Page 6 of Death and Divination
Chapter 3
Ophelia
Istared into the murky depths of the water, willing it to reveal its secrets, to bring clarity to the disturbing visions that had been haunting my sleep lately. When the universe wants you to know something, it tells you. Except sometimes it tells you in crazy gibberish that’s absolutely impossible to figure out.
Once more I’d had a restless night. Once more, the visions of blood had plagued me—faint blurry images, smells and sounds, a feeling of dread and doom, all of it an incomprehensible mishmash of nonsense. It was time for me to take the minotaur by the horns and figure this out before it drove me insane. It was time for me to attempt to divine exactly what these visions of blood meant.
All it took was a bowl of water and a spell. Well, in theory that’s all it took. In reality, this might yield me nothing more than the gibberish of the dreams.
A trillion pathways converge and dissect, a tangled knot of thread.
Show me the one that will come to fruition. Show me the future ahead.
The water turned black as onyx, its surface like a mirror. I touched the edge of the bowl, running my finger around the rim as I repeated the spell. Vertigo sent my heart into my throat and my consciousness slipped forward into the shining dark water.
Blood on leaves. I reached out and touched their waxy green, feeling the thick stickiness of congealed red. Oleander. This was the blood of my dreams, I knew it. The oleander leaves were new. I pushed harder, wanting to know more. I couldn’t warn someone, couldn’t intervene to help if all I had to go on was blood that could be anyone’s and some plant that could be anywhere.
The oleander dissolved into the inky blackness of the water and now I was on top of a mountain. A decision. Two courses of action, one which led to death, and the other to… death. Oh, great.Thatwas helpful.
Mountain. A rocky peak where I could fall either forward or backward. I was so high I could nearly touch the moon. Its craggy surface seemed like divots on a golf ball.
Golf. Manicured greens and goblins with plaid shorts and berets with little fuzzy balls on top.
No. No, no, no. I was pretty sure golfing goblins had nothing to do with my vision. I needed to get back to the blood, back to the mountaintop. The blood was important. The decision on the mountain was important. Golfing goblins were most likely not important.
Blood. We were back to blood on the oleander leaves. Something smelled rancid. It was the heavy foul smell of death, of something that had lain in the open too long. A tree line. Underbrush. Oleanders parted, their branches moving aside to reveal the source of the smell.
I was afraid of what I might see. Death. A body. Terror roared through me and unable to face it, I shut my eyes. When I opened them, the smell was gone and so was the tree line.
We were back to golf balls. I heard a voice and turned to see Marcus, the panther shifter, behind me.
“You did this,” he scolded me. “It’s your fault.”
“What’s my fault?” I asked him, full of dread.
Had I failed and someone was dead as a result? Dead and lying in the oleanders, in a pile of golf balls? What was my fault? What had I done wrong? And what choice would I make where death lay on either side?
I came out of the trance with a gasp, sweat trickling between my breasts. The bowl in front of me only held clear water. Before I could forget anything, I grabbed the pen and paper I’d placed by my side and wrote everything down. Then I got up and fixed myself a hot tea and tried to make sense of the whole thing.
I was a witch, an oracle, and my spells were a whole lot less clear and precise then those of my sisters. We all had our specialties, except for Cassie who was a bit of a witch generalist and also the most powerful of us all. My specialty was revealing the past, the present, and the future. Sometimes it was a useful gift, like when John, our resident cyclops, needed to find his car keys, or one of the leprechauns needed to know where his dearly departed great uncle Seamus had hidden his gold, or when the nymphs wanted to know when the first frost would be. That stuff was easy. The hard stuff was…well, hard.
Death. It was my nemesis and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to see the future when it came to the who, how, and when of death. Car keys, gold, and accurate weather prediction, yes. Death, no. Any vision having to do with death was so unclear, it was basically useless.
My first rare glimpse of a future fatality was when I was four. I’d woken up crying, babbling about falling, and how my chest hurt, and something about those fuzzy pipe cleaners kids use in school art projects. It was just a bad dream, Momma had told me. But when we were on our way to the grocery store that afternoon, a squirrel had fallen from a tree right onto our windshield. Momma had slammed on the breaks, throwing me forward.
My chest hurt from the seatbelt. The squirrel had died. Evidently something in my brain had interpreted “squirrel” as a fuzzy pipe cleaner. This was the sort of the weirdness that came with any divination. And this was the beginning of my life-long battle with death. Every vision that hinted at injury, sickness, fatality, was one I pursued with every fiber of my being, with every bit of my magical ability. If only I could figure out who, what, when, and how, then I could prevent it—I could save someone’s life.
It never worked. No matter how hard I’d tried, I could never figure the visions out enough to prevent a death. Or even to figure out who it was that was going to die.
I’d become a paramedic. I was a first responder, fighting death with everything I had. And whenever I had visions of falling or blood and got that sense of doom, I tried my darnedest to learn enough that maybe one day I could use my magic to save someone’s life. I see myself as less of a witch and more of a caped crusader with a pointy hat, throat-punching the grim reaper and stealing his victim from under his scythe.
Maybe this time, I could make a difference. Maybe I could figure out this vision and intervene. Maybe I could save a life.
Blood on oleander leaves. I poured my coconut oolong into a mug and mulled over the symbols in the vision. Oleanders were poisonous. Ingesting them caused severe gastric distress including seizures, coma, and death. Touching the leaves sometimes resulted in skin irritation. Even burning the things was a hazard since the smoke could also cause death.
But they were beautiful with their waxy, vivid green leaves. They bloomed from summer to fall, in a cluster of funnel-shaped blooms that could be white, pink, red, or yellow. The flowers symbolized love, but a love that should be approached with caution.
Love and death. Caution. Toxicity that could result in death. Hmmm.
