FOUR
I dreamed again. I wasn't in the car this time, but sitting at a table. It could have been any table sitting in any room in any white-walled place in America. There were no decorations and nothing that felt like a home. Just a blank slate on top of pale gray carpet. I sat in one chair, wearing a pair of jeans, faded and comfortable, and a hoodie for a college I had never gone to. I knew, in the way that you know in dreams, that I wasn't alone.
At first, I didn't see her; I just felt the overwhelming knowledge of her distinct presence. After all, my relationship with my mother was almost entirely ethereal in nature.
The moment I thought the word 'mother,' I could see her. Again, she was wearing the gray robes that I knew her to favor, without any accessories or stylization to make them stand out. The Ordo Hermeticus Fidelis, more commonly referred to as The Order of the Loyal Hermit, was the cult my mom belonged to. And, for that matter, so did my half-sister.
As soon as I thought of her, there she was too. She wasn't sitting at the table; instead, she was standing in a doorway I hadn't really seen before. At her feet was a giant dog, like a wolf but with a pointed, more vicious face. It leaned protectively against her. I wasn't surprised; animals were for her what the undead were for me: a connection to my magic. It surprised me, I think, that someone who belonged to an order who believed in strict practice in the realm of magic was connected with animals, who I thought of as the epitome of organic. Then again, what did I know? I hadn't even been practicing for a quarter of a year.
“What are you doing?” my mother asked.
“Sleeping,” I answered, knowing it was true. I may have said it a little snippily, but I was feeling a little overwhelmed to even be looking at her. What the heck was the woman who had manipulated and kidnapped me to her little cult compound, run by her Jim Jones boyfriend, doing in my dream? “What do you want?”
She sat back, the hood of her robes masking a face that I knew to be beautiful and completely unlike mine. “To say I'm sorry.”
I hated that I wanted to believe her. It wasn't a big part of me, just a tiny little part, the size of a germ, but it happened. This minuscule hope that my mom wasn't a terrible human being, that she cared about me, and that she didn't just think of me as the daughter that she shouldn't have had. A part of me still clung to the dream that I had a mom that loved me. Stupid, yeah, but true.
“Sorry?” I asked.
“I can apologize. I'm a person, not a monster.” She sounded a little offended.
It might have been the worst possible thing that she could have said. “You're right. Only a monster would use magic to manipulate her eldest daughter to go to a cult compound.”
“We aren't a cult,” Connie said. She sounded offended too. If this was my dream, why was everyone arguing with me? I liked the dreams where we all agreed and then went diving in swimming pools full of ice cream while dinosaurs danced to salsa music in the background. These hyper surrealistic arguments with the family I had barely found out I had just weren't doing it for me.
“Cults,” my mother said, going back to her unruffled tone, “strip away your identity; they take away who and what you are, make you feel important, powerful.”
It was my less than professional opinion that my mother's little magic club was doing just that. I didn't have all the details on it yet, but I eyed the twin robes that my mother and sister wore, completely lacking in personality. Taking away identity? Check. Feeling special? Well, that was totally their shtick too. Magic, according to their order, was relegated to the few, not the masses. While I understood what they were saying in theory, history told us over and over again that leaving power in the hands of only a couple of people was the fast track to riot-ville. So that was a check too.
Yup. Definitely a cult.
I sat back in my dream chair, and it shifted. It was no longer cheap plywood and particle board with a stiff cushion. It was a dark wood throne with curling armrests. It was a position of power and, I gotta admit, I liked how it felt beneath me.
“I'm not going to argue this with you,” I said with a shake of my head. My ash brown hair had been arranged into curls, pulled back with a tiara of diamonds that glittered with every movement. My pajamas shifted into a rich gown of velvet, the same shade of blue-gray-green as my eyes were. “You sit there and you tell me that you want to apologize, but already you are trying to make excuses for what you did.”
“You have to understand-”
I rolled my eyes. “No, I don't. I know everyone says it's the adult thing to do to just let people be and let them have their own thoughts so long as those thoughts aren't hurting anyone, but, Mom, you hurt me. And you wanna keep magic locked up in this neat little ball that only you and your friends practice, and I don't think I'm okay with that.”
“Would you offer nuclear weapons to everyone?” Connie demanded. The dog at her feet snapped its teeth at me. They were sharp, too sharp for a normal dog.
I rolled my eyes. “Let's not go down that path, okay?”
“Why?” my mother wanted to know. She still sounded calm, but there was a gleam in her eyes as if she had caught me in my own web. “Because it bears a ring of truth?”
I sighed. This was a conversation that I really just didn't want to have. It wasn't that I couldn't argue my side of it. I had spent enough years in customer service to learn when to just shut up and let a person say whatever they wanted. I had also learned how to put my views in a clear and concise manner (thank you, three years on the public high school debate team), and I knew that I didn't want to walk down this path...but I was totally going to do it anyway.
“No,” I said flatly. “It doesn't.”
Connie rolled her eyes. The dog growled. My mother, however, looked at me with a steadfast curiosity that was almost amusing; you know, if it hadn't been directed at me.
“How so?”
I blew out a long breath. I sat up straight, not because I thought I was better than my mom, though I pretty much believed I was, but because sometimes you had to get a little full of yourself to get your point across. The sleeves of my dream gown slithered over the arm rests as I folded my hands in front of me. “It's a bad comparison. No, it's a crap comparison. A nuclear bomb has one ability. It's destroys. It falls out of the sky, gives this big ol' blast of EMP, which wrecks technology, and then it obliterates an area of life and everything in it.
