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What in the world…?
All right, maybe the pendulum hadn’t been the best choice for this particular quest.
I secured it in its box, then reached for another box, the one that held my two favorite decks of Tarot cards. For this particular question, which required a bit of far-seeing, I thought the crow deck was probably my best choice.
Holding the words,Show me Athene,once again in my mind, I pulled a card from the deck.
The Queen of Swords, reversed.
Well, maybe I was being a bit too literal. Or rather, the cards were, since the Queen of Swords in the upside-down position could refer to a woman who seemed cold-hearted and — dare I say it? — bitchy, both words I’d used to mentally describe the woman in question.
I shuffled the deck again, asking it to show me where Athene had gone. The next two cards were the two of cups and the four of wands, neither of which seemed applicable to the current situation.
Maybe I should try my moon deck.
However, when it turned up the Queen of Swords once again, I guessed that the Tarot just wasn’t operating on the correct wavelength for me.
I slid both decks into their protective bags and returned them to their box. Next to it stood my crystal ball, resting on the pretty stand of four crescent moons that I’d bought on Etsy a while back.
Looked like it was time to bring in the big guns, since I had a feeling my rune stones wouldn’t be any more helpful than the pendulum and the Tarot cards had proved to be.
Reluctantly, I reached for the ball and pulled it closer to where I stood. Its surface was cool against my fingertips, and I made myself take a breath.
I wasn’t a medium, wasn’t someone who communed with the dead. What I was about to do was subtly different…but that difference mattered.
Calling on one’s ancestors for guidance has always been a big part of witchcraft going back centuries, if even longer than that. I never knew my maternal grandmother, because she died of breast cancer when my mother was only twenty, three years before she even had me. But when I first picked up my crystal ball and laid my hands on it, asking for guidance from the spirit world, it had been Ellen Marx staring back at me from within the crystal.
Actually, at first I hadn’t even realized it was her, because the face of the woman who’d reached out to make that connection looked just as young as mine, and most of the pictures I’d seen of her had been when she was in her thirties and forties, raising her young daughter alone after her husband — my grandfather — walked out. It had always seemed grossly unfair to me that she’d gone through so much, only to lose her life to cancer before she was even fifty years old, but she didn’t seem too bitter about it.
Most of the time, I tried my best to get the answers I needed through other means of divination. I hadn’t seen the need to reach out to Grandma Ellen when making the decision to move to Globe, since the pendulum and the Tarot cards had made it pretty damn clear where I was supposed to go.
This time, though, I thought I needed some extra help. I didn’t know what force was clouding Athene’s location, but I didn’t seem able to break through that veil on my own.
The blue eyes looking out at me from within the crystal ball were almost identical to my own. All three generations of Marx women had those same eyes, although my hair was much darker, thanks to the genes I’d inherited from my father, a guitarist in a failed hair band that my mother had hooked up with back in the early ’90s.
“You moved,” my grandmother said, her tone almost but not quite accusing.
“I thought it was time for a change of pace.”
Her tawny brows lifted, although she refrained from commenting. I never could tell exactly how much she knew of what was going on in my life — or in my head — although it seemed obvious to me that she caught enough to know about any major life changes. “What do you need, Selena?”
As usual, there was something almost impatient about her manner, as if she had a packed schedule in the afterlife and kept getting dragged away from it by my constant interruptions. Maybe she did. She never told me much about what she did with her time when she wasn’t hanging out in the crystal ball and dispensing bits of advice, so far all I knew, she spent her days lying poolside while heavenly cabana boys brought her mai tais or something.
“I’m trying to find someone,” I said. “Her name is Athene Kappas. She was Lucien Dumond’s business partner.”
A flicker of distaste flared in my grandmother’s eyes. “Oh, he’s a nasty piece of work. Odd that he didn’t get immediately recycled.”
Her term for people being sent back to Earth to live another life. I didn’t know why my grandmother had been allowed to stay in the afterlife — or the summerlands, if you wanted to use the ancient phrase — rather than being sent back to live all over again. I supposed it was possible that she’d reached the end of her karmic journey, and was now allowed to stay in her version of heaven and dispense advice.
“Is he up there?” I asked next. I tended to think of the summerlands as “up,” although directions as mortals thought of them really weren’t a thing when it came to describing the etheric planes. And it seemed strange to me that Lucien would be hanging around there when I doubted he was anywhere close to the end of his travels on the wheel of existence.
A pause, and then Grandma Ellen said, “No. At least, I didn’t sense him come through. I suppose I could have missed it. I see a lot, but I don’t see everything.”
“Well, here’s hoping he evolves a bit on the next go-’round, whenever that is,” I said lightly. “Anyway, Athene and I are the main suspects in his murder, and now that she’s missing — ”
“Why would anyone suspect you of murdering Lucien Dumond?” Grandma Ellen broke in. “You’re the kind of person who puts spiders out rather than kill them.”
True enough. I wouldn’t say there weren’t a few times when I’d been sorely tempted to squish a particularly scary specimen, but I’d told myself to be brave and let the spider carry on…just not in my bedroom or my shower. Yet another downside to being in a place where no one knew me very well. Back in L.A., I probably would have had plenty of people who could vouch for my pacifist nature.
