Evocation

CHAPTER FOUR

MOIRA

Moira Delacroix hummed to herself as she dusted off each piece of amethyst, rose quartz, and citrine in her crystal collection. The windows of her meditation room were thrown open to the balmy weather, welcoming in equinox breezes and the smell of evaporating morning rain. Moira’s grandmother had taught her to respect the equinox as a powerful day of rebirth and new life, and it was a perfect time to clean out the clutter of winter.

Moira swept candle stubs and incense ash into a garbage bag. She and Rhys had set upon the townhouse as soon as the dishes had been cleared from breakfast, and as lunchtime approached, they were nearly done with the top level.

“Why do we have so much stuff?” Rhys called from the bedroom, a distant clatter following his voice as he knocked something over.

“Because you can’t drive past an estate sale without pulling over.”

Rhys appeared in the doorway in teal chinos and a rumpled button-down, with a smudge of grime on his nose. Soon, the sun would bring back the smattering of freckles across his face, the ones that made him look much younger than twenty-six if he smiled. But now he was wearing his usual vaguely dour expression.

“I like antiques,” he huffed, dumping an armful of throw pillows on the ground. “And you have too many pillows. They’re going to smother us in our sleep.”

Moira gathered the puffs of sea foam cotton, teal velvet, and lilac suede to her chest.

“But they’re so pretty!”

“They can be pretty in your meditation room. Pick two for our room.”

“Four.”

“Three, and I’ll let you keep the pink one.”

A knock at the front door cut off their negotiations. Rhys turned to head down the stairs, doing his best to arrange his hair into some semblance of order.

“I’ve got it. It looks like you’re on a roll in there.”

“So, four?” she called after him from the landing.

“Three!” Rhys demanded, but laughter broke any resolve left in his voice.

Moira chuckled as she began re-introducing her meditation room pillows to their exiled bedroom brethren. It could be anyone at the door: a walk-in tarot client or the UPS delivery man with another international order for Rhys.

Moira froze when she heard Rhys’s voice, crisp as an ice storm and devoid of his usual courtesy.

“Absolutely not.”

“You weren’t taking my calls, and I was in the area.”

She knew that voice, buttery and plying.

Moira’s skin turned to steel.

“That’s no excuse for showing up on my doorstep,” her husband continued. “I asked you for space.”

“It’s been half a year. You’re pushing me out.”

“I have every right to.”

“Rhys?” Moira called out, voice a little higher than she would have liked. “Who is it?”

“No one!” Rhys called back. He immediately dropped his voice out of audible range, but Moira could still follow his irritated rhythm.

“I thought we agreed on civility,” the other man said, apparently not caring whether she heard him or not. “The civil thing to do would be to invite me inside.”

This was all Moira could stand. Wiping her hands off on a dust rag, she marched out onto the landing at the top of stairs.

David Aristarkhov stood in her doorway, looking poisonously at ease with his sunglasses on, hands tucked into the pockets of his navy blazer.

He slipped his sunglasses into his breast pocket and glanced over Rhys’s shoulder, eyes alighting on Moira. They were a pale green that would have been pretty on a nicer face.

“Are you going to invite me in?” he asked Rhys.

Rhys’s shoulders sagged and he stepped aside.

“Ten minutes. That’s all I’m giving you. Don’t expect coffee and finger sandwiches.”

David slipped into the foyer, taking in the framed portraits and cityscapes on the wall. Rhys couldn’t afford much genuine art on his associate librarian’s salary, but he had an eye for convincing fakes. Moira did her best to brighten up Rhys’s tastes for heavy furnishings with cream-colored backsplashes and potted plants, and they had found an equilibrium between historic charm and shabby chic. But David was a blight on her Eden, filling the space with his blinding arrogance and the sharp scent of his bergamot cologne.

“This had better be good, David,” Rhys muttered. “You had better be on death’s door or about to tell me I’m getting promoted to High Priest. I’m serious.”

“I assure you,” David said. He probably thought he sounded suave, but to Moira he just sounded like a used car salesman. “Intruding on your evening is not my intention.”

“Don’t do that,” Rhys snapped. “That Aristarkhov charm thing. I can tell when you’re doing it, and I hate it. Just shoot straight with me and then get out of my house.”

“Ms Delacroix,” David said. At least he was respecting the fact that she had elected to keep her name after marriage, something many men overlooked. It felt like a gesture of kindness. Moira didn’t trust it. “I hope I haven’t come at a bad time.”

