Chapter 12 Witchcraft
WITCHCRAFT
I don’t know where I am. The thought floats lazily through me as I slowly make my way to consciousness.
It is the same thought I had my first morning at Solidago.
I remember waking up in my distant room, scooting from the bed into the hall, and wandering through the bone-white maze of a house, chilled and calling for my mom.
She’d tucked me in the night before, lain down beside me until I drifted off.
I never expected to wake up alone. But the halls were empty, the doors all closed.
And I never heard her voice call back. By the time I found the kitchen, I was sobbing.
Nina, in her infinite goodness, scooped me up and bundled me into an empty chair, stacking a pile of pancakes so high before me that I could scarcely think through the flood of maple syrup.
I manage to peel open one eye and then the other.
A gauzy champagne light is pouring through tall windows, stroking me softly awake.
In it, particles of dust glint like bubbles.
I make a feeble attempt at prodding my memory of last night for answers, but it remains stubbornly dormant.
Instead, I take in the room, craning my head to examine the beaded purple bedding and the dark leg to my left—hairless, smooth as silk, decidedly feminine.
A jolt of alarm forces me all the way up, and I stare down into a sheet of platinum-gray waves.
My eyes follow them to their source, the young, rounded face of the woman on the dance floor, her headphones resting on the nightstand beside her.
Did I come home with her? Did we …
I quickly check myself beneath the covers, take stock of my current state.
My trench coat is nowhere to be seen, my jeans are in a heap on the floor on the opposite side of the bed, but I’m still wearing the black T-shirt and my not-at-all-sexy underwear don’t look like they’ve seen any action since they came out of the package.
I reach up to find my hair unattractively knotted on one side.
Sliding out of the bed, I tiptoe over and start to drag on my jeans, noticing that Madam Gray is also dressed on top, making a tryst seem less and less likely.
With my jeans all the way up but not yet fastened, I pick up her headphones and slide them on, curious.
There’s no sound, just a sudden sense of slipping out of the world, a muffled quiet that wasn’t there before.
I take them off and set them down. Who wears noise-canceling headphones to a nightclub?
I stagger to the window and look out over a Seattle street capped with a yellowed sky the color of an old bruise.
I am several stories high, which is exactly what I was last night too.
The evening begins to flicker back to life like a silent film.
The cemetery. The club. The dancing. What were they putting in those drinks? Arla has some explaining to do.
As if the thought conjures her, a florid mahogany door swings wide.
Arla stands in the frame, her silk kimono robe dripping off her in a dance of peacock feathers.
Her face is porcelain, unblemished and unadorned.
There is not one feature, I think as I stare at her, that stands out on its own besides her smile, which is curly as incense smoke.
It’s the way they come together that strikes the eye, the fit rather than the parts.
She looks me over and grins. “Oh good. You’re awake. There’s coffee.” Then, just as quickly, she twirls away.
I’m still doing up my fly when I trail after her into a large, open room with the same tall, vertical windows.
Plush, curving sofas square off before them, an engorged fringed ottoman in the center, its upholstery the same rosy hue as a bloated mosquito.
On one of the sofas, Brennan is laid out with a vintage issue of Vogue spread open.
On the other, Rock is snoring. A freestanding fireplace encased in glass glistens seductively in a far corner.
To my left, a long glass dining table is poised on two ibex heads made of brass, their horns curling gracefully from table to floor, and surrounded by delicate chairs.
Beyond them, Arla is standing behind a zebra-marble island lined with brass stools.
A wall of sleek black cabinets backs her, and a Jura coffee machine purrs at her side.
I recognize the brand because Roger was always going on about them.
They were in the top three items on his fantasy Christmas list, sandwiched between a Breguet watch—sorry, timepiece—and a trip to the Faroe Islands.
I should have known what a tool he was then.
“What time is it?” It’s Monday, I recall groggily. The thought of being late for work again so soon after the last disastrous occasion stirs my anxiety. Calvin will eat this up.
“Sit down,” she commands. “I called your office. You’re at the UW Medical Center being treated for food poisoning.”
“I am? Why would they believe that?”
She smiles softly at me. “Because I’m your nurse.”
I can’t imagine Arla as a nurse unless it’s a slinky, pinup one. But a real nurse—finding a vein, holding someone’s colostomy bag? No. She seems to have a way of convincing people of the unbelievable, though.
