Homecoming (12 page)

Lyse had moved closer to study one of the masks.

“I have no words,” Lyse said, shaking her head. “But, damn, this would freak me out if I had to walk through here to get a glass of water at three
A.M.
”

Lizbeth had been prey to similar thoughts about the spookiness factor of Arrabelle's masks—especially when she stayed late into the night, helping Arrabelle with some of the more difficult distillations.

“I wish we could have an actual conversation,” Lyse said softly. She'd stepped closer to Lizbeth, speaking in a low voice so what she was saying would stay between them. “Can you just nod or shake your head if I ask you a couple of questions?”

Lizbeth sensed the prickly feeling returning, but she tried to ignore it. She smiled at Lyse and nodded.

“Eleanora,” Lyse began. “She believes she's some kind of witch. That this nature walk into Elysian Park is so we can conduct a ritual of some kind . . . Did you know this?”

Lizbeth realized Lyse had no idea who or what they were. This was shocking to her—how could Eleanora not have told Lyse anything about herself? It didn't make any sense.

“Did you know that she thinks she's a witch?” Lyse repeated.

Lizbeth nodded slowly, eyes drifting down to look at her feet.

Lyse took this in, her body tense as she nervously shifted back and forth on the balls of her feet.

“O-kay.”

Lizbeth waited for the next question, and for a moment it seemed like there wasn't going to be one, but then Lyse asked: “Has this been going on a long time? This delusion my great-aunt is having?”

Lizbeth didn't know how to answer. It'd been going on for as long as Lizbeth had known Eleanora,
but
it wasn't a delusion. So she nodded first—

“Okay—”

And then she shook her head.

This only served to confuse Lyse.

“Wait, what? I don't understand.”

Lizbeth shrugged, not sure how to get across what she wanted to say with just a shake or two of her head.

“Wait, wait . . .” Lyse said, her eyes sparking with an idea. “Do you mean, yes, this has been going on a long time?”

Lizbeth nodded vigorously, her long hair falling across her face.

“And that, no, it's not a delusion?”

Once again, Lizbeth shook her head with vigor. It was nice to feel like she'd made herself understood. It was the hardest part of being what she was, the idea that no one really knew what she was thinking. It was sweet relief to be able to communicate with Lyse.

“So, if you're saying it's not a delusion, then what is it?”

Lizbeth frowned to remind Lyse this wasn't a yes-or-no question.

“Sorry,” Lyse said. “This is hard. Like surreal
Jeopardy!
or something.”

An amused grin spread across Lizbeth's face, mirrored by Lyse's own smile.

“Let's try that again,” Lyse said. “Eleanora thinks she's a witch. Do
you
think she's one?”

The smile disappeared as Lizbeth nodded.

Lyse shook her head as she took this in.

“I don't believe in witches.”

Lizbeth raised her gaze to meet Lyse's eyes.

“I'm just gonna play along with this because I promised her I would . . . and because she's dying,” Lyse continued. “And I owe her one for taking me in when I was a kid. After my parents died.”

Lizbeth understood the pain she heard buried underneath Lyse's words. Loss, bereavement, being alone . . . all those things Lizbeth knew well. She wished she could say,
Yeah, I get it. We're the same. I know how it feels to be lost
—but she couldn't. Instead, she reached out and took Lyse's hand.

Lyse stared down at their clasped fingers.

“It's okay,” she said, giving Lizbeth's fingers a gentle squeeze before releasing them. “It was a long time ago.”

Lizbeth knew Lyse was wrong: Time might heal a body's wounds, but it could do nothing for the misshapen scars those wounds left behind.

“All right,” Lyse said, stepping away from Lizbeth and twisting her head so she could look around the room. “Take me to this bathroom I've heard so much about.”

Lizbeth grinned, then ushered Lyse away from the living room. She led them down a long hallway that opened up onto a spacious sitting room decorated in tasteful shades of pale cream and beige, overhead track lighting giving the space a soft yellow glow.

Lizbeth pointed to a door in the back corner of the room. Beside it was a desk that held a metal sculpture of a dancer caught midleap, its body twisted backward in flight. Beside the sculpture sat a brown corded telephone.

“Wait,” Lyse said, and Lizbeth, who'd been planning a quiet getaway, was forced to turn back. “Okay, you have to stop looking at me like you're a scared little baby animal. You're making me feel awful.”