Moira fumed. The last time David had stepped foot in her home, he had accused her of witching up a thoughtform to torment her husband. David hadn’t been entirely off base; the dark entity banging cupboards and stealing sentimental keepsakes was a thoughtform, a mass of negative energy brought to life by the unkempt emotions of its magician-creator. But it had been made by both Rhys and Moira, accidentally, over many months of refusing to discuss problems in their marriage.

Moira and Rhys had spent the next six months making painstaking progress towards healing. They were working on their communication. Things were getting better. And more David was the last thing their marriage needed.

She gave David the eyes her grandmother had always given her when she was in deep trouble. She hoped she looked forbidding, even in wide-legged overalls and the silk scarf around her hair tied in a big bow.

“No better than any,” Moira said.

“What are you doing here, David?” Rhys asked.

“I came by to apologize.”

Every line of his Rhys’s body went taut as a violin string.

“Apologize? No, no. You don’t apologize to anyone. Being a dick about being right is your whole thing.”

David glowered at him. “Easy.”

Moira rested her hip against the banister, settling in to watch the boys go at it. She had been raised by Southern women and a chivalrous father. She was fine letting her husband rise to her defense as much as he pleased before she laid into David herself.

“I invited you into my home,” Rhys went on. “I gave you everything you asked for, and you completely betrayed my trust.”

“You asked me for my professional opinion about a haunting,” David clarified. “Judging by the evidence available to me at the time, a thoughtform seemed like a viable explanation. I wasn’t wrong.”

“That doesn’t put you in the right. You upset me, and you insulted Moira, and we nearly killed each other fighting when you left. It took us an hour to figure it out, and by then it was almost too late.”

David shrugged, trying to look sympathetic. It didn’t sit right on his features.

“Does that mean I’m not allowed to apologize?”

Rhys turned from David with a sharp tsk through his teeth. “I’m done with this. If you’re dead set on apologizing, apologize to Moira.”

David eyed her lazily, a snake debating whether or not its would-be prey was worth the energy it took to slither out of the sun. Moira pulled herself tall as a cypress and eyed him right back. She wasn’t positive apologizing was even a thing a man like him could do, as it involved making himself smaller so that someone else could take up space. He probably hadn’t had much practice in his life.

To her surprise, David approached the stairs, pausing with one foot up on the first step. The gesture was oddly gallant.

“Go on,” she said, Southern accent sweet as strychnine. “Impress me.”

“As I understood it,” David began, “you took offense to some… allegations I made last fall.”

Moira snorted and tossed her head.

“It’s possible I was a little hasty in my diagnosis of the problem,” David went on. “I’m sorry if you felt singled out or bullied.”

Rhys lingered close as a shadow to David, arms crossed over his chest. He looked like he had half a mind to drag David back out of the house and throw up a couple of nasty wards to make sure he never got back in.

Moira descended the stairs, and kept advancing when she reached David’s level. He took an unsure step back. Confidence flickered off his face for only a fraction of a second, but it still felt like a victory.

She always told her clients that forgiveness wasn’t about the person who wronged you; it was about freeing yourself from resentment and moving on with your life. Her distaste for David was an old companion, a stubborn grudge she nursed in private. But Rhys didn’t have many friends, certainly not ones that had stuck by him as long as David had, and she knew she had no right to take that away from him. She might be ready to make peace with David’s existence, but not his attitude, and only on her terms.

“I don’t forgive you.”

David blinked. “Sorry. You… don’t forgive me?”

“No, I don’t. I have no indication that you actually feel any remorse, and moreover, I’m under no obligation to give you my goodwill even if I did. But I might be more inclined to believe you if you tell me why you’re actually here. What do you want, David?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

“You wouldn’t have come all the way out to Jamaica Plain for an apology. I know you’ve been trying to contact my husband. What’s going on?”

David glanced over at Rhys. “I was hoping we could talk alone,” he said.

“What do we have to talk about, David?” Rhys sighed.

“Fifteen minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Whatever you have to say in front of my husband, you can say in front of me,” Moira said. “Just spit it out, already. You’re damn near close to wrecking my Saturday.”

David took a deep breath, as though what he was about to say pained him physically. “I’m, uh… a little, how shall I put this. Unwell.”

“Unwell,” Moira repeated slowly.

David’s shoulders were tight with discomfort at having to show weakness. Moira felt a touch guilty for enjoying the sight, but not enough to deny herself the pleasure of reveling in it.

