Death of the Body (Crossing Death) (27 page)

He cowered playfully and snickered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s why we have the red tack rule!”

“Where the
hell
am I supposed to get a red tack, you little bastard?”

Nicholas bellowed with laughter and preemptively ducked. “I always carry one just in case. Why wouldn’t you?”

I had thrown my last pillow and was half tempted to throw the phone. Instead, I catapulted myself back onto the mattress and joined him in laughter.

“It’s not too late. She’s just in there,” Nicholas said, motioning toward the bathroom door. “Shower sex can be fun. I’m pretty sure you don’t need an invitation.”

“Call me an old romantic, but I think I’d prefer our first time to be in a sleazy hotel bed, not in a sleazy hotel bathroom.”

Nicholas tugged at the wrapper to a protein bar he retrieved from his bag. “Suit yourself.” He chewed for a minute before continuing, “Brunch with my mom is at eleven-thirty.” His chewing slowed. He wasn’t good at hiding the pensive look on his face. I wasn’t going to like what he was about to say. “She wants you to come. She has some information about the college, and with the…” his words started to come with some difficulty, “… magic thing in common, she wants to talk.”

He added a quick, “I don’t know…anyway…” at the end with a dismissive tone.

I waited to answer until he looked at me. When he did, I could see anticipation on his face, but it was also soft and hopeful like a puppy who knew he did something wrong but hoped you wouldn’t notice.

I felt my nostrils flare and my eyelids tighten. I just nodded. “How much does she already know?”

I was sure Nicholas took another bite of his protein bar to avoid answering, so after a few moments I filled the awkward silence by asking the question again, this time more firmly.

“Everything I do.”

I had to swallow to stop a profane word from escaping. “She knows about your possession?”

Nicholas nodded.

“Me?”

He nodded again.

“Orenda?”

He didn’t nod, but he didn’t need to anymore. His lack of denial was confirmation enough.

“I knew you were close, but I had no idea. You are hardly able to talk about this stuff with me.”

“I never talked to her about it until I started talking with you. She’s the only one who doesn’t think all of this is entirely insane. I needed to talk to someone else I could trust.”

He emphasized the word “else” so that I wouldn’t think he didn’t trust me.

“You know I don’t like this stuff. I don’t want to know about it. I need to keep a good head on my shoulders too. Normally when you would go off on all of this, Quon and I would go out for a few drinks and make fun of you. We’d blow off some steam, remind ourselves that none of this exists. Now he isn’t answering his phone, no one knows where he is. Xia doesn
’
t seem concerned and he very well may be dead! He was always around to keep me grounded in
reality
and now he isn’t. My mom has a way of making all of this seem less scary, so yes, I told her. She’s here for all of us, and wants to be there for you. She’s been living in this world for a long time so I want you to talk to her so she can put things into perspective for me.”

Nicholas’s rambling diatribe was so unlike him that all I could do was agree to meet his mother for brunch, not only because it was something I wanted to do (although I was feeling apprehensive and unprepared), but because I needed to keep him from having a breakdown.

“Okay,” I spoke in a soothing tone. “I’ll go.”

***

I always considered Nicholas’s reluctance to believe in magic odd, considering his mother was a practicing witch. I thought about the dichotomy this presented, but in my mind, being someone directly involved myself, I simply had to believe that either his mother wasn’t very good at the craft or he was so deeply hurt by what happened to us in the orphanage that he blocked out not only those experiences, but any he had with his mother as well.

Still, thinking about how someone could believe completely opposite of what their life experiences had taught them gave me a headache. I often compared the thought process to any religion or faith, and saw the same dichotomy in the super zealous as they struggled with hypocrisy: sometimes in little things like how not to judge while being judgmental, and sometimes in larger things like how to continue an affair while preaching fidelity.

Obviously I had my own dichotomies to work out. I was literally two people. What greater dichotomy was there? Where did Edmund end and Alexander begin? Did Alexander even exist? Or was Edmund the imaginary figure? If I were to believe only what I was told was possible, then Edmund was nothing more than a dream and I was Alexander, with simply no memory of the first twelve years of my life.

But I knew differently and I had a select few experiences that confirmed my belief, not the least of which were my magical gifts. Comparing the importance of those few experiences with those in which Nicholas chose to place his faith helped me to understand him. The faith-building experiences that shaped my beliefs were founded in magic; his were founded anywhere else. I clung to my beliefs because of those experiences, and he did the same.

It became easier to see how Nicholas could dismiss the magic surrounding his life when we arrived at a small café for brunch and I saw his mother. Her skin was pale and smooth like porcelain, so untouched by the sun that it was almost translucent. The light in the room seemed to find the angles of her cheekbones in a way that made it look like she was glowing from the inside. Her deep burgundy lips were stunning, even from across the room of the little café we had entered. She looked up at us, her eyes smiling from beneath a large, floppy sunhat that seemed to fit the scene so perfectly I couldn’t imagine her without it.

Quite honestly, she looked strikingly normal. Perhaps a bit more beautiful than average, but she certainly didn’t look like a witch.

She stood when we entered, only to be dwarfed by her son as they embraced.

“Hi, Ma,” Nicholas smiled as he engulfed her tiny frame in his giant arms.

She chuckled joyfully and kissed his cheek, standing on the tips of her red stiletto shoes to reach him.

“Mom, this is Edmund and Xia,” he continued by way of introduction. He then stepped aside as I came face-to-face with someone who struck me as remarkable. Perhaps what was most stunning were her piercing gray eyes, exactly the same shade as Nicholas’s when he was a child, the color of rain clouds—not dark or threatening, but ones that accompany the smell of grass just before the fall of the first refreshing raindrops. I was immediately swept back in memory to the alfalfa fields in Orenda as the earthy smell flooded my nostrils.

