BloodMoon (11 page)

There was Sister Lena, Sister Nayala, Sister Bertrille and an Abbess Layolin to call the corners and sweep the space clean from negative energy. There was Siegfried and Spanky and me, of course. Ghost Mom, who was beaming with excitement.

Will’s sister, Samantha, who I’m only just lately finding out is much more informed than we ever would have guessed, had oxygen, shock paddles, and an IV drip on hand, while Elle sat stoically on the edge of the bed, holding my sister’s hand as she reclined among the pillows like Cleopatra.

Surprisingly enough, we were all crammed into the master bedroom, a sacred space that even JR and I couldn’t enter without explicit permission. No wonder both my twin and her wife appeared vulnerable. This was a huge concession on my sister’s part and I marveled at the changes she was making to even explore a new aspect of her neo-witchy self.

The witches called the directions and invoked the Goddess to midwife their “sister” into the heart of the familiar, which was funny, because as I understood it, the ride-along spell was a brain thing. Siegfried used the analogy of the conscious observer, an almost pure non-judgmental consciousness that one could inhabit in the practice of mindfulness. Only this conscious observer was more like the peanut gallery.

Anyway, I was glad I wasn’t in for the trial run, So, I could spectate and take notes. I wanted to record it on my cell phone, but Amber nixed that one.

“Knowing you, the damn thing would end up somewhere on YouTube.” To which I vehemently replied that I might think about it but I’d like to think that my good sense would get the better of me. Regardless, as it stood I was stuck with my favorite gel ink pen and composition notebook. I’m good at taking notes. Making sense of them on the other end, now that’s a whole ’nother story.

Siegfried, come
, my sister thought at the dog, and he gracefully leaped up to lie down next to my sister on the ridiculously huge California King. She placed her hand on his head and turned to the witches. “I’m ready.”

Sam pricked Amber’s finger with a lancet and pressed the blood spot just above Siegfried eyes, halfway between his ears, the drying rust color like a blemish on the dog’s lambswool coat.

“Good thing we only have to do that once,” Amber said, sucking on her finger. Sometimes she was such a wimp. Then she began to sing the chant she’d been taught.

I felt a chill run down my spine and a lump rise in my throat at the intimacy of the moment. Except for the sound of Siegfried dog-crooning next to her, the house was eerily silent.

Bring my consciousness to bear

Upon my chosen familiar

Canine thoughts and canine sight

Be my refuge for a night

She sang it like a round, or a chant, evoking a resonance of our childhood growing up with a mother who bought us DVDs of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo, all the old stuff from her own time as a little girl. In fact, I think the tune she was using was similar to the one about the magic mirror.

I must have dozed off, because,
Mom
, was the next thing I remember hearing and my eyelids shot open and Siegfried was off the bed and prancing around with our ghostly mother. He’d tackled her to the floor and she took on a solidity I’d never seen as she sank to lotus position and took Siegfried and my sister’s consciousness into her arms.

Elle gasped and I realized that Ghost Mom was no longer invisible to everyone else. My sister crooned with Siegfried’s mouth and Annabelle Scott spoke sweet nothings into the familiar’s ear.

“Why don’t we leave the girls to their reunion,” Nurse Sam said and ushered the rest of us out of the room, but I wasn’t too upset, werewolf hearing and all. Besides, with Amber’s body in a coma it seemed that the twin bond was wide open and I could see through Siegfried’s eyes myself. I had to lie down against the nausea I felt at the superimposition, so I retired to the floor of the guest bedroom and turned all the lights out.

My mother’s frame wavered before me on the cinema in my mind and she rose, Siegfried-Amber attached to her hip, and approached Elle who still sat on the edge of the bed. “Elle Gordon. I am so desperately pleased to finally meet you,” Annabelle said and held out her hand.

Elle looked at it and then extended her left hand toward my Mother’s right. Annabelle caught it and brought it to her lips and I shivered as the scent of Jean Nate wrapped around us. Ghost Mom was bringing them all together.

“If you’ll pardon me, Mrs. Scott,” Elle said, “but how can you be here?”