“And Rhys is the only person you could think to come to when you’re feeling unwell, is that it?” she prodded, twisting the knife a little.

“I had thought that you might offer a second opinion, actually. I hear such good things from your clients.” He gave her a smile, one that might have charmed the pants off someone else, but she saw it for what it was: Desperation.

No matter how much she might not want to admit it, Moira was curious. And her curiosity, as her mother always used to tell her, could rival any cat’s.

“Fine,” Moira said crisply. She turned from him and started down the hallway. “Stop hanging around the doorway; y’all are making me nervous. There are chairs in the kitchen, and coffee. You can have your fifteen minutes there.”

The kitchen was hazy with steam from the bisque bubbling on the stove, and thick with the scent of oregano and bay. Dragon’s blood incense, sweet and musky, lingered in the air as protection against negative energy.

Rhys cleared her flower cuttings and his abandoned glasses of iced coffee from the table. David lingered in the doorway, almost looking spooked to step onto the tile.

“Haven’t you ever been in a kitchen before?” Moira asked dryly. “Or does your personal chef handle that?”

David’s eyes flashed in irritation, but then his expression was smooth again.

“No, I’m just taking it all in. Is this your office?”

She glanced around at the hand-labelled jars of herbs, flavored honeys, and graveyard dirt sitting out on shelves, and the witch’s ladders tied with colorful thread in the window. She had stuffed the little room with all the plants it could hold, mostly ones with medicinal properties mentioned in rootwork lore. It was her effort to recreate her grandmother’s garden, as well as she could this far from the fertile soil of sweltering Georgia.

She imagined what David’s workspace might look like. There would probably be crystal balls, and spirit boards, and all those other methods of communicating with the dead that her mother had strictly forbidden her from using growing up.

Not that it kept the dead from trying to reach out to her, anyway, but David didn’t need to know that.

“Suppose so,” she said.

Moira handed Rhys two floral mugs and nodded towards the coffee pot, nudging him towards hospitality. He was as tightly polite as any New Englander raised by strict Irish parents, who hadn’t been brought up in an entertaining household.

Rhys poured coffee and a swirl of cream into David’s cup, then slid down into a chair while Moira discreetly set out a plate of coconut meringues. Store-bought, because David didn’t deserve the custard pie chilling in the fridge.

“Unwell, huh?” Rhys said.

David settled against the side of the island but couldn’t quite bring himself to take a seat.

“What do you know about demon possession?”

“What kind?”

“The Catholic kind. Is there anything to it, or is it just something priests say to scare altar boys into going to confession?”

Rhys blinked at him, unamused. “You open up your body to the dead and goetic spirits and God knows what else every Thursday in conclave. How can you even ask if it’s real or not?”

David waved Rhys’s words away with a breezy gesture.

“I’m not an open door. I play host and then, when I’m done, I send the spirit back to where it came from. I’m always in control.”

Rhys shot him a dark look, then drained half his coffee cup in one swallow. “If you want my opinion, possession against one’s will is possible, but it’s rare. You need a very spiritually weak host, a powerful entity, and the right environment and timing. It’s always because someone has some sort of contract with the demon, or because they’re channeling for a certain time under certain controlled circumstances. Even if that wasn’t the case… I don’t know, I feel like there would have to be someone pulling the strings.”

“Why are you so interested in this, anyway?” Moira asked.

“I was with a client recently and I got a little bit more than I bargained for. It was one of your referrals, actually.” He smirked in a way he probably thought looked friendly. “Better than the last one you sent my way, though. He cried the whole time I was trying to get hold of his dead wife. So distracting.”

Moira bristled. There was something about the thin layer of disdain glossed over most everything he said that got her hackles up.

“Sorry, do you just want me to send you the bereaved who can behave themselves? Or should I stick with the ones who are willing to pay your exorbitant fees?”

“Moira,” Rhys said, halfway between a warning and a plea.

David laughed brightly. “Two-hundred and fifty an hour is hardly exorbitant, in our line. What are you charging, anyway? You do all that energy healing stuff; you should be going for at least that, if you’re as good as your clients say.”

“I am good,” she shot back, scandalized that he was trying to get her to discuss hard numbers in mixed company. “And I know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck.”

“So why keep that up if you don’t have to?”

“David,” Rhys said.

“I’m being nice!” David exclaimed, looking absolutely martyred. “I told you I would do my best to be nice, didn’t I?”

