“Aye,” Felicity returned, her voice surprisingly calm. “Maybe so, but I broke it.”
I nodded. “True. But it obviously wasn’t a clean break.”
I cut a final strip of the surgical tape and stuck it to the edge of the table then snapped the spindle back into its cover. I tossed it back into the box with a slight clatter. Then I reached deeper into the first aid kit and pulled out a small, brown jar then twisted off the lid. I dipped a cotton swab into the homemade comfrey and menthol salve and twirled it for a moment.
Felicity let out a short laugh that came as an abbreviated ‘hmph’, and then she said, “I wasn’t really sure that the spell would work at all if you want to know the truth.”
“It didn’t, really,” I offered. “All it did was suck you into all of this mess.”
“Aye, but you were free of the visions for a short time.”
“I’m surprised it did that much.” I shook my head. “Nothing should have happened at all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, I’d already tried it.”
“You did?” There was a note of surprise in her voice. “When?”
“Awhile back.” I shrugged. “I even tried a banishing.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
“But if you don’t believe in the magick, Rowan, then it can’t work. You know that.”
“I know,” I told her. “But you just told me that you had your own doubts.”
“Aye.” She nodded. “I did at that. But still… You tried to do a banishing?”
“Don’t act so surprised. It’s not like I want this to keep happening to me you know.”
“That’s not true.”
I stopped twirling the swab. “Excuse me?”
“You see it as a gift as well as a curse.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do,” she replied. “I can feel it. You certainly don’t revel in it, but you see it as your destiny. If it were to stop, you would feel as though you had failed.”
She was touching on insights I had thought were completely hidden from view. Of course, I shouldn’t have been at all surprised by that. I really knew better than to think I could keep anything from her.
“Pretty amazing,” I offered with a sigh, returning to the original subject and hoping she would follow. “A spell that shouldn’t have worked to begin with, doomed to certain failure by your own disbelief, and yet you still managed to make magick happen anyway. Lucky you.”
I took her hand and blotted the oozing gashes once more.
“Why do you think that is, then?” she asked.
“The Ancients like your accent maybe?” I replied.
“What?” She shot me a puzzled look. “Oh, no, seriously. Why do you think it worked at all?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe there’s something bigger going on here. We both know I’m probably the last guy to be able to answer that.” I pulled her hand closer and retrieved the cotton swab from the ointment. “This is probably going to sting.”
The word ‘probably’ morphed instantly into ‘absolutely’ as I touched the healing salve to the gashes. She sucked in a startled breath as her face twisted into a grimace. At the same moment, her hand jerked out of reflex, trying to pull away from the sudden burn, but I held it fast.
“I really wish you’d reconsider the stitches.”
“No,” she forced out between clenched teeth.
I continued gently dabbing the wounds until they were covered, then tossed the swab into the small trashcan next to me.
“There, that should be the worst of it,” I said as I started wrapping her fingers with sterile gauze.
I glanced up and saw that her grimace had melted into a thoughtful stare. She was absently chewing at her lower lip, something she tended to do when she was preoccupied. I stopped wrapping for a moment and asked, “You okay? This too tight?”
She snapped out of the shallow trance and looked at me. “What? Oh, no, it’s fine. I… Ummm… I was just thinking about earlier.”
I went back to wrapping the gauze then glanced up as I said, “Earlier? You mean the hypnosis?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Before that. Before I left this evening.”
“What about it?”
“What I said about you feeling sorry for yourself,” she said hesitantly. “I’m sorry.”
I gave my head a slight shake. “Don’t be. You were right. I have been feeling sorry for myself.”
“No, Rowan…”
“Yes,” I interrupted her objection. “I have. Don’t get me wrong, honey, it hurt when you said it, but all you did was point out the obvious. I should actually thank you.”
“Aye, but I shouldn’t have been so mean.”
“You weren’t really.” I grinned. “No meaner than usual, anyway.”
She gave her head a dismissive shake, but the corners of her mouth curled into a slight grin.
“Of course,” I added as I started applying the tape, “I’m not suddenly all better now just because of what you said. That only happens in the movies. But, I recognize that my own self-pity is a part of the larger problem, so maybe I’m on the right path to do something about it.”
“You know you have family who wants to help, then.” Her words were a comment as much as a question.
“Yes, I do.”
“Hey you two,” Ben’s voice came from the doorway. “Come look at this for a second. I think I got somethin’”
Felicity was already coming up out of the chair as he finished the sentence, and I had to rise in unison with her as I hastily finished looping the white tape around the gauze.
“Whoa, honey, slow down,” I told her as she pulled away and stepped past me, but she wasn’t listening.
I knew the sense of urgency she was exuding all too well. She was physically manifesting her desire to get this over with, to make it into a distant memory. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it wouldn’t work. Nothing could make it play out any faster than had already been pre-ordained and that speed was something that we’d never be privy to before the fact.
But, what pained me even more was the fact that while I knew the memories would fade somewhat, the distance would never be great enough for her to ever stop running from them.
I pushed back the wave of sorrow brought on by the thought and followed her into the dining room.
“Look at this,” Ben was already saying, running his finger along the contours of lines between the sketch and a page in the road atlas. “Right here, this could be the Mississippi River.” He drew his hand downward, first on one page then the other. He shot a quick glance at us and then proceeded to motion horizontally. “This here could be Two-Seventy, and this could be Riverview.”
I stuck my hand in and traced the same lines. “Sure, but couldn’t this also be the Missouri River, this be Highway Seventy, and that be Fifth Street?”
“Yeah,” he replied, swishing his fingertip around. “And it could also be the other end of Two-Seventy and this could be Two-Thirty-One. Or it could be Sixty-Four and Fifty-Five for all that matter. But bear with me. Just assume that this is the Mississippi and look here and here.” He pointed first to an extra line running perpendicular to the line he had identified as Highway Two-Seventy. “This could be the Chain of Rocks Canal on the Illinois side.” He moved his finger back and forth between the sketch and the road map and then dropped his finger onto a small spot on the drawing. “On the mirror, this is pretty much just a bloody fingerprint, so I really didn’t pay much attention to it at first, but look at this.” He pointed to an identical spot on the roadmap, and at the tip of his finger was a small triangle encompassed by a circle. “This is the tourist info center on the Missouri side.”
I glanced back and forth between the two renditions, considering what he had said. The sketch was rough and in reality, just a simplified version of the smears that coated the bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, what we were looking at could be any one of a hundred intersections on the map, not to mention that we were looking only at Missouri. Still, if you did as he said and made certain assumptions, the details could be construed to support his conclusion.