Rebirth Page 15

  I was shocked into shutting up when he moved on in and put his lips to mine. He gave me a quick kiss, no tongue, then pulled his head back.

  “I didn’t think it would get this bad this fast Rose” he turned loose of my hand “but I am burnin’ up for you, you just get me too hot.”

  I busted out laughing and got on up. “You come on and get inside, let’s check out if you’re burned bad.” I touched his neck and checked for damage, he was just singed and nothing else wrong. On the other hand, I was seriously feeling my bruises, sprains, and at least a few broken bones and torn muscles. Maybe a torn ligament in my shoulder.

  “Let me get back out in the yard on the dirt and see if I can fix me now. Carl, will you see what you can do with the window? I don’t want to leave it open, too hot and people – or somethin’ – might come in when I sleep if I leave it tore up like that.”

  Mags smiled as I sat back down in the yard she sat facing me “Rose, you have fire! How?”

  “I told you before, it’s the necklace. It has fire, wind and iron, I reckon. And me, it said it was a mix of all of that.”

  “I did not understand before. I not understand now, but happy for you, very powerful but make me worry too. Most only have one for a long time. Talking with different, problems, too many make thinking problem.”

  “I can see that. They are totally different, but I guess getting all put together in the necklace helps. It ain’t too bad.” Busy fixing the myriad of little problems in my body, I paid total attention to her and healing at the same time. How many times could I split my attention before it got to be a bad thing? And was I really using my total attention on two things at once, or just fooling myself?

  “Not wind, Air.” Mags enunciated carefully. “Wind is air that moves, air can make wind, can have air go away, make no-air.”

  “Vacuum, that’s what no-air is.”

  “OK, Vacuum.” She tried out the word. “Not breathe, fire stop burnin’, dry clothes, many things good with air and vacuum.” She leaned back on her hands and looked up at the stars. “My next was air. Now, maybe never have air, no….person show how.”

  “A teacher is a person who shows you something like that, teaches you.”

  “Ok, teacher, no teacher for air, or earth or any now. Need to find teacher. Need to go home.”

  “I can get behind that, I could use a teacher too. There is way too much shit I don’t know about this whole deal. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to go home alone though, I’d like to help you with that.”

  “Good, thank you. Go now?” She stood up.

  I considered what she was saying. We had just got through with this booger, pretty well healed, but I was mentally tired and we had the window to deal with, needed to look around and see what else there was that needed doing.

  “Mags, it’s getting dark and we just finished with Chen. Can we take a break and maybe go in the mornin’ when we rested and got our heads together? If you really want we can go now, though.”

  She said “We do that, want to go soon and always more stuff come up.” She walked up the steps into the house, she was right. We’d go in the morning come hell or high water.

  Carl got with Wanda and let her know to come back. They’d spend the night in Montgomery. They’d gone too far to turn around and the break would do them good. He’d get the window done. He wanted to come with us. After I explained that we’d travel through a tree he changed his mind. I didn’t care either way. We stayed at my house with the window covered with a piece of plywood tacked with screws. Plywood is excellent. There were a few more pieces in the cellar for hurricanes. If I waited till the hurricane was here, the demand would drive prices out of sight.

  I lay down and got comfy with Mags scrootched up to my back, I wondered about the, I guess you’d call it lifestyle, of Chen. He’d been around a couple hundred years, lived in Canada for part of that, and other places. Did he have mementos? A main place he lived? Or did he just dig down in the dirt whenever he wanted a place to rest or recover? Andy had a house. That was just the luck of the draw, or maybe he was crazy in a different way. Existing for a long time would give time to accumulate goodies, I wondered what you could do with them though. How would it be if you only came out at night, allergic to the sun? I loved the sunshine and daytime. It would suck for me. And the whole ‘you must suck blood to survive’ thing made me sick. Could I turn into one of them? How did it get created? Sleep pulled me on down, I was out like a light.