Moira turned abruptly to deposit her dishes in the sink. She wanted David gone, but her father hadn’t spent thirty hours stitching her cotillion dress so she could throw good raising out the window whenever she felt like it.

Rhys caught Moira gently and tugged her back towards the table, nestling his arm around her waist. She smoldered in silence, but his reassuring closeness dampened her anger.

“Let’s get back on track,” he said to David. “Plenty of people think they’re possessed the same way plenty of people think their houses are haunted. It’s rarely the case; you know that. So, you were with a client. Then what happened?”

David rolled his shoulders. “Something… grabbed me. I don’t know how else to phrase it. It’s like when I channel a spirit in conclave, only I didn’t decide to open myself up to it. One second I was fine, and the next second I was seeing stars. I haven’t felt right since.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t the ghost you were talking to?”

“Positive. It felt entirely different.”

“What did it feel like?”

David flexed and unflexed his hands at his side, searching for the right words. “Old. Malignant.”

“Demonic,” Rhys supplied.

“Your word, not mine. But I’ve seen a lot of wild shit in my life, and I’m not going to take demon possession off the list just because I don’t understand it. This is your playground, Rhys.” Moira got the impression that whatever David was about to say next was only happening with great effort. “Listen, I’d love your help diagnosing the problem. I’m happy to pay consultancy rates.”

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to, David, and because I’m busy. I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your mediumship, but that’s not my responsibility. If you really need help that badly, call a priest.”

David looked like he would rather swallow tacks than get on the phone with the Church.

“That’s it, then? Just, no?”

“I can say it again if you’d like.”

Moira chewed the inside of her mouth. A thought, as bold as it was petty, was bubbling up inside her. “How old are you, David?”

David was so taken aback by the question he answered without hesitation. “Twenty-nine.”

“You’re probably in your Saturn return. It’s a particularly tough astrological transit that can bring up all sorts of issues about ability, identity, and life purpose. It’s been known to mess with intuitive people especially badly.” Moira ran a hand lightly through Rhys’s curls, her mind whirring. “Baby, go get me my charts.”

Looking dubious, Rhys pushed himself up from the table. He disappeared from the kitchen with a parting glance at David, which was probably meant to bring him to heel. The little room was chillier in his absence, despite the fragrant steam still rising from the stove.

“Want to let me in on what you’ve got in mind?” David asked.

Moira wiped the powdered sugar off her fingers with a tea towel, then put her hands on her hips. “Giving you that second opinion you asked for.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I don’t like seeing anybody getting harassed by nasty entities, no matter my opinion on the person.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, but she wasn’t about to admit she also wanted the pleasure of showing him exactly how good she was at what she did. The men of the Society liked to say they respected all magical paths, and that they recognized that power could take many forms. David, however, had never had the opportunity to really see her at work, to taste the magic that had been handed down to her from her mother and grandmother. She might not know her way around a goetic circle, but she was damn good with the stars. “I can do your natal chart, if you want. If there’s anything in there about facing a health or spiritual crisis right about now, I should be able to see it. Unless you’re the type who thinks astrology is just a party trick.”

“You’re still angry,” he said, like he was noting something for the court record.

“Fit to be tied, if you want to know.”

She did not in fact, want him to know, but as much as she might want to radiate effortless cool in his presence, she had never been good at hiding her emotions.

David helped himself to a bit more coffee and cream as though this were his own house. When he spoke, it was in a tone so light it had to be calculated.

“Is this about my having dated your husband, or about my accusing you of cursing him?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she shot back. “It’s the second.”

“You really do hold grudges, don’t you?” He nodded and took an introspective sip of coffee. “I think that’s fair.”

She glanced over at him in suspicion, but if he was pulling her around, his face didn’t show it. As a matter of fact, David seemed entirely unbothered by her disdain. Admiring, even.

“I mean it,” he went on. “I crossed you, so you can hold a grudge as long as you like. When people embarrass me, they’re on my shit list for life, and sometimes on the ground with a broken nose first.”

She had assumed that David had never felt embarrassment, that he floated from social hierarchy to social hierarchy, impervious to insults and gossip. He certainly carried himself like that was the case. But maybe that was just more grandstanding.

David drained his coffee, and Moira reached out instinctively to take the empty cup from him. As she did so, their fingers brushed, and a tiny crack of electricity sparked between them.

