There was an interested pause as she caught a flash of my strange dreams about Gloucester and the mermaid. I felt her mind hooking onto the images and processing them in some way. And I was telekinetic? Sparks of surprise as she saw objects falling, flying, breaking…
After that, her emotions changed, softened. I came to something raw within her. She felt for me as I returned to the house where no one understood what I had seen or been through. She was with me on the floor at Hunter's as I wept full of frustration and pain. Then she saw me running away, coming to her, and how rejected I felt. Her guilt was thick, smothering. Images of my mother flickered through our minds.
She was moving faster now, through the events of the last few days. We came to Charlie—my ripple of excitement at meeting him, our kiss in the library. I cringed—how embarrassing!
The book. That was what she wanted to see. Finally we faced the book with its strange green print. She pulled on close to it and read the pages. What was odd was that now I could see even more writing that had been invisible before, along with the passages that I had been able to uncover. Telekinesis… she was thinking again…. uncontrollable magick…uncontrollable… the word was making her uncomfortable.
Then she saw what I had concluded—what I had asked Hunter to look into—what Ardán Rourke had suggested… that she also suffered from telekinesis. There was no ghost. No Oona. No…
Everything was rushing back at me, a rush of gravity pressing on my head, making my stomach churn. I wanted to get up—to move around, to stretch and feel the blood flowing through my veins. But she put a hand on my shoulder.
"Sit," she said. "It catches up with you."
I sat. It caught up with me. I wondered if I was going to barf.
"You," she said, "you're telekinetic?"
I nodded and steadied myself.
"And the Seeker is trying to find out if it is hereditary?"
I nodded again. "He thinks it may be passed down by first born females. Like my mother, me… and you." I looked at Evelyn. "Think about it," I said softly. "When did you have the most problems with Oona? When something bad happened? When you were upset or confused? That's when it happens to me."
No answer. She stared at some tiny birds that had come to eat at a bird feeder outside her window.
"What you saw in the book," Evelyn said, "I understood what it was saying. The passage suggests that Oona performed a spell—probably a bit of magick. The result brought telekinesis into our family, starting with Máirin."
"What else did it say?" I asked, my voice hoarse.
"There is no cure—at least, not that the writer knows of. The attacks are caused by repressed emotions, so the only solution is not to bottle them up. The more they are kept under pressure, the greater the explosions."
"What about the missing pages?"
"The spellwriter admits to ripping out any pages relating to a description of telekinesis. Later in life she regretted it. She spent many years investigating the problem, with only some success."
"But why did she destroy them?" I asked, shaking my head. "I don't get it."
"All good witches pride themselves on control." Evelyn sighed. "Rowanwand especially. We rely on the power that our knowledge gives us and the control we have over it. When a witch's control is in question, his or her power may be reined in. Most of us will do anything to avoid that fate, even lie when we are ill or weak. The woman who wrote these words was smart enough to know that if her own fear and pride could actually cause her to tear out pages in a book that described a family affliction, there was a good chance that one of her descendants might do the same. So she hid her writing and spelled the book so that it could be found by the right people—people ready to face the truth, to admit that they didn't have the control that they thought they had."
She leaned her back against the refrigerator, legs akimbo, looking more like a stunned teenager than the imposing, matronly woman I had known. "That's why I couldn't see that book for years," she added. "I was open to ideas the first time I found it. When my mind closed up, the book became invisible to me. All these years…" She shook her head as realization lit her eyes. "I could have done something about these problems. Oh, Goddess, Sorcha…"
Suddenly Evelyn's composure completely abandoned her, and her face crumpled into a sob. "Sarah, your mother," she whimpered as her age finally seemed to show, "she had it, too. She stripped herself because she was frightened by her powers. Her telekinesis." Evelyn closed her eyes and sobbed again. "Oh, Goddess, I could have saved her…"
I shook my head, reaching out to take her hand. "You didn't know," I said.
"I should have," she whispered. "It was all there for me to put together. If I had been honest with her, if I had told her about what was happening to me instead of just pushing her away…"
"You couldn't have known what she was planning," I said, squeezing her hand. "She was frightened, and she didn't tell you how deep her fears went."
Evelyn sighed wearily. "I could see how frightened she was, I thought I could take care of Oona on my own." She looked me in the eye. "I pushed my daughter away," she concluded, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "And I lost her."
She looked over at me, slowly regaining her composure. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. I was suddenly profoundly aware that I could pass on telekinesis to my daughter, if I ever had one. Looking at Evelyn's tearstained face, I swore to myself that I would always be honest with my children. And open.
"I'll have to tell them the truth," she said, sitting up straight again. "There is no Oona."
"No," I said. "You were right. She was real, and she cast the spell that is affecting us."
"I suppose," she replied. "All these years, I thought it was something entirely outside myself, something I could eventually control. But it was coming through me. It was always me."
I could tell it was more than she could bear.
"The Seeker," she said, "he's working with a chaos specialist in London to find a remedy?"
"A chaos speicalist?"
"That's what someone who specializes in uncontrollable magick is called." She smiled wryly.
"Yes," I answered, slightly chilled by the term chaos specialist. That had a really bad sound to it. Hunter had obviously been trying to be delicate. "He is."
"Well, then," she said. "I suppose we'll have to see what he comes up with." She pulled herself off the floor, moving stiffly.
"I'm not going to tell anyone up here about this," I said as I watched her. "I'm only going to tell some people in my coven and that man Ardán. This can just be between us. We'll tell them that we found something to bring Oona partially under control."
Evelyn's eyes looked pale and red rimmed in the sunlight from the window. She turned to me. For the first time I felt something coming from her, something warm.
"Thank you," she said simply.
"I should go," I said, gathering up my things. "I mean… I should rest before the circle."
Evelyn nodded and put her hand on my shoulder as she walked me to the front door. "Have a good rest, Alisa. And thank you." She looked me in the eye. "I am very lucky you chose to visit."
"You're welcome," I whispered, and walked slowly down the front steps and along the road to Sam's house. I wasn't very tired. I just thought Evelyn needed some time alone. She's just learned some serious things about my mother and her leaving, and I knew it would take her a long time to come to terms with them.