  Ten

  I left Mags in the bed and started a pot of coffee. It was kinda nice having someone to share things with; a cup of coffee or the way everything looks first thing in the morning with the sun just getting over the trees. Living alone was sounded great. Not having to allow for someone else’s presence; wallerin’ around naked, eatin’ in the bed, sleeping till I just got enough of it and got up out of pure slept-out. It wasn’t like that. Once I was alone, I was a lot harder on myself than grammaw had been. That stuff was always for later, something always needed doing. Later never came. I knew it wouldn’t.

  I had the cups down and the fixins’ ready when Mags came in the kitchen. She woke up quick and easy. When she came to, she jumped out of bed and got moving. I’d got in the same habit, it seemed natural.

  Mags poured her coffee and put the pot back in the coffee maker, inhaling the steam off the coffee. She didn’t mention going home as hard as she could.

  It didn’t take much for me to give in, “Mags, we’ll leave as soon as you’re ready. All I need is to get my shoes, I got some money. You want to get something to eat first or eat after we get there?”

  “Eat there. Eat here you puke it all.” She kinda grinned at me, I didn’t know if she was serious or not. I did the tree traveling thing before and it didn’t bother me that I remembered, but whatever.

  “Ok, we eat there.” I sucked down the last swallow of coffee and stood, “If you waitin’ on me you backin’ up, baby.” I looked forward to visiting another country, I never been out of the neighborhood before.

  She got her last swallow and put her cup in the sink. I turned off the pot. Carl had a key. He could fix the window if he got the stuff before we got back. He knew we were heading out. I couldn’t think of anything else, we were ready.

  We walked around back where the privet hedge surrounded the back yard and an oak tree sat in the corner. I think it’s an oak, it could be something else and I wouldn’t know. It ain’t a pine.

  Mags wrapped her arm around me under my shirt so we were touching skin to skin and laid her hand on the tree. She stood there a while and nothing happened. I knew this had worked before, at least with the hedge bushes and me. I didn’t want to interrupt her. She seemed calm and not worried; if we didn’t get going pretty soon I needed a bathroom. Coffee runs through me quick.

  Know how you get real tired, but you’re doing something, maybe reading, and next thing you know you’re dreaming? Or when you pass out, things people say don’t connect right and your mind makes little stories.

  That’s happened. I couldn’t see around me, but I didn’t try to move, it never occurred to me. Nobody was talking. I watched stories, little slices of people doing things, sometimes just sitting or standing and it would drift into being different people and places. Hard to explain and it wasn’t really watching, more living past them…which doesn’t make sense.

  At any rate, it came to a sudden halt. I came to with a jerk, dropped to my knees because they wouldn’t support me, and did some fine projectile puking. This wasn’t vomiting, that’s when you got a little control and can make it mostly go in the toilet. This was full bodied nothing existed but getting everything inside me out as quick as possible. Hands and arms and legs and shit were totally weak and useless, puking pulled all the energy in my entire body to the pit of my stomach and used that to propel everything out. It didn’t care if I breathed or my heart beat; none of that made a difference.

  As quickly as it started it was over, and other tha
n the stench, a little residual weakness, and cold sweat covering my body, I was back to normal.

  Mags had dipped with me and kept me from flopping over in the nasty stuff on my face. I felt her shaking and heard little gasps, I figured she might be strangling and need to throw up too. I backed away carefully to give her room, she flopped over on the ground howling with laughter and beating on her legs. When she caught her breath a little so she could talk, she rose up and looked at me, “We both glad we don’t eat now!” That set her off again. What the hell?

  I didn’t want to rain on her parade but I just wasn’t getting it. I looked around and started noticing my surroundings. It was bright, everything green, a few degrees cooler, the air was much cleaner and refreshing, it had more oxygen in it is all I could guess. I seriously needed to wash my mouth out and a drink or several of water. The tree Mags was collapsed next to was made out of a lot of what looked like smaller trees, with maybe moss growing on it. It was bright, looked like around the middle of the day, and nobody was around. That was great, I didn’t want to try to explain anything to anybody, and I had no idea if they spoke English around here. I realized I didn’t have any identification. I had some money stuck in a pocket, and that was it. I was also starving, so hungry, which made sense after that bout of vomitry.

