Cate Tiernan: Reckoning

"Do you feel up to talking about it now?" Hunter asked, watching me as I drained the cup. I nodded. Morgan poured me some more from the pot and mixed the honey.

"Right," said Hunter, his tone turning professional. "The exercise we did tonight was designed to help bring out and release negative emotions. A lot has happened to you recently, to say the least. You have a lot of new information. Morgan has told me that there have been some things going on in your family, too. All of that was shaken loose, and it seems to have triggered an attack."

"An attack?" said Morgan. Hunter turned to her.

"Alisa is telekinetic," he explained. "We said that we would look into the problem after the dark wave had been dealt with, and now we are."

"Telekinesis," Morgan repeated. "Is that what it was? I thought I felt something weird in the tàth meàmna brach ."

Just before the dark wave had come, Morgan and I had joined minds in a ritual called a tàth meàmna brach to fight it. She had seen everything inside my mind, and I had seen everything in hers.

"No doubt you did," he agreed. "Could you get a clear idea of what was going on?"

"No," she said. "It was a strange sensation, but I didn't really know what to make of it. It felt like an electric shock, but a mental one. I thought it was coming from the dark wave."

"All that stuff that happened to you—the shelves in the library, the butter dish in the kitchen—that was all me," I said, looking down at her. I was referring to various instances of things falling over or flying around in the last few weeks. Several had ended up heading for Morgan, and she'd seemed really upset by them. "I didn't mean to do those things. In fact, at the time I didn't even know it was me."

"So the deflection spell…" she started to say, turning pale. "It put you in the hospital. Oh, Goddess."

I wasn't sure what she was talking about, but Hunter nodded to her. "It wasn't Ciaran at all," he said. "But to get back to the problem at hand," Hunter went on thoughtfully, "aside from helping to release your emotions, the spell obviously triggered something. It would be very hard to tell what exactly it was. It's a general release spell with a broad range. How did you feel when we were performing it?"

"It was so strong," I said, remembering it with a shiver. "These feelings… I felt like a volcano. I kept trying to push the emotions down. I didn't even know what was going on until I saw everyone panicking."

He drummed his fingers on his knee and looked thoughtfully into the fire for a moment.

"Judging from what I've seen so far," he said, "I'd guess the phenomenon is somehow connected to your emotional state. I remember that objects would fall when you became frustrated with learning the dark wave spell. Tonight the flooding stopped when you started to cry."

"That's it?" I said hopefully. "So how do I stop it?"

"Its exact mechanism will be a bit more complicated to determine, I'm afraid," he explained. "These things are rarely easy. You may react to certain substances or elements more that others, or you might be attuned to certain magnetic or magickal forces. In order to draw up that much power, you're tapping into something fairly deep—probably a whole web of energies."

Wrong answer. He was supposed to say that this was a cake problem and that he had a book that would fix it right here.

"How long have you had this condition?" he asked.

"My whole life, I guess," I said, picking at the flecks of herbs that floated to the top of my cup. "Weird little things have always happened to me. I just used to think that I was very unlucky and clumsy. But it's gotten a lot worse recently. My mother has it, too. She talks about it in her Book of Shadows."

"That's very significant. I didn't know that. Is there anything else you've noticed about these episodes? Do they have anything in common? Anything at all?"

"Not really," I said. "Nothing I can think off."

Hunter got up and started to pace a bit. He seemed to be thinking the problem out. I noticed that the cuffs of his jeans were soaked, as were his boots. "I know a man in London named Ardán Rourke," he said. "This kind of thing is his specialty."

"What kind of thing?" Morgan asked. "Telekinesis?"

"Uncontrollable magick, in any form. It's too late to ring him now—it's after two o'clock in the morning there. I'll try tomorrow. There's also Jon Vorwald, a Burnhide who works out of Amsterdam. He might be able to tell if it's a magickal reaction to certain metals or other substances, which it very well might be. I'll contact him, too. In the meantime I'll talk to Bethany Malone. In fact, let's see if she's home now."

He went into the kitchen for the phone. Morgan reached up and took my hand. I felt a warm flow of energy coming from her, soothing some of my frayed nerves.

"I wish I'd known," she said.

"I just figured it out a little while ago," I said. "It was news to me, too. I never meant to do anything to you. You know that, right?"

"Of course," she said.

"No answer," Hunter said, coming back and breaking himself off a handful of the cake.

"Do you want me to scry for her?" asked Morgan.

"No." Hunter shook his head. "I'll try again tomorrow, after I talk to Ardán and Jon."

"I need to wash my face," I said, wanting to get up and be alone for a moment. I suddenly felt like some kind of leper. All this talk of phenomena and metals and bringing in specialists from London and Amsterdam was too much. Was my problem so bad that it required a global effort to fix?

Hunter shifted uncomfortably. "I'd use the upstairs one. The downstairs is still… very damp."

In the upstairs bathroom there was a film of water covering the black-and- white-tiled floor. Hunter had thrown down a few towels. They were strewn around the various puddles, swollen and heavy, like enormous slugs. Water had pooled into a kind of lake under the claw foot tub. If this was the drier of the two bathrooms, I really didn't want to know what the downstairs one looked like.

Though I had soaked the place, I could see that it was otherwise spotlessly clean, even austere. Soon it would smell like mildew, thanks to me. I picked up the towels and wrung then out as best as I could into the tub, then hung them from the shower rod.

My face was a damp wreck. My huge eyes were completely bloodshot, and the lids were puffy. I looked gross, froglike. I splashed cold water on my face until it seemed less swollen, then dried it on one of the hemp washcloths that hung from the towel bar.

When I came back into the living room, Hunter and Morgan were huddled together in discussion. They separated as I entered.

"Are you feeling any better?" Hunter said, rising to give me his chair.

"I think I should go home," I said.

"I don't think that's advisable, Alisa," he said. "You've just been strongly affected by a spell. I think you should stay here until it wears off a bit."

"I'd really like to go," I said quietly.

Hunter studied me for a moment, and I felt a weird sensation come over me, as if someone was trying to climb into my skin.

"What's that?" I asked.

They both raised their eyebrows.

"You felt that?" said Hunter.

"Yeah," I said, running my hands over my arms. "It was creepy. What was it?"

"That was us," he said. "We were casting our senses out to you, trying to get information about how you felt."

So they were witch-spying on me. At least he was honest.

"Have you ever felt it before?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Why? Have you ever done it before?"

"Very strange," Hunter said, not answering my question. He rubbed his chin, then nodded to himself. "Right, then. I'll take you, if you really want to go. Morgan, you might want to have a look at those books on pyromancy while I'm gone."