Lizbeth nodded and tried to relax her face, so she seemed less “scared baby animal.”

“I think we got off on the wrong foot earlier, and I wanted to apologize. You just freaked me out a little, and I wasn't the nicest to you, so I'm sorry.”

She offered Lizbeth her hand.

Lizbeth stared at it.

“Just take it,” Lyse said, offering Lizbeth an encouraging smile.

Lizbeth was tentative in her approach, meeting Lyse halfway. She was unused to shaking hands and squeezed Lyse's fingers too hard.

“Ow! Okay, okay,” Lyse said, laughing. “I need that hand.”

Lizbeth dropped Lyse's hand, embarrassed all over again.

“So, are we cool?” Lyse asked, massaging the fingers Lizbeth had just crunched.

Lizbeth gave Lyse a shy smile.

“Good,” Lyse said. “Now, go keep an eye on Eleanora for me. That way I can actually pee without worrying.”

Lizbeth nodded, and then, hair flying behind her, she left the sitting room at a gallop. She felt more settled, and the prickly feeling was almost gone. She floated down the hallway with a wide grin on her face, pleased that Lyse seemed to trust her.

Curiosity was sitting in the middle of the living room, waiting for her. Lizbeth stopped so the kitten could bump into her ankle, rubbing her face against Lizbeth's jeans.

Hi, kitty,
Lizbeth thought as she dropped to her knees, picking the squirming kitten up and letting it nuzzle her chin.

She imagined the kitten answering back with:
Hi to you, too, Lizbeth. You smell like magic. I want to eat you.

Lizbeth grinned, liking the made-up personality she'd given the kitten—this wasn't their first conversation, actually. She talked to Curiosity almost every day.

Hey, you don't want to eat me,
Lizbeth thought, as she stroked the soft spots behind the kitten's ears.
I'm your friend.

In her head, Lizbeth heard the kitten say,
You're nobody's friend.

Unsettled, she set the kitten back down on the floor and wandered back to the kitchen to wait for Lyse.

W
alking through the dark streets of Echo Park after they'd left the safety of Arrabelle's house behind them, the streetlights and pregnant moon their only means of illumination, Lyse recalled how, as a teenager, she'd dreamed of the original bohemians and radicals of Echo Park. Not just daydreams, but convoluted, lucid things that woke her up on the hottest nights of the summer to find the covers bunched at her feet, her heart beating in time with her shallow breaths. She would lie there, listening to the birds chirping out their night songs, the sound carrying through windows left wide and screenless to let out the pervasive heat and take advantage of the unpredictable crosswinds.

She dreamed of nights spent dancing around a devilish bonfire lit by the Semi Tropics Spiritualists—a long-disbanded camp of bohemians and psychic enthusiasts who'd resided not far from where Eleanora's house stood. Fever dreams of old Echo Park that made her want to be alive sixty years earlier, when the neighborhood was nicknamed Red Hill because of all the political radicals and artists that populated its lush hills, their tiny bungalows hidden within the tangle of wooded greenery high above Sunset Boulevard.

She'd been a teenage girl full of nostalgia for a time that wasn't her own. But all that changed the minute she slipped the noose of adolescence and left Echo Park behind her for college. She'd lost the magic of adolescence in favor of more adult pursuits. She'd found a few good friends—like Carole—who seemed to understand her, and she was happy.

Her time in Echo Park became a hazy dream, a faded photograph pinned to the sheets of a forgotten photo album.

Walking these streets brought that world back to her with a vengeance. As they got closer to Elysian Park, more memories began to resurface, filling her head with a sense of nostalgia so strong that her heart ached.

They passed a funny little cottage Lyse remembered from her teenage wanderings, and she was surprised to find it hadn't changed a bit. Peeling brown wood, stained-glass front windows, and wind chimes hanging like luscious grapes from the porch rafters, their hollow bodies tinkling wildly as the wind pushed them to and fro.

Night-blooming jasmine grew all over these hills, woven into trellises, snaking over metal and wooden fences alike, permeating the air with its creamy, almost tropical scent. Nature was still alive in Echo Park, concrete and drywall and brick mixed together with trees and wild animals and the smell of living things.

They took the rolling hills at a brisker pace than she'd have liked. She'd have preferred to linger and marinate in thoughts of the past,
and
she was worried about Eleanora wearing herself out, her great-aunt moving too fast when she should've been taking her time.

