“Water?”
“
Oui
, water bends the light, yes?”
“Yes.” I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me, either.
“When you accept the blessing of the True Cross, the instrument that allowed the Christ to save us, you become closer to creation, yes?”
What’s she talkin’ about
,
Willis?
Shhh.
“Umm, yes?”
“Yes, so you use the blessing to see the full glory of God’s creation. When you can see, you can touch, and with your touch you can call upon ze power of Christ to mold it to your desires.”
Some of this almost made sense to me, but I’d never tried to put my hoodoo into words, and I’d never couched it in Christian terms. “These pieces of the cross allow you to see things more clearly, and if you can see it, you can change it?”
“
Oui
! With the Cross—we touch Creation. By accepting the sacrifice of Jesus, we become one with the God’s Creation, and in this small way we may create.”
I thought of the pulsing song of the Caduceus. It always felt like some fundamental truth, some basis of reality, but I’d never connected it with God or Jesus. It was both awe-inspiring and scary to think about. I was nominally Christian, like my parents, but I didn’t think about it as something I could touch every day. Things like
The Da Vinci Code
were firmly in the realm of fiction for me. I guess I’d never tried to integrate Jesus and the Bible into my reality. It was somehow unnerving to have a solid physical connection to the crucifixion.
Are you buying this whole Jesus angle?
asked Spring.
I don’t know, Spring. If the Caduceus is part of the cross, then how did it get buried under that mound on a different continent a thousand years ago?
As I pursued this new thought, I completely forgot about my original question. “So, are you saying you must believe in Jesus to use these pieces of the cross?”
“But of course. We must study and purify ourselves before we are allowed bear the True Cross.”
What did that mean for me? “So, if someone didn’t do this, they wouldn’t be able to use it?”
“Perhaps...if their soul is pure and innocent.”
Well, she got that wrong.
Gee thanks.
I had to agree though. The number of people I’ve killed or maimed in my head would put me in the same league as Jack the Ripper.
I looked over at Dave. He’d been uncharacteristically silent through this whole exchange. There wasn’t much on his face that told me what he thought about all this.
“What if somebody who hadn’t gone through your training, someone maybe not so believing, were to use it?”
“Like you, yes?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“The danger, it would be terrible. It could... euu... put your soul into the peril. This is why we gather all ze pieces we find. It is to protect the innocent, and to use this power only for God’s will.”
Ah, like sneaking into your room at night and stabbing you.
I grimaced. I so didn’t want to go there. I cast my net into my sea of thought to catch some other relevant questions.
An hour later, I still wasn’t sure I had precisely figured out everything she was saying, but I had a lot to think about. We fell silent, and I slipped into a meditative state and tried to see the world as Colette described it.
As we drove, I periodically coaxed Jen to drink some water, but I couldn’t get her to eat her McGoodness.
About three hours into our trip, Dave missed a call. He was fast asleep, and I had to yell to wake him. He grumpily pulled out his phone and fiddled with it for a minute before he handed it to me.
“Here, there’s a message from your mom. Just press one.” Duty done, he flopped back in his chair.
I pushed one and waited nervously for the message.
The call was from my mom’s cell, but the message was from Holly.
“Finn, you’ve got to get here quick! Dad’s been shot. There’s blood everywhere! Finn, please answer the phone!”
Adrenalin shot through my veins. “Frack!” I fumbled a bit with the stupid not-iPhone to get it to redial. The phone rang five times before it went to voice mail. “Gah!” Mom probably had her ringer off again. I called the home phone. By the third ring, I was out of my mind with panic.
I yelled into the phone, “Answer the phone damn-it!” The phone picked up, “You’ve reached the...”
I hung up and tried again. “Pick it up, pick it up. Come on.” It didn’t help. There was no answer there, either. I tried my dad’s number and got the same thing.
I yelled at Colette, “They’re there right now! Go faster! Go faster, damn it!”
“Finn, if I go faster, we may get stopped by the police. If that happens, they’ll discover that this auto is stolen, and when they see us covered in blood, they will arrest us.”
“I don’t fucking care! Go faster.”
“Do it Colette, or let me drive,” said Dave.
