In all honesty, I had expected something of this sort to happen eventually and because of that had already resigned myself to dealing with it. I just hadn’t been expecting the annoyance quite this soon.
This certainly wasn’t the first time I had tried to renounce this curse of communicating with the dead. This go around, however, my resolve was driven by a deep fear. My unwanted ability had been bringing the horror closer and closer to home, and most recently the nastiness had literally set up shop inside my wife. While Felicity was able to find a thousand reasons why it wasn’t my fault, I could only see the one that laid the blame directly on me.
I hoped that if I ignored the chatter inside my head for long enough, the disembodied voices would move on to some other unfortunate sucker. It wasn’t that I really wanted to wish it on anyone else. I simply felt like my luck was running out, so I was trying to heed what I perceived to be a wakeup call and get out while I still had some shred of sanity.
“No, Ben,” I said as I started shaking my head. “I can’t do this. Not anymore…”
“Didn’t ask ya’ to,” he replied. “All I did was ask if ya’ knew about vampires. You don’t, so no harm, no foul.”
“But you had a reason for asking.”
“Yeah. I already told ya’ the reason. I’ve got a dead girl in a cold storage drawer over on Clark, and from the minute I arrived on scene this mornin’, my gut’s been tellin’ me somethin’s extra hinky about it. You and your neck just confirmed that for me.”
“You aren’t helping.”
“Look, white man, believe me, I’m not tryin’ ta’ drag you into it. Hell, I’m usually the one who’s tellin’ ya’ to stay outta the way and let us cops do our jobs, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, but that’s not exactly how it sounds to me at the moment,” I returned.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve been down this road with ya’ before, Row. You might not know it, but right now you got that look. It’s the one you get when the hocus-pocus is gonna take over and shit hits the fan. I’ve seen it a dozen times, and it always means you’re gonna be in the middle of it no matter what.”
“No. No I’m not.”
He shook his head. “For your sake I hope like hell you’re right. But I gotta be honest, I sure as hell wouldn’t put money on it.”
“Remember I just said you aren’t helping?” I grumbled. “Well, you still aren’t.”
“Sorry, white man.” He grunted. “Just callin’ it like I see it, and from where I sit there’s a signpost up ahead…”
CHAPTER 6:
By the time I arrived home, the pain was screwing itself into my neck with a vengeance. It had gradually escalated from sharp discomfort to a tortured sting that rose and fell in intensity with each beat of my heart. Fortunately, although my stomach was still off-kilter, the acidic queasiness that plagued me earlier had subsided a bit, which was at least some small consolation. Of course, my appetite certainly hadn’t made haste to return, so the still untouched breakfast was in a Styrofoam to-go box resting in the passenger seat of my truck.
I had no doubt that I was dealing with the earthly manifestations of someone else’s ethereal torment. That much was a given in my mind. In fact, despite my initial objections, I was also more than willing to believe the victim in Ben’s current investigation was the one assaulting me across the veil between the worlds of the living and dead. Nonetheless, I was clinging to my resolve and remained set on ignoring her no matter how much it hurt. There was just one small problem. Everything my friend had said about me earlier at the diner rang truer than I cared to admit. Whenever the dead came to me for help, I always ended up in trouble. Always. While I couldn’t really blame him for pointing it out, just thinking about it made my mood as sour as my stomach.
After parking my vehicle in the garage next to Felicity’s Jeep, I let myself in the back door of the house. As I came into the kitchen from the sunroom, both of our dogs met me and began snuffling about before finally sitting and looking at me expectantly. They immediately jumped up and followed along as I skirted around the island then pulled open the refrigerator door and started to make room on one of the shelves for the takeout container I was carrying. After a moment our English setter snorted a low sigh followed by something that wasn’t quite a bark but was definitely meant to convey a message. I looked over and found both of the canines sitting a few feet away, staring at me with imploring eyes as they quivered in excited expectation.
“You ate this morning,” I told them. “It isn’t dinnertime yet.”
The Australian cattle dog perked his ears and let out a short yip. The English setter followed with a repeat of his non-barking dog speak. I stared back at them and sighed.
All I really wanted to do at the moment was put the carton away then down a couple of painkillers and relax for a bit. But, I knew if I was going to insist on ignoring the ethereal pokes and prods, then I was going to need to learn to function around them as well. That meant, very simply, I couldn’t use unexplainable aches and pains as an excuse to eschew my responsibilities, even though I may want to do exactly that.
“Yeah, okay…” I mumbled in a tired drone, abandoning my task and swinging the refrigerator door shut.
A minute or so later I had the canine’s dishes up on the island and was still in the middle of dividing the contents of the container between them when I was verbally admonished from behind. This time, however, there was no need to interpret because the scolding was spoken in perfectly understandable English.
“You’re spoiling them, you know,” Felicity said.
“And you don’t?” I replied without looking up from my task.
“That’s not my point,” she returned, a smile in her voice.
“Of course it isn’t,” I returned, trying not to let my foul mood creep into my tone, which was no easy task since physically I seemed to be entering a steep, downward spiral. “Besides, Hon, they’re getting old. They’ve earned a few between meal snacks.”
She was next to me now and inspecting the contents of the bowls. “Snack? That looks more like a whole meal to me.”
“It kind of is…” I replied. “I wasn’t hungry.”
“You aren’t coming down with something, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I replied with a weak sigh.
The blatant lie might have worked had it not been for the fact that I winced as I said it-not to mention the fact that my free hand automatically went up to my neck.