But this wasn't Lyse's journey. She was just a spectator, following Eleanora and Lizbeth as they led her deeper into the hills, past the houses and streetlights, and into the heart of Elysian Park.

“This is really far,” Lyse said, out of breath as they crested a sloping hill.

“Not too much longer,” Eleanora said, stepping off the marked trail and cutting into the trees.

“Where are you going?”

“It's just through these trees,” Eleanora said, pointing off into the thicket of greenery.

Lyse sighed, aware nothing she could say would dissuade her great-aunt when she had her mind set on doing something. When they were still back at Arrabelle's house, before the epic hike into the heart of darkness, she'd tried to get Eleanora to go home—but she'd been shot down. Her great-aunt was stubborn, determined to do what she liked even when it wasn't healthy for her.

“I'm dying,” Eleanora had said. “There's nothing bad a hike in the woods can do to me anymore.”

Lyse had no argument for that, though she'd already decided she was going to force Eleanora to get a second, or third, or fourth doctor's opinion—she didn't care how many it took. She remembered that Carole's brother had gone to Sloan-Kettering when he'd been diagnosed with lymphoma. She was gonna call him in the morning and get his doctor's name and number. There had to be more cutting-edge stuff a specialized place could be doing for Eleanora.

Plus, she was worried about her great-aunt's state of mind. Maybe a psychiatrist should be on the docket, too. This whole game about witches and blood sisters and rituals was clearly some kind of psychotic delusion. Eleanora had gotten mixed up with a group of well-meaning (probably) Earth mother Wiccan ladies and, in her demented state, had decided their Earth magic stuff was for real.

And she didn't even want to think about the weird conversation Eleanora had been having on the way to Arrabelle's house. The one with the “Dream Walker” called Hessika.

“Just through here,” Eleanora said, her voice low.

The perfume of night-blooming jasmine gave way to the sharp scent of eucalyptus, and Lyse looked up to find herself in the middle of a stand of trees.

“Come on, slowpoke,” Eleanora called back to Lyse. “Pick up the pace.”

Lizbeth had Eleanora's arm, and the two of them were moving away from her through a gap in the trees. Lyse shook her head, not wanting to follow, but knowing it wasn't a choice. She pushed on, keeping Eleanora and Lizbeth in her sight line.

This is ridiculous,
she thought.
It's pitch-black out. We're in the middle of nowhere . . .

She realized belatedly that Eleanora and Lizbeth were no longer ahead of her.

Shit.

“Eleanora!”

The quiet
whoosh
of the wind through the eucalyptus leaves was her only answer.

“Dammit,”
she murmured, annoyed with herself for losing track of the others.

The fog was beginning to roll in—or maybe it'd been there the whole time and Lyse just hadn't noticed it.
No, that's not right,
she thought.
There was no fog before. The night was clear.

An eardrum-shattering
howl
cut through the stygian night, and Lyse took an involuntary step back. The shawl she was wearing wasn't warm enough. It let the cold leak in, chilling Lyse down to her very marrow. She began to walk again, faster than before, moving through the dense stand of unending eucalyptus trees. It was getting colder, and the fog was thicker the farther she ran—because she was running now—her brain thrumming with the need to escape.

“Eleanora!”
she screamed into the night, the eucalyptus smell cloying in her throat and nose.

No response.

“Oh shit!” she shrieked, stopping her forward momentum and beginning to backpedal as terror gripped her heart.

Crouched in the fog ahead of her was a feral dog, its muscles tensed to attack. She didn't dare turn her back on the beast, afraid it would pounce if she took her eyes off of it. She slowed down, not wanting to trip over anything in her haste to get away. All she had going for her was that she was bigger than it. If she ended up on the ground, she could imagine the nasty creature using it as an excuse to attack.

“Shoo!”
she hissed at the dog.
“Get away from here!”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a fallen branch lying on the ground a few feet away and she started inching toward it.

She slowly bent down to pick up the branch, and the dog snarled at her. She froze, the makeshift weapon a few inches from her grasp.

“Get away!” she yelled, trying to sound as confident as she could, and then in one sweeping movement, she grabbed the branch and swung it out in front of her, brandishing it like a sword.

The dog attacked, racing at her with almost supernatural speed. She didn't flinch, just aimed the branch, and the moment the dog was in range, she swung it like a bat. She missed but was able to sidestep out of the dog's way before it could sink its teeth into her.

