Chapter Forty #3
“Do you think the last fifteen years have been just dreams and nightmares?” I tried to study his face, to see his answer there, but he was looking down at the tea so I saw mostly the top of his thick brown hair and a rim of face.
His hands looked so much darker as he lifted his cup to drink more tea.
They were tanned and weathered more than his face, as if the beard and wild hair had protected him like fur, but his poor hands .
. . they looked like they belonged to someone older.
Someone who’d worked outdoors their whole life maybe, but not the soft, smiling boy I remembered.
He’d been the best of us all, the gentlest soul, the kindest heart, and the highest scorer on all the tests for psychic ability, as long as it was pure power being tested and not control of that power.
He sipped the tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. His eyes looked very dark for a moment, almost black, the way they’d get the few times he got truly angry.
“Maybe I just want to think of it as a nightmare so I don’t have to think too hard about everything I did while I was sick.” The voice was deeper, not a hint of laughter in it; this was how he’d sounded on good days over the last decade.
“I can understand that.” I finally sipped my tea and it was good, but I’d let it start to get cool. I didn’t want tea, I wanted Levanael, I wanted to undo the shadow in his eyes and the tone in his voice.
“I can feel your questions hanging like something heavy around you.”
“You can’t hear them?” I asked, and took another sip of tea.
His eyes held that bitterness I’d come to dread, but it was better than the rage, or the terror.
That was the worst. “Not right now. I told you my head is quiet, quieter than it’s been since I hit puberty.
You know the theory that God doesn’t let our full powers hit while we’re too little to cope with them? ”
“Of course, that’s why they recruit so early for the College. They want to train us to control our powers before they are fully fledged. Untrained psychics and witches who suddenly grow into their power as teenagers are dangerous to everyone, including themselves.”
“I don’t remember when I couldn’t hear other people’s thoughts,” he said, and upended his teacup like you’d finish off liquor, or maybe his was getting cold, too.
“I remember that your parents brought you into the College to see if the angels could help you.”
He flashed me a smile and asked, “Could I have another cup?”
“I’ll make us a pot if you want.”
“Do you have a real teapot?”
I grinned and went to the cabinet over the microwave. I got down a carefully covered bundle and set it on the cabinet by the stove.
“Is that a tea cozy on it?” he asked, and sounded happy again like I hadn’t heard him in so long. I didn’t want the serious sad coming back; it made me feel like the positive change was only temporary. I wanted it to last.
“Yes, though I like thinking of them as tea sleeping bags,” I said, and lifted off the deep blue tea cozy.
He laughed again, head back and just so happy. “I’d forgotten that we used to call them tea sleeping bags when we were little, and how did you get a nice heavy teapot like Master Sarphiel had?”
“I sent away to England for it when we bought our house.” I pushed the thought away that Reggie had packed it up in a box with some other things she thought I’d need in the apartment, as if I wouldn’t need a big teapot at the house anymore.
“What did Master Sarphiel here call it, a Brown Betty?”
“Yes, though since this one is a deep blue is it still a Brown Betty, or is it a Blue Betty?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. It takes me back to those endless pots of tea when we were all still together before we had to choose specialties.”
I nodded. “I’ve told Connery it’s a tea cozy, but when he asked what that meant, I told him it was a sleeping bag for the teapot to keep it warm.”
“Does he call it a tea sleeping bag?”
“He says, ‘Don’t forget the sleeping bag, Daddy. The tea needs to be warm.’ ”
“That’s great, I’m sorry I scared him the last time. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know you didn’t mean to.”
The sadness started to slip back over his face as I put enough water in the teakettle to fill the big pot. “You can feel my questions, so I’ll just ask, how did your head get so quiet? How did you clean up and get . . . better?”
He smiled, chasing back the shadow in his eyes. “I was sleeping in an alley, I’m not even sure where I was exactly, but I woke up and there were people standing over me. I thought I was going to get robbed or beaten up again.”
I fought to keep my face neutral at the again . I’d taken him to the emergency room at least five times myself. I’d hated that he wouldn’t stay in the shelters where he was safer, not safe, I knew better, but safer than that.
“But they didn’t hurt you?”
