Chapter 4

Willow pulled into the driveway of the hundred-and-twelve year-old farmhouse she shared with her mother. The driveway was long and winding, up the mountain a quarter of a mile past the Honey Depot, the restaurant Willow had opened five years ago, mostly because she was bored out of her mind. She hadn’t been allowed to leave Serenity, because her mother had been told that, until she was twenty-five, Willow would be safe from the demon she was born to fight, as long as she didn’t leave the city. No college, because her mother had said what was the point? Although Willow knew there was more to it. Willow had never gone to school. Lucinda, her mother, was as anti-government, anti-establishment as a pacifist could be. She’d lost her only love, her husband of three months and two days, on one of the last days of the Vietnam War.

Willow couldn’t imagine the pain her mother had felt when she’d gotten the news from two grim-faced soldiers in full dress uniform, while the presidential address from President Nixon announcing the planned cease-fire that would end the war for good, was playing in the background on her tiny, black-and-white television.

Willow had tried to comb some of the pain out of that memory for her mother, but her mother didn’t want that. Wouldn’t allow it.

That was a memory of Lucinda’s that Willow had seen many times, one of only two memories Willow had never been able to block, even when she tried. Her mother walked around with the tremendous loss at the forefront of her mind every day, and it colored her every decision. Willow had been born at home. No social security number ever requested. No birth certificate either. No last name given, no middle name even considered. Willow had had to go to the government office on her own, at 18 years old, and explain her situation, request a social security number, file a piece of paper that gave her a last name and a middle name. Willow had picked her own. The middle name, Meadow, she’d picked because she thought her mother would like it. And the last name, Kendall? She’d picked that by plucking a special memory out of her own mind, a treasured memory of the only time in her childhood she played with girls her own age. Sisters. They had both been fun and full of life, but one had seemed special to her, like a shining and bright knick knack on a shelf full of dusty and dull ones.

The memory of playing hide and seek with those two girls at Sinissipi Park when she’d been five years old had stuck with her for a long time, growing soft with age, like a river rock that had been in the river for decades, and now was smooth and worn. She couldn’t remember the girls’ names, but she thought the one she’d connected with so well had been Kendall.

Willow had never gone to school and rarely left the farm, never going to daycare or staying with family. Lucinda had been scared, shunning both people and the government. The only reason Lucinda hadn’t had the farmhouse taken from her, was because as the wife of a Vietnam war veteran, who’d posthumously been awarded a purple heart, she never had to pay taxes on the house or land again.

The day that she’d gotten to play with those girls, her mom had been sick, staying overnight in the hospital, so a neighbor had been taking care of Willow. Willow had intense mixed feelings about it then and now. She’d been terrified for her mother, but so happy to be off the farm, playing with children her own age. She didn’t blame her mother, though. How hard it must have been to be told at the moment of your child’s conception, that she would be instrumental in a war against a demon.

Willow parked the truck and walked to the house, but the creaking wood floors and airy, bright spaces only told her that her mother was not in the house. Willow guessed she knew exactly where Lucinda was. She headed to the back porch, and sure enough, the beekeeping blouse and veil were gone from their hooks.

Willow headed out the back door to find her mother in the summer heat. Willow had gotten the bees for herself, wanting to raise fresh honey for the restaurant, and wanting something to do to occupy her endless days of waiting for the ‘angel’, but Lucinda had been the one to take over most of the bees’ care. They both found it tranquil and meditative, an endeavor that always restored mental health and never stole it.

Willow saw Lucinda moving among the frames at the back of their property, still a mile’s walk up the side of the bluff for Willow. She had flubbed her mission to get hive beetle baffles from the store, but this discussion wouldn’t wait any longer.

As Willow drew close, a few bees alighted on her. She petted their wings absently. She’d never needed a bee blouse, never been stung. She wouldn’t try to test her theory, but she was pretty sure that, even if she crushed a bee between her fingers, it wouldn’t try to sting her. She didn’t know why, but her mother would only nod at her as the bees came to her like pets.

Lucinda stiffened as Willow moved through the tall grass toward her. Did she hear Willow? Or sense her? Willow had always thought her mother had a touch of the empathic abilities Willow overflowed with.

“How long have you been planning this?” Lucinda said, still turned away, but going on the offensive like a sniper. Lucinda was short, only four feet, nine inches tall, but she had never shied from a confrontation in her life.