“You sure aren’t acting like it, then,” she said. “What’s wrong with your neck?”
“Nothing,” I told her. “I think I just slept on it the wrong way or something.”
“Do you want me to give you a massage?” she asked, reaching up to move my hand. Before she could pull my fingers away, however, she let out a small gasp. “Rowan, you’re ice cold!”
I could feel her pressing the back of her hand against my neck and then my cheek as her maternal instincts took over and she slipped into nurturing mode.
“I just came in a few minutes ago,” I told her. “I haven’t warmed up yet.”
“Nice try, but it’s not that cold outside.”
Given how truly awful I was beginning to feel, I decided not to prolong the inevitable and simply conceded. “Okay, then maybe you’re right and I’m coming down with something.”
“You aren’t running a fever,” she countered. “You’re freezing.”
“So maybe it’s a cold,” I quipped, managing to squeeze out the last drop of sarcastic humor I had left in me.
“Not funny,” she replied sternly. “You’re helping Ben with another murder investigation, aren’t you? You’re channeling someone. Damn your eyes, Rowan Linden Gant, you promised!”
At this point the dogs had grown impatient, and the English setter was doing a halting dance nearby while the Aussie was letting out a nasal whine as an accompaniment.
“No,” I told her, giving my head an animated shake then picking up the food dishes from the island and stooping to set them on the floor. The canines were on them immediately, gobbling up the breakfast as if it was their one and only meal for the week.
“Don’t lie to me, Rowan,” she snapped.
“I’m not!” I barked in return as I stood. “I’m not helping him. But the victim apparently doesn’t seem interested in hearing that, okay?”
“You aren’t…”
“No,” I interrupted before she could finish the question. “I’m not letting her in. I’m doing just the opposite, but it isn’t working.”
“Are you grounding then?” she asked, referring to the conscious connection most any Witch makes with the earth in order to avoid mishaps with magickal energies.
Even though the question annoyed me on the surface, I knew she was right to ask. Grounding was a basic skill right out of WitchCraft 101 and moreover, the first step in protecting oneself from a psychic influence. However, following the first experience with my curse a few years back, I had been left unbalanced; therefore, it was also an important ability where I had fallen woefully short for quite some time now, no matter how hard I tried.
In recent months I had been much better at maintaining my focus-or at least I thought I had.
I took hold of my wife’s hand and said, “You tell me. Do I feel grounded to you?”
She twined her fingers into mine, pressing our palms tightly together. I knew she really didn’t need to have the physical contact to know one way or the other if I was truly grounded, but I wanted there to be no mistake. She looked into my face, and what had been a rising flash of anger in her green eyes now turned to concern.
“ Damnu,” she mumbled. “You are grounded… That fekking doiteacht , I’ll kill him.”
“Who?”
“Ben,” she snipped. “Who else? Come on then…”
She began dragging me by the hand toward the living room, and I had no recourse but to follow.
“You can’t blame him for this, Felicity,” I said as I lumbered along behind her, an overwhelming weakness starting to permeate my body. “This all started before I even met up with him this morning.”
“But he talked about a case, didn’t he?”
“Yes. A little.”
“And your channeling the victim, aren’t you?”
“Yeah… That’s my guess, anyway… Why?”
“Because this doesn’t happen to you when it’s someone else’s investigation, that’s why… Here, sit down.”
My wife all but shoved me onto the sofa-not that it took much for her to do so given my present state. She took a moment to situate me to her liking then began covering me with an afghan after shooing one of the cats from it.
She had a point, even if it wasn’t entirely on base. This sort of thing still happened to me even when it wasn’t one of Ben’s cases, but never to this extreme. I suppose even the tortured spirits of the dead had enough sense to know whether or not I had access to someone who would actually listen to what I had to say rather than having me hauled off for psychiatric evaluation.
“You stay right there,” she told me after she finished more or less tucking me in. “I’m going to go make you some sage tea.”
“Okay,” I told her.
There was really little else I could do. Even if I wanted to bring up the fact that I’d been using salt and try to argue the point with her I wasn’t feeling up to it. Oddly enough, however, my lack of fight wasn’t because I was in any major pain. In fact, I no longer felt a single ache. The pervasive weakness had actually transformed into a sense of absolute comfort and the earlier cold that had started to seep into my bones was now replaced by welcome warmth.
I allowed my eyelids to droop as the pleasantness washed over me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so completely relaxed. I was on the verge of giving myself over to the darkness of sleep when I felt a quick flutter in my chest. It was followed by a second, and then a tickle started somewhere deep inside my brain.
I tried to ignore it, but it was on a mission. It persisted in the same way a nagging question would turn into a mindless obsession that kept you awake at night. As if giving in to just such a need to go check and make sure a light is turned off, I allowed the relentless itch to force me to move my arm. Had I been in any other state of mind I don’t know if I would have considered the unnatural degree of effort it took to accomplish that task to be worthwhile. But since the growing nag was going to continue pecking at me until I satisfied the curiosity it had awakened, I complied.
After what seemed an endless stretch of time, I managed to bring my hand against my neck. However, the action did little to quell the tickle in my grey matter because I discovered in that instant my fingers were now completely numb. Unable to feel anything at all, I gave up and allowed my hand to fall away as I offered myself to the comfort of the encroaching darkness.
At that same instant, I could have sworn I heard Felicity’s near panicked voice screaming my name.