Chapter 19

"Every vulture in the neighborhood is staring at Mom's house," I said, opening the gate into Gail's garden.

Gail stood up and frowned, brushing dirt off her hands. "That's not good."

"Do they do this often? Stare at something? Is something dead in our attic or on the roof? A possum? Maybe a raccoon?"

She gave me a pitying look. "Vultures are extremely sensitive to the dead. Particularly when the dead are doing things they shouldn't be."

I gritted my teeth. I didn't want ghost stories, I wanted a wildlife rehabilitator's opinion. Obviously the vultures weren't there for ghosts, because ghosts don't exist.

Do they?

Of course they don't. There's no scientific literature supporting them at all.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Yeah, that's what the Bigfoot hunters all say too. Start believing in ghosts and you might as well throw in aliens and Chupacabras.

And hands under the roses?

"I don't believe in any of that stuff," I said.

Gail folded her arms. "Do you truly not believe in it, or do you not believe that it would happen to your mother?"

"I don't—"

"You're an archaeologist. Do you think every other culture is misguided too?"

She might as well have hit me with a two-by-four upside the head. My mouth sagged open and I didn't have any words to put in it.

Because of course I didn't think that. Not even close. I'd spent my undergrad years reading Black Elk Speaks and Divine Horsemen and all the other classics and I sure as hell didn't speak up in class and say, "Well, the Ghost Dance wasn't real." If I was attending a Haitian dance with associated spirit possession, I wasn't going to grab anybody by the shoulders and inform them that they weren't really being ridden by the divine, or yank the mask off a kachina and say, "Look, there's really a person under here!"

Sure, I might think privately that there was probably a specific altered state that was being ritually induced and the results were influenced by the cultural context, but I would keep my damn mouth shut and my mind open, because who was I to come in all high and mighty and tell someone their spirits weren't real? Practitioners of other faiths are just as smart as I am, and they'd spent a helluva lot more time in it than I had. A couple of hours of comparative religions class didn't somehow give me more insight than somebody who'd spent their life experiencing the divine. Maybe there are divine horsemen. Maybe gods walk among us. Who was I to say differently?

Unless, apparently, we were talking about my mother, and Lammergeier Lane.

Never mind that my mother is definitely as smart as I am. Never mind that she was the one who taught me to be skeptical in the first place. I was willing to extend strangers a courtesy that I absolutely was not extending to Mom and Gail, and that was… yeah, that was pretty shitty of me, no getting around it.

IT'S REAL YOU'RE NOT IMAGINING THINGS.Hell, I'd probably write myself the same note in the same circumstances.

Gail said, very gently, "If you keep your mouth hanging open like that, I'm going to toss a dead mouse in it. I won't be able to resist."

Hermes came bouncing around the side of a flower bed, apparently having heard the word mouse.

I closed my mouth and swallowed hard. "All right," I said. "That's… valid. You're right. I'm dismissing this because it's my mom. I shouldn't do that."

"No one is a prophet in their own land," said Gail. She picked up a glass, took a sip, and eyed me over the rim. "There may be hope for you yet."

"Has Mom told you that she thinks my grandmother is haunting her?"

Gail grimaced. "Yes, and I told her to get the hell out of there. Offered to let her stay with me. But she was afraid that the old bat would retaliate, and I can't say that she's wrong. We were never friends, and that's putting it mildly."

"She really didn't approve of your garden," I muttered, looking over the flowers that buzzed with pollinators, unlike the silent roses.

"The garden was only the surface. We belonged to two wildly different schools of thought when it came to the unseen world, and our practices were… very different."

I turned this statement around in my head, trying to unpack the meaning. It sounded far too much like some of the things I'd skimmed past in Thelema in America. "Practices?" I asked weakly.

"Magic, Sam," said Gail, and tossed Hermes another chunk of mouse.

"You mean like a witch?"

"No," said Gail thoughtfully. "I'm a witch. This is different."

I reminded myself that I was going to keep an open mind.

"No," Gail continued, "I'd probably use the word sorcerer for your grandmother. It's not a kind power, not at all. But honestly, the semantics are the least important part of this."

MAD WIZARD OF BOONE ARRESTED!flashed through my brain. "It wasn't my grandmother," I said. "It was my great-grandfather. He was a sorcerer. Err… thought he was one, anyway. You know." I rubbed my forehead. My open mind was not going to extend to Parsons, Pasadena Antichrist. I had limits. "Apparently he was pretty famous for it."

"Was he, now…?" Gail chewed on her thumbnail. "Now that's interesting. That would explain a lot, actually."

"Not to me!"