At five feet, two and a half inches tall, Willow didn’t exactly tower over her mother. Her voice was soft as she responded, even if her words weren’t. “Planning what, Mom? To discover that you’ve got me wired for tracking, like some prized hound you don’t want to lose during the pig hunt?” Willow winced at the words themselves. She didn’t want to fight with her mother. She took a deep breath in through her nose and out her mouth, consciously ousting the accusation from her message and answering again, even softer. “I didn’t plan anything, Mom. I wasn’t going to leave for good. I just needed to see that, if I crossed that town line, lightning wasn’t going to strike me.”

Lucinda didn’t say anything. Her back was still turned as she pulled frame after frame out of the hive to inspect them for honey. Willow sighed. “It didn’t, you know. No lightning. No demon. I went a good five miles into Ogle County.”

Her mother’s movements turned jerky. Willow tried one more time, her voice even softer. “It’s ok, Mom, I understand why it scares you, and why you acted like my twenty-fift birthday never happened. Now that I’m twenty-five, the angel is supposed to come for me, and I’ll be active in the fight against the demon. That makes you nervous that you’re going to lose me. I get that. But I’m not safe just because I’m here anymore, right? That’s what the angel told you? So there’s no reason for me to stay in Serenity. It doesn’t keep me safer.”

Lucinda’s shoulders shook, and Willow stepped forward, uncertain. Lucinda socked the frame back into the hive too hard, smashing bees and making Willow wince. Lucinda turned around, her face partially obscured by the bee veil, but Willow could hear the tremor in her voice, and feel how cold her hands were as she grabbed Willow’s bare arms, careful not to disturb any of the bees. She peered into Willow’s face, her voice tight. “You’re not scared?”

Willow looked into her mom’s dark brown eyes, a testament to a conflicted heritage that was second only to the memory of her husband’s death announcement, with how much it colored Lucinda’s life, and spoke her heart. “No, Mom, I’m not. I’m still not certain I 100% believe it, exactly as you have always told me. But let’s say I do.” Willow ignored the pain in her mother’s eyes. She couldn’t be forced into believing by her mom’s suffering, or it would have happened by now. She kept speaking. “The demon may be strong, but the love of my angel for me and me for him will make us stronger. That was what my father told you, right?”

Lucinda turned back to the bees with jerky movements, her distress clear. Thought-forms swirled around her. Memories, things unsaid, emotions that Lucinda thought were from the current altercation, but Willow knew had never been healed and transformed when they had first happened. They were stuck there, in Lucinda’s brain, to play again and again, changing nothing.

Willow slumped, exhausted from the emotions, unable to block her mother’s thought-forms. What Willow could understand was always incomplete, not exactly the way her mother would see it, so Willow didn’t stress too much, or feel all the way bad for not trying harder to block. She just wouldn’t assign any credence to anything she saw. She would let it pass through her mind, unexamined.

A by-thought of her mother’s wavered in front of her, glowing and huge like a still-connected soap bubble, and Willow’s mind snagged it. She followed the snaky tendril of it all the way back to the original thought, until she could almost see the actual angel through her mother's eyes, her mother's memories. The angel who was her father. Willow watched the memory play out in front of her.

Lucinda was thirty-three when the angel came to her, a deeply-conflicted woman who rented the oversized lawn and field in front of her family homestead out to campers heading across the country in mimicry of their 1960s hippie predecessors. Lucinda had just finished taking payment, and had smoked some of it, retreating to the house and pulling the curtains in the living room for no reason she could fathom. She never pulled those curtains.

Willow watched the memory, not fighting it. She knew where to stop so that she wouldn’t see anything she didn’t want to see, or that her mother didn’t want her to see, but this was the only knowledge she had of her father. Willow mostly believed what her mom thought she had seen and heard, and she relished the memory, picked it farther apart each time she relived it. It was real. She was half-angel. But then again, there was no way it was real. She was all-human. She leaned toward half-angel more every time she tapped into this thought, because it seemed more real and right each time.

In Lucinda’s memory, the angel came.

Willow’s mom stumbled back to the couch, and dropped onto it, her mind wheeling and reeling from the good pot she had smoked. Something was about to happen to her, and because she was high, her experience of it would be different than it would have been if she was sober, even though he would have come either way. He was above any human judgment and saw nothing wrong with her smoking, seeking what she thought was reality.

She was about to have her mind blown, and she couldn’t wait.

He came, the being she’d sensed wanting to get at her, appearing as if he had always existed in her living room, the closed curtains at his back, light glinting off him, through him, as he took the form of a man made from light.