I couldn’t see Colette’s expression, but the van jumped underneath me and the rattle around Jen and I became deafening.
“Where are we?” I yelled. “How long to get there?”
“We’re just entering Columbus,” yelled Dave.
Shit. I hoped they could survive another thirty minutes. I hoped I could.
“Dave, is Detective Hunter’s number in here?”
“Yeah, look for ‘Detective Hotty.’”
I found it quickly and called.
“Hi, this is Vicky.”
“Detective, this is Finn. You have to help—”
“Finn, what the hell did you do to my officer? Where are you? Do you—”
“Detective, my parents are in trouble.”
“—know how much... Trouble, what kind of trouble?”
“There are armed killers at my house with guns. My dad’s been shot. You’ve got to get over there fast!”
“Wait, where are you?”
“I’m driving in from Columbus. I can’t get there in much less than half an hour. Please hurry!”
“Finn, who are these killers?”
“I don’t know, Holly just called. Please get somebody over there. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
I hung up to discourage any more questions and tried to get a grip on my pounding heart and my leaping imagination.
I looked down at Jen. Her head was in my lap. The rest of her stretched out across the hard-ridged metal floor.
As usual, Spring was paying more attention than me.
Finn, there’s something wrong. Her aura is gone.
I didn’t think I could panic any more, but I have hidden depths. When I Looked at her, my heart pounded in my chest, and I suddenly couldn’t take a breath. Jen had no aura.
“Jen!” I shouted. I pushed my sight down into Jen’s deathly-still form and ignored Dave’s questions. To my relief, Jen was alive—barely, but she had almost no aura.
It made no sense. Spring was just as confused as I was.
How could her aura just disappear? This can’t be happening.
“Jen! Jen can you hear me?” I yelled mentally as well.
Neither mental nor physical calls got an answer. I looked deeper inside, but I still couldn’t find out what was wrong. I pulled back to get another look and tried to understand. This time I saw what was happening. Her aura was flowing away from her body in faint a wispy cord. I freaked out. Could Wendigota suck out a soul at this distance? In an instant, I put up a shield to keep the remainder of it in place.
The small remains of her soul snapped back and the cord vanished.
Under Il Saia’s instructions, I had done something similar for Jen’s brother Gregg while cradling his dead body in my hands. Il Saia told me that our souls could regenerate over time. I just prayed I’d kept enough of Jen, so she would still be Jen when she woke up.
I threw my aura out over Jen to help heal her. It was a terribly intimate act, but it had worked with Holly and several other people whose auras I’d inadvertently damaged. So, I sat there and offered her everything I had. Something was different this time. When I’d done it before, I’d been inundated with images and feelings from the person’s life, but this time, those came across as just a whisper. I strained to hear them, to support them, but they stayed distant.
Spring, this doesn’t feel right.
Something stung my cheek. I pulled back into my body and was slapped again for my efforts. Colette was squatting in front of me, calling my name.
I struggled to retrieve my thoughts from the rarefied realms they’d been traveling and weakly raised my hand to ward off another blow. “Stop it! I can’t talk right now.”
“We’re here, Finn, at your house.”
That landed me with a thud. I had to go help my dad. But then, what would happen to Jen?
I looked down at her to check for changes and found them. Her body and aura seemed stronger. Strong enough for me to risk taking her off my life support. Part of me was screaming to rush to my family’s aid, but I held back enough to gently move Jen’s head aside and confirm she was stable before charging out of the van.
Colette had us parked on our driveway behind two police cruisers and an ambulance. The whole scene flickered eerily in the red and blue light from the strobes of the ambulance. I ran to the house past Dave, who’d been stopped by two uniformed officers guarding the front entrance. They stopped me as well.
“I’m sorry sir, this is a crime scene. We can’t let you go inside right now.”
I recognized the officer on the right, “Officer Taylor, you know me. That’s my home! My family is in there.”
“Sorry, Finn, Detective Hunter told us to keep everyone out.”
I pulled up my will and said, “But remember, she did say that you could let me in.”
Taylor scowled and said, “Yes, she did, just please be careful not to disturb anything. Don’t step in any of the blood if you can help it.” He pointed to a spray of blood on the porch emanating from the front door.
