Homecoming (6 page)

*   *   *

The girl stood by the hedge, waiting until Lyse finally disappeared from view. She was confused by the lukewarm reception she'd received from the one person she assumed would understand everything.

With a silent sigh, she flipped over the last page she'd used in her pad, but not before scratching out what was written there:

Don't be scared of the tall lady from your dream. She visits me, too.

E
leanora was relieved when she saw the turnoff for Curran looming ahead of her, the rectangular street sign faded and half hanging from its cylindrical post. The sun was high above her in the sky, which meant there was still plenty of time to sit Lyse down and explain everything—God help her—before they went into the sacred grove to begin the induction ceremony.

Eleanora was finally going to come clean to her grandniece. She'd spent years skirting around the fact that she was a clairvoyant and the master of a coven, but that time was over. She'd stayed quiet, hiding her abilities—she could see and talk to ghosts, or Dream Walkers, as she called them—because she didn't think Lyse was ready for the information, nor did she want to burden her grandniece. Now she felt both excited and terrified to share her secrets—and she wished she possessed a crystal ball, so she could see exactly how Lyse would react to the news.

She hoped her grandniece would be open to joining them, but there was just no way to tell. From Hessika's portent, Eleanora assumed that Lyse's love of plants meant she would join Arrabelle in the herbalist's trade. Eleanora seriously doubted Lyse even knew her talent
was
a talent—because most herbalists just thought they had a green thumb. They had no idea magic might be involved.

She realized it was asking a lot of Lyse to give up her plant nursery in Georgia, but she hoped her grandniece could build something similar in Echo Park. Still, becoming a member of the coven required sacrifice, and Eleanora had never regretted the choices she'd made—and therefore she didn't feel guilty about asking Lyse to do the same. To give oneself over to the greater good was a sacrifice well worth making. It had given Eleanora's miserable life purpose, had brought her blood sisters and given her the greatest gift of all: Lyse.

She was selfish about her memories, about the sheer joy and love she'd experienced because Lyse had belonged to her. She'd never expected to fall in love—didn't think it was possible even—but it'd happened all the same. The gaunt, dark-haired child she'd found standing on her porch one wet afternoon had, with a single gaze, stolen her heart.

Eleanora remembered the haunted look in Lyse's blue eyes as the girl had stared up at her. This was a child who'd endured misery and had accepted that her life would only contain more of the same. Eleanora had vowed then and there to place this child's needs above her own. She was going to love Lyse with the fierceness of everything she possessed.

Back then she'd seen it as an easy thing, this loving, but somehow, when she wasn't paying attention, it had transformed into something else. It was only now, as death approached and the future remained uncertain, that she realized Lyse would be the greatest gift she left the world.

She felt her breath get away from her. She was winded, the uphill climb harder than she'd expected. She stopped on the sidewalk in front of her neighbor—and blood sister—Daniela's house, leaning against the short wooden fence to catch her breath. She peered past the hedges, curious to see if Daniela was home, but all the lights were off inside, and Daniela's two black cats, Verity and Veracity, were lounging on the wooden front porch—one in a wicker chaise longue, the other sprawled across the porch's top step, belly exposed to the sky.

With its weather-blistered siding and warped wraparound porch, Daniela's house was no longer a showplace, but once upon a time—before Hessika's tenure on Curran, even—the Zeke Title House had been magnificent. A converted artist's bungalow, it'd seen its heyday in the 1920s when Title, an art dealer and rare-book seller, played host to stylish salons with the crème de la crème of Los Angeles's bohemian set.

Even a house falls prey to age,
Eleanora mused, her heart rate finally slowing down to normal as she enjoyed the feel of being static.

But static wasn't in the cards.

As soon as the cats sensed Eleanora's presence, they both looked up expectantly, two sets of sea-green eyes focused in her direction. Verity, who was missing half her tail from a run-in with a neighborhood dog, stood up and stretched, arching her back so her shiny black fur stood on end. She jumped down from her perch on the chaise longue and trotted across the lawn toward the wooden gate that separated the yard from the sidewalk.

“Hello there, little one,” Eleanora said, as Verity collapsed onto her belly and slithered underneath the gate like a garden snake, emerging on the other side to rub her lithe body against Eleanora's ankles.

Eleanora knelt down and picked up the purring feline, burying her nose in Verity's dark fur.

“I'm not trying to slut-shame you, Verity, but
come on
. I've been gone ten minutes!”

Daniela stood behind Eleanora, holding a brown bag in her gloved hands, the green glass neck of a wine bottle protruding from inside.

“She was just keeping an old lady company,” Eleanora said, marveling, as always, at Daniela's choice of hair color: Today, her Louise Brooks bob was bright pink with violet streaks.

Verity squirmed out of Eleanora's arms and joined her sister, who'd come running as soon as she'd heard Daniela's voice. Together, they began to twine around their mistress's legs like a caduceus, nipping at Daniela's suede ankle boots in order to get her attention.

“We'll go inside in a minute, girls,” Daniela said, placing one hand on her hip, the other still holding the paper bag. She grinned at Eleanora. “They are such fierce little bitches. And so damn needy.”

Eleanora laughed, wrapping her arms around herself as a sudden chill racked her body.

It was true. The cats were obsessed with their mistress—to the extent that if anything ever happened to Daniela, they'd haunt her grave for weeks on end, mourning their mistress until, finally, they'd just curl up in front of her headstone and die.

“I promised Arrabelle I'd bring a bottle for
after
the induction ceremony,” Daniela said, switching the paper bag over to the crook of her other arm. “She left me a bitchy voice mail about drinking all her reds last time—and hey, you, I saw your grandniece leaving your place earlier. I'd love to have her sit for me if she'd be down.”