“Whoa,” Willow’s mom said, as energy hit her like a softball to the chest.

The angel spoke. His lips didn’t move, but his colors danced in time with his words. “Angel,” he said in his make-believe voice. Or that’s what Lucinda thought he said. His voice was lyrical, more songbird twitter than words. No, not twitter, but laughter- his voice was the laughter of a child before he learns what shame is. She thought he was telling her he was an angel, or maybe he was telling her he was a being that she could only conceive of as an angel, even if he was so much more.

Lucinda believed.

Willow opened herself up to the feeling her mom had received from the angel on that glittering night, twenty-five years ago. Pure, untainted love so thick it had a color, a shifting, glittering color that couldn’t be pinned down but was somewhere on the violet-crimson-indigo spectrum. The color-love shot from the angel to Lucinda and she knew that her life would be forever different. From that moment on, she would live for the baby. The baby the angel was about to give her.

Lucinda adopted nodded at the angel. “Come on, then,” she said. “I’m ready.”

He approached her, love shining through his eyes, but a different kind of love than existed between humans. It was an all-encompassing love, that meant no matter what she ever did or didn’t do, he would love her the same. He would never try to control her with his emotions or forbid her from anything. He wanted only life from her, but she was free to choose it or not. He gathered Lucinda into his arms and whispered the most beautiful music in her ear.

Willow, hearing the angel’s words in her mother’s memory, heard something different than she knew her mother had. Lucinda insisted what the angel said went like this.

“Our daughter will be a queen among the angels. She will save them with her touch, her love, and her special connection with the angel. She will save, he will lead, and all will be right in the end. This I foresee.”

But what Willow heard went like this.

“Our daughter will be a queen among the barren. She will save them with her touch, her love, and her special connection with the barren who will lead them. She will save, he will lead, and all will be right in the end. This I foresee.”

Willow allowed herself a moment of puzzlement about that word, barren. It made no sense, and in a decade of contemplating it, she still couldn’t understand why she would be slated to lead the ‘barren’.

Moment over, Willow prepared to pull herself away from the memory, because just after this was where her mother had said the angel-sex started, and Willow did not want to see that.

But because she stayed with the memory only a second or two longer than normal, she caught a glint of something in the angel’s hand. It was something that hung on a chain and caught the light in a way even the angel couldn’t manage. It seemed to glow yellow, then lavender, then yellow again, then a color she couldn’t name or describe. Willow stayed seated in the memory, risking a sight she didn’t want to see for one she couldn’t quite look away from.

The angel held his hand up. It held a delicate gold chain and at the bottom of the chain was a thick piece of gold jewelry an inch or so tall. An angel made from gold stared out at her, the jewel between its hands glowing a bright lavender, but when it twisted away from Willow/Lucinda, Willow saw the backside of it was a bear. A massive, snarling bear, whose upper lip was curled, massive fangs showing, open eyes glowing red.

Music. Birds singing. The angel was speaking, and it raised its hand to show off the pendant. The words were not clear, but the meaning was. “You will name her Willow. This shiftsegen will protect her, and guide her, and travel her. I will return after she is born, train her in the use of her special power. When she is twenty-five, her fated mate will be shown to her, and she will join him in the war against the demon, Khain. This is my will.”

Willow pulled back from the memory with a start. Her mother still had her back to Willow and was checking another frame for honey, as bees flew around her, reveling in the lack of a breeze.

The angel had left her something? She’d never seen that part of the memory before, and certainly never seen this shiftsegen thing with the snarling bear on it. Shiftsegen had been the only word that she’d heard with her ears and not her mind, as if he’d taken great care with it, knowing Lucinda’s brain had no way to interpret it.

But more than that, the angel had promised to come back? He never had. Willow gazed at the back of Lucinda’s head, seeing only white hat and black veil designed to keep bees out. What did Lucinda think of the fact that the angel had never come back? It had to increase her anxiety about her daughter. Her sadness about her life. Willow put up her blocks. She would ask her mom later if she wanted to shift through some of the emotions, maybe have Willow release them? But not until she thought more about that promise.

As for the bear/angel pendant, the shiftsegen?

She chose not to see it as a betrayal of her by her mother. She knew how hard her mother tried to take care of her. There had to be a reason her mother had never given it to her.

Willow spoke. “I’ll see you later, Mom. The restaurant is about to open and I need to be there.” Lucinda didn’t look at her or respond to her, and Willow turned around to walk away through the tall grasses, back toward the house.

She needed distance.