“I only get a few dispensations in my role as guardian of lost souls, but I wanted to meet the woman who made my daughter happy.”

“You know, I think your daughter would appreciate this moment more if she weren’t stuck in a dog’s body.”

I keep telling them I’m not a dog
.

I laughed at the absurdity of it all.

Ghost Mom said, “You’re absolutely right.” And the next thing I knew, Amber was popped back into her own body, the twin bond was shut down, and I got my equilibrium back.

Ghost Mom has powers
, I thought, but I felt a bit hurt until Siegfried relayed that my mother only had a limited time to take advantage of the energies of a full manifestation. Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere.

I decided to leave them alone and go for a run up the canyon. I reminded myself of one of the things that all the twin books I’ve read said was important: parents needed to establish individual relationships with each of the twins. I’ve had Ghost Mom for years. Amber, on the other hand, was making up for lost time. I could be the grownup here and let them have each other all to themselves for a while.

At dawn the next morning, I found Amber sitting out on the back porch with her coffee. She looked like she’d been up all night, but she was radiant.

“So, how was it?” I asked.

“I’ve always envied you, you know. You seemed to get most of her attention.”

“Yes, but you were Daddy’s little girl.”

“The price of that was too high,” she said, referring to Dad’s long, painful and not-really-over period of adjustment when she finally came out of the closet. Amber always told me, “You know, I never really felt like a lesbian. I just fell in love with a woman.”

“And now?” I asked.

“I still envy you. Not quite as much.”

We both chuckled.

“So, tell me. What did she say?”

Amber looked at me and said, “That’s for me to know, and you to never,
ever
find out.”

“Hey, no fair!”

“We’re not kids anymore, Ashlee. We don’t have to share everything.”

And though I knew she was right, it felt like something inside of me died a little.

If this is what growing up feels like, I don’t wanna.

“What died in here?” I voiced to nobody as I opened up the shed in which Elle kept her toys and the smell of rotting meat wafted out. I’d gone to get a couple of seahorses, er, sawhorses, so I could do some silk painting

“Don’t let the flies in!” My sister called out the window and reinforced her words over the twin bond we shared.
That’s the titan arum, the corpse flower, and it’s for the spell we’re doing to protect you all over the Blood Moon
.

I closed and locked the shed, but not before a waiting swarm of big ugly black insects made it into the aluminum building.
Hope that’s not going to cause a huge problem,
I thought. I’d decided I needed to save a little face with the delegation and give them all hand-made silk scarves that I dyed and set myself. Well, all the females at least. I could do four at a time, which means I could have them done in two days. Dying silk is a messy business, but besides my writing it was the one thing I could always rely on. In silk painting, even my mistakes came out beautiful.

Will had cobbled together an old water heater down in the basement and I could steam-set the silks after they were dry and wrapped in newsprint.

I wonder if I should think about dyeing more, as a moneymaking cottage industry? Get it, cottage? Never mind. I set up in an undeveloped flat of land between the shed and a copse of trees that bordered the back of the property and began the arduous process of using push pins to stretch the silk over the bars.

Soon I was laying down my patterns with a blue fabric pen that would wash out later. So, I was up to the elbows of my smock in multicolored spillage when Colby showed up in the backyard. I only got the heads-up a moment before when Amber opened up the twin bond in my head and spat,
this isn’t Grand Central station, Ashlee. You need to tell me when someone is coming over, or at least tell them to come in by the gate and not make me answer the door.

Hey, I didn’t know myself!

But she’d already shut the bond down.

“What’s that godawful smell?” Colby asked as she passed by the shed.

“Corpse flower. Witchy stuff. Blood Moon Spell. That’s all I know.”

“Huh,” she said and looked at the scarves that were drying in their stretcher bars against the back fence. “Those are cool. What are they?”

“Silk scarves for the delegates. The bitches, anyway.”

“Cool! I want that one,” she said and pointed to a teal number I was particularly fond of. On all of the scarves I’d used a gouda, which in this case is not a cheese, but a rubberized liquid that hardens into a flexible but impenetrable line to create a resist and stop the bleed. I never treated my silks beforehand, and in these I’d sketched paw print indentations over a multicolored backdrop that evoked nature in rich fall and autumn colors.