Then, you know what? It lingers. If the bomb is big enough and bad enough, it doesn't even allow for regrowth after that because is screws up the area so badly. But you know what? The same can't be said for magic. Magic has the ability to protect. It has the ability to help things grow. It has the ability to heal. Yeah, it can hurt people. No argument there. But at the end of the day, it's more complex than comparing it to a stupid nuclear bomb.”
I hadn't even known that was my view until the words started pouring out of my mouth. Yeah, at first, I had been okay with the magic=weapon idea, but now? No. I had dipped my toes into the possibilities of magic and knew better.
Connie's lip curled into a wolfish snarl. My mother's mouth settled into a bemused grin. She almost looked proud. Then again, maybe that was just my inner child wishing really hard.
“An interesting view. But let us say that there are only one or two of the people who inherit magic because of your fulfillment of this prophecy. What about all the deaths that they accomplish?”
It was my turn to roll my eyes. Even for a dream, that was a cheesy line of thought. “Is this the blood on my hands speech? Because if it is, you lose major cool points. Sad because you don't have all that many to start off with. But again, I'm going to have to say no. If I give someone something, anything, and they use that to kill someone, it's not my fault. That death is on them.”
“Even if you know that they could use it as a weapon?” Connie demanded.
“Seriously, in this day and age, anything can be used as a weapon. Someone assaulted an old woman with a loaf of bread the other day. Is it the bakery's fault? Nope. It's on the shoulders of the person who committed the assault. Plain and simple.”
“So why not just give everyone a gun?”
I rolled my eyes again. I did not want to stay on this soapbox in my dreams, but it didn't look like I was going to be awake anytime soon. “Uugh. We already covered this. Guns have only one ability. To hurt. That's it. That's all they can do. Let's use a better comparison here. Let's use a Swiss Army Knife, the multi-tool of doom. A tool that can help you survive in the right circumstances. Then, let's say that we can attach a smart phone and a personal doctor to that SWK. I'm all for giving everyone one of those. That's awesome. Leaving that tool in the hands of just a few is, as far as I can tell, creating a class system that we don't need.”
“How liberal of you,” my mother said. Now, she didn't sound proud.
I shrugged. “Maybe a little. But I work fast food. You tend to get pretty liberal after being stuck in minimum wage for four years.”
Connie scoffed. I was surprised she was being so vocal in my dreams. Usually, she was quiet.
“Well then, that settles it.”
“Settles what?” I said. My mother had sounded pretty fatalistic.
“You'll have to die.” She drew her hand down the table. Her fingers made an intricate pattern so quick my eyes couldn't follow. But I could see the trail her fingers made. They created a glowing circle on the wood, split into three perfect sections. Symbols I didn't understand shimmered between the lines both inside the circle and outside. Watching the swim of light made me nauseous.
Okay. I totally wanted to wake up now. I told my body to be conscious, but it was like pulling away from cold molasses. The dream sucked me down.
“What are you doing?” I demanded. I felt sick to my stomach. Everything was swimming. The walls weren't white anymore. They were the same acid green as the magic my mother used, the same color as the storm in my first weird dream. Not cool. “Back off.”
I threw up my hands. I knew I could create a magical barrier. I pictured a perfect glass ball around me, like a great big hamster ball but only half as adorable. My magic pushed into it, but it didn't feel like glass; it felt like a bubble, pliable and easily broken. My mother reached out a hand. The symbol she had drawn on the table echoed in her palm.
The dog howled. The bubble broke. And I screamed as a pain I had no chance of describing ripped right through me.
“Lorena!” I heard a voice from a very long way off. I really wanted to follow it.
“What are you doing?” I asked again.
“I really hoped that we could be close,” my mother said. “I'm sorry.”
Weird, I thought as I felt a pounding behind my eyes, she didn't sound all that sorry. She sounded happy. The inner child in me, the one who had hoped with everything she had that my mom might not be a wholly terrible person, threw a tantrum.
How dare she! Because we had a difference of opinion on magic, she was going to…what? Kill me? Nope. Not gonna happen. I had stuff to do. I had a prophecy to fulfill and some fuzzy feelings to figure out. This whole death thing was just not going to work out for me.
Anger, hot and wild, swam through my veins. It burned away the pain behind my eyes, the sickness in my stomach. It burned like a forest fire, obliterating all the unwanted and leaving nothing in its wake. For a split second, I saw the flash of eyes like volcanic glass glimmering at me from the distance of consciousness.
Then, the strangest thing happened. I heard a cat yowl. It echoed through the dreamscape and seemed to clear the last bits of confusion from my mind. When it was done, I felt cold. More than that, I felt powerful. Magic spilled through me, gathering in my palms like a phantom wind. I got up out of my dream throne and hurled one hand at my mother, and one at my sister.
This was my dream, I screamed inside my own head, and I was master here. My mother let out a gasp as she slammed against the wall. She disappeared in a wisp of gray smoke. Moments later, my sister did the same. The dog went with her.
“Lorena!” the voice called again.
I woke up with a hiss of pain. Dear god, everything hurt. I felt like I had run fifteen miles after completing some Mr. Universe triathlon. I was made of rubber, warm rubber. I was burning up and cold all at once. The pillow beneath my head was soaked with sweat.
Jenny stood over me. Her eyes were wide with fear. I could smell salt and earth. Those were Jenny's elements. “Hold on!” she cried out, taking my face between two very warm hands. “Grandma's on the way.”
Oh good, I thought because my mouth couldn't form the words. I was glad someone was coming who might be able to help. Because if I had to go on living like this, the chances of me actually being able to do that whole prophecy thing were slim to none.