TWO
There are maybe three or four things that could have been said that might have surprised me more, but I couldn't seem to think of them right then.
“What?” was about all I could manage as I took a single step back towards the door.
The girl behind the counter smiled a billion dollar smile at me. She leaned down and rested her elbows on the countertop so that she could palm her chin between her hands. She had a slew of rings on, all in various precious metals, and a range of stones so wide I couldn't even name but one or two. A necklace slid out of her top, a chunk of clear crystal that reminded me of the collection back at my grandmother's house. “You ain't as scrawny as I thought you'd be.”
“Huh?” I looked down at myself. She was right. I wasn't scrawny. I wouldn't call myself fat either, but what did that have to do with anything? Why did she think I'd be anything at all? “What?”
“Might be kinda stupid though.”
“Hey!”
“Jenny? What's all this yellin' about?” Another woman stepped out of the backroom. She was older, plump and pleasant to look at. Her hair was every shade of silver and brown and formed a large semi-circle around a face that had the look and texture of carved mahogany. Her shoulders made a perfect line beneath a floral button down shirt. Her dark eyes fell on me and I felt like she could see everything I had ever done. I hoped not, because some of that was embarrassing. “Well now,” she said, “what have we here?”
I swallowed hard and put my hand on the door, wishing that my legs would move. The glass was cool beneath my fingers, but I couldn't bring myself to push on it.
“You Ms. Loretta's grandbaby?” the younger girl wanted to know. She brought her hand to the top of her head and patted at the roots of the many braids her dark hair was coiled into.
“No,” I said instinctively, remembering only a second later that Loretta was my estranged and now deceased grandmother's name. “Yes. I mean...I think so.”
“Well,” the girl asked, looking at me like I had grown a set of limbs from an awkward location, “which is it?”
“Hush, Jenny,” the older woman admonished. She came around the counter, moving with the kind of speed and grace that you only got if you were really fit. “Come on, then. Let's get a look at you.”
She took my chin between two warm fingers that smelled of herbs I couldn't name. Her eyes were big and brown and warm. I couldn't seem to look away, even if I wanted to. Her face had a kindness to it that you could just see, like you could tell her every terrible thing you had ever done and she'd tell you that it was okay. I didn't feel like running anymore, but I was still very confused.
“Yeah,” she finally said, turning the single word into twice as many syllables as I would have given it. She dropped her hand from my chin and nodded. “That's her. You look a whole lot like your grandma, you know that?”
I thought back to the pictures I had gone through. I nodded back. “Yes, ma'am.”
My father had taught me to say “Ma’am” and “Sir ” when the occasion called for it. Four years in customer service had done nothing to help that. She smiled at me, and I knew that her and the girl behind the counter; Jenny, the woman had called her; were definitely related. Both of them had incredible smiles.
“I'm sorry,” I said, realizing I could think again, “I don't think you've got the right girl.”
“Pshaw,” said Jenny, rolling her eyes. Hers weren't brown so much as they were gold, and even from this distance I could see they had a sparkle. “If you Loretta's girl, then you the one from the prophecy, plain and simple.”
“Hush, Jenny,” the woman said again. She put an arm around my shoulders and guided me deeper into the convenience store. “You gonna scare the girl. Now then, let's try this one again. My name is Marquesa. Most call me Ms. Marquesa or Momma Marquesa; and this is Jenny, my granddaughter.”
I did not think the woman was old enough to have a granddaughter, much less one who was old enough to have gone to school with me. I looked between the two of them. The family resemblance was undeniable.
“Hey,” Jenny said, her voice thick with the slow speech of Appalachia.
“I'm Lorena,” I said, as if they hadn't already figured that one out, “and I am really confused.”
“I'm the one that sent you the letter,” Ms. Marquesa told me, “I was real good friends with your grandma. We was in the same circle.”
“Circle?” I asked.
“Witches,” Jenny offered. She made it sound like it was no big deal. Like they had been in the same sewing circle or softball team.
“Oh.” I remembered all the crystals and books in my grandmother's house. I had already come to the conclusion that she was into all that new-age stuff. Why I didn't think that she was also in some kind of coven, I don't know.
“I see you gone and figured that much out for your own self,” Ms. Marquesa said, “I think that's alright, but you don't know much about the rest, do you?”
I shook my head. “I don't know what you are talking about.”
“Well, that's alright. We can fix that up. You hungry?”
I was going to say no out of politeness, but my stomach picked that moment to growl. I blushed. “A little.”
“Come on, we got dinner in the back. Let's go sit down. Connie!”
Another girl stuck her head out of the back. She had freckles and a riot of red hair. I could see a series of tattoos peeking out below her olive-green sleeves. “Yeah?” she asked.
“Come watch the front. We gotta go and talk to Loretta's grandbaby,” Ms. Marquesa ordered.
Connie gave me a look. It didn't have the same weight as Ms. Marquesa's did, but there was something behind her hazel eyes that made me feel like she was seeing more than just my face. I resisted the urge to cross my arms over myself.
“Yeah, alright then,” Connie said. Her voice was so soft that I barely heard it.
