True of Blood (Witch Fairy Series) (2 page)

When I open this box, I find a necklace on a similar cord with knots but this one has only one stone in the center.  The stone is amber colored and shaped into a circle with a hole in the center that contains a rust colored metal.  The stone is embedded in a cradle of silver.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.  Thanks again, Mom,” I say as I pull the cord over my bone straight, long black hair and settle it on my neck.  Mom looks pleased as I continue to examine the various stones of my new bracelet and necklace.  She has never been one for jewelry and I know I’ve never seen them around before so these presents surprise me.  Dad always says Mom is too pretty to need jewelry.  I suspect they just don’t want to spend the money on it but he’s right, Mom is very pretty with long curly blonde hair and an oval face with eyes so blue that even as a ghost they’re the color of the ocean and shine brightly.  Dad also has blue eyes and sandy brown hair like Zac and he has a stocky build.  There must have been some serious recessive genes in their DNA to give me black hair and green eyes.  Even the shape of my face is different with high cheekbones and a slender face.  Mom says I’m beautiful, too, but I always wanted to look more like her.

Mom is beaming at me and Dad is smiling at her.  Even as ghosts, the love they have for each other is almost tangible.  Mom says it was their love for each other and for us that anchored them both here to continue to take care of us.  I often wonder if I’ll ever meet someone with whom I’ll experience that kind of love.  But since there are no boys in a fifty mile radius of where we live, it certainly isn’t going to happen any time soon.

After breakfast, Zac and I do the dishes.  I wash and he dries and puts away.  We have an unspoken mutual agreement to drag this out as long as possible to postpone starting on our schoolwork.  That’s one good thing about Aunt Barb not being the greatest cook, the pans she uses usually need a lot of scrubbing to get the burnt food off from them.

“Xandra, I can see myself in the Teflon,” Mom laughs as she hovers over my shoulder.  “I think it’s clean enough.”  She knows what we’re up to but she doesn’t usually give us a hard time about it.  She thinks a little rebellion in kids is a healthy thing.

Not being able to avoid it any longer, Zac and I trudge into the small room at the back of the house that is set up like a classroom.  There’s a whiteboard on the far wall, a large desk off to the side of the room, and two smaller desks facing the white board for Zac and me.  The wall behind the larger desk that Mom and Dad used to use when they could actually sit on furniture is lined with educational books.  Everything from math and science to English grammar and literature to obscure ancient texts of religion and mythology.  I love looking at those.  I have a fascination with anything that has to do with magic.  When I was younger, I used to wish that I was Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series although I don’t ever admit that out loud.

While I’m taking my Anatomy test, Zac gets a lesson in dividing large numbers.  He’s having a hard time sitting still this morning because we’ve been snowed in for a week and he hasn’t had much of a chance to play outside.  When the snow is this deep, it can be dangerous to wander too far from the house and Mom and Dad worry a lot.  I remember how it felt when I was his age to have all that pent up energy and no way to release it, so I feel for him.  But he is making it hard to concentrate on my test as he keeps interrupting Mom’s lesson with questions and comments. 

When he accidently knocks his pencil holder off his desk, Mom looks at him sternly although I can see a sympathetic gleam in her eye.  “Zacchaeus, soft of eye and light of touch – speak you little and listen much.”  I’m pretty sure she got that one from a fortune cookie.  Zac makes an effort to concentrate on his lesson and I finish my anatomy test in peace before starting on a physics assignment Dad had given me.

Finally, it’s lunch time and we can take a short break.  I usually make lunch for me and Zac so Aunt Barb can work uninterrupted until dinner time.  Zac and I head to the kitchen and I make him his favorite sandwich.  Peanut butter and jelly, light on the peanut butter and heavy on the jelly.  I make myself a turkey sandwich with cheese.  It’s a little dry with no condiments but I’ve never had a taste for mustard or mayonnaise.

“I think the snow is letting up,” Dad says as he floats into the kitchen.  “Since it’s your birthday maybe we can play hooky and take a walk later and look for tracks.”  Zac grins.  He loves taking nature walks with Dad and learning how to spot animals.  At this point, I think he could track a mountain lion through a blizzard.

“Did you grade my test?” I ask nervously around a bite of turkey sandwich.

“I did and you passed with flying colors like you always do,” he says with a proud smile.  “I think you deserve the afternoon off even if it wasn’t your birthday.  What do you think, want to go?”

Hmm, tough choice.  Slaving away over physics and Dante’s version of hell for the next three hours or trudging through knee deep snow.  It really is a toss up.  I don’t consider nature and me to be friends.  But, Dad looks so excited at the prospect that I can’t refuse even though the thought that as a ghost he can no longer feel the cold runs through the back of my mind.  On the other hand, he also can no longer do any of the things he used to love to do outside like hunt or fish or even chop firewood for the fireplace.  For his sake, I try to muster some excitement.  “Sure, sounds great.”

Dad chuckles at my lukewarm response but chooses to ignore my hesitation.  “Great, after you finish up lunch throw on your winter gear and meet me outside.  I’ll see if your mother wants to come, too.”  He floats off in the direction of the living room where Mom is reading a novel on the computer that Aunt Barb programmed to automatically turn the page every sixty seconds.  She decides to stay inside and finish up her book.

The nature walk is everything I expected it to be.  Cold, wet and miserable.  After an hour, I start to get whiny and by two hours, I’m down right surly.  Dad finally gets the hint and we start heading back towards home.  After climbing up a particularly steep slope and losing my footing twice, I vow not to leave the house again until July.  I’m so excited to finally be at the top that I almost walk through Dad who is staring at the ground with a puzzled expression on his face.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” I ask. 

