Chapter Forty-Two #2
“Levanael,” she said, crying.
“No, Levi, just Levi, I can’t be the other, not if it will hurt you, Emma. I won’t feed you to them, the way my family fed me.”
He turned to me then, and said, “The way your family fed you to them, Zaniel.”
“Fed us to who, Jamie?”
“Yes, I’m Jamie, just Jamie alone in the dark.”
“Fed us to who, Levi,” I said.
He shook his head. “You know who, Z.”
“The College of Angels,” I said.
He nodded, tears streaming down his face.
“They can’t force me to go to the College of Angels,” Emma said.
“Why do you think they send people from the College here to the store, Emma? They’re looking for more angel-touched that they missed, and they missed you.”
“They didn’t miss me, Levi. I told you my parents refused to let them take me.”
“Levi.” Bast’s voice soothed over all of us; I smelled lavender, but not incense.
I found her with a spritz bottle in her hand, spraying lavender-scented water in the air, but it was more than that; her voice seemed to calm us, too.
It was her store; she had a right to use magic to calm us down.
She was speaking and I couldn’t remember the words, as if they weren’t meant for me, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to remember them.
Bast hugged Jamie and he let her hold him, but I realized there was movement on the other side of him as if there was something there I couldn’t quite see.
I concentrated and it was his totem. The orangutan wrapped its overly long arms around Jamie.
Emma was crying on the other side of them, her dove like an echo of angel feathers around her head with a glowing almost-halo to make it even more confusing.
I saw movement out of the corner of my eye again and it was the raccoon standing there on two feet beside my left leg.
It looked up at me as I looked down at it.
It—no, he—looked at me with those big, dark eyes and seemed to be trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know how to hear the message.
Did I say, What’s wrong, Lassie, is Timmy down the well , or would it be like a Disney movie where he started talking like a person?
“I don’t know what you want, boy,” I said, as if he were a real pet.
“He wants you to call your friend and see if she’s missed him,” Bast said. She was taking Jamie back to one of their rooms where they usually read tarot or did reiki. Emma tried to follow, but Bast made her stay out.
“You’re on the register. I can’t keep all our customers from wanting to come inside forever.” The moment she said it, the door to the store opened and a group of people came inside.
Bast called back over her shoulder, “We’ve got this, Zaniel. Call your friend before your phone rings for work.” The door shut behind them.
I glanced down at the raccoon. He didn’t look solid in the way that a real animal would, but it was more solid than some Guardian Angels, but then it wouldn’t blast a human’s mind to look at a raccoon, and even a Guardian Angel in its pure form could be too much for some people.
I hadn’t known that the College took people’s totems and non-angelic spirit guides away from them.
I didn’t remember it happening to me as a child, but I trusted Jamie’s pain on this.
The College had told us all that only angels were worthy guardians and guides and that all the rest were if not evil at least unworthy.
We were taught to counsel people to only listen to their Celestial guides.
I concentrated in a way that was more familiar, and my own Guardian Angel was still at my back like a halo of light and white feathers.
The raccoon was still there at my side, and either they ignored each other or the two energies were so different it didn’t matter to them.
A tightness in my shoulders loosened. Had I really believed that just because I had a totem, my angel would leave me as unworthy?
Maybe, okay, probably. I’d never taken anyone’s spirit anything away from them, but I’d been taught that anything short of angelic was lesser, and that the angelic didn’t like being around lower spirits, and everything was less than angels.
I blinked and let go of both types of seeing. I was just standing in the store watching Emma answer questions from the small crowd of customers. She glanced my way, then mouthed the words Call your friend . She turned back to the couple who were asking her questions with a smile.
I walked to the side of the room near the crystals and the outer door and away from the customers. It was the best I could do for privacy without leaving the store, and I wasn’t ready to leave without seeing Jamie again.
“Hi, Havoc, aren’t you supposed to be resting, too?” Ravensong sounded so ordinary and like her usual self that it made me smile.
“I wanted to check on you, see how you’re doing.”
“I’m okay and the hand works.”
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you back . . . more,” I said, which was a totally inadequate word for not being able to give her back her hand, complete and whole.