The beast turned around and went for her again, but this time she hit it square in the face with as much force as she could manage. The dog gave a pathetic whimper and veered off course, steering itself away from another wallop with the branch.

“Stay away from me, or I'll do it again!” Lyse cried, adrenaline pumping through her body. She felt glorious and sick to her stomach at the same time.

It wasn't light enough to see if she'd drawn blood, but the dog's whimper gave Lyse a clue that she'd scored a direct hit.

“Go home, or back to wherever you came from!” Lyse yelled, swinging the branch around to further dissuade the dog from attacking.

“Need a little help?”

Lyse wheeled around. Behind her stood a tiny slip of a woman in a sexy sweatshirt cut strategically to hang off one shoulder—and though it was hard to tell for sure in the moonlight, Lyse was pretty sure the woman had pink hair.

“I think I've got this—” Lyse started to say, but the dog chose that moment to take another run at her.

“Go,”
the woman said, stepping in front of Lyse as the dog pounced.

Lyse did as she was told, taking off into the trees. Tree branches sliced into her as she ran, but she didn't dare stop. She wanted to put as much space as possible between herself and the dog.

Behind her, she heard a snarl and then a soft
yip
of surrender, the sound fading into the night. Out of breath, she stopped and leaned against the trunk of an old eucalyptus tree. She took a shuddering gulp of air and realized she'd been holding her breath. She let the branch fall to her side and felt her body shake with relief . . . and the aftereffects of a heavy adrenaline surge.

She didn't know what else to do, so she started walking again. It didn't take long for the fog to clear and the trees to thin out, and soon she found herself stepping through a gap between the foliage.

She gasped . . . and stared into the clearing from her nightmare.

*   *   *

“Lyse,” Eleanora said, running over to her grandniece and grabbing her wrist. She was trembling.

“My nightmare,” Lyse whispered, patting her great-aunt's arm as she pushed away an overflow of emotion. “It's real.”

“Are you okay?” Eleanora said, with an intensity that was frightening. “You were right behind us, and then it was like you'd vanished. I was so worried—”

“I'm fine,” Lyse murmured, wanting to reassure Eleanora, even if she had to lie to do it. “There was a stray dog, but it's fine.”

She gritted her teeth, channeling all her energy into putting on a happy face. Eleanora didn't need her to fall apart right now.

She slid her arms around her great-aunt's shoulders, hugging the older woman to her. The trembling in Eleanora's body worsened, and Lyse wondered if this was going to become a constant thing—if so, it was even more upsetting than her great-aunt's appearance, which was bad enough, all fragile eggshell skin revealing the bones beneath the flesh.

Dammit, Eleanora was really dying. Any idiot could see it—and
she
was the delusional one if she thought a second opinion would change that.

“I'm glad you're here now,” Eleanora said, peeling away from Lyse's embrace.

She'd never been one for prolonged touching, was forever pulling out of hugs too soon, nodding instead of shaking hands. It was an aspect of Eleanora's personality that drove Lyse crazy. Now Lyse was just happy for
any
morsel of affection from her great-aunt.

“This place,” Lyse said, the words spilling from her lips. “I know it. I've dreamed of it. For years and years it's haunted me—”

“I didn't know,” Eleanora said. “Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“What was there to tell?” Lyse said. “I had nightmares. I didn't know they were actually about a real place.”

Eleanora sighed and rubbed at her chin, her fingers splaying across the lower part of her face like wings. She began to nod, turning Lyse's words over in her mind.

“
I
should've known,” she said. “I'm the master of this coven and it's my business to be on top of these things. Besides, I know now that I should've told you everything: about myself, about my ability . . . about the coven. It wasn't fair to keep things from you.”

“Why?” Lyse asked. Ever since Eleanora had begun talking about witches and magic and covens, Lyse had wondered why her great-aunt had kept this information from her. “Did you think I couldn't handle it? Or was it that I wasn't good enough to tell—”

“No, you were always good enough for anything,” Eleanora said, interrupting her. “That's a ridiculous thing to say. You were just young. I didn't want to burden you—”

“Lizbeth is a goddamned kid!” Lyse yelled, pointing in Lizbeth's direction. The younger girl shied away, embarrassed at being singled out. “She's a teenager. I was her age. That's a bullshit argument.”

“You're right. I've been thoughtless,” Eleanora said, spinning off in another direction, one Lyse hadn't expected.