Never Been Witched (25 page)

Destiny hit the light switch and sat up to face him. “Something about your childhood?”

“Meggie made predictions of the future, no matter how angry it made my parents. I, on the other hand, kept my mouth shut, unlike her, to protect myself from their anger.”

Destiny settled herself against the headboard, ready for a long talk. “Let me get this straight. You’re admitting that you’re psychic?”

“I know you’ve suspected.” He brought the blankets up to cover her shoulders. “I’m afraid I am, or was.”

“There is no was. It isn’t curable, and it isn’t a disease or something to fear.”

“When you screw it up, it is.”

“How did you screw it up?”

“Before Meggie died, I got a vision of the school’s tower falling—not of Meggie dying, just the tower—but I convinced myself that it was a dream, and by then I’d bought into the concept that no one would believe me if I told them what I saw anyway.”

“Don’t torture yourself like that.” Destiny tried to pull him close, but he wouldn’t let her, as if he’d break if he didn’t finish.

“For months after Meggie died, I thought if I’d spoken up, my parents would have gotten her out in time, and she’d be alive today.”

“Oh, Morgan, no.”

He swallowed hard. “I blamed myself for her death, until I went to the seminary and buried my guilt in school-work. I studied hard, and my dark memories went into deep cold storage. I doubled up on my majors, took night courses in architecture at a local college, continued my day studies in theology at the seminary. Architecture, I enjoyed. Theology, I endured.”

Destiny couldn’t imagine what it cost him to reveal his guilty memories. “I’ve met your mother. She wouldn’t have believed you. Meggie knows that. Time for you to realize it.”

“You might need to keep telling me that.” He went into her arms then, his eyes glistening.

Eventually, they made love again, gently at first, then almost savagely, and lastly with a burgeoning freedom, as if a damn had burst and Morgan had been set free.

As they drifted afterward, Destiny sat straight up. “Oh good Goddess. Just shoot me now. A falling tower, and I painted another. I must have gotten my psychic messages mixed. Was Meggie’s tower made of brick, too?”

“It
was
brick. That’s it then? The mistake I hoped for?”

“What made you hope for that?”

“The painting of the school tower in the upstairs hallway at your house.”

Destiny had never been so relieved. “You’re psychic, too. You must be right. I could have gotten the towers mixed up.” She hoped. “When I think of what you went through, no wonder you were a grumblestiltskin.”

“I thought you were a spoiled brat, but always the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen.”

“I look exactly like my sisters.”

“No you don’t. But your psychic energy is off the charts. I’m still worried about our tower. I hope the worry is
not
the psychic in me. Des, why didn’t I tell somebody about Meggie’s tower? Anybody.”

“You’d been brainwashed, taught since birth to deny the existence of anything that couldn’t be explained, psychics especially. All along, I thought it was the priest in you that couldn’t accept my magick and psychic abilities, when in fact, it was your upbringing coupled with trying to deny your own psychic ability.”

“You think I subconsciously denied my ability to keep my parents happy?”

“On some level, eventually. But wouldn’t it make more sense if your determination to debunk psychics and paranormal activity was a deep-seated, unacknowledged need to prove that you
couldn’t
see the future? Therefore, you couldn’t have saved your sister, because you couldn’t be a psychic, since they don’t exist.”

“You’re pretty smart for a sex goddess.”

“I grew up learning to pay attention to the signs. Having a sixth sense makes you a mighty powerful listener.”

“Guess I buried plenty when I buried Meggie, because I stopped listening as well.”

“We’ll work on resurrecting your sixth sense the way we resurrected the big guy.”

“He’s always ready for a resurrection. My sixth sense, not so much.”

Disappointment and frustration filled Destiny. But she figured there was more than one way to awaken Morgan’s gifts.

Chapter Forty

“I’M hungry,” Morgan said, recognizing the imminent arrival of dawn outside the window.

Destiny turned on her side, snuggled her bottom against his boner, closed her eyes, and sighed in contentment. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s still dark, but it’s nearly dawn.” He jumped from the bed and put on some sweats. “Wear warm clothes and meet me at the top of the lighthouse tower in fifteen minutes for a sunrise picnic. I’ll teach you how to ring the fog bell.”