  “Mags, let’s go get something to eat. You got any idea where?”

  She looked at me and smiled, “No, I not here for a long time. We find somebody or store, have food.”

  “Well, Ok, let’s get going. I need water.”

  We were in the woods. There were no buildings in sight. This wasn’t like the woods at home. There was no underbrush or litter. There were leaves on the ground, but very little in the way of fallen limbs and such. The trees were spread out and you could walk between and around them easily. I left it to Mags to lead since she was the local but I was figured I was local as she was.

  We walked maybe half an hour and I was thinking about this was an island, how far would we have to go to get to the edge? We came to a small road, less than two lanes but more than one. I mentioned my thought about the size of the place to Mags, she said “Not small, ride a horse for days, and not come to the edge. Maybe even weeks riding.”

  Bigger than I thought.

  By this time I was dry mouthed, absolutely parched. It was cool, so I wasn’t sweating that much but I needed something to drink.

  “Mags” I had to work to speak, my mouth was totally dry “I gotta get some water, thirstin’ to death!”

  “Come over here” she walked to the side of the road where there was a low fence of posts and boards. She stepped over the fence and walked into a field a little, kneeled down and scraped the beginnings of a hole in the almost eye hurting green grass.

  “Make a hole here, ask for clean water. It is easy.”

  “I don’t feel dirt at all here. No connection?” I didn’t feel disconnected though. Just no dirt. Maybe the necklace could do something, although I didn’t want to get sick from drinking ground water. “Mags, water from the ground might make us sick, the ground is not all that clean.”

  Mags laughed “If” (gargle-snort), what I took to mean elemental, “make water, it will never make you sick.”

  Screw it, I was dying here, the taste of stale vomit was not all that good. I thought at the necklace about what I needed. Half a minute later a hole formed where Mags and done her digging, but it had clean sides. A stone pushed up from the bottom of the hole. By this time I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, I took the stone and did the mind splitting thing to talk. This one was very similar to dirt in communicating. I introduced myself and the necklace. And then, it occurred to me that Mags needed an intro here, I requested another stone for her. And I requested water, clean and drinkable, urgently. I used a picture of a drinking fountain with the cool, clean water squirting up in a gentle arc my request; I picked up Mags’ rock, water bubbled up in the bottom of the hole, then a gentle jet of water shot up waist high and stayed there like a fountain. I handed Mags her rock and glommed onto the water, let it splash in my face and mouth, and finally got my mouth cleaned out and did some good drinking. It was perfect, cool, and plenty of it. Maybe the best water of my life.

  I got out of the way and Mags bent for the water, obviously she was thirsty too. I was wondering why she hadn’t asked for the water, this was her place after all; on second thought she told me she never got an intro to an earth elemental, just fire, they were greedy with the earthen one. I could fix that.

  “Hey, when you talk with fire, you have to use a different sort of thinking, right?”

  She’d had enough water. Moving over to where it was dry by the fence, “Yes, else will hurt you.”

  Huh. I didn’t know that. “You have to do the same thing with the earth. It is too big, it thinks…not slow, but not 1, 2, 3, it is all at one time.”

  “Yes, I heard this. But I have to get token…” She looked at the rock in her hand like she just noticed it. “This is token? Oh, thank you, Rose!” She grabbed me and hugged me, then sat back and stared at the rock in her hand. I could tell they were talking, almost like I could overhear if I tried but I didn’t try.

  When she had finished, she got up, “Let’s go to village, go fast!”

  “OK, lead off, if you know where it is.”

