Chapter 4 #2
Sylvia always just shrugged and smiled, either not caring or keeping her secrets to herself.
Archie was a necromancer, though, so he came with his own set of creepy abilities.
Mason had explained once that Archie’s magic was like Ward’s—warlock magic.
But as a death witch, I tried not to think too hard about what Archie was capable of, especially because it was likely too close to my own for comfort, if I ever bothered to learn how to do more than suppress my abilities.
It was pretty clear that I was not very good at taking responsibility for myself or my abilities.
And, yes, I had a really good excuse for it—spending most of my life locked up in a completely messed up mental institution where they kept stripping my magic from me over and over and didn’t bother with things like education or socialization had left me… Well. A complete mess.
Add to it medical and magical PTSD that wasn’t my fault, but was now my problem, and it wasn’t really surprising to anybody—least of all me—that I was overly reliant on the people who had saved me from said institution. I knew that.
I also knew that I really should do something about it.
Regardless of how I’d spent the fourteen years between the ages of six and twenty, I was now a twenty-four-year-old adult who had finished his online GED and was working on his BA part-time while also working a really straightforward and fairly simple front desk job that didn’t ask all that much from me in terms of overtime or complex skills.
And let me do my homework, if I needed to.
And that, okay, also came with ghosts and murder on a regular basis, but I felt like my past had actually equipped me to deal with those sorts of things a bit better than most people.
It’s just that sometimes I had to confront the fact that I was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults, to quote Ward, dealt with their shit.
It was really too bad that I was sure what that meant, practically speaking.
I strongly suspected it meant things like being a more active contributor to Beyond the Veil and taking responsibility not only for paying my rent and buying and making my own meals, but for making choices that would enable me to be an asset, not just a door-stop.
I felt like a door-stop.
Sylvia?
Yes, sunshine?
Do you know anything about being psychic?
The smile she turned on me was sad. No, sunshine, I don’t. But I do know a thing or two about flogging a dead horse.
I frowned. What’s that mean?
It means continuing to try the same thing when it hasn’t been working. Her look was sympathetic. You’re trying to help Hart and that Agent Parikh? she asked.
Yes. They have a necklace from the murder victim that they want help tracing—not to the victim, but to whoever gave it to her.
They think it might be cursed. Well, I was the one who thought it might be cursed.
Raj and Hart hadn’t disagreed with me, but they needed more than I could give them. Names. Details. Something more.
So what are you doing?
What do you mean?
What are you doing—how are you seeing your visions? What do you do to see them?
I don’t do anything, I told her. I touch something, and it’ll tell me something. I see—well, more like hear, really—something about the person who was last in contact. If I hold on long enough, I might hear other people before that, if the memories are strong enough.
So then try doing something, she suggested.
Try what? I asked. It was basically the same question I’d asked Cass, over and over.
The question she hadn’t been able to help me answer because the way she saw things was different from the way I did—she saw, I heard…
ish. It was one thing to think about slowing down moving visual images so that you could see all the details, which was how she’d talked about learning more from her visions.
But slowing down words only slowed them down—it didn’t give you more of them, or more depth.
If you wanted more words, you asked people questions. But you couldn’t ask questions of memories… could you?
Be open to what they have to tell you, Sylvia suggested.
How?
Listening isn’t just about hearing the words, sunshine, she told me, a small smile hovering over her lips. It’s about everything else that comes with them.
She was right. There was more to listening than just words. Tone. Pacing. Feeling. All the things I was terrible at understanding. The cues I kept missing because I was always focused on the words.
I looked at the dead woman, trying to find more than the words in what she’d said to me.
That it wasn’t just about this conversation—in order to understand memories, I had to understand people. How they felt. How they thought. I had to be able to put myself where they were. To see the world from their points of view.
That’s what my visions were, really—not visions, but moments of being someone who wasn’t me.
I always fought them. Tried to push back against them. To hold on to my own perspective in spite of everything.
Maybe I had to stop fighting.
By the time I found myself once again staring at the loathed baggie with Cass’s worry stone inside, I’d made dinner—macaroni and cheese from a box with cut up ham and peas added into it so that I got some protein and green veggies and with parmesan on top so that I could pretend it was something approaching real food—and, as I ate, quickly dashed off a short paper for my online American Arcane History class, which I felt like I didn’t need to take because I could just talk to Mason.
I generally did just talk to Mason, since the textbook was unbelievably boring, but I tried to at least do the assignments and reading response papers because that’s where most of my grade came from.
In other words, I was procrastinating touching the worry stone by pretending to be an adult and doing homework, the things I normally tried to avoid doing with audiobooks and videogames.
Maybe I was learning how to be a little bit of an adult. Leveling up my procrastinating to be productive.
I sighed, then saved the paper to go over one more time tomorrow to catch any mistakes or typos.
I’d put this off long enough.
It was time to look again—and try to look deeper.
To listen not just to the words, but, as Sylvia had suggested, to everything else that came with them. To stop fighting and listen to everything the stone had to tell me.
When I’d first gotten out of Tranquil Brook, the counselor working with me—also a psychic, although probably not as strong as I was, she’d said—had suggested I envision building a wall around myself, brick by brick.
That I could use that to keep the thoughts and feelings attached to objects from being too overwhelming.
They’d still be there, but they’d be more muted by the walls.
We’d spent weeks slowly building up those walls. Making it tolerable to be a person in a world full of objects.
Sitting there at my kitchen table, I took a deep breath, and started pulling down one of the walls.
The stone was smooth, warm from her palm, the feel of the worn depression in it oddly soothing, even as her stomach roiled with both fear and nausea brought on by Arcanavirus. She didn’t want to die, and she didn’t really want to become something that wasn’t human, either.
When she and her sister had been little, they’d talked about what they thought they’d become if they got sick. Well, they were sick now, both she and Alexandra.
Alex was a senior in high school, about to graduate and go to college at UVA.
She was a junior, only a year behind, and already planning to go to UVA, too.
They were going to grow up and get houses on the same block, or maybe a duplex, and Alex was going to get married and have kids, and she was going to get married and probably not have kids, since in vitro was expensive and she’d have to have a girlfriend she actually wanted to marry first. Alex thought she was going to marry Greg.
They’d gone to Homecoming together, she and Alex and Greg and Deana.
She and Deana had broken up a few weeks later, although Alex and Greg were still going strong.
Or they had been, before this.
They’d been separated as soon as they’d gotten to the hospital, she and Alex. She was as afraid for Alex as she was herself.
She didn’t want her sister to die.
The stone clattered on the cheap thrift store table as I dropped it, managing to open my own fingers to break the spell of the memories.
I sniffed, my nose congested, and then swallowed, confused.
I hadn’t been sick when I’d picked up the stone—but then I touched my fingers to one cheek and discovered tears.
I’d been crying… because Cass had been upset and scared.
“Shit,” I whispered out loud, scrubbing my hands down my face.
I guess I’d been more open to the memories contained in the worry stone.
A lot more open.
I really hoped that I’d be able to find a bit more balance—I didn’t want to break into sobs every time I touched something that someone had held while upset.
I got up and made my way to the bathroom, where I could use tissues to blow my nose.
I flinched back from my reflection when I caught sight of it in the mirror—I looked, to quote Hart, like absolute shit.
My eyes were bloodshot and a little puffy, my skin an unattractive combination of too-pale and pink splotches, and my hair, which was called dishwater blond on a good day, was a mess. Apparently, I needed a hair cut.
I’d beg Beck to do it when she got back.
If I managed to get myself put together enough to leave the apartment ever again.