The Flower Bowl Spell (20 page)

“You’re a mind reader?”

I sigh. How many times have I heard that from
Cooper? “Not exactly. I know things about people. The facts of
their lives. Not necessarily what they’re thinking or their future,
but some of what has happened to them or what they’ve done.
Sometimes where they are, but I usually figure that out by picking
up on scents or sounds they’ve smelled or heard. Sometimes the
facts involve what they’ve thought in the past. I can also see
auras.”

“Auras?”

“You know, the colors vibrating off people’s
bodies. I guess it’s like steam coming off something hot. It’s a
byproduct of their souls.”

“Their
souls
?”

“Auras are like a preview of a person’s state
of mind, even if they don’t know what that state is. Seeing them
just takes a little practice.”

“What’s mine right now?”

“Black,” I lie. It’s more of a yellow with
red—fear and anger and that edge of pink that I’ve come to
associate with his feelings about Cheradon. Yet, he’s taken off the
glasses. Maybe they’re about someone else.

“That’s bad, right?”

“No. It’s good. Why do you think so many
musicians and poets wear black?”

“But if you’re not making the hula girl drive
the car like you said, what is?”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure. But I suspect
that some objects are magickal when we need them to be.” I think
back to all the inanimate objects that have come to life in my
presence, like the Day of the Dead dolls when I was a kid. “There
always seems to be a reason. Sometimes, figuring out what that
reason is takes time.”

“And you can do all of this and see this
stuff because you were raised a witch?”

I look at him and he turns away from me
quickly. I face the road again.

“Being raised a witch gave me some helpful
tools. But, no,” I say. “Not because of that.”

“Then how come you know this stuff?”

I shrug. “Because I can.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know why, exactly.”

We drive in silence for a while. I lace my
fingers together in my lap.

Finally, Tyson says, “Reading auras? That
doesn’t seem like a very useful superpower.”

“There are other things I can do,” I say,
wondering why I feel the need to impress him. “But I don’t want to
freak you out too much.”

He’s sitting close to his door, as far from
me as possible. “You’re certifiable, Memphis.”

“Wait. I do have a theory. About why I can do
these things or how it works. Remember in physics class—”

“I never took physics.”

“Oh. Well, I did, but not much of it made
sense. Except this thing Mr. Chun said—did you know him?”

“Yeah. I had him for chemistry.”

“So, you know what a dork he was for
theoretical stuff.”

Tyson shrugs.

“He was. Anyway, he taught us about quantum
mechanics, about how there are equations or formulas that show how
things in particle physics that seem like science fiction could be
facts. Like there’s a one in gazillion-billion-trillion-quadrillion
chance that I could drive our car through that car ahead of us, and
we’d just pass through it like water over a stone and come out
solid on the other side.”

“Can you do that?”

“No, not that.”

“But there’s a formula that can prove it
could happen.”

“It posits a baboon-billion chance that it
could. That someone could make it happen. And some people are in
better possession than others of the…skill set, I guess you’d call
it, that could make it happen.”

He grunts and there’s still a slight edge of
hysteria in his eyes, but it’s just slight.

“Witchcraft,” I say, “is really just science.
It’s particle physics or quantum mechanics. At least, the way I see
it. For some people it’s more spiritual. A religion.”

“Sure, then by that token you could say
life
is particle physics.”

I ignore his sarcasm. “Life and death.” I
think about Gladys and her awful death and my brief glimpse into
her afterlife. And why I stopped living the magickal life I’d
always known.

I swallow a sigh that’s threatening to turn
into a sob. I have tamped this down for so long, this guilt and
pain, the fury and regret, but they have been slipping back into my
consciousness, awakened by fairies and Tyson and strange
clothes-wearing waterfowl.

“I actually tried to get away from it,” I
say. “From being a witch.”

“Because it’s crazy?”

“No, because…” The urge to cry has passed.
“Because of what happened to your sister.”

