“Yes. She does. And she’s been carrying a big load of worry. We need to talk, you, Mol, and me. But first, let me catch you up.” It took a while. At one point, I heard the shower come on and then stop upstairs. And later a moan drifted down the stairs as Alex woke. Eli, and later Molly, joined me at the table, and I put the cell on speakerphone and switched on the camera so we could interact. Otherwise the house was silent.
When Eli and I had given Evan all the info we had, he frowned and said, “What if Mol and I bind the skull so the arcenciel can’t see it?”
Angie peeked around the wall and said, “That’s a good idea, Daddy.”
I managed not to eep. Eli managed not to shoot her. Molly managed not to drain her of life. I thought we all did pretty well.
“Angie?” Evan said. “When did you—”
Molly interrupted with “Son of a witch on a switch. What are you doing downstairs? She’s supposed to be in time-out,” she added to Evan.
She told her father, “You can do to the scabertoothed bones what you did to me. It worked until I grew up and undid it.”
I said, “We didn’t know she was here, Evan. No sound, no scent.” Evan breathed in, a soft sound of shock. Molly looked terrified. Angie had spelled herself in ways I wasn’t sure her parents could do, at least not without a lot of prep time and testing and frustration. Eli, who might not understand what had happened, but did understand that we were all upset, looked bored but intent, the way he had when we were trapped inside while outside a dragon made of light and magic raged, wanting to eat us.
“But I can’t undid it if I’m mad,” Angie added, taking her place at the table like the big girl she proclaimed herself to be.
“Angie,” Evan said, “how did you know about the binding?”
“It tickled. And then it hurt, the way my purple heart jammies hurt when I try to put them on.”
“She’s outgrown the purple heart pajamas,” Molly said thoughtfully.
“She outgrew our binding?” Evan asked. “Literally and physically or metaphorically and metaphysically?”
“Yep,” Angie said cheerfully. “Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sam’ich?”
I stood and got the almond butter and the cashew butter out of the cabinet and some homemade muscadine jelly. I made sandwiches for all of us, including Alex, who was clomping down the stairs, a cold rag around his neck and a plastic bottle of pain meds in one hand. I used Eli’s new sprouted grain bread, which tasted a little weird but worked well with the nut butters and jelly.
I poured goat’s milk—another of Eli’s new passions—into glasses and passed the food and drink around while Molly and Evan experimented, putting Angie into her binding, watching as she loosened it and stepped out of it, almost the same way she might unknot a too-tight bathrobe and peel it off. Then they put her back into it and let her unknot it again. And then they wanted to try a binding on the skull, all of which sounded terribly boring to me and to Eli as well. He took his and Alex’s snacks to the living room on a large sterling silver serving tray he’d found in the butler’s pantry, leaving the family working in the kitchen. I got the cause of all the trouble, touched the crow on its beak to remove the ward from the skull, and placed it on the kitchen table, to the delight and awe of Angie Baby and the wide-eyed disgust of her parents.
Leaving it there, I took my plate and glass of milk to the back porch, where I could be alone with my thoughts. It was raining, a soft plink of drops, and I sat with my back against the house wall, staring out at what passed for darkness in a city, and ate. The scents were clean and mildly ozoney, wetwetwet, falling from the sky, flowing along the ground, draining into the storm sewers. Between downpours, mosquitoes buzzed everywhere, though most of them were locked out of Molly’s ward, butting the energies and making tiny sparks before dying. I’d have to tell her she could patent the ward as a house-sized bug killer/security system/light show.
The repaired ward was a haze of shadows that lit up in silvers and greens in Beast’s vision, glowing a rich and mottled blue, green, gray, and lavender, like a psychedelic dream from the sixties or an animated fantasy magic movie. Few humans could see the energies of magics, except for the presence of unexplainable lights, which made it easy to pretend there was nothing there, nothing happening. Even I couldn’t see magics well without Beast helping. I worked to combine our vision and tilted up my head to watch the rain falling in the security lights of the house to my right. The drops hit the ward and ran down the wall of energies, picking up the reds from the ward, looking like blood falling from the sky and dripping downward.
I thought of Beast and found her sitting in our soul home, the cave dark and silent, her eyes golden and bright. We couldn’t fight today, I thought at her.
No, Beast thought at me. Was trap/cage. Beast remembers trap, steel mouth filled with steel teeth to break bones and make prey bleed. Her ear tabs flicking, she added, Have been inside cage. Do not like cage.
That was a lot of concept for my Beastly self. Yeah. It was a cage. A protective cage.
Like den?