“The doctors would have cut my hand off, Havoc, you and I both know that, so stop beating yourself up about cosmetic issues. Besides, all the other witches will be jealous they don’t have their own dainty demonic hand.” She tried to make a joke of it, and it made me feel worse.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and focused on the raccoon gazing up at me with big eyes; it looked like it was trying to talk to me, but there was no sound.
“Are you missing anything since we healed you earlier?” I asked.
“Missing something? The extra flesh of that monstrous hand, but other than that, I’m fine.
I mean, if you could have shaved a few pounds off other places so I didn’t have to keep hitting the gym that would have been great, but I forgot to ask if there’s an angelic weight loss program.
” Another joke; her trying to make me feel better when she was the one who was permanently changed was making me feel worse.
The raccoon waved its paws at me almost like it was asking me to give it the phone, but I knew it wasn’t solid enough for that. “I’ve got . . . somebody here who wants to talk to you.”
“Put them on the phone.”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“No more riddles, Havoc, it’s been a long day.” Her voice held tiredness and the edge of exasperation. If I pushed hard enough, she’d get angry with me and part of me thought I deserved it. Surrie had been my friend and she was the reason Ravensong was missing one of her totems now.
Some teenagers were peering into the case of crystals near me. I lowered my voice and asked, “Are you missing one of your totems, or spirit guides?”
She was quiet for a second and then said, “Son of a bitch. Where is the little bugger?”
“I think he’s with me.”
“Why would my totem be with you?”
“It’s complicated and I’m in public.”
“It’s not impossible to damage a witch’s ties to their totems and guides, but it’s not an easy type of magic and it will come back and bite you on your karmic ass so hard that you’ll wish you hadn’t done it.
” She sounded angry now, and now I felt I didn’t deserve it, not for this, this hadn’t been my fault.
“I didn’t do anything to cause this,” I said.
“Then how did it happen?”
I glanced at the teenagers, who were close enough that I had to move to let them see something in the cases. I looked for Emma, but she was out of sight in the store, still helping other customers. The door to the room where Bast had taken Jamie was still closed.
“Talk to me, Havoc,” Ravensong said.
“Let me get someplace quieter,” I said, having to move so that the teenagers could get a better look at stones in the case behind me.
I looked around the store and finally spotted Emma walking with an older woman, but their backs were to me as they looked at books.
God help me, I didn’t want to leave Jamie upset.
I didn’t want him to think that I’d abandoned him again.
“Havoc, talk to me,” Ravensong said; her patience was starting to wear thin, and I couldn’t blame her.
“I’m here, Athena, just give me a second.” I pushed through the doors to the sidewalk. It was a lot less crowded than the store. I stood where I could glance in the windows in case I saw Jamie, but I owed Ravensong my attention.
“You almost never call me by my first name unless you’re at the house socializing with the missus and me,” she said, her voice wary now instead of angry.
“I just learned that some of the people at the College of Angels may be stripping people of their totems and guides, all except their Guardian Angels.”
“I’d heard the rumor,” she said.
“I hadn’t,” I said.
“You don’t hang out with enough pagans to hear the rumors.”
“I’ve talked to someone who has regained his totem after the College stripped it away from him as a child.”
“Are you saying that your little friend from the College, the Infernalist, took my raccoon?” Her voice rose, the anger back and hotter than before.
“No, she may have tried, but somehow it’s with me.”
“What do you mean, it’s with you?” She sounded surprised, maybe even shocked.
“When I was able to see my friend’s totem and his girlfriend’s totem, then I could see the raccoon with me. It looked like the same one that I saw with you in the interrogation room, but I’m not an expert on raccoons so the friend told me to call and check with you.”
“I can’t guarantee it’s mine, but I’m missing my little guy and it would be a hell of a coincidence if it was someone else’s raccoon that you absconded with.”
“I didn’t abscond with anyone. The friend thinks that when the Infernalist tried to strip it away from you, it hid using my energy so she couldn’t damage its tie to you.”
“That raccoon has been my co-walker through life for over thirty years, so I’d call that damaged.”