Gail laughed. "Poor Sam," she said, not entirely unkindly. "This is terribly hard for you, isn't it? Humor me for a minute, will you? Pretend that magic is real and some people can manipulate it. You can argue later."

"Fine," I said.

"There was always something very odd about your grandmother," said Gail.

"You don't know the half of it," I muttered.

She ignored me. "A great cruel power, doing almost nothing. Like a dormant volcano. All she did was grow roses. Not the way that a witch would, growing plants to improve a place, to bring more magic about through hard work and sweat and weeding, but as if she were building a wall of thorns to keep something out. If her father was a sorcerer, that would make a certain sense. Perhaps she inherited his talent but only bits and pieces of his training. All she knew was how to make herself safe, and she bent all that energy and all that malice to putting up that wall."

I stared at her. She took care of vultures and could talk about biodiversity. You don't expect that from people who then tell you, quite calmly, that your grandmother's roses were magic.

"So you're saying my grandmother was an evil wizard."

"More or less, yes."

"My grandmother."

"Yes."

I clutched my forehead. I'd promised that I would wait to argue, but this was ridiculous. I could not be having this conversation.

You found a jar full of teeth…whispered my brain.

Which means at most that Gran Mae was a very disturbed woman! Not that she was some kind of sorcerer! This is not a game of Dungeons Dragons!

"Look," I said, "she was difficult and she was definitely racist and she told some really weird stories occasionally, but she was my grandmother! She always had Popsicles in the freezer for me and my brother and she wrapped presents and she… she did grandmother stuff! She wasn't going around chanting and drawing pentagrams on the floor!"

Gail was unruffled. "I didn't say she wasn't a grandparent. There are plenty of truly evil people in the world who are also absolutely gaga over their grandchildren and would knife someone at Christmas to get them a Cabbage Patch Kid. Or whatever it is these days, I can't remember. Elmo? Something."

"Buzz Lightyear," I mumbled, thinking of how Gran Mae had got me one for Christmas and had told me that it was the last one in the store and she had fought off two other women for it. At the time I thought she'd used a shopping cart and maybe her elbows. Now I had to worry that she'd been using demons. "This is nuts."

"People are complicated."

"But…" I couldn't get all this in my head. "Okay, even assuming it's real, which I am still not granting you, she's dead! Very dead! Years and years dead!"

"The roses aren't," said Gail simply. "And I think maybe she put a lot more of herself into those roses than anyone realized."

"And now Mom's trying to… what? Keep the ghost happy?"

"The dead are easier to appease than the living," said Gail, "at least in most cases."

The noise that came out of me was probably a laugh. It startled Hermes and he bounced sideways and gave me a wary look, as if I had done something extremely rude. "Gran Mae couldn't be appeased when she was alive," I said.

"That hasn't stopped Edie from trying, I think."

Appeasement. Yes. Everything was clicking into place. Mom was trying to keep Gran Mae happy. She'd painted over the bright colors that she loved, taken down art that meant something to her, and put up the things that Gran Mae would have wanted. Generic family photos and beige walls and that stupid, stupid Confederate wedding. All to keep a dead woman happy.

No, not even happy. To keep her from being angry.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to go buy five gallons of paint in the brightest colors I could and repaint the house. I wanted to burn that racist-ass Lost Cause painting in the backyard.

I turned on my heel and yanked the gate open. Regardless of whether ghosts were real, there was no way in hell that I was letting Mom paint her entire life ecru for a dead woman's approval. Gail called after me, but I didn't hear what she said.

I stepped out of the tree line at the end of the lane and blinked.

The air over Lammergeier Lane was full of wings. A kettle of vultures boiled overhead, dozens of them, forming tight circles over one particular house. As if the house were a dead thing and the vultures were about to land and begin to feed.

I broke into a run.

I never run if I can help it, and definitely not without supportive undergarments, but I ran now. Mr. Pressley was getting a show if he was watching. I locked one hand over my chest to slow the tectonics and put my head down and charged.

The vulture on the mailbox took off, wings flapping. "Sorry," I gasped at it as I ran past.

I flung the door open and found Mom standing in the living room, wringing her hands. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but I was panting too hard.

"Sam," said Mom. Her voice was painfully sweet, but her eyes darted frantically back and forth, like a trapped animal. "You're back. Gran Mae's come to visit. Isn't that nice?"

"… what?"

"Now we can have Sunday dinner as a family."

My heart sank. This was it. Whatever was wrong with Mom had finally snapped into full-blown delusion.

"Mom," I said, starting forward, still gasping for breath. "Mom, whatever is wrong, I'm here and we'll sort it ou…"

My voice died.

My dead grandmother was sitting at the table. "Hello, Samantha," she said. "It's so nice to see you again."