Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation (11 page)

“This is really going to heat up if those are
in fact Tamara Linwood’s remains, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah it is.”

“So, what about the seizures?” I asked.

“What about ‘em?” he asked rhetorically. “I
told ya’ the deal on that last night.”

“But what if Felicity has another one?” I
pressed. “What if I have another one?”

He huffed out a sigh and then said, “There’s
nothin’ I can do, Row. If there was, you know I would. So… So,
maybe you two shouldn’t be doin’ any drivin’ for a while.”

“Y
ou know, you’ve been
avoiding talking about this all day,” I said to my wife.

It was now rapidly approaching seven-thirty
in the evening, and she was rushing around the house haphazardly
stuffing ritual items into her nylon backpack. As usual, she was
running late.

Physically, she had bounced back from the
episode the previous evening much better than I had expected. In
fact, on the outside, if I hadn’t been a witness to it, I wouldn’t
have been able to tell anything had happened. Still, I knew
something had to be going on behind those green eyes, and she
wasn’t being very forthcoming. Scratch that; she was all but
denying it.

I had filled her in on the conversation I’d
had with Ben, but much to my dismay, she had simply taken it all in
with calm detachment. I’m sure it was largely due to the seizure
she had experienced, but the radical shift in her personality was
disconcerting to say the least.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she told me
matter-of-factly.

“I know better than that, Felicity,” I
replied. “Think about who you’re talking to. I’ve been there,
remember?”

“Exactly, so you know there’s nothing to talk
about,” she returned.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” She shrugged. “I saw nothing. Just
like you.”

“You must have seen something,” I countered.
“What about the grading papers thing?”

“I don’t even remember saying that, Row.”

“But you did, whether you remember it or
not.”

“Okay, so I said it. Your point is?”

“That you were channeling the spirit of
Tamara Linwood,” I said. “Or her memories at least, which means
recent experiences can’t be far behind.”

“So?”

“So you have to have seen something, it’s
just not in your conscious mind.”

“Good.”

“What do you mean, ‘good’?”

“I mean, good. Maybe I don’t want it to be in
my conscious mind.”

I shook my head harshly. “You aren’t like
that, Felicity. You and I both know it. You aren’t going to run
from the responsibility.”

“Maybe I don’t want the responsibility,” she
spat back. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Do you think I wanted it?” I returned. “It
pretty much just got dumped in my lap.”

“And it’s been fucking up our lives ever
since,” she stated with enough bluntness to give me pause.

“I haven’t exactly got control over it you
know,” I replied sharply.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she
answered.

I shut my eyes and rubbed my forehead for a
second before reopening them and letting out a heavy sigh. “You’re
right. This whole conversation has gotten off track.”

She looked back at me wide-eyed, gave her
head a slight shake, and shrugged again. “Has it?”

“Yes it has. My original question in
all of this is
why
.
Why
is this happening to
you
now?” I submitted.
“
Why you
instead of
me?”

“Not instead. It happened to you too.”

“You’re being evasive, Felicity. You know
what I’m talking about.”

“Coincidence. Sympathy. Destiny.” She
offered the words in a quick stream and then followed them up with
a quick change of subject. “Can you hand me that copy of
Everyday Magic
on the table
there?”

I looked at her in silence, inspecting her
face carefully. There was something just not right about the way
she was acting and moreover, the way she felt to me, and I didn’t
mean the current argument.

She had erected an ethereal wall about
herself, creating a shield against the outside. It was something
she had automatically done the moment the psychic episode had ended
last evening. I knew it was an act of self-preservation, and it was
exactly what any Witch in her position would do. That, in and of
itself, was a good thing; but, she was keeping me out as well, and
that bothered me.

I kept telling myself that the enforced
distance was just because of the newness of the situation and
though she wouldn’t directly admit it, because of the fear I knew
she must be experiencing deep down inside. I had lived with the
very same emotion swirling in my gut for long enough to know the
pain.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel there was
something more going on. I just couldn’t get it to sit still long
enough to peg exactly what it was.

She looked back at me questioningly and
raised an eyebrow. “It’s right there. Behind you. Please?”

I twisted and picked up the book then slowly
handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said as she took the tome
from me and then stuffed it into her backpack. She continued
flitting about the room as if the previous conversation had never
occurred.

I continued watching her and resigned myself
to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to pressure her into
talking to me about this. I suppose it wasn’t all that much
different the first time it had happened to me, but that didn’t
make it any easier to take.

“After what happened yesterday, I’d still be
a lot more comfortable if you rode with someone,” I finally
said.

“Okay,” she replied. “I’ll ride with
you.”

“Funny,” I told her. “Very funny.”

“I was being serious,” she answered without
looking at me.

I borrowed a page from her current playbook
and ignored the comment. “Maybe you should beg off and just stay
home. They’ll be fine without you for one evening.”

“Can’t,” she told me. “I’m the one giving the
lesson tonight.”

“So postpone it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to. Besides, what good
is a Coven meeting without a Priestess?”

“Felicity…”

She turned to face me, shuffling things in
the knapsack and then zipping it shut. “Come with me.”

I shook my head. “You know I can’t do
that.”

“Rowan…” she spoke my name then looked away
while chewing at her lower lip. She brought her gaze back to my
face and adopted an almost pleading tone. “This was your decision
alone. No one in the Coven wanted you to leave.”

“I had to,” I answered succinctly.

“No you didn’t,” she appealed. “No one blames
you for anything that happened.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do,” she shot back. “You are the only one
to hold yourself in contempt. You had no control over what a crazed
maniac did.”

“He did it because of me,” I replied.

“If it hadn’t been you, it would have been
someone else who was openly Pagan. You know that.”

“But it wasn’t someone else. It was me, and
he killed them to get to me.”

