Woman King

CHAPTER 11

From the moment she began speaking, I knew that Elsa was holding something back. I could feel her hesitation. By now, I also knew her well enough to know I should back off and wait to ask her again later. So I let the matter pass, and dressed and readied myself for my first day of learning how to use my reclaimed skills.

We were headed to the Mission District. Elsa insisted we use the subway to travel downtown. Riding the public trains, she said, would be a good place to practice. As soon as we got on the N-Judah streetcar, Elsa leaned in and whispered my assignment.

“Focus on one person, and try to block out the rest. Find one person and tell me what you see and feel.”

I scanned the train looking for my target. A few seats away, I locked on to a well-dressed woman who looked to be about 25. She was tall with long blond hair, held in place by a tortoise shell headband. Her hair, which had been brushed until it shined, cascaded down her back. She looked successful and content—an easy first assignment, I told myself.

When I examined her more closely, though, I began to see a different story. She was encased in a solid red line of fear. She was worried. I could feel it. Her heart also held another emotion: longing. I sat down on a nearby train seat and watched her.

“She’s worried,” I said to Elsa under my breath. “She’s trying to reassure herself about something, maybe not reassure, but I think I can feel her trying to soothe herself.”

Elsa pulled me up and walked us to the second car of the train. “Try again.”

I was feeling more confident, so I decided to try something more challenging. This time I locked on to a slightly disheveled homeless man, his belongings piled high on the seat next to him. I focused in on his coloring and saw something odd. He gave off a grayish color that looked like smog hovering over the hills. As soon as I tried to read his emotions, he turned around to face me. He knew I was trying to read him. Although he smiled at me, his behavior was anything but friendly. He began to press back, sending some very dark emotions my way. I felt a rush of sadness, and realized that he was trying to drive me to despair. He was persistent, trying to drive negative feelings into my head. Elsa appeared at my side.

“That’s a demon, Olivia. Can you feel him trying to drive a wedge through your soul? Block him out.”

Once again, I practiced using my breath to lower a blind over my mind’s eye and closed off my nervous system. Soon, I began to feel like myself again. The demon turned away from us and looked out the window.

“He gave up very easily,” I said.

“He probably knew he had no chance with you,” was Elsa’s reply. “Demons, in general, are a lazy lot and do not like to work hard. I think he knew better than to test your will.”

“Are they always grey?” I asked as we made our way out of the train station.

“Always. You must have a soul, or some connection to humanity, to give off an aura. Remember that. Grey is the absence of color. As servants of the devil, they have no humanity left inside them, and therefore give off no color.”

“Wow. That is scary. What would have happened if he’d succeeded?”

“You would have left the train feeling like your life was not worth living,” Elsa said ruefully. “Demons are responsible for a lot of the suicides you read about that happen in public—the stories about people who jump into the path of a moving train, or leap from the Golden Gate Bridge. Their deaths are often incomprehensible to the people who know them. Now you know the reason for their actions.”

I shuddered slightly as we rode the escalator up from the bowels of the subterranean train station, trying to shake off the gloom of the demon and Elsa’s story. Would that have been my fate, too, had Elsa not appeared? Would I have been doomed to toss myself over a bridge when Stoner was done with me? I didn’t want to know.

We exited the station at 16th and Mission. From there, we moved west, walking through the crowds on Valencia Street. There were dozens upon dozens of bodies moving through the neighborhood. I held still, allowing myself to feel the energy of the people passing by.

“Don’t lock on to it or try to absorb it, let it move past you as if you were browsing titles in a book store,” Elsa said.

If I had been in a bookstore, the floor would have been a mess. It felt as if I was bumping into everyone who passed. A jolt here, a jolt there, I was being brushed by anger, anxiety, sexual longing, happiness and true love. Each time someone passed, they tickled my senses. I began to regulate it, as if searching a radio by turning a dial. I concentrated, focusing my mind to pull in from one person but not the next. A rainbow of colors passed behind my eyes, and I was enjoying my newfound skills until something began pressing on my skull again.

I looked up, trying to find the source of the pain and found myself staring into the dark green eyes of a man with long hair and a nose ring, whose piercing gaze seemed to be picking at my head. It was a very specific kind of pressure, but it came with not a trace of emotion.

“Elsa that man over there is trying to force his way into my head.”

“Vampire,” was all she said.

“Vampire,” I replied. “In the Mission?”

“Especially in the Mission,” she said.

“He is picking at my skull like a woodpecker.”

“Make him stop.”

I closed my eyes and forcefully shut him out. He smiled, saluting me with two fingers as he passed.

“He doesn’t give off any emotion,” I said as he passed. “Only that pecking sensation.”

Elsa laughed. “Vampires don’t feel emotions the way humans do. It has something to do with the absence of a beating heart. If you ever get to know a vampire well, you will learn to read their feelings more closely.”

“Wow, a vampire and a demon, all in the last hour in San Francisco,” I said, shaking my head. “I never imagined it was possible.”

“And now?” Elsa asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “But I do know that everything I thought I knew has changed.”

“That is a good beginning,” Elsa said, putting her hand on my arm. “Let’s go find a place to meet Lily for dinner.”

We settled on Bar Tartine, a quaint bistro on Valencia Street. Lily arrived at about 5:30 looking exhausted. Seeing her made me realize how tired I was, too.

“I don’t think this will be a late evening,” I said. “We both look like we could use a good night’s sleep.”

A waiter took our order for three glasses of wine, and a sampling of house-made meats and cheeses. I added on a bowl of warm olives, and Lily asked for some bread. Once our drinks and small plates arrived, I quizzed my magical friends on what really was going on around me.

“You’re very lucky to live in San Francisco,” Lily said, licking a drop of olive oil off her fingertip. “This city is the most magical of any in the world.”

“You don’t mean picturesque, do you?”

Lily smiled. “Nope. I mean magical, with a capital M. After a while you will feel it. The land itself is part of it. Very early civilizations knew it, too, the Ohlone Indians, for example.”

Lily’s comments reminded me of something from my adventure the night before.

“I think I saw them,” I burst out, interrupting Lily’s sentence. “I saw them at Ocean Beach last night. I ran there after leaving the park. There were hundreds of people chanting, and I saw a woman—their shaman. I thought I was hallucinating.”

Both women exchanged glances. “You were having a vision, but it’s extraordinary that you saw the Ohlone,” Elsa said. “Your abilities are very strong, Olivia. You picked up on a very old memory embedded in the land.”

“You were amazing last evening, but I did have a brief scare,” Lily said, joining the conversation. “After Elsa left and you began to run towards the lake, I thought at one point that I’d lost you. You seemed to disappear from my line of sight, but then I found you again at the foot of the water. I think my eyes must have been playing tricks on me.”

“I was running around like a crazy woman, maybe a tree or a bush blocked me from view,” I said as I nibbled. “My memory of specific details about the evening is hazy, but I do remember one thing. I heard a man’s voice. He asked me to leave behind my old life and join him. I followed the sound of his voice all the way to the museum, but never located him. I’m guessing it was just a hallucination.”

My companions both laughed. “If we ever do this again, I will remember to brew a weaker tea next time,” Elsa said lightly.

Elsa shifted in her seat, and just for a minute I felt apprehension coming from her. Then, very quickly, the emotion disappeared from my radar, almost like a shadow that disappears from the corner of your eye when your turn your head to find its source. But it was clear that for the second time in one day, Elsa was hiding something from me.