This is not what he has expected me to say.
Alice. His baby sister Alice, the light of the Belmonte family, the
sweet, dizzy girl who went off to Africa to bravely save the third
world while the rest of us remained safe and selfish in our cozy,
privileged first world.

“What does any of your insanity have to do
with Alice?” Tyson asks, and before I can answer he says, “She got
herself into her own mess. I mean, what was she thinking? Going to
Africa where there’s war and famine and danger in just about every
fucking corner. Trying to help those refugees. That’s all well and
good.” He laughs bitterly. “But then she had to ramp it up a notch.
Not just give them clothes and food and medicine and do her
do-gooding, but actually turn into a fucking Harriet Tubman.”

He’s talking about the escaped slaves Alice
worked with, those women and children and men who had been stolen
from their villages to work for and pleasure warlords and their
henchmen.

“What the hell was she trying to prove? That
she was as good as you?”

I turn and we look at each other and this
time he doesn’t turn away.

“She always said you were
so
brilliant, and she always said it like she wished she were
you.”

I know immediately what he means. Alice went
to Africa not only to escape her failed relationship with a married
man, but also to prove herself, to show she could do something
beyond remarkable with her life. Because no one ever thought she
could. I admit that I never did. She was always so lighthearted,
happy-go-lucky, and sweet. But she was also smart enough to
recognize everyone’s affectionate derision of her. By going to
Africa, Alice succeeded in surpassing everyone else’s goodness and
bravery. We never would have had the guts to do what she did.

“So tell me, Memphis,” Tyson says. “Aside
from being the inspiration for Alice’s African adventure, what did
you have to do with her death?”

Now I do start to cry, and the tears blur my
vision. I wipe at my face, trying to squeeze the moisture back into
the atmosphere. I realize I’ve been waiting for this moment, not
just since the Palace Hotel when I saw Tyson for the first time in
years, but since Alice died.

“I couldn’t protect her,” I say. “I tried.” I
feel something like relief as I finally confess.

“What do you mean?”

The tears are suddenly gone. I can see again.
I put my hands on the steering wheel and Hula Girl looks up at me,
her smile sympathetic and breezy. She climbs elegantly back to her
perch and freezes into place. Tyson looks at the doll and blinks.
He looks at the steering wheel, and back at the bobbling doll, and
then at me. But he doesn’t say anything.

“I gave her something,” I say, eyes on the
road. “An amulet. It was supposed to keep her safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“From
everything
!” I shout so harshly
that my throat feels raw. There happens to be a pause between songs
on the CD player, and for a moment, the car fills with a profound
silence. I wonder if the girls are listening. “From anything that
might harm her,” I say more softly. “I was arrogant enough to think
my magick would protect her from anything and everything.”

“Doesn’t your magick always work?” There is
something new in his voice, but I’m too lost in my sadness and
shame to pay attention to it.

The urge to cry returns, a stone tied around
my neck. “It used to. But like everything, it takes practice and is
only as good as I am.” It’s true. Also, I’d been either incredibly
lucky or incredibly good—up until that point, my magick was rarely
off and it never completely failed.

I picture it, can almost feel it in my hand:
the amulet I imbued with a protection charm, Alice’s name scratched
in the runic alphabet on a piece of smoky quartz. I gave it to her
before she left and I told her what it was. She teased me, called
me a dippy hippie and said she had not asked me to protect her,
which was true. But I did it anyway. I was taking care of her, I
reasoned, giving her a little magickal insurance.
What was the
harm in that?
I asked myself at the time—rhetorically,
carelessly.

“And she died.”

I look over at Tyson. I feel like his words
have burned me. He looks back at me as if something were my fault
after all.

I see it then. Without needing to touch him,
I see it all, like with Gladys. That doesn’t happen much, reading a
person without physical contact. I see him in a village in
Nigeria.

It’s hot and the earth is a
brownish-orange, coating everything with a fine layer of silt that
turns into a blood-colored mud when it rains. Tyson is wearing his
old military fatigues, hoping they’ll bring him something—luck,
better treatment. There’s someone with him, an African man, the
stethoscope around his neck signaling his medical status. Tyson
bends over a table where something lies under a dirty sheet. Alice.
My friend, her battered body, her mutilated flesh, the bullet hole
in the back of her skull and the slash across her throat
.