Before I knew it, I was being ushered into the employee lounge. There was a whole slew of food. Chicken and seasoned rice and some kind of mixed vegetables in sauce, enough of it to feed a family of five. My mouth watered. I didn't make drooling sounds, but it was a close call.
“Go on, then. Sit down,” Jenny pointed to one of the folding chairs. I sat. It was cold against my back.
Ms. Marquesa picked up a plate and started loading it up. I thought she was making it for herself before she shoved it in my direction and took the seat across from me. Jenny stood in the doorway.
“I think I oughta start at the beginning,” Marquesa said, “best place after all. I could start with once upon a time or something, but that's best for fables, and this ain't no fable. It's the truth, pure and honest as can be.”
“Yeah, it is,” Jenny chimed in, moving past her grandmother to pick up dinner for herself.
Remembering that I had my own food, I picked up a plastic fork and took a bite. It was good. Better than good. Maybe it was because I had been living off of fast food recently, but I didn't think so.
“Thank you,” I said, indicating the meal.
Ms. Marquesa shook her head. “Think nothin' of it. I know there weren't nothin' to eat at Loretta's place; cleaned it out myself. But anyhow, like I was sayin', once upon a time is for fables, and this isn't one of those. I tell ya that all the things you've read about, faeries and vampires and witches, are all real. Magic is real, it's just sleepin'.”
She said it all with that matter of fact tone that another person would have used to describe the weather. I blinked at her, and then at Jenny, and then down at my plate. My mind, being the bastion of witty repartee that it was, could only form one thought: “Wait, what?”
She chuckled. “I could complicate it all, talk about how the world has magic in it, great big roads of it that the average person can't see. I could even give you fancy names like Ley Lines or Magical Weave, or names in a hundred different languages, but the truth is, ya don't really need to know that. What you need to know is that magic used to be strong, but it's grown weak.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling intrigued despite myself.
I loved magic. Okay, more accurately, I loved the idea of magic. I liked reading about it, hearing about it, watching movies with it. You name it. Call me a nerd if you want, but I'll just tell you that's a vague and outdated word with no real meaning and keep reading my comic books.
“We don't know,” Jenny answered. She shrugged her slender shoulders in an elegant motion and I decided that she wasn't just pretty, she was Cover Girl gorgeous. The blue shadow matched the blue in her jeans and I didn't think it was on accident. “We just know that it stopped working.”
“When?”
“Again, we don't know.” Jenny pulled apart a piece of chicken and stuffed a good portion of it in her mouth. “But it was a while ago, a couple hundred years, maybe.”
“Not that long,” Ms. Marquesa interrupted, “but close. Still, we was told it happened because magic needed a rest, it needed to sleep, and so we let it be. Well, most of us, anyhow. Some dabble.”
“Witches?”
“Mmmhmm. Witches an' beings that need it to live. But they all went into hiding, pretended to be human while they waited for some sign, something to happen to shake it all up again. They stopped doing the big kind of magics that made everyone believe. They waited for a sign.”
“Let me guess,” I said, drawing on my years of playing video games, “signs have happened.”
“You happened,” Jenny said pointedly.
I repeated my super snappy line of, “Wait, what?”
“The prophecy. Didn't your daddy ever tell you why you weren't allowed to come back here?”
I thought about that. I know I had asked, but my dad worked in marketing; he was really good with words and messing with them until they said a whole lot and nothing at all at the same time. Had he ever actually told me why me being with grandma was bad? Aside, of course, from a random late-night phone call no more than thirty minutes ago.
“Just that it was dangerous,” I answered, bringing another bite of food to my face.
“Could be, prophecies are fickle things.”
There was that word again. Prophecy. I'd read enough fantasy novels to know how those kinds of things ended up. In short? Badly. Prophecies either meant the end of the world or the rising of some great evil and the death of the person they were about. Of all the numerous daydreams that I'd had, I never wanted to be at the center of a prophecy.
“Okay,” I said, setting down my half-finished meal, “here's the part where I start to feel confused.”
“Your grandma had a gift for seeing things.”
“Like looking into the future?” I asked.
Ms. Marquesa nodded her head, reaching up to brush her fingers through her natural curls. “Future, yes, but the present and the past, too. If magic hadn't been sleeping, she'd have been a full-fledged oracle, I believe. Instead, all she got was snapshots, pictures of what had been, and what might be, and a little in between.”
There was a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach. I wasn't stupid. Sure, I had dropped out of college before even getting an associate's degree, but that had to do with being lazy, not unintelligent. I could put two and two together. If my dad thought me being here was dangerous, and my grandmother had a gift for prophetic visions or snapshots, and Jenny's first words about me were that I was a witch? Yeah, I saw exactly where this was all going. “And she had a prophetic snapshot? About me?”
“Hole in one, powder puff.” Jenny smirked.
“What did she say? What was it about?” That squeaky voice was not me panicking, I swear.
“That you would have the child that brought magic back into the world.”
“Oh boy,” I managed right before my head went all light and dizzy. I was not going to pass out. Nope. Not going to happen. I swear I was cooler than this. Who was I kidding? No, I wasn't. I was not now, nor had I ever been, anything close to cool. I was on the edge of totally barfing all of that food I had just tossed on an empty stomach.