“Call me Linda Rose, please. This is quite a pleasure.” She stepped forward and embraced me without hesitation, deeply inhaling at the nape of my neck as she did. “I do so love the smell of rain, don’t you?” she whispered into my ear.

“Aren’t you a beauty? And so powerful!” Linda Rose chimed as she moved on to Xia. “Quite truly a warrior spirit. She’s feisty, Edmund dear. You’ll have quite a bit of fun with this one if you are up for the challenge.”

Xia grinned at this, which caused me to melt, as usual.

“Well, let’s take a seat, shall we?” It wasn’t a question that expected an answer. “I ordered a pot of tea for the table,” she said while pouring herself a cup from a large metal pot, “but of course we can order coffee or whatever else you would like.”

“I’m going to go get a sandwich. Edmund? Xia? Want me to order you anything?”

“Split a turkey bacon avocado?” I offered.

Xia flushed slightly green. “How about the vegetarian?”

“Still a bit queasy from the butcher?” Nicholas chuckled. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve lost all taste for red meat.”

Xia glared, her nose wrinkled in disgust. It was adorable.

“I’m afraid I’ve missed something,” Linda Rose stated—or questioned—I wasn’t sure which.

“It’s too soon to make jokes,” I chided Nicholas, “regarding recent events.”

“Ah, I see,” Linda Rose remarked quite seriously, although her lip turned upward slightly. It seemed Nicholas’s twisted sense of humor was not lost on her. This small insight into her character settled my stomach some. “On that subject, I’ll have you know the school called looking for Nicholas. I took the liberty of informing them that all three of you were staying with me, and that you were most distraught about not knowing when you would be allowed back into the dorms to collect your personal belongings. I told them you had come for Thanksgiving and had no knowledge of the events. They’ll want to speak to all of you, of course, but I convinced them to hold off until after the break. You should stick to that story if you are questioned.”

I was filled with gratitude.

“I’ll have a vegetarian too, please, Nicholas,” Linda Rose added, placing her napkin in her lap.

It was here, in this moment, when my stomach had just started to settle, that something quite subtle occurred, or at least it would have been subtle by anyone else’s standards. Linda Rose picked up her spoon, shuffled a few spoonfuls of sugar into her tea and started to stir. While this event was not out of the ordinary or unexpected, what happened next was both.

Linda Rose lifted her hand from the spoon and simply hovered it over the cup while she turned to Xia and started asking something about her family. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear the question above the screaming.

The motion of the spoon was subtle, but it continued to stir, all the while screeching with a horrendous metallic moan. It was almost the same noise as the metal-on-metal sound you hear when your brake pads are getting too low, but the sound was amplified to a state that made my hair stand on end.

I looked around the café wildly. How could no one else hear the noise? Xia was chatting brightly with Linda Rose who smiled graciously before her mouth started forming words I couldn’t hear. Nicholas was flirting with the barista, his back to us. All of the other patrons seemed unbothered.

“For the love of that poor spoon, stop!” I bellowed, slamming Linda Rose’s hand down over the cup so hard that it tipped over and spilled the tea. It felt like time had stopped. The silence that now permeated the room was heavy. All eyes were trained on me. It became obvious I had yelled more loudly than I had thought.

Linda Rose maintained her composure, even with the spilled tea now running off the table onto her flowered sundress. She didn’t look at me with any anger or malice, but instead with inquisition.

I became aware of my hand still clutched over hers and I released it awkwardly, offering no apology. “Couldn’t you hear it screaming?” I asked in a whisper.

Only now did she move to clean up the tea. She started with a couple of napkins along the edge of the table, but a change in the air, and the feeling in the pit of my stomach, made it obvious that Linda Rose had no issue using magic to do everyday tasks. The tea fled from before her hand as she motioned it across the table, congregating into an easily seep-able puddle. Her power felt odd to me. It took me almost until she was finished adding a few more spoonfuls of sugar to the righted and refilled cup to find the right word for it: forceful. Her power required much more force than I would have expected from such a frail-looking woman. She was undoubtedly strong, her will obeyed as long as it remained unbroken, but she had to push hard to get magic to work for her. I wondered why she was so pushy. It seemed strange for what seemed like such a proper woman in every other aspect.

Linda Rose stirred her tea, by hand this time, until the café patrons returned to their normal conversations. Then she took a sip from her cup and asked me a very odd question.

“Edmund, do you think that spoon would have stirred for you, if you simply asked it to?”

The question was perplexing. “I couldn’t know the answer for sure until I asked it to. I suppose now it would feel that it owes me a debt since I saved it from—” I didn’t finish when I realized my thought was coming out as an accusation. Instead I said, “So I guess it probably would, as long as it wasn’t too tired.” I was trying to find a tactful way not to add
because you forced it to stir against its desires
, but since I doubted Linda Rose understood this, I hoped this point would be lost on her anyway. Surprisingly, it wasn’t, as her next question hinted to understanding.

“Do things often obey you, simply because you ask?”

“I prefer to think we understand each other and have a relationship. If I respect something and it respects me, we can mutually benefit,” I replied.

“Have you ever forced something to do something it didn’t want to do?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to.”

“And why not?”

I briefly scanned the room, stood up, and pulled a spoon off the table next to us. “Options,” I responded, putting the spoon in her cup. It began stirring when I asked it to, just as I knew it would. “This one wanted to stir.”

“How did you know this one, above all the others, wanted to stir?”

I hesitated. I had to think about this question. I had never really analyzed what it was that made my ability unique, what gave me the ability to communicate with the elements. Finally, when I could come up with nothing better, I responded, “Magic. I think that is what magic is… the feeling… the knowing… the understanding.”