“She's not for you, naughty girl,” Eleanora said, used to Daniela's ways after the last six months of having her for a neighbor and blood sister. “You know very well that once she's your blood sister there can't be any hanky-panky.”

“Aw, where's the fun in having a hot blood sister if you can't—” Daniela began as she took a playful swat at Eleanora's arm.

The instant Daniela's gloved hand touched Eleanora's sleeve, the paper bag fell from her grasp, the wine bottle shattering on the sidewalk, ruby red liquid spreading across the pale concrete like blood. Spooked by the loud sound, the cats took off for parts unknown, leaving Eleanora alone to watch Daniela stiffen, eyes glazing over as her whole body began to vibrate like a tuning fork.

As much as Eleanora wanted to go to her, she knew when to leave well enough alone. Touching Daniela now would only make things worse.

The turquoise leather gloves the girl was wearing should've protected her, but things were stirring in the ether around them, charging the air with electricity, so Eleanora wasn't surprised when strange, seemingly impossible things were born into existence.

“Daniela?” Eleanora said, every instinct begging her to touch the ill girl. “Can you hear me?”

No response.

Being an empath was a dangerous business. No one in their right mind would choose it for themselves. A trick of fate bestowed at birth, this ability to touch someone and “feel” into the emotional core of their being came with a high price: a heightened sensitivity, one that overloaded the brain's circuitry and caused tiny, destructive seizures that slowly chipped away at the brain, until eventually their combined effects created massive and irreversible damage.

Until her recent death, Marie-Faith Altonelli—Daniela's mother—had been a close friend, and so Eleanora knew of Daniela's limitations. The gloves (because touch was the conduit through which Daniela's talent lay) gave the girl a fighting chance at having a normal life. Only twice a year did her blood sister duties compel Daniela to remove them. Otherwise, they stayed on her hands at all times . . . even when she slept.

“Two sisters. The Teacher and the Innocent. Your Saint Anne watches over them so long as you are alive.”
Daniela's eyes were pitch-black, as though the pupil had swallowed the irises whole.
“You fear once you are gone that nothing can stop The Flood.”

Eleanora stared, her skin pimpling with gooseflesh. It was no fun to have someone delve into your inner mind's domain.

“The Flood is coming, sister,”
Daniela whispered—and now she spoke in a reedy voice straight out of Eleanora's past, a voice that froze the blood solid in her veins.
“The Flood is coming and you won't be there to stop it.”

Eleanora felt her heart flutter, not gently, but as though it were being torn asunder.

“No,”
she rasped, collapsing against the fence and tearing the sleeve of her scarlet Windbreaker as she tried to hold on to the wooden post.

Pinpricks of black danced around her peripheral vision as she fought back the panic clawing its way up her throat. It felt like a vise had tightened around her heart and was squeezing it to death. No, she couldn't, she
wouldn't
die like this. There was too much at stake, too much that had to be settled before she could go.

“Hessika!”
Eleanora gasped, reaching out to the ghost of her long-dead friend.

Instantly, she was enveloped in warmth as Hessika's shade appeared before her. She felt the ghost's energy infusing with her own, a trickle of heat that began at the top of her head and oozed its way down the rest of her until she was floating away, the pain receding as though it'd never been. Eleanora closed her eyes, relief washing over her.

Thank you,
she thought.
Thank you for the respite, my old friend.

Though she knew the ghost's energy wouldn't last forever.

*   *   *

Eleanora set both palms flat on the gold Formica kitchen countertop and rested her weight against the cabinet. She closed her eyes and took two deep breaths.

She'd left Daniela recuperating on her front porch, both black cats curled around their mistress's legs like silent, watchful sphinxes. Unlike traditional spirit channelers, empaths were often awake and aware while they worked, so the first two questions on Daniela's mind—once she could speak coherently—had been:
What the hell just happened to me?
To which Eleanora explained that Daniela's body had been used as a vessel to channel a restless spirit. And then:
Who in the hell was I channeling?

Eleanora had neglected to answer the second question. Not out of ignorance or spite, but because the answer was just too painful.

She opened a cabinet and began pushing aside the ridiculous orange prescription pill bottles the oncologist had prescribed for her—pills that she refused to take—then plucked a tiny glass bottle of cannabis tincture from the back and set it on the counter. At her blood sisters' urgings, she'd done the first round of chemo—she'd been all right with that; it was fighting, and fighting was something she knew about—but once the doctors realized it wasn't working and had started prescribing chemically manufactured crap to “make her comfortable,” she'd said
fuck you
to Western medicine. Now she just took herbal remedies Arrabelle made for her and medical marijuana—she had a doctor-prescribed card so she could shop at one of her local dispensaries—and that was it.

If she was going to die, she was going to do it on her terms.

She extracted a dropper full of liquid from the tiny bottle, then released the tincture under her tongue, where it was quickly absorbed into her bloodstream. After a few moments, she felt herself relax, and the blissful freedom of intoxication gradually commandeered her senses.

She knew she was stoned because she could feel it in her ears, and then the silly grin—the one that always accompanied the ear thing—began to spread across her face. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and when she opened them again, she was sitting on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, head back against the cabinets, smiling like an idiot.

She felt better than she had in hours . . .

Clunk.

Clunk.

Clunk.

Eleanora sat on the bed, the star-patterned quilt that once belonged to her mother and was now hers wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. She flipped through the pages of her mother's Bible, holding the treasured artifact in her lap as she devoured its contents. When she heard the first
clunk
at the bottom of the stair, she panicked and with a shaking hand shoved the old book underneath her pillow. She reached for her knitting where it sat on the table beside the bed and clutched the long needles in her hand. This was the work she was supposed to be doing but had set aside in favor of reading.