“Breathe, Lorena,” Ms. Marquesa placed a hand on my neck, visible since I had put my forehead between my knees. “It's okay.”
“I'm sorry,” I said, talking to the denim on my thighs, “I think you and I have really different ideas of what okay means. You just told me I'm going to have a magical prophecy baby. That isn't even in the universe of what I would define as okay.”
When I glanced up, all three of them were looking at me, even Connie who was supposed to be watching the front counter. Maybe I got a little louder than I had intended. I was justified. “Are you a witch, too?” I snapped at Connie, feeling a little grumpy.
“Yeah,” she answered, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Oh good, then you go give birth to a prophecy.” An idea suddenly struck me. “Wait, Jenny said the witch from the prophecy is here. That's not right. It can't be right. I'm not a witch.”
The three women exchanged a series of glances that made me feel like I'd said something stupid. I'd like to reiterate that I am not now, nor have I ever been, stupid. I can do stupid things from time to time, but that's not the same thing.
“You are,” Ms. Marquesa said gently, moving her hand from the back of my neck to cup my chin. I looked up into her warm eyes and felt just a tiny bit less like throwing up. “You are the granddaughter of one of the most gifted witches ever born on these mountains. You might have swallowed up all of your talent, denied it, but it's there.”
“You've got the wrong girl,” I protested, “I wouldn't have swallowed anything. Okay? Let me just...let me explain something to you. I wanted to be magical. Okay? I wanted to be someone special when I was a little girl. I wanted to be the girl who turned sixteen and found out she was a witch. I wanted my mom to come back from wherever she had disappeared to and tell me that she was really a goddess and I had inherited her powers.
If they were looking for kids to try out some cocktail of super drugs in the hopes that they would become better, faster, stronger versions of themselves, I would have been the first one waiving my human rights to give it a go, and eventually throwing on a cape and tight underwear to fight against the undoubtedly evil corporation that spawned me. Okay? I desperately, urgently wanted to be special. But I have not even levitated an object or accidentally cast a spell.”
Ms. Marquesa's hand, still a comfortable heat on my skin, gave me the slightest pat. “Oh, Honey, that's not how magic works.”
Before she could explain further, an explosion went off. Not the kind that blew stuff up, but the kind that swept down on you, like a hurricane without any wind or rain. It was a change in air pressure, the pounding of someone's overdone amp. All noise without any sound. I clapped my hand over my ears as Jenny and Ms. Marquesa stood up. Connie turned in a tiny circle, throwing her freckled arms wide.
The three of them joined hands, palm to palm. The necklace around Jenny's neck seemed to glow, as did the many rings on her fingers. I was suddenly very aware of that herbal smell emanating from Ms. Marquesa. Connie threw back her head and howled like some kind of wolf. I was pretty sure I heard something answer her.
I wish I could have paid more attention, but the weight of whatever was happening pushed me down to my knees. I pushed harder on my ears but it didn't help. The pressure was sinking into my bones until I thought they would crack.
“Lorena,” a woman's voice called. I didn't know it, but it was light and vibrated, “Lorena come to me.”
I don't know what I expected to happen. I don't know what I thought I would see when I looked past the trio of women, but I saw a fourth woman in a robe of gray. The hood was so large that I couldn't see her face, but I got the feeling that no one else saw her. They were looking up at the ceiling as if there was something there. Then the image of the woman flickered, skipped like a video that wouldn't stream properly but the sound worked just fine.
“Come to me, Lorena. I'll tell you everything.”
I couldn't help myself. I started walking towards her outstretched hands. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to feel her arms wrap around me and make me feel safe. I took one step and then another. My fingers reached out, stretching towards her. I knew if I could just take her hand, everything in the world would be okay. There was a scant inch of space between my hand and hers.
Suddenly, I was jerked backwards, and I found myself staring up into the face of the most attractive man that I had ever seen. Cliché, maybe, but totally true. He had a long sheet of perfectly blond hair, white blonde or platinum. Whatever color you wanted to call it. It was bright. His skin was moonlight pale and his cheeks were sharp as diamonds. He looked like an angel. Not one of those creepy baby ones you saw in those old pictures, or even the alien looking things the Bible actually describes, but a golden-haired angel without the big feathered wings. He swept me into his arms like I was no more than a feather and hugged me to a chest that I was sure had excellent definition. My cheek pillowed against a frilly cravat around his neck, and I realized he wore the outfit of old French Aristocracy.
“No!” the woman cried, but her voice wasn't soft and pretty anymore. It sounded creepy, like a hundred snakes all hissing at the same time. The hand, which had been perfectly formed, now looked withered and ancient and covered in warts. Ew.
The three women let go of one another, throwing their hands to the sky. The pressure suddenly lifted and I could think again.
“Lorena,” Jenny called, sounding a little out of breath, “are you alright?”
“I have protected her,” the man holding me said.
Being the master of everything suave, I asked, “Who the hell are you?”
“Ma chère, I am Alan Pierre Rouergue, of the House of Rouergue, and I am going to be the father of the child that you birth.”