Page 6 of The Turning of the Tables

I guided the Cruiser onto the highway, immediately moving to the middle lane so that I wasn’t too far away from the right exit, but also so that I could avoid all the merging cars as everybody and their uncle got onto the main artery of Richmond to head to their dinner dates, suburban houses, or mall-adjacent luxury apartments. Those last ones I totally didn’t get. Why anyone would want to live next to a mall, I did not understand, but I’m also still a rural boy at heart.

Don’t get me wrong—I like Richmond. But I do sometimes miss the stark beauty of a night sky studded with a million stars, the heavy smell of wet earth, and the widepalette of green offered by trees and vines and shrubs and all sorts of growing things. And flowers. It might seem incongruous to a lot of people for a big hulking guy like me to like flowers, but I do. Roses, especially, but also daisies and irises and violets… I try not to talk about it too much, since pretty much everybody either gives me weird looks or laughs at me when I talk about flowers.

Richmond had plenty of tree-lined boulevards and flower boxes and little offset emeralds of parks, but it wasn’t the same as being able to walk out your door and find yourself surrounded by nature. Where Noah and I lived—well, where Noah lived and I squatted—was near a cemetery, so I had access to green space, but I still missed having nature right there. Noah would humor me once every month or two if we managed to both have a day off at the same time, and we’d go out to Pocahontas or Powhatan State Park and let me get my nature fix.

I wondered whether Elliot thought of himself as a nature guy or a city guy, then told myself to stop wondering, because it didn’t matter what Elliot thought.

I got myself over to exit, then joined the slow-moving twisting ramp that would put us out at the right part of Broad Street to go to the store Elliot had requested. Once I pulled into the parking lot, it occurred to me that I might need to move some stuff in the back of the Cruiser to make space for whatever Elliot was going to buy.

“Are you going to need a lot of space?” I asked him, as we climbed out of the SUV.

“Not really,” came the response. “The back seat will be fine, if that’s okay with you.”

“Yeah, of course.” My back seat was empty, and I wasn’t one of those people who had pristine upholstery. I wanted to have a car that was always clean, but I mostly justmanaged to not have trash in my car—but mud, dirt, leaves, probably some crumbs from chips and the occasional lost peanut didn’t count as trash, and those I definitely had.

In the far back, I kept a big Rubbermaid tote with blankets, jumper cables, a first aid kit—what I thought of as car necessities. And beside it was a crime scene kit bag. Since I never knew when someone might call and ask me to come in, I didn’t want to get caught out somewhere without it. I guess it was good Elliot didn’t think he’d need that space.

We put on our masks, and I followed him into the store, a big blond shadow that didn’t know the least thing about woodworking. Elliot stopped one of the employees to ask about the availability and location of several things, and pretty soon they were chatting about their favorite this-thing or that-thing—I had no idea what any of them were—for carving and turning and whatever-else-ing carpenters did.

I tried not to look bored. I knew it would probably be the same situation in reverse if we’d gone to a crime scene, so it didn’t bother me, I just didn’t have anything to add to the conversation.

I was useful when it came time to carry the bags out to the car, at least.

“So what’s sospecial about this table that means they need you to come all the way out here to make it?” I asked, dragging a cajun-spiced fry through the ketchup before sticking it in my mouth. It was pleasantly warm for an early March evening, so we were sitting outside at a patio table eating our dinner. “I mean, I’m sure you’ll do a good job with it—” I broke off, neck flushing, as Elliot laughed, his lips quirkingunevenly. I deliberately looked down at my small mountain of fries next to a grilled mushroom, pepper, and onion sandwich, no meat, no cheese.

Lucky me, I have chronic Lyme disease, thanks to a deer tick that bit me back when I was twelve. Because my parents believed more in the power of prayer than they did modern medicine, they didn’t bother taking me in when the bull’s-eye rash appeared when I was a kid, so I’m stuck with chronic pain and early-onset arthritis.

And, because apparently I am tasty and delicious to ticks, I also have alpha-gal syndrome from a lone star tick that bit me last November. Alpha-gal is an autoimmune condition in which your body utterly fails to process a certain mammal protein. I’ve gotten several new tick-bites over the years, and I’d done to this one what I always did—pull the little fucker out with a tweezers, just like you’re supposed to. But two weeks after that, Noah and I went out for cheeseburgers, and I went into anaphylaxis.

Alpha-gal is this fun condition in which you have severe allergic reactions to anything mammal-based. So no beef, no pork, no dairy. Chicken, sure. Fish, sure. But I have to eat cashew-milk ice cream—which isn’t actually that bad—and plant-based meat and sad soy cheese if I want to pretend that I’m having a cheeseburger. The pea-protein meat is actually pretty decent, but I usually just forgo the fake cheese because it really isn’t good.

Point being, I couldn’t get a burger at Five Guys. Or even a grilled cheese. But I could have a mountain of fries, and I do really like their fries. The alpha-gal is annoying, and I’m still getting used to what I have to avoid, but I’m even less of a fan of the chronic Lyme, which comes with joint pain, occasional swollen joints, and an inability to actually get a solid night’s sleep. Not that I intended to go into all that witha nearly-complete stranger, although I’m sure Elliot was wondering if I was vegan.

“As I understand it,” Elliot answered my question about the table, “part of the idea is to have a permanent casting table—instead of someone having to draw out the summoning lines every time they want to talk to the dead, these would be a permanent part of the table’s surface.”

“And you can’t just use an existing table and carve that?” I asked, hoping that wasn’t an insulting question. I took a bite of my sandwich.

“I could,” came the response. “But I guess when magic is involved, there’s something better about having something made by hand and with particular intentions.”

I blinked. “Intentions?”

Elliot chewed a bite of his massive bacon double cheeseburger with a shrug. I was a little jealous of his burger, although I was used to that—Noah also had no compunctions about eating bacon cheeseburgers in front of me. I’d only had alpha-gal for the past four months, but while I really missed bacon cheeseburgers, I wasn’t going to be a jerk about it.

“I don’t totally understand, myself,” Elliot said, “although Mason tried to explain. But there’s something magically important about what the person who makes a thing thinks or feels about the person it’s madefor. It’s notnecessary, but I guess it makes the casting easier?” He shrugged.

I thought about that. “So a bought table wouldn’t have anything like that—because it was made by a machine or by someone who doesn’t know them.”

“That’s what I got from the conversation,” he replied with another shrug.

I supposed that made sense. I might work magical crimescenes, which meant that I knew more than the average bear about what particular magical symbols might mean—summoning circles, protective circles, things designed to keep people out, or things designed to cause harm. I’d seen all of them, some of them with more frequency than others. Protective wards over doorways were actually fairly common, and I felt like I could pretty much identify those on sight by now.

But while I was familiar with how something like a summoning circle might work and understood that the skill of the person drawing the symbols would impact the efficacy of the circle itself, it hadn’t occurred to me that what it wasonmight also matter. I’d seen Ward summon the dead without any circles at all, and I’d also seen him sketch symbols on walls and sidewalks and floors with chalk or charcoal—after we’d processed the scene, of course.

“Have you done this before?” I asked.

“The table part, yes, many times. Not the summoning circle.” He took another bite of his burger.

“I assume someone is going to draw it out for you?” I grabbed another fry.