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Hopping off the bed, I go to retrieve the grimoire and my laptop and splay them between us on the sheets. “I did some research on possible ways to fix this. Honestly, it’s therapy for ghosts.”
If I’m going to die in a few weeks, I’m determined to at least fix this; maybe I’m not a powerful enough witch to create a soul shard, but the spell necessary to address Mei’s blockage doesn’t seem out of reach. Some good old internet stalking and some astral projecting, which I may not have been able to do on my own, but with Tei’s blood thrumming in my veins, I’m far more powerful than I was even just a few weeks ago. I have no doubts I can handle this, and confidence is half the battle.
I fire up my laptop and bring up a search bar. “Let’s start with finding your lover; what do we know about her?”
Mei blinks up at me. “What are you going to do with that thing?”
“I’m going to social media stalk her, of course.”
“You’re going to…” she opens her mouth and closes it a few times, as if to mimic the words but failing. “Stalk her?”
“Social media stalk her. I’m going to find her on the internet to figure out where she is nowadays.”
“To what purpose?”
“Because you’re blocked,” I repeat as if it’s the most obvious thing ever. “And in order to fix that block, we need to get to the underlying cause, which is obviously your lover. You feel guilty, and a host of other things, for leaving her, and we need you to let go of all those things. So we’ll start by finding her, and go from there.”
Mei takes a deep breath, which makes her chest rise all the way to her chin. “Her name is Huiling. Huiling Wang.”
I type that in the search bar, and a few social profiles come up; a few are on a professional networking site, one is from a magazine, and a handful from personal pages. “What year would she have been born? Or how old would she be, roughly?”
She chews on her thumb, thinking. “She would be in her late sixties, today.”
I scroll through all of the professional profiles first; they all belong to younger women, none of them older than forty-something, which rules all of them out. The personal social media profiles are harder to parse; some of them are private, and of the public ones, a handful have no pictures of people at all — just food, or trees, or animals — and a handful are definite no’s as they also belong to younger women. Just to make sure we leave no stones unturned, I click on the magazine entry, and immediately suck in my breath.
It’s from an art digest publication, and it highlights the portfolio of one Huiling Wang, Parisian contemporary artist. For the most part, the page only has photos of the artists’ work, but at the very top, there’s a headshot. Of an older Chinese lady with long silver hair tied in a sleek high bun, skin marred by expression lines around the eyes and mouth, and deep, chocolate brown eyes that sparkle like they’ve seen a million lives in one. I flip my computer around to show the screen to Mei. “I know a long time has passed — but does she look familiar?”
She gasps, bringing both hands to her mouth, and starts sobbing. “Bao bèi. That’s her.”
It takes me only a few more clicks to find a link to Huiling’s gallery in Paris, where I also locate an address. “All right, we’re taking a detour to Paris.”
Her eyes widen. “You want to go to Paris? Now?”
“Just in spirit.” I open the grimoire to the spell I’d bookmarked; I’ve attempted it a couple of times, just to make sure I felt comfortable with it. Granted, I only went a few blocks away in Barcelona, not as far as Paris, but I’ve got the theory down. “If I project somewhere, will you be able to follow me?”
Mei nods. “I can travel anywhere. I am just spirit, after all.”
“Okay. Let’s go, then.” I grab pen and paper from the nightstand, and scribble the address of the gallery on it. While I’m on it, I also pull it up on my Maps and look up the street image, so I can picture it in my mind’s eye.
I give the spell one last read over to make sure I have it memorized, then close my eyes. “En l’ombra de la nit, les ànimes surten a volar, amb aquest encanteri, el meu ésser s’elevarà, cap als planys astrals, lliure i màgic com un estel brillant. L’energia que em recorre, ara es desplegarà, les atadures físiques deixaran de lligar-me, en el món astral, llibertat total experimentaré.”
Grabbing the piece of paper, I rub it between my two hands, warming the ink. “Amb la ment clara i el cor obert, recite aquest encanteri amb força i fervor, per projectar-me en l’astral, el meu ésser s’ofereix. Deixaré el cos físic, com un ésser de llum, volaré pels racons més remots de l’espai, explorant els misteris de l’univers en plenitud.”
If I hadn’t attempted this a few times before, I’d be scared I was experiencing a stroke. My body feels numb, heavy at first, then suddenly light; none of my limbs respond to my commands, I can’t move my arms, or my legs, or my fingers; a ring of sharp pain encompasses my head, and it gets tighter and tighter and tighter, until I feel like I might pass out. I don’t — instead, the next moment, I’m not in Mei’s room in our Barcelona apartment anymore, but in the streets of Paris, dark and overcast, with rain drizzling down.
Because I’m nothing but spirit, the rain doesn’t pelt over my skin. I just see it catching on people’s umbrellas as they pass me down the boulevard, hear its slow trickle on the sidewalk.
Mei is by my side moments later. I turn to her with a gentle smile. “How was the trip in?”
She ignores my question, instead looking around with eyes wide. When they find the gallery, her focus becomes razor sharp. “Is that the place?”
“How did you know?”
“Little dragon,” she says, translating the name of the gallery from French. “That was Huiling’s pet name for me.”
Oh. She named her gallery, the fruit of her decades of artistic labor, after Mei… my gut twists.
Mei curls into her shoulders. “She always wanted to be an artist. We talked about how we’d move to Paris all the time… I’d teach math, and she’d teach art.”