Destiny moaned in frustration and tried to keep warm without him.

“Tower picnic,” he coaxed, pulling her blanket slowly away from her and toward the foot of the bed.

She grabbed it to stop its defection, but she shivered anyway.

“Sex in the tower at sunrise. An experience to—” Tell their kids about? Was he nuts?

“To what?” she grumbled, as she got up. “And it better be good.”

“An experience to make us come every time we remember it.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

“Now who’s the grumblestiltskin?”

“Breakfast better be ready when I get there.”

Morgan saluted and left.

 

 

AT the top of the tower, Destiny stole his breath when she arrived wearing makeup and a pair of purple sweats with a matching hair band, her blonde hair curling around it. What a stunner.

“I love it up here,” she said, walking the birdcage around the Fresnel lens along the lantern room gallery, then going out onto the main gallery, the boxy deck surrounding the square tower, then a smaller gallery lower down that connected them to the fire escape.

Afterward, she came back inside, shivering. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Champagne and birthday cake.”

“Now that’s something to wake up for.”

“And sex, isn’t?” he asked, making a bed for them on the main gallery around the caged lens, with enough blankets to throw over their shoulders while they watched the sunrise.

“Breakfast first, sex after,” she said. “I worked up an appetite last night.”

An unannounced and silent visitor startled them. A white owl landed on the gallery railing and stared right at them.

“Hello, Owl,” Destiny said. “This is Morgan. Morgan, Owl.”

“Kismet, you scare me sometimes.”

“If an owl sits nearby, face your fears, for a great mystery is about to unfold. Grandmother Owl is the totem of psychics, a link between the seen and unseen. She encourages us to make peace with our pasts. She must understand your need, Morgan, or she wouldn’t be here. Owls are night eagles, and since the owl is my totem, that makes us both eagles, Boy Scout.”

“She could be here for you, Kismet.”

“I embraced Owl a long time ago. She’s here for you, believe me.”

“I’m making peace with Meggie’s presence.”

“How about your parents?”

“I’m making peace with their presence, too.”

“And how about your psychic ability?”

“It would be easier to make peace with that if I hadn’t blown it first time out of the gate.”

“You were twelve years old. You couldn’t have saved Meggie’s life, but you can still clear her memory. You can’t let anyone continue to believe that your sister was crazy. You have the power to correct that misconception.”

Morgan understood, and he was as appalled that he did as by what Destiny proposed. “You want me to tell my parents that Meggie was sane.”

Destiny nodded. “As sane as you and me.”

“They would debate that.”

“Doesn’t matter. We have to vindicate her, because she can’t speak for herself.”

The owl stayed, refused a bite of birthday cake, and watched the glorious sunrise with them. With Destiny, Morgan huddled in the blankets against the bite of the ocean breeze at dawn and began to make peace with his past.

A few hours later, he called his mother from town to tell her that they were coming.

Destiny had obviously decided not to dress to please his mother but to please herself. She wore her favorite cowboy boots and hat, a butterscotch leather straight skirt, a yellow Western-stitched shirt, buttons open to the clasps on her yellow bra.

Morgan looked her up and down. “Thank you for not wearing your Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy shirt, or the one that says Orgasm Donor.”

“They’re only words,” she said, buttoning one more button on her yellow shirt, bless her.

As she got in the car on the dock, Morgan checked the backseat. “I can’t believe we brought the cat and dog.”

“Don’t look now,” Destiny said, “but they’re not all we brought.”

“Meggie? Are you kidding me?”

“No, and Buffy, too. Stop at the Immortal Classic. I need to pick up some picture frames. We have tons. Then we have to stop at a drugstore to make prints of these pictures of you and Meggie as kids that I found in the captain’s chest.”

Morgan did a double take. “I’m afraid to ask why.”

“So you get to keep the originals? Speaking of asking, I’d like your permission to replace the priest pictures on your parents’ wall with framed copies of you and Meggie.”