Alice died a horrible death. She was scared,
alone, in pain, and nothing I did helped her. I wonder, as I have
so many times in the past, why the magick failed. I made the
amulet, and perhaps I made it with too much confidence in my
abilities, with hubris, and thus with too much carelessness for the
details. For a while I wondered if it failed because it was all a
crock of shit. But I know magick works. So why not that time?

“What was going on at that house this
morning?” Ty’s question snaps me out of his past. I check the road,
the speedometer, the rearview. When I look at him I notice he’s put
on his sunglasses again.

“A woman,” I say, wanting to give him
everything I can to make up for my mistake, to make up for what he
had to go through. “She was part of my coven. I—I think she had
something to do with Viveka, but I’m not sure what.”

“Had?”

I glance in the mirror at the girls, who look
blissed-out on the Beatles, and mouth the words: “She’s dead.”

He just looks at me.

“As far as I can tell,” I whisper, “someone
used magick to kill her, then strapped a bomb to the cat to blow up
the house and cover their tracks.”

Tyson doesn’t model my discretion when he
says at a normal volume, “That is fucking lunacy. She’s dead, my
sister’s dead. People seem to die prematurely when they know you,
Memphis.”

I slam my foot on the brake, which isn’t the
greatest idea since we’re going almost seventy miles an hour. I can
feel Bright Vixen’s cat under my seat roll forward. It lets out a
low yowl. The car does what it can to stay steady as I drive over
to the side of the highway and stop. The girls gasp, and I give
them a quick once-over, but there’s no whiplash, no harm.

I turn back to Tyson. “Get out.”

He doesn’t hesitate but he takes his time. I
fling my door open and walk quickly around to his side. There’s a
defiance to him that wasn’t there a minute ago. As soon as he
closes the car door behind him, I go first.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

He shrugs.

“Take off those fucking glasses!”

He does, although his expression doesn’t
change. I feel, suddenly, something I’m not used to feeling.

I feel afraid.

But then he closes his eyes and sobs. The
sobs roll on, and he leans forward so that there’s nothing to do
but catch him in my arms. His arms encircle me, and the feel of his
body against mine makes my heart beat faster.

When he pulls away his cheeks are wet with
tears. “I’m so tired,” he says.

“I know. Me too.”

He walks a few steps from the car and I
follow him. We watch the wind in the grass and trees. Over a hill,
a horse whinnies.

“In the army, I saw things,” he says. “I’ve
seen worse things than my sister’s corpse. If there’s one truth I
know, evil exists.”

After a long silence he turns to me. “Magick
is more than particle physics.”

“It is?”

He nods.

“Well, what is it?”

He steps closers and leans so that I feel his
breath on my ear and neck. “Magick is magick.”

He steps back and puts the sunglasses back
on. He takes my hand in his and squeezes it. And with that
pressure, the images hit me like rocks.
Piles of severed hands.
Soldiers smoking and playing cards around a dimly lit table. Voices
arguing about being on duty Christmas day. A movie screen with
flashes of classic horror films like
Halloween, Nightmare on
Elm Street, Friday the 13th.
A pentagram splattered in clotted
blood
.

I shiver and pull my hand away.

“Let’s get out of here, Memphis. Let’s just
put the girls on the side of the road here and drive away. Someone
will pick them up, right? They’re little girls, cute as hell.
They’ll be fine. Five-oh will be along any minute now. You and
me—we have a connection. We should explore that.”

All I can do is gape at him. “You are out of
your fucking mind.”

He grabs me and kisses me. And despite what
he’s just said, sparks zing through me. For a moment I forget
everything else except how good it feels to press up against him,
feel his strong hands grip my back, his lips at once soft and rough
on my mouth, his tongue sensuous against my own tongue and
teeth.