"Drink it all," she said, pointing at a huge cup of tea.
This stuff was nasty. Seriously nasty. It tasted like I was licking a slimy, insect-infested tree. But I gulped it back, determined to show no sign of weakness. She drank one herself, and I saw her grimace slightly. When we had gotten this down, we sat cross-legged on the polished wood floor, we took each other's hands, and put our foreheads together.
"Relax," she said. "Just breathe."
At first I just felt my butt getting sore and heard the hum of the refrigerator.
I became gradually aware that I wasn't in the kitchen anymore. I wasn't sure where we were. It might have been on the shore because I thought I could hear the sound of the ocean. The ground was soft, like cool, damp sand.
"Come, Alisa." Evelyn's voice was somewhere in my mind—not in sound. I could feel the words. I started walking along, not sure where to go. Then I saw that Evelyn was besides me. I could tell that she was somehow in control of the experience, that she was the guide.
What came next was a weird mix of images—a falling of furniture, the sound of splintering wood and ripping fabric. A storm. A baby. Evelyn—or both of us—was holding a baby. Sorcha was her name—Sorcha…Sarah…my mother. Evelyn led me away from this image. There was an overwhelming love of the Goddess. I could feel her power all around me, especially in the ocean. And I felt walls—anger, sadness, terrible loss—a father, a mother, a sister named Tioma, also named Jessica, killed in a car accident, a husband dying quietly in his sleep, a daughter gone forever… unbearable sadness…
We were leaving Evelyn, and Evelyn was coming into me. Evelyn drank up my life, taking in everything. She saw me, at three years old, trying to understand my father's explanation that my mother was gone and the she was never coming back. She saw my life in Texas—the long flatness of the land and the constant warmth of the sun. Then New York State, Widow's Vale, so cold and bleak and lonely.
I felt her close attention to the whirlwind of events that followed—discovering Wicca, my fears at seeing what my magick could do, my hospitalization. Finding my mother's Book of Shadows and realizing I was a blood witch. As we came to the point where I was standing alone as the dark wave approached, linked to Morgan through the brach, I felt her speeding, falling through my mind. This she couldn't take in enough of, and she could hardly believe what she was seeing. She couldn't get to everything I learned through Morgan, but the power she saw here was unlike anything she had ever encountered. She saw me finish the spell as the dark wave closed in, and I felt her pride.
There was an interested pause as she caught a flash of my strange dreams about Gloucester and the mermaid. I felt her mind hooking onto the images and processing them in some way. And I was telekinetic? Sparks of surprise as she saw objects falling, flying, breaking…
After that, her emotions changed, softened. I came to something raw within her. She felt for me as I returned to the house where no one understood what I had seen or been through. She was with me on the floor at Hunter's as I wept full of frustration and pain. Then she saw me running away, coming to her, and how rejected I felt. Her guilt was thick, smothering. Images of my mother flickered through our minds.
She was moving faster now, through the events of the last few days. We came to Charlie—my ripple of excitement at meeting him, our kiss in the library. I cringed—how embarrassing!
The book. That was what she wanted to see. Finally we faced the book with its strange green print. She pulled on close to it and read the pages. What was odd was that now I could see even more writing that had been invisible before, along with the passages that I had been able to uncover. Telekinesis… she was thinking again…. uncontrollable magick…uncontrollable… the word was making her uncomfortable.
Then she saw what I had concluded—what I had asked Hunter to look into—what Ardán Rourke had suggested… that she also suffered from telekinesis. There was no ghost. No Oona. No…
Everything was rushing back at me, a rush of gravity pressing on my head, making my stomach churn. I wanted to get up—to move around, to stretch and feel the blood flowing through my veins. But she put a hand on my shoulder.
"Sit," she said. "It catches up with you."
I sat. It caught up with me. I wondered if I was going to barf.
"You," she said, "you're telekinetic?"
I nodded and steadied myself.
"And the Seeker is trying to find out if it is hereditary?"
I nodded again. "He thinks it may be passed down by first born females. Like my mother, me… and you." I looked at Evelyn. "Think about it," I said softly. "When did you have the most problems with Oona? When something bad happened? When you were upset or confused? That's when it happens to me."
No answer. She stared at some tiny birds that had come to eat at a bird feeder outside her window.
"What you saw in the book," Evelyn said, "I understood what it was saying. The passage suggests that Oona performed a spell—probably a bit of magick. The result brought telekinesis into our family, starting with Máirin."
"What else did it say?" I asked, my voice hoarse.
"There is no cure—at least, not that the writer knows of. The attacks are caused by repressed emotions, so the only solution is not to bottle them up. The more they are kept under pressure, the greater the explosions."
"What about the missing pages?"
"The spellwriter admits to ripping out any pages relating to a description of telekinesis. Later in life she regretted it. She spent many years investigating the problem, with only some success."
"But why did she destroy them?" I asked, shaking my head. "I don't get it."
"All good witches pride themselves on control." Evelyn sighed. "Rowanwand especially. We rely on the power that our knowledge gives us and the control we have over it. When a witch's control is in question, his or her power may be reined in. Most of us will do anything to avoid that fate, even lie when we are ill or weak. The woman who wrote these words was smart enough to know that if her own fear and pride could actually cause her to tear out pages in a book that described a family affliction, there was a good chance that one of her descendants might do the same. So she hid her writing and spelled the book so that it could be found by the right people—people ready to face the truth, to admit that they didn't have the control that they thought they had."
She leaned her back against the refrigerator, legs akimbo, looking more like a stunned teenager than the imposing, matronly woman I had known. "That's why I couldn't see that book for years," she added. "I was open to ideas the first time I found it. When my mind closed up, the book became invisible to me. All these years…" She shook her head as realization lit her eyes. "I could have done something about these problems. Oh, Goddess, Sorcha…"
Suddenly Evelyn's composure completely abandoned her, and her face crumpled into a sob. "Sarah, your mother," she whimpered as her age finally seemed to show, "she had it, too. She stripped herself because she was frightened by her powers. Her telekinesis." Evelyn closed her eyes and sobbed again. "Oh, Goddess, I could have saved her…"
I shook my head, reaching out to take her hand. "You didn't know," I said.
"I should have," she whispered. "It was all there for me to put together. If I had been honest with her, if I had told her about what was happening to me instead of just pushing her away…"
"You couldn't have known what she was planning," I said, squeezing her hand. "She was frightened, and she didn't tell you how deep her fears went."
Evelyn sighed wearily. "I could see how frightened she was, I thought I could take care of Oona on my own." She looked me in the eye. "I pushed my daughter away," she concluded, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "And I lost her."