“You’re gonna piss off my mother.”

“Either that, or she’s gonna kill me.”

“No, I won’t let that happen. Changing those pictures needs to be done, and we’re going to do it together.”

“My hero.” Their hands met and held. “You’ve just taken a big step in facing your past,” Destiny added, which made him feel like he could do anything, even tell his mother the truth about his beautiful sister.

At the house, he didn’t knock; he opened the door like he’d once done naturally and let Destiny and their pets precede him into this house where he grew up and learned to shut up. But no more.

Samantha the schnoodle jumped on his father’s lap. His dad laughed and ate up the attention.

Caramello hissed at his mother, jumped on her coffee table, and a milk glass bowl went flying, though Morgan was sure that Caramello hadn’t gone close enough to have knocked it over.

His mother screamed so loud, Caramello peed on her pineapple doily.

Meggie, the instigator, had surely come in with them. Morgan tried not to crack a smile as he went for a trash can, paper towels, and spray cleaner. This house needed some Meggie action, though Caramello’s accident had been an unfortunate side effect.

“Mrs. Jarvis,” Destiny said, on her knees picking up glass when he returned. “Go to my shop tomorrow—you know where it is—and Reggie will give you an identical replacement. I’ll have it put aside for you on our way home.”

Together, he and Destiny cleaned the mess while everyone sat in silence, Caramello on his mother’s lap, despite her obvious dislike.

Dumb cat, unless she planned to pee again.

His mother wanted a fight. She looked hard. Purposefully older, a sympathy cane in her hand, granny shoes on her feet, hair pulled back so tight, her face was all severe angles.

She’d given him life. He’d been taught to appreciate that, but thinking about it, he couldn’t imagine her taking joy in anything, ever. They heard a sudden racket upstairs. It reminded him of Meggie’s tantrum in the lighthouse kitchen, minus the plates. Morgan ran, Destiny behind him, as they followed the sound to Meggie’s room. Barren. Stark. Empty. White walls. Not a stick of furniture. Empty closets. “What the hell did you do?” Morgan snapped at his parents. “Erase Meggie from your lives?” No wonder his sister was upset.

Every door—closet, bathroom, hall—and every drawer and window opened and shut, slammed and crashed. Window glass broke.

His father shouted with alarm.

His mother screamed. “What’s happening?”

“Maybe Meggie’s haunting you. Maybe she’s pissed off that you stripped her out of your lives. My room’s the same as it was when I grew up. Why isn’t hers? I’m ashamed of you both.”

The tantrum stopped, another shock, and Morgan felt something lean against him, like maybe Meggie, grateful that he’d spoken up for her.

He swallowed the lump in his throat and stood straighter.

He loved her, and it was time somebody stood up for her. “Mom, Dad, I’d like to speak with you downstairs.”

Chapter Forty-one

MORGAN waited until his parents were sitting. “Destiny,” he said, “Give me a minute to do the first part myself, then you can help me.”

She nodded and sat in a rocker, protecting the box of framed pictures in her lap.

He went to the stair wall and took down every picture where he was wearing his cassock or vestments or any form of priestly garb.

His mother shrieked once, as he began, and his father shushed her successfully. Very reassuring.

“I presume you came here for a reason,” his mother said when he finished.

“I have a whole list,” Morgan said, bringing Destiny up with him. “No, we,” he said, keeping an arm around her. Because if he let his mother stare her down like that, Destiny would grow icicles.

His mother stood to face them head-on, firming her spine.

“Sit down, Olive,” his father said.

“Gordon!”

“No. You had your turn at calling the shots, and now it’s mine. Sit.”

His mother sat.

“Son, Miss Cartwright, feel free to sit or stand. Whatever makes you comfortable.” His father settled into his favorite chair, and Samantha and Caramello joined him. “We’re listening.”

“Give us a minute first to replace the pictures on the wall,” he said.

Destiny opened the box, and they hung the ones she’d picked, great pictures of him and Meggie together as children.

His father got up, came closer, and gazed at each one, clearing his throat more than once. His mother remained ramrod straight on the sofa.