  She took off doing twice the normal speed for a person, using speed from the earth. So I pulled, and I got that same speed. We were hauling ass and it was no problem at all to run at least twice as fast as I ever had, with no shortness of breath, not even breathing hard. Every footfall came down perfectly, not a chance of a fall, just sailing over anything in the way, more like floating than running. Damn, I could do this all day. We ran for a half hour, houses became more common, we saw a couple little cars on the roads. There were roads randomly placed that connected nothing to nowhere. We were running mainly in the fields. The land was mostly fields, there were few trees and most of them had little fences built around them. We got to the edge of a small town and slowed down to a more normal walk so as not to attract attention. A few people saw us, I’m sure it was strange to see two women running through the fields that fast in the middle of the day, but they didn’t panic or anything, just thoughtful looks and they continued on their way.

  Mags led us to a beer joint and it occurred to me that I couldn’t produce an ID. They might run me out. And Mags didn’t have anything either.

  My worry was for nothing. We got a couple seats at a table. A woman came over and asked “What’d be yer pleasure, wud ye loike someting ter wet yer whistle er could oi get ye some kipper?”

  It was pretty talk, I really liked it. I wondered for a second why Mags didn’t talk like that, I guess she left before English became popular.

  “Something to eat. Whatever you got is fine, for both of us, and something to drink with it.”

  The waitress said “I’ll be roight back.” and bustled off.” I guess this was more of an eating joint than a bar.

  There were a few people in there, one older guy smoking a pipe, the place smelled faintly of smoke, both tobacco and wood. We were getting looked over very casually; they’d seen people from elsewhere before. It must have been lunchtime because most of them were eating. There was more facial hair than I was used to but any of them would have fit right in back home.

  True to her promise the waitress showed up with some big plates with a pile of cooked greens, bacon both fried and boiled, bread and big chunks of boiled potatoes. After she sat them down she asked about drinks, “We got soda’s, stout, milk, just ask fer what you want.”

  I never liked beer and I had never been to a bar before. I got milk and Mags followed my lead, I think she was as lost as I was. The waitress came back quickly with the milk, sat it down and said “you call if you need something.”

  I took a bite of what turned out to be cabbage and it was good, maybe because I was starving, but this was just done to perfection. The bacon set it off just right. I ate it all, I was st
ill hungry but pretty full. I guess because I had basically inhaled it all and cleaned up my plate. Mags ate just as fast, I looked over at her and grinned, “good stuff, that hit the spot!”

  She nodded, “This ain’t changed, wonder if they got pie?”

  It hit me, all I had was dollars to pay with, no local money. I held my hand up and looked around for the waitress. She came over “Yes, what ken I get ye? Was everything allright?”

  “It was wonderful, I loved it! I might have a problem, all I have is U.S. money, can you change it or can I pay that way?”

  “We can take a card, will not be a problem.”

  “I didn’t bring my card with me, just money. I have plenty” I thought about that after I spoke, might not be a good idea to advertise I had money. “Just haven’t got it changed.”

  “We can deal with it, let me get the exchange rates.” I called her back and handed her a hundred dollar bill and she took it with her.

  I had been thinking, whoever it was Mags was looking for was likely long gone. We needed someone local to point us in the right direction, maybe the waitress could help us out.

  When she came back with my change I asked “Do they still have any of the old religious stuff goin’ on? The stuff that deals with earth and fire and so on?”

  She said, “Oh, the druids. Yes, they still do that, it died out for a while, but it is coming on again. They have meetings and ceremonies, just finished with a thing at Tara.”

  “How would we go about getting into some of that, meeting the people and seeing what they do?”

  “I don’t rightly know, you go to county Louth or Meath, the Skryne valley, they’ll know more.”

  “Where is that in relation to here? Which way would we go to get there?”

  “Yer in east Dublin, ye go west and north to Meath. North to Louth, t’other side of Meath. T’hill of Tara is south of here, maybe an hour. Take the M3, there are signs.” She laughed, “If you find one with powers, let me know, I could use some help. But I’m not holdin’ me breath. Will that do ya?”