I tried to keep my anxiety in check and rushed passed him while ignoring the blood. Once inside, I gaped at the scene of violence presented to me in the front room.
Two bloody male corpses lay on the floor. Vivid splatters and splashes of red blood coated the floor, the drapes, the ceiling, and dripped down the walls. There was so much that it looked fake. The two badly abused bodies assured me that it was not. One body had no head, and the other was lying on its stomach while its dead eyes studied the ceiling. A ragged hole was all that remained of that one’s right arm. Neither of them was familiar. I numbly noted the missing arm on the sofa still oozing blood onto the once-blond fabric. I found the first man’s head sleeping at the bottom of an irregular bloody smear on the far wall. The death smell of blood and feces assaulted my nose.
Damn,
observed Spring.
Thankful for the lack of flashbacks, I took a shallow breath and held it as I ran through the room, trying to ignore my squishing footsteps. “Dad! Mom! Holly!”
“In here, Finn.” My dad’s voice came through the far entrance of the living room. He was in the family room
“Don’t go through the...!” Detective Hunter’s cry from the far door trailed off into a soft curse and a glare as I dashed into the family room. She was standing in the middle of the room.
My dad was sitting on the couch with a female paramedic crouched in front of him. Blood covered him from head to toe. A tattered, scarlet-stained shirt dangled open from his shoulders, exposing two bloody patches of mangled flesh.
Panic and nausea seized me. I muscled past the paramedic to crouch in front of my dad and disregarded her heartfelt protest. “Holy crap, Dad! Are you okay?”
“Finn! I’m glad you’re alright,” said my dad in entirely too normal a voice. “We’ve been worried about you.”
Driven by the tectonic pressure of my anxiety, the words geysered out of me. “Are you alright? What happened? Are Mom and Holly okay? We couldn’t get back in time. I lost my phone, and I tried—”
“Finn, everyone is fine. This looks worse than it really is.” He nodded towards the paramedic now sprawled on the floor. “I’ve been trying to tell that to the young lady there.”
The “young lady” in question sat several feet away getting a hand up from Detective Hunter. My face heated up with embarrassment. I hadn’t meant to throw her.
“Sorry about that—”
“He’s in shock and denial,” she said with a scowl. “He’s obviously sustained massive blood loss. You need to convince him to let me help him.”
My dad grimaced and waved her away with a bloody hand. “I told you, most of it isn’t mine.” He looked at me. “Finn, can you go get me about a dozen of those acorns and a hammer?”
He was referring to the acorns I’d gathered from Spring’s oak after it had been cut down by Jen and Gregg. Each acorn emitted a bright golden aura—each a little love child created by Spring and my life essence—or something. The ones that had dropped before the tree had been cut down had created an oak forest in my back yard. The unripe ones I collected seemed to pack a bit of a metaphysical punch, and a few could replenish my hoodoo as well as a pizza or foot-long sub. They might be able to help my dad heal.
“Okay, but where’s Mom and Holly?”
“We sent them upstairs, so they wouldn’t be in the way of the investigation and didn’t have to look at all the carnage and blood. Holly’s too young to be exposed to something like this.” My dad waved his hands to encompass himself and the front room.
“What happened?”
My dad shrugged. “The guy had a shotgun and shot me when I wouldn’t cooperate.”
I’m sure my astonishment was evident. “So, you ripped his head off?”
He looked down in shame or embarrassment and studied the shredded flesh of his chest beneath his chin. He dug into one of the many deep, bloody holes, pulled something out with finger and thumb. “Yes, I’m afraid they made me pretty angry.” He tossed a small gray sphere onto the carpet. It was a buckshot pellet.
“Finn—” said Hunter.
She was overridden by a little girl’s squeal. “Finn! You’re here!” A pink streak of child tackled me around the waist, ignoring my own bloody clothes. “I’m so glad you’re home! I had bad dreams about you last night!”
I staggered and tried to hug her back, but she was little short for a good hug. Instead, I stroked her hair thinking about how this must have traumatized her. The contrast of her pink Dora jammies and the raw horror of the living room nearly caused my brain to pop.