“No worries. It’s yours,” I said, pleased at her enthusiasm. I didn’t paint silk often, but scarves made the best presents at Christmas time.

“Awesome…anyway, I know it’s not polite to show up unannounced, but after the other night and the fiasco that I caused –”

I interrupted, “You didn’t cause a fiasco. You just gave me more information than I was willing to handle at the time.”

“That’s me, Queen of TMI.”

I laughed. “That’s what Amber used to say about me.”

“So, you’re okay?” Her eyes pled her case.

I sighed.

“You’re okay with Jackson and me?” Colby pressed.

“The wolf in my head may want Jackson,” I confessed, “but the heart of the human knows Will is the only alpha male for me.”

“But, I thought Will was a beta.”

Ah, the literal teenager, always trying to sharpshoot her elders.
“It’s just a figure of speech.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Depends on how personal.”

“When did you first have sex?”

“As a wolf or as a human?”

“Both.”

“Human? High School. Wolf? Never.”

“OMG! You’re a virgin too? Did they keep you locked up like me?”

I laughed at that. “Only one who locks me up is me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” I said. This child did not need me to give her a lecture on consensuality and velvet handcuffs. Besides, chances are she’d already read Fifty Shades of Grey. “It means most of the time we’re complicit in our confinement.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, you’re eighteen now, and you’re here. You can disregard whatever restrictions your father put on you any time, right?”

“I guess. Daddy gave me the key to the chastity belt. I can take it off any time now.”

“But will you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Eventually.”

I lifted my palm in a there-you-go gesture. “Like I said. You’re complicit.”

She thought about that for a while. I let her mull it over.

“So, Jackson said you have a cage in your basement and Dad and Sierra wanted to know if I could use it over MoonFall.”

“He said that, eh?” I was hot after working all afternoon on the dyeing, so I splashed myself with the garden hose. I guess I wasn’t thinking too much about teenagers and hormones, because Colby’s eyes got wide as the water, well, let’s say it highlighted my better assets. “Er, sorry.”

“No worries,” she squeaked out. “Sully also said it might be good to have the ulv on hand with me, just in case.”

“Not ready to do the deed, yet, eh?” I asked, tactlessly.

“I’m just trying to get my bearings. Jackson thinks I should have sex as a human before I try it as a lycanthrope. Especially not over the Blood Moon.”

“What? Gotta test drive the Honda before you go for the Lamborghini?”

“What’s a Lamborghini?”

Can you say “sheltered”? I was seriously going to have to show this kid Fast and Furious. We could have a marathon and watch every single movie. How many were there, nineteen by now? “Never mind. So, what do you think?”

“I don’t know. I used to think I wanted to get it over with. But now I’m thinking I should at least be in love with a guy before we knock boots.”

“And when you say sex, you mean…” I hedged.

“Everything. Nothing.”

“So you’ve never even…”

“Dad would never let me. Only thing he let me do was kiss and hold hands. He would have killed anyone he smelled had tried to go too far.”

“But what about the Inuits?”

“Dad said what a girl does with another woman doesn’t count.”

“I think my sister would beg to differ on that one.”

Ashlee!
My sister’s voice resounded in my head.
Don’t you dare put words in my mouth!

Then you get out here and talk to this child!

Silence. Opening up the twin bond between us had its pros and cons. I guess I glamorized the experience in hindsight, the feeling of connection and energy that flowed between us when the floodgates were wide open. But it often meant a lack of privacy and left me with a hollow feeling when she shut it down. Did that make me codependent?

“Anyway, Jackson said you’d be a good person to talk to about all of this stuff.”

I rolled my eyes. “Remind me to thank him for that.”

“I really like him,” Colby said. “I mean, he’s like twice my age, but Dad said except for his being gay, he’s like the perfect alpha.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but he is quite the gentleman.” I surveyed my handiwork one last time, before I went to wash up. “Well, come on. I’ll show you the layout.”