She opened Kate's tobacco pouch and shook a generous mound into her right hand. Sparks danced upward, greedy, reaching for food, and she tipped the sacred leaves into a matching shower of flame down to the coals. Dense blue smoke poured out, thicker than possible, clouding the space and closing tight around her, testing, probing, weighing, guarding the Spring's Power, guarding the spirits' Power.
Black dots danced and grew in her eyes, and the weight of the centuries settled on her chest. Power did what it wanted to do. A witch risked her life each time she summoned it.
And then the lamp flared back to full brightness and the smoke vanished, leaving cold clear winter air in its wake. The fire lay dead, pure white ash, no charcoal. Alice wiped a sleeve across her forehead and felt sweat soak through the cotton, felt equal cold across her aching shoulder blades and under her arms.
She'd lived through another one.
She slumped flat on her belly on the rough granite, face in the Spring, and drank deep. The water burned like icy fire that spread from her throat out through her body to the ends of her fingers and toes. It stabbed a knife into her injured shoulder, but she welcomed it. It proved that she was still alive. It gave her enough strength to face the stairs back into the world.
A world without Kate.
Chapter Fourteen
Kate sat in her truck, took another hot deep drag on her cigarette, and sighed the cloud of smoke out against the windshield. Lew's house still showed through the billows, bare plywood on the front roof and the small gable that sheltered the front door, windrows of old shingles ripped and scattered on the ground. That meant money out of her pocket, materials and Jeff's time, until and unless she could ditch the place on some sucker.
Money out of a pocket that was already down to lint and the occasional cartoon moth. If Alice hadn't picked up the hospital tab, Kate would have been in the hole until about ten years past Judgement Day. Damn fine line there between "gratitude" and "resentment." Money again, shoving itself between her and Alice.
And That Time of the Month. Might not be politically correct, but sometimes hormones shouted louder than Feminist Truth. Not a good day for a reminder that Alice was Haskell to the core. Rich. Secretive. Devious. Give that Machiavelli guy lessons in manipulation.
Add PMS on top of that . . . Hell, if one of those leash-law cases had gone to trial, you probably would have been pushing for the death penalty. Revenge for the fact that the surgeon didn't pull out your plumbing after the wreck and emergency C-section.
Scarring from the crash. She couldn't have any more kids, but she still had to live with the monthly whipsaw. Worst of both worlds. Only half a woman, and it had to be the wrong half.
Alice didn't have a fucking clue what that trust fund would have meant. Stonefort was such a Looking Glass world, where Indians were rich folk and whites lived in broken-down trailers with failing septic systems. Alice, Caroline, Elaine, Aunt Jean, the lot of them — they never had to scratch for the next meal, might not spend the money but it was always there if they needed it. They'd never have to send the kid off to school wearing Mom's steel-toed workboots for lack of shoes that fit.
Just the damned interest on that trust fund could have lifted Jackie out of "trailer trash," maybe meant the divorce wasn't necessary and left her with two parents who lived under the same roof. Instead, there were so many things a single mom could wheedle out of the government that a couple found harder — Medicaid, food stamps, you name it.
Even her cop job — probably couldn't have landed that if she was still married to the town drunk. Hell, Lew might not have drunk so much if sober hadn't looked so bleak.
Scratch that. Lew was a drunk. More money would just have meant more booze. Would’ve killed him sooner.
Still, a little more money and Mom could have spent more time Mom-ing. Worked four jobs instead of six.
Yeah. But adversity builds character. You're a better person for working hard and living thin. More spiritual. In touch with the common people. Not like certain witches we could name.
Kate shook her head. She sucked down the last half-inch of cigarette in one drag, until the glow scorched her fingers. Stubbed it out. She climbed down from the truck still holding the smoke for the last of the nicotine rush.
She blew the smoke straight and hard, like a dragon crisping the knight in shining armor. Fuck this. Like you told the lady, you've got work to do.
Jeff had stripped off half of Lew's roof, her roof, patched in two new sheets of plywood where the leaks had gone on long enough for rot, laid down valley flashing and the new metal drip-edge, and had three courses of shingles already nailed on top of the water-shield. By himself, since morning. The kid had learned to work.
First get the roof tight, then patch the ceiling underneath. Critical path construction.
Jeff Burns, a little older than Jackie, Goth-black tee shirt and jeans and spiky-green-haired image of teenage rebellion, on informal probation to her since a juvie possession charge a year ago last spring. He'd started out useless as tits on a boar, but somewhere between then and now she'd ended up with a carpenter. And he was taking night classes for high school. Up for a full diploma next spring, not a GED substitute.
Kate shook her head again, this time in wonder. Sometimes things go right. Damned rare, but sometimes. That boy's more a Rowley than Jackie ever was. Why couldn't she have turned out decent?
She glanced around the yard. With the recent rain, she'd better mow the lawn one last time before winter.
