Chapter 18 #2
The hallway opens into the living room, all crystals, hanging things, and a selenite lamp that casts everything in a pale blur. When we turn left into the kitchen, the air changes. It’s warm, buttery, and something cinnamon. Mabel is at the stove, flour on her hands, with the oven on.
My stomach wakes up before I’ve decided to be hungry.
Then I register that it’s not quite right.
The spice balance is off, or the browning, or something I can’t name. I realize with a sort of resigned despair that Lennon has apparently recalibrated my entire sensory system without asking.
I think about her in the inn kitchen, how she moves as if she already memorized it, how she tastes things directly off the spoon and then immediately adjusts without hesitating.
Nobody else’s cooking is going to be right anymore, and that’s just something I’m going to have to live with.
I should tell her that. That she’s ruined me.
I will. When she’s back.
“Boys.” Mabel looks up and smiles at us with the warmth she reserves for people she’s known since they were young and stupid. “Sera had a feeling you’d come by today.”
“She did?” I look past her.
Mom is at the kitchen table, her cards spread across the surface in a pattern I don’t recognize.
Her silver hair is loose down her back, her rings clinking softly against each other, and she’s looking at the cards with an expression I know—the faraway one, the one that means she’s somewhere else entirely.
Then she looks up.
Not at me.
At Paul.
She stands with a smile. “You turned around.”
Paul looks uncertain, but she’s already crossing to him, and when she reaches him, she presses a tarot card flat against his chest. He frowns down at her hand, and I look, too, but she’s already up on her toes, her mouth close to his ear, saying something I can’t hear.
Paul goes rigid, and when she steps back, he takes the card from his chest and puts it in his back pocket without looking at it.
I have no idea what just happened, but before I can ask, Mom settles back into her chair and gestures at the empty seat across from her. “Sit down.”
I automatically sit and am again tempted to do a reality check, given how easily my body followed her instructions.
My hands don’t know what to do with themselves, so I fold them on the table, then unfold them before I end up gripping the edge of the chair instead, white-knuckled. My nervous system seems to think a tarot reading is somehow as dangerous as the jumping out of a window thing from earlier.
I don’t examine why I’m still in the chair instead of already making an excuse to check on something in the inn. Progress, maybe.
Or I’m just that hellbent on getting answers for Lennon.
“You survived the collapse.” She smiles. “Now comes the climb.”
Yeah, I had that climb already, thank you very much.
“Mom, we actually just wanted to—”
“Listen to your mother,” Mabel says from the stove without turning around.
I close my mouth.
Mom’s hands move over the deck, her rings making soft sounds against the cards.
She draws two and lays them flat. The letters on the names are doing the flickering they always do for me, but I know the pictures. I grew up with them.
The Chariot. The Seven of Wands.
She holds up The Chariot and taps it once. “Momentum. Forward movement, but only if you control the force, not the other way around. There’s a bigger road ahead.” She lays it down. “A bigger test.”
Great. Just what I needed to hear.
Seraphine touches the Seven of Wands. “You gained ground. Now you have to defend it.”
She draws one more card.
The Devil.
She doesn’t even look at it. Instead, she looks at me. Not through me. Not at the air beside my head.
At me, directly.
I can’t remember the last time we had full, clear, and present eye contact like this, and the thing that happens to my throat is so fast and dumb that I’m grateful Paul is behind me, not in front.
Her ringed hand comes across the table and covers mine.
“The luck and love you’re feeling right now, you deserve it. It is meant for you. Don’t be afraid to take it. Don’t be afraid to fight for it. Don’t be afraid to be you. You are worth everything.”
I stare at the cards.
I hate when she does this.
I want to pull my hand away, but I don’t know when the last time she held it was, either.
Goddammit.
“Trust where the universe has guided you.” Her gaze moves, briefly, past my shoulder, and I glance back. Paul is leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching. “Trust the company it has given you.”
I turn back to her, and the next words come out before I can even decide to say them out loud. “What if I fuck this up?”
She squeezes my hand. “You won’t, my earthborn tether. Don’t let fear keep you from what’s meant for you. What you want and what the universe wants for you are aligned. That is rare. That is a blessing not everyone gets.”
Earthborn tether.
I’ve heard those two words a thousand times. I used to think it meant I was the one who stayed on the ground while she traveled planes. I thought it was her way of saying you’re the dependable one, the one who keeps things running, which was fine. I was fine with being that.
I never thought to ask what a tether was for.
Paul uncrosses his arms and steps closer. “You called him your earthborn tether. Why?”
Seraphine looks up. “What?”
“Nevan. You called him…”
“Who is Nevan?”
My stomach drops. Not suddenly. It never is sudden. It’s always this slow, gutting slide that I’ve had years to recognize and have still never learned to brace for.
“Me, Mom. I’m Nevan. Your oldest son.”
She looks at me with a bright, interested expression. “You’re my son?”
“Yeah.”
“You are handsome.” She tilts her head. “Isn’t he handsome, Mabel?”
“Sure is,” Mabel agrees.
I press my teeth together, breathe through my nose, and let it pass. “Mom.” I wait until she looks at me again. “What is a tether? Can you explain it?”
“Of course, but you know that already. A tether is like an anchor. It is the thing that pulls a soul back. Not a rope but more like gravity. You don’t feel it until you try to drift.
” She takes her hand back and smooths it over the cards.
“Your tether is the person who makes the waking world feel worth returning to.”
“And if someone has more than one?”
“That’s healthy. A heart doesn’t divide. It expands. The more it loves, the more room there is.” She looks over at Mabel. “Like a room where the walls keep growing.”
Paul speaks from behind me, “So when you said the soul has to remember there’s something to return to, and that you cannot pull someone back who no longer reaches toward you, you were talking about tethers?”
Seraphine nods. “People can get stuck in their dreams when they have a tether here and there. The tethers are what guide you. If you have more, you’re free to go anywhere, but at a price. Being tethered has its price too.”
“But what can we do?” Paul’s voice is careful. “When one tether is in 5D, and one is…”
“Right here,” I say quietly.
He nods once.
Mom turns back from the window. Her gaze finds the cards again, then settles somewhere between them.
“A tether in elsewhere is more potent than one in waking life, because elsewhere is a shared place, consciousness without a container. It is heavier.” She turns a card over absently with one finger.
“The pull from there is stronger. To hold against it, to keep a soul oriented toward waking, there would need to be more than one tether in the waking world. The pull has to be stronger here than there.” She looks up, suddenly clear-eyed.
“The soul goes where the love is strongest.”
Lemon.
I turn to look at Paul, but his gaze is already on me.
And I do the math I’ve been avoiding, and it comes out uglier than I want it to, because I think about what’s actually holding Lennon to this side of things. The people tethering her here.
Her mom is gone. Her dad has been gone. The boyfriend who only ever tolerated her is gone, too, and good riddance, but gone.
The soul goes where the love is strongest.
And Lennon’s strongest love has been pulling her the wrong way this whole time.
But we aren’t. We’re here. All three of us. And we’re not going anywhere.
That’s the whole answer, isn’t it? If the pull from elsewhere is strong because the love is strong, then we just have to be stronger. We have to love her so loudly that waking becomes the place she reaches for without thinking.
That I can do.
That I know how to do.
I’ve spent my whole life being the one who stays. The one who shows up, carries it, keeps the lights on so nobody else has to. I never once thought of it as worth much.
Turns out it might be the most useful thing about me.
I hold Paul’s gaze and nod.
Together, we’ve got her.