“There’s people tracks,” Zac says excitedly pointing to a spot about ten feet away where there is a line of tracks in the snow that do indeed look like human footprints.

“People tracks?  Who besides us would be crazy enough to trudge through this snow and get this close to being a human icicle?”  Okay, I already admitted that I was surly.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Dad says completely ignoring my icicle comment.  Peering closer at him, he looks worried.  The way he’s standing there so still as only a ghost can do and staring with his brow scrunched together is making me nervous. 

“Is everything okay, Dad?” 

Shaking his head as if to clear his thoughts, he looks back at Zac and me.  “Yes, of course.  Just wondering why someone would be so far off the trail.”  The closest hiking trail is over five miles from our house.  Someone would have to be seriously lost to find their way here.

He must have been thinking the same thing.  “Why don’t you take Zac back to the house.  I want to see where these tracks lead and see if someone needs help.”  He’s totally oblivious to the distress that coming across a ghost when you are already lost in snow filled woods and thinking you’re going to freeze to death would cause.  But his heart is in the right place.  Maybe a spirit guide through the woods would be welcomed by a lost hiker.

Zac and I make it back home and I’m finally able to peel off my soaked jeans and gray long underwear, which are unfortunately a necessity at this elevation, and step into a hot shower.  By the time I’m done and come out of my room, Dad’s home and he and Mom are in the living room speaking in hushed tones. 

“It couldn’t be,” Mom is saying.  “There’s no way anyone could have found us here.”

“Then how do you explain the tracks suddenly disappearing?  Who else could do that?”

What is he talking about?  “Dad, what’s going on?” I ask coming into the room startling them both.  If they could turn any paler, I believe they would have.

Dad tries to put a convincing smile on his face.  “Nothing’s wrong.  I wasn’t able to find the hikers and I’m worried that they’re in danger.” 

“What did Mom mean about someone finding us?”  I don’t miss the guilty look that washes over her face before she puts her own unconvincing smile on.  “I was just hoping that they would find our house so we could help them but we’re so deep in the mountains that it would be almost impossible.  I hate to think of someone being all alone and lost.  I think I’ll go talk to Barb about getting dinner started.”  With that, she floats through the living room wall in the direction of the garage and Aunt Barb’s lab.

“I think I’ll take another quick look around,” Dad says as he floats through the large picture window.

Okay, Mom and Dad have never lied to me before that I know of but their explanation just isn’t adding up with the conversation they were having but they’re obviously not going to say anything else on the subject.  All through dinner, they both have a hard time looking me in the eye when talking to me and I am getting more uncomfortable by the minute.  What is going on that they don’t want me to know about? 

After dinner and dishes, I go to my room and log onto my Facebook account.  I get lost for the next couple of hours in my own little cyber world of friends.  By the time I come out to get a snack before bed it’s already Zac’s bedtime.  I stop by his open bedroom door and listen to Mom tuck him in.  From the time I can remember, Mom has always sang the same lullabies to us.  I used to look forward to them every night when I was younger and still needed to be tucked in.  I still love to hear her lilting voice as she sings the songs she says have been sung to all the children in her family for generations, so I stand in the door to listen as she sings softly:

“Deosil go by the waxen moon - sing and dance the Witch’s Rune;

Widdershons go when the Moon doth wane, the wolf will howl by the dread         wolf’s bane;

When the lady's moon is coming new, kiss your hand to her times two;

When the moon is riding at her peak, then your heart's desire you should seek. 

Heed the north wind's mighty gale - lock the door and drop the sail;

When the wind is from the south, love will kiss thee on the mouth;

When the west wind blows o'er thee, the departed spirits will restless be;

Heed ye flower, bush, and tree - by the Lady blessed be.”

I have no idea what the song means and when I’ve asked in the past, Mom just smiles at me mischievously and tells me that the important thing to remember from the lullaby is that to bind the spell every time, let the spell be spoken in rhymes.  Then she says that it was a southern wind that brought Dad to her.  As far as an answer goes, it’s not a very good one but I can never get her to tell me anything else. 

“Will you sing both to me tonight?” Zac asks as he yawns widely.

Mom smiles.  “You look awfully tired, are you sure you want me to sing again?”

“Uh huh,” he says as his eyelids already start drooping.

“Alright, we’ll do both tonight.”  Mom begins to sing softly again.

            “BeWitching Goddess of the cross roads

Whose secrets are kept in the night,

You are half remembered, half forgotten

And are found in the shadows of the night. 

From the misty hidden caverns

In ancient magic days,

Comes the truth once forbidden

Of thy heavenly veiled ways. 

Cloaked in velvet darkness

A dancer in the flames

You who are called Diana, Hecate,

And many other names. 

I call upon your wisdom

And beseech thee from this time,

To enter my expectant soul

That our essence shall combine. 

I beckon thee O Ancient One

From far and distant shore,

Come, come be with me now

This I ask and nothing more.

Zac is sound asleep by the time she finishes.  I think she only kept singing because of me listening at the door.  Even if I can’t explain what the songs mean I’ll probably still sing them to my kids some day, too, just because they’re so beautiful and comforting.  I’ll hold off on the cryptic replies, though, when they ask me what they mean and just admit that they don’t mean anything I think as I head back to my room with the apple I just got from the kitchen.