David’s skin was hot, almost like he was fighting off a fever. Unbidden, a rush of emotion coursed through Moira’s fingers and up her arm. As a born intuitive, this was one of her many abilities: to be able to pick up someone’s feelings simply by touching them. But she rarely felt anyone’s emotions with such supercharged clarity, so strong and clear that it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

David snatched his hand back, staring at her in bafflement.

“You shocked me,” he said quietly.

Moira folded her hands and fixed him with her most compassionate gaze. She suddenly felt in control again. “You don’t have to be nervous around me.”

“I’m not nervous,” David said, with so much petulance he almost sounded like a teenager. “How long have you been able to–”

Rhys returned, his arms full of notebooks and star charts. He dumped them on the table, and Moira sorted through the huge rolls of indigo paper that cataloged the night sky. Rhys had also brought down the dingy plastic star finders she had stolen from her high school, and the stacks of spiral-ring notebooks where she meticulously recorded eclipses, new and full moons, and of course, birth charts.

“I’ll need your place and time of birth,” she said, making the executive decision to sweep whatever had just transpired between her and David under the rug. There would be plenty of time to turn it over in her head later. “Date too, of course.”

David pulled a pen out of his pocket and jotted the data points down on a nearby sticky pad. Rhys sidled up to his wife, his fingers brushing over the top of her wrist in a silent question. Unlike David, his anxiety was faint and indistinct, more a suggestion of a feeling than anything else.

“I know what I’m about,” she said to him, too quietly for David to hear. Rhys nodded, and that was that.

“The placements of the planets at the time of someone’s birth exert influence over their temperament,” Moira said. “But they continue to exert influence over us during the rest of our lives. Our bodies are seventy percent water; the moon pushes and pulls on us, and sometimes we get caught in planetary crossfires. Astrology has material benefits. If you know what’s going on in your client’s stars, you know what’s going on with them.”

“Alright,” David said. “Do it.”

“Happy to. But it’s an involved process, and I need to run my numbers. I wouldn’t suggest hanging around here waiting.”

“What’s your turnaround time like?”

“A few days, if I clear my schedule.”

“Beautiful.” David pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. “What’s your fee?”

Rhys shot up from his slouch against the kitchen counter, nearly swatting the wallet out of David’s hand. “We don’t want your money, David.”

“Uh, I do,” Moira said, baffled by her husband’s hair-trigger reaction. She thrust her open hand out between the two men. “It’s one-fifty.”

David scoffed. “For a full natal chart? You are undercharging.”

“I didn’t ask you for business advice, I asked you for one-fifty.”

David peeled off two hundred-dollar bills from a neatly clipped stack and placed them in Moira’s hand.

“Call the extra fifty a tip for taking a walk-in. Maybe you can buy Rhys a sense of humor.”

“Well, this has been loads of fun,” Rhys said acidly. “But your fifteen minutes are up, and now I think it’s time for you to get the hell out of my house.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” David said, already halfway out of the room. He threw one parting glance over his shoulder to Moira, surveying her spread of materials on the kitchen table. “Thank you for your time, MsDelacroix. I look forward to hearing from you.”

With that, he was gone, the front door swinging shut behind him. Rhys seethed in silence and watched him out the kitchen window.

Moira didn’t say anything until the purr of the Audi had disappeared down the street. “You can’t tell that boy anything.”

Rhys killed the rest of his coffee, and grimaced. “You’re preaching to the choir.”

“How many times are you going to cut him off just to let him back in again?”

“You’re the one that invited him into the kitchen.”

She worried at her thumbnail with her teeth. “Is it wicked of me to want to show off a bit?”

“Of course not, little goddess. It’s good for him to realize that there are people besides him who know what they’re talking about.”

“I wouldn’t get my hopes up about that,” she said with a sigh. She seated herself at the table, settling in for a long session of filling in logarithm tables and cross-checking planetary placements. “You have terrible taste in friends. And in men.”

“You go through a couple of near-death experiences with someone in college and suddenly you’re stuck with them for life.”

“Is it him that’s stuck on you, or are you stuck on him?” she mused aloud.

Rhys gave her a startled look, bringing an affronted hand to his chest. Moira smirked right back.

“You’re going to give me gray hairs,” he said. “Both of you.”

“I keep you young, Rhys McGowan, and you know it. Now get outta here and let me earn my two-hundred dollars.”

Rhys stole a kiss, then left her to lose herself in the familiar sea of trigonometry, astronomy, and divination.