back up at me. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she wasn’t looking at me straight on, but instead she was silently inspecting the obvious fingernail scratches on my cheek. Out of reflex I reached up and brushed my fingertips across them and let out a sigh of my own.
“Mister Gant, do you have any reason to believe that your wife would want to hurt or even try to kill you?” she asked in a flat tone.
“Officer,” I appealed. “I understand your concerns here, believe me, but I think you might be reading something into this that you shouldn’t.”
“Mister Gant,” she replied. “The only thing I am reading into this right now are the facts, and those are the following. One, your wife assaulted a federal officer. Two, she secured said officer’s sidearm. Three, she fled the scene and is now considered an armed fugitive.”
CHAPTER 26:
I had always considered the comment “worrying yourself sick” to be nothing more than an exaggerated metaphor. But tonight, in a closely linked pair of painful moments, I changed my mind about that turn of phrase.
The first came, of course, when the final point ticked off by the police officer struck me like a solid punch directly to the abdomen. Apparently, the Gods had decided that it wasn’t enough that I had already been agonizing over Felicity and what was now happening to her to the point where I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. As was their penchant for doing, they wanted to see just how far they could push me.
My stomach had been churning ever since I discovered that my wife had ducked out of the police station, so I was on the edge as it was. I knew that she stood a real possibility of inadvertently coming face to face with the killer due to what I suspected was their shared possession, and I couldn’t imagine that such a clash would be without some level of violence.
On top of that, and just as bad, was the fact that she seemed likely to act out one of the killer’s fantasies and actually murder someone. After what she had apparently done with the officer while filing the complaint against me, this scenario seemed almost to be a given.
That is, of course, unless we were able to stop her first.
But, as I said, that simply wasn’t enough strife for whichever deity happened to be pushing me around the cosmic chessboard on this particular day. Now, a whole new bolus of foreboding had been mainlined directly into my bloodstream, and that fear was of an overzealous cop shooting my wife because she was now considered an armed fugitive.
The column of bile that this sent rising up my throat came startlingly close to being heaved out onto the floor right where I stood. Fortunately, I managed to contain it; how, I can only assume by pure luck. All I knew was that in the end, it had taken me a good five minutes just to bring myself under enough control to even think about functioning.
Of course, this was right about the time the second moment of the fateful pair elected to reveal itself. I was just regaining my composure when I glanced toward the dining room only to see Constance being helped onto an ambulance gurney. Ben was staunchly remaining by her side, as well he should. The problem was that they were the two people whom I knew I could count on to believe me in all of this, and they were now wrapped up in their own concerns.
A panic attack tried to set up residence in my chest as I realized exactly how alone in all of this I truly felt. And then, I knew that I truly was worried sick.
The paramedics had finished strapping Mandalay onto the gurney while I was sitting on the arm of a chair in the living room. They had the head of the folding rig propped upward in a partial sitting position in order to keep her torso elevated, so I could see that she was still conscious and alert.
She had made it clear that she wasn’t happy about the trip to the hospital but had agreed to at least go and get x-rayed. Not that it mattered, however, because I had the feeling that whether she agreed or not, Ben was going to see to it that she went. Judging from the bleeding she had done, I suspected some stitches would be in order as well.
They were ready to wheel her out, but she had insisted on talking to me first. Considering how isolated I had been feeling only a few moments before, her demand gave me a renewed hope.
“Okay, Rowan…” Constance said with a thin smile. “Explain to me why I shouldn’t kick Felicity’s ass the next time I see her.”
I sighed and shook my head. It was obvious that she was making a small attempt at humor in the face of everything that had happened. I shouldn’t have been surprised because I’d met only a very few members of the law enforcement community who didn’t do that sort of thing. There was no reason for her to be any different.
But, I was also betting that, even with the dry humor, there was more than just a hint of seriousness in the words.
I couldn’t say that I blamed her.
According to her recounting, the physical entity that was my wife had invited her in as if nothing was wrong but then immediately blindsided her as she came through the door. She had struck her hard enough with a ceramic statuette to be able to overpower her and then restrain her with her own handcuffs. Considering that Constance was a trained FBI agent, I could only speculate that it had been a lucky shot.
But, in that vein, I was also betting that it had been somewhat humiliating for Constance to identify herself as an FBI agent after being found that way by the responding officers.
Were I in her position, I would be more than a little miffed myself.
On the other hand, whoever was possessing Felicity could just as easily have killed her, and she didn’t. That, in and of itself, said something about the motivation of the entity in control of my wife’s body. At least, to me it did.
“Listen, I know it sounds unbelievable, Constance,” I finally replied. “But, all I can say is that it wasn’t really Felicity who attacked you.”
She laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes for a moment, letting out her own sigh before quietly assuring me, “I know, Rowan. I got that distinct feeling when she was standing over me. The look in her eyes was… it was just odd.”
“I know,” I replied.
“Ben said you thought it had something to do with the crime scene this afternoon.”
I looked over at my friend and he shook his head. “I told ya’ I couldn’t really explain it.”
“It definitely has something to do with the ritual that was performed there,” I told her. “I just still need to do some research.”
“It was like she was a completely different person,” she repeated. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“That was only her body. I think the person you know as Felicity is most likely drifting out there somewhere in the ether waiting to return.”
“The gwo-bon-anj,” one of the paramedics mumbled.
I hadn’t paid much attention to either of them earlier, but now I focused directly on the man who had spoken. He was African-American, roughly in his late twenties to early thirties, and his voice was edged with what might have been a faint Creole accent. I raised an eyebrow and said, “What was that?”
“Gwo-bon-anj,” he repeated, somewhat louder and much more clearly this time. “The great good angel. It’s the part of your spirit which holds your personality and experiences.”
“Where does that come from?”
“It’s a religious concept,” he offered, acting as if he wished he’d never opened his mouth.”
“It wouldn’t happen to be Vodoun would it?”
He looked back at me with a hint of surprise in his face. “Yeah. Actually it is.”
“Do you know much about Voodoo practices?”