“So?” she spat. “That doesn’t make it your
fault.”

“It’s my fault that I didn’t stop him.”

“You DID stop him.”

“Not in time to save Randy or Millicent.”

We stood looking at one another. A gelid hush
frosted the air between us, expanding out to fill the room. The
rhythmic tick-tock of the swinging pendulum on our wall clock
clacked dully out of time with my slow breaths as I watched my
wife. The passing seconds kept appending themselves to the end of
the measure, lengthening the painful silence with each beat. As if
pre-ordained to mark the end of the torture, the hammer on the
timepiece drew back with a mechanical whir then fell hard, striking
a single blow against the chime. The initial sharpness of the
bonging sound slowly flowed through the room, softening as it faded
to nothingness.

“I have to go,” Felicity stated simply,
slipping a single strap of the knapsack up over her left shoulder
as she brushed past me.

I didn’t turn nor even say a word. I heard
the deadbolt snap and the door creak slightly on the hinges as she
swung it open. I could sense her hesitation as she stood in the
open doorway, and I could feel her eyes on my back.

“You know, Rowan,” she finally said. “You can
stay gone for a year and a day, or you can stay gone forever, it’s
up to you. But a Coven is family. You know that. You have people…
people who are more than just friends that are worried about you.
They’re your family, and they want to help if you’ll just let
them.”

She grew quiet for a moment, and I slowly
turned to face her. She was standing with one hand on the doorknob,
staring back at me with a pained sadness in her face.

As I watched her, she swallowed hard then
spoke again. “You know… This will never be over until you stop
feeling sorry for yourself.”

With that, she was gone.

* * * * *

I was still brooding when the dogs began
barking at the heavy noises on the front porch. I shushed them as I
glanced away from the television to quickly check the clock. Only a
little over an hour had passed since Felicity had left, so it
didn’t seem likely that she was already returning.

I muted the sound on the television and
listened closely, wondering if the noise had simply been one of the
cats leaping down from the ledge and thudding on the decking of the
porch. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had set off what
we affectionately called the ‘dog alarm’.

There was nothing but ambient sound for a
moment, and I was just about to up the volume again when a scrape
and thud sounded. The new thump was followed by the creak of the
screen door levering open. The canines stood their ground and
renewed their vocal attempt to keep the intruder at bay, our
English setter emitting a dangerous sounding growl that was echoed
by a throaty rumble from the Australian cattle dog.

A moment later the doorbell rang, sending its
harsh tone echoing through the house. The dogs immediately exploded
once again into angry barks meant to repel the invader.

I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I couldn’t
imagine who would be dropping in unannounced this late in the
evening. Even Ben normally called, albeit at times while he was
already standing on the porch, but he called nonetheless.

A paranoid thought raced through my head, and
my heart seemed to stop as an artificial hollowness filled my
stomach. My subconscious assumed control, and I was gripped by a
sudden fear that something was wrong. Given the situation, the
first thing that came to mind was that Felicity had been afflicted
with another seizure while behind the wheel of her Jeep and that
she had been in an accident.

I jumped up from the chair and strode quickly
to the door, not even bothering to look through the peephole before
unbolting the lock and swinging it open.

The sudden impact of a massive fist against
my shoulder was pretty much the last thing I had been
expecting.

I
stumbled backward and
let out a yelp of pain as I reached for my shoulder. The force of
the impact had caused me to spin a quarter turn away from the door.
My primal gut reaction was to keep that momentum going until I
reached the ninety-degree point and then run as fast as I could in
the opposite direction of the threat. However, my socially
ingrained, testosterone-induced reaction was to defend my
castle.

I quickly recovered my balance and twisted
back toward the open door, certain that whomever it was attacking
me would be only a hair’s breadth from landing another punch. Out
of instinct, I brought my arm up to block the expected blow and
braced myself against its onslaught. I was already clenching my
fists into hard balls, determined that even if I took the first two
punches, I was going to give the next three.

I shot a guarded look past my arm in an
attempt to see my attacker, expecting to come face to face with
some brazen home invader. Instead, I found Ben holding up the
doorframe with his shoulder. He stared back at me with a tired
grin.

“Howth’hell’are’ya’?” he bellowed, creating a
single word from an entire sentence.

“That depends on if you’re going to hit me
again,” I answered, slightly miffed.

“Sorry ‘bout that, whyman,” he mumbled.
“Didn’t mean ta’ hitcha’ that hard. Was jes’ s’posed ta’ be a
frenly punch ya’know.”

I rotated my shoulder as I rubbed it with my
hand. There was still a good deal of dull pain working its way
through the joint, and I winced as it popped. I suppose it didn’t
help any that he had connected with my left shoulder which was the
one Eldon Porter had driven an ice pick into the first time he’d
tried to kill me. I’d had surgery to repair the damage that had
occurred from both that and the subsequent struggle, but to this
day, it still bothered me. I guessed it probably always would.

“I’ll live,” I told him, my voice still a bit
edgy. “Just don’t do it again, please.”

“Yeah, no prob, Kemonas… Kesomob…
Kenomos…”

“Kemosabe?” I offered.

“Yeah, that.”

The glazed look in his eyes and the slurred
speech were the first two indicators to grab my attention, so I
didn’t actually need to smell the brewery riding along on his
breath to know he was all but obliterated. However, there was no
avoiding it. I could only recall having seen him this far gone once
before, and that was very early on in his career as a police
officer. He was a young, far from streetwise uniform, and he had
been the first to respond to a particularly heinous murder-suicide.
It had affected him deeply then, and as seasoned—almost even jaded—
as he had become now, I was certain that it still did to some
extent. Evidence that the old adage about never forgetting your
first time applied to just about anything, good or bad.