“They were prophets,” he said, his face sliding into that seriousness again.
“Oh,” was all I said, because street prophets could be just another name for crazy homeless person, except that they thought they had the ear of God, or the angels, or a saint, or even occasionally the devil.
A lot of schizophrenics thought they heard the voice of God; how did you tell delusion from true prophecy?
“I know what you’re thinking, Z. They were the real deal.”
“I thought you couldn’t read my thoughts.”
“I don’t need to; that little oh and the way you go all stiff through the shoulders, that was enough.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult the prophets.”
“I know some of them are crazy like I was, but in between the crazy some of us truly do hear the angels, or spirits and powers of one kind or another.” He was getting sullen again.
I had a glimpse of what his face must have looked like behind the beard and hair all these years.
There was a sourness to it that looked wrong on his shaved face, as if the old crazy Jamie was getting mixed up with the original Jamie, which I guess was exactly what was happening.
Even if he stayed sane from this day on, the years on the street had to have left their mark.
I sat back down across from him this time, because I wanted to see his expression full on. “What did the prophets tell you?”
“That I needed to go to a shop and talk to a woman who worked there.”
“What shop?”
He gave me a sly smile that had always been edged with beard before this; I didn’t like the smile still being in him. It was an unpleasant smile, the one that meant he was usually about to say something crazy, or mean, or both. I prayed that whatever he said next wouldn’t be either.
He looked confused. “Part of me wants to say I bet you’d like to know , or It’s none of your business , but it’s like habit. It’s not what I want to say to you.”
“What do you want to say to me?” I asked, trying to keep my voice and face neutral so I didn’t trigger any negative urges in him.
“I want to tell you about the shop and that Emma works there. She does reiki and reads tarot. The prophets told me a woman wearing a rose would help me close my shields so I could be alone inside my head.” The confusion moved to something else, something that didn’t quite believe in going to look for a woman with a rose.
“Why did you do what they said?” I asked.
“Is it that obvious that I didn’t believe them?” he asked.
“To me, it is,” I said.
He smiled then. “I guess expressions and body language don’t change that much with time.”
“I don’t know about that, but we can still read each other.”
He offered me a fist bump and I touched his fist with mine just as the rapid-boil kettle beeped to let me know the water was hot.
“Make the tea, Z. I’ll talk while you do it.”
“Sounds good,” I said, and got up to pour hot water into the big blue teapot. I swirled a splash of hot water around to warm the pot. Master Sarphiel had always been very firm on that. The tea steeped better in a warm pot than in a cold one.
“I can’t tell you everything, because I don’t remember all of it, or understand what I do remember.”
“That’s okay, Jam . . . Levi, just tell me what you can.”
“I honestly don’t remember what alley I was sleeping in when they woke me up.
I just stared up at this group of shapes.
I had a few seconds of wondering if they were real, or I was seeing spirits, or hallucinating, or having someone else’s nightmare, or maybe my own?
I thought I was flashing back to the last bad beating I got. ”
“The hospital called me on that one.” I was glad I had finished pouring the hot water into the pot, because my hands shook.
I lost one of the tea bags, but with the others I got their strings tight underneath the lid of the teapot.
I slid the tea cozy over the pot to make sure it stayed hot while the tea steeped, then set the timer for ten minutes.
“You’re still my emergency contact,” he said.
“But you said they were prophets, not thugs.”
“Yes, when I was sure I wasn’t still dreaming, they gave me their message about going to the shop and talking to a woman with a rose.”
I leaned against the edge of the cabinet and watched him instead of sitting back down. “But you didn’t believe them?”
“No, I thought they were just crazy like me, so I laid back down and told them to leave me alone.”
“And did they, leave you alone?”
He gave a little chuckle. “No, because at least two of them were prophets, the real thing. They grabbed my arms and pulled me to my feet. I started to try and fight them, but they were a lot stronger than they seemed. I wondered if they were angels in disguise for a second, because of how strong their hands were on my arms.”
“Angels don’t do that much anymore,” I said.
“No, but they had the strength of God in their hands. I felt that and knew they were real.” He was quiet so long I prompted him and asked what happened next.