Page 26 of Freak
“What do you see?” she asked softly.
His focus sharpened, and he frowned. “I ... I guess I lost it, but ... it wasn’t what I was looking for. I thought if there was anything to see, it would be ... I don’t know. Like the halo around a lamppost on a foggy night?”
She smiled at the poetic imagery of his example, but she didn’t speak.
He went on, still frowning, not with unhappiness but with confusion. “I saw ... I don’t know. I saw ... like a shimmer. Like the window over the sink had green glass all of a sudden—you know what I mean?”
“I do.” Her aura, then, hadn’t changed much.
Much more importantly, Mel had seen it.
He took a big breath and leaned back. “I’m gonna say something that might fuck everything up, but I need to say it anyway. Full disclosure kinda thing.”
“Okay ...” Abigail tried to prepare herself to hear something hurtful.
“That shit’s real, isn’t it? I didn’t think it was.”
Having already known that, she wasn’t hurt by his confession. He’d never tried to pretend he’d believed. He’d never insisted it wasn’t real, either. He’d expressed a lack of knowledge, tinged with skepticism.
“And what do you think now?”
He thought for a moment, then laughed ruefully. “That I don’t know shit.”
She laughed with real delight and set her hand on his where it rested on the counter. “I thought that’s what you already thought.”
He actually blushed a little. “Yeah, that’s true—but I guess maybe I thought the magic stuff was probably make-believe. Sorry ‘bout that.”
If they were going to consider a romantic connection between them, the most important parts of themselves would have to mesh. After a sip of her coffee, Abigail gave him a close, serious look, drawing his full attention. “I think I need to explain what I believe. Maybe I never told you.”
“I’d’ve said you don’t have to. I thought I knew. You believe in magic.”
“Well, yes. But ... the magic I believe in isn’t muggles and portkeys and conjuring something from nothing. The magic I believe in isn’t founded in religious traditions like Christianity, either. It’s not about angels and demons, it’s not about curses and conjuring. I don’t like to use the word magic because it carries all those associations first, and they don’t describe what I do. What I believe in is a kind of science—certainly it’s guided by the same scientific principles of physics, chemistry, and biology.”
His brows drew in again. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know a single person who subscribes to Wiccan practices, traditional healing, or other disciplines considered ‘magic’ who believes it’s possible to conjure something from nothing. Traditional practices are bounded by scientific principles like energy exchange. You know what I mean.”
“Sure. I was decent in science and math in school—and, you know, there’s science in the work I do. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, just transferred. Electricity is all about energy transference.”
“Exactly. What I do is about the transfer of energy—it’s a finite, measurable thing—absolutely real, absolutely necessary, but mostly invisible in daily life. Sweat might be considered a visible sign of energy transfer, fire is visible energy, but really we see theresultsof the transfer, like a bulb going bright, unless we’re looking in very specific ways—through a proton microscope, say. Or by training our eyes to see more than what’s obvious. An aura is nothing more than a person’s energy signature.”
“Like infrared shows heat?”
“Very close to that, yeah. You know different emotions feel different inside, right? We feel physically different when we’re happy, sad, angry, excited, and all the rest. We feel different because each emotion uses energy differently. And anything we feel habitually becomes set in our aura. If we’re habitually angry, that energy shows as dominant. If a habitually angry person is having an unusually happy day, that burst of new feeling will change their aura in a way that shows they’re usually not loving life, but today they are. Nothing mystical about it—just unconventional. And we both know that everybody doing a thing a certain way don’t mean nohow that it’s the best, the only good, or even the right way to do it.”
Mel glanced at the Hoyle deck of tarot cards on the island. Abigail had set the deck there as she’d seen Brittany out. She had many decks and let the client choose which they’d use. Brittany liked the standard set.
“What about those cards? How’re they not mystical? They’re like mind-reading, right? Or seeing the future?”
“No—or that’s not how I use them, at least.” Abigail picked up the deck and slid the cards from their box into her hand. She pulled the major arcana from top of the deck and, after a quick shuffle, set them on the island. “Cut the cards, hon—and as you do, focus on a question or a problem you’ve been working on. You don’t need to tell me what it is.”
She didn’t know if his smirk was dismissive or ironic, but he cut the cards.
After laying out a quick three-card spread, face-down, she tapped the first card. “This card represents thesituationof your question or problem. When I flip it over, I’ll tell you about it, and you think about how it suits the context of your question.”
She flipped the card. “This is the Fool. If he were oriented toward you, he would be upright, and he would suggest new beginnings, spontaneity, innocence. But he’s oriented toward me, so he’s reversed. This suggests recklessness or risk-taking.”
Mel’s eyes flashed up to meet hers. Thinking of their mutual situation, she let one corner of her mouth lift slightly. Though this was Mel’s reading, the cards could show her something, too, and her question was the obvious one. Was his the same?