I’m too tired to argue. Dragging myself onto one of the padded stools, I say, “Coffee would be great. Thanks.”
But what she passes me is a half-empty shot glass of black tar. “What is this?”
“Ristretto,” she says. “Try it.”
“You said you were making coffee.”
“I was,” she replies. “Figuratively, anyway.”
“Can I get a lime and some salt with this?” I ask just to be a brat, but she ignores me.
I shoot the coffee dose and expect to cough it down but instead find it rich and smooth as cream. “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll have another. In fact, just leave the bottle.”
Arla folds her arms and glares at me. “I like this version of you,” she says, “even when it annoys me.”
The statement leaves me feeling naked.
“It’s an improvement, I think, over the introverted damsel you’d become.” When I don’t respond, she walks around the island and places a hand against my stomach, low so it covers my empty womb. “There is fire in your belly yet,” she whispers before sauntering away to join Brennan on the sofa.
I follow like a puppy and seat myself on the floor beside the ottoman, crossing my legs over the sprawling hand-knotted rug.
Despite the tension I read between Brennan and Arla last night, he rises to let her sit, laying his head back in her lap, and Arla strokes his hair while she leans over him to read the 1961 issue of Vogue he’s lazily thumbing.
They all seem to have such an easy way with each other.
“The woman in your room—” I start to say before she cuts me off.
“Cadence.”
I remember Brennan mentioning her to Arla. She let him know we were at the cemetery.
“Did you two have fun last night?” Brennan asks wickedly.
I frown. “I don’t think so. Not the kind you’re looking for.”
He pouts his disappointment. “You don’t pitch for the all-girls team?”
“Not usually,” I tell him.
He yawns as if this makes me boring. “Too bad. You’re not her type anyway. She likes the curvy ones.”
I think I should feel offended, but I’m too hungover to care. “Is she … one of you?”
Arla and Brennan share a chuckle. “You could say that,” she replies.
“I used to be the only fledgling,” Brennan explains with a grin. “But Momma went and laid a new egg.”
“Oh, stop it,” Arla scolds, smacking his shoulder. “You know it’s not up to me.”
“Oh?” I stare at her, my mouth rounded. “Who is it up to, then?”
Twig’s laughter on the dance floor echoes back from the fuzziest recesses of my befuddled brain.
She decides who comes, who stays … at least for now.
This constant allusion to a secret power, to someone other than Arla calling the shots, both concerns and intrigues me.
Arla has the languid certainty of a jungle cat, that sleek independence that calls lesser beings to her shadow. I can’t imagine her beholden to anyone.
Brennan sits up and bends down to pinch my cheek before stalking to the kitchen. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“One step at a time, kitten. That’s how any road is traveled,” Arla coos.
“So, I’m in the Fathom now?”
She studies me. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
Her response only confuses me more. “Get what?”
“It wasn’t us you had to prove yourself to.” She crosses one leg over another. “It was you.”
I shake my head. “No. That’s not what this was about.” I never lured myself into a locked park at night or asked for the Space Needle to be shut down or insisted on digging up a cemetery in the middle of nowhere.
“Sure it was,” she says casually, taking up the magazine where Brennan deposited it and stacking it neatly with the others on the ottoman.
“Look at you, how you’ve changed. Last night you defended yourself with a fireball you conjured from nothing but willpower.
You stood up to the twins.” She cocks a brow at this.
“No easy feat. You danced until your feet wouldn’t hold you up any longer and slept beside a beautiful sylvan nymph in a bed dressed in silks.
You are finally beginning to live the life you deserve.
That isn’t for my sake or benefit, Jude. It’s for yours.”
I want to argue, but somehow she’s twisted the story, distorted my reality, so that I can’t quite pick out which thread to pull to fix it. Instead, I ask, “So, we can all do this?”
She smiles. “If by ‘this’ you mean…” The fire in the fireplace roars suddenly and sends up a trail of sparks.
“What else can you do?” I ask her, but it’s Brennan who responds.
He steps out from around the island as the magazines Arla just stacked neatly leap from the ottoman, flying across the room to smack against the windows at dizzying speed, where they fall in a heap of pages on the floor.