It was worth a shot, and if it didn’t work, then she was a dead woman—if killing her was his intention.
Jocelyn ran up to him and gave him a flat kick to the torso, knocking him backwards against the wall. With both hands, she shoved her sword into the center of his neck, striking the wall behind it.
He went limp. She withdrew the weapon, and he slid down the wall. Adrenaline taking over, she hacked at the neck and severed his head, now generating a lot of warm, spraying blood. Only then did she collapse to her knees, keeping her eye on George.
She had never killed a man. With her head in her bloody hands, she wept. After her sobs died down, she examined his wounds, trying to understand how he had no reaction to them, how there was only a little blood.
The wounds had healed! Wiping away the small amount of blood showed smooth, unblemished skin.
What the hell?
She communicated with George’s spirit. Her grandfather had told her she could communicate with the recently deceased who still kept a memory of the last few hours of life. “Pretend you are meditating a prayer,” he had said. She had never tried doing this, however, until now.
All she got from George was a hunger for brains.
Brains?!
She struggled to contact Saint Michael—no response. She had never felt so alone.
Jocelyn’s racing heartbeat slowed as she noticed slickness and pain on her neck. Instinctively, she put her hand there. There wasn’t much blood, and the wound superficial. Carrying her sword in her other hand, she went into the bathroom, cleaned the wound, and covered it with a large bandage.
What the hell just happened? George had been dead. He had clearly been dead . . . hadn’t he?
Whether or not he was dead before, he was alive when he attacked her. What would possess him to do that? Her first blows, such as running him through the abdomen with her sword, should have killed him, but she didn’t kill him until she severed his spinal cord in his neck. Or did chopping off his head seal the deal?
This was all impossible . . . right? Well, some would say her communing with spirits, her shamanic journeys, her mild spell-casting—all of that they’d say was impossible, too. All the more advanced things her grandfather, her mentor, did—the advanced spells he cast, the rituals and their results, the astrology, the focusing power of gems—impossible, they’d say. What, really, is impossible in this world? If everything—the astral plane, Skunk, etc.—was in her mind, how could this be explained?
Up until now, she had had nagging doubts about the realness of her magic. Deep meditation, communicating with spirits and the recent dead on the astral plane and with flora and fauna on the material plane, and shamanic journeys—these things could be only in her mind. And it was mere coincidence that these things seemed to influence the outside world.
Like the parking magic, the Instant Magic. She had programmed herself to perform Instant Magic, to, of all things, find a good parking spot in the city. She always seemed to find one, if she executed the spell the correct amount of time ahead, which seemed approximately ten minutes. Later than that yielded less time for the universe to find a spot. Earlier than that, and the power of the magic tended to fade before she arrived at her destination.
Seemed. It always seemed. The truth is she didn’t know what to believe, except that her life became so much better since she started performing magic. Her relationship with her boyfriend improved. She finished her PhD thesis—finally!—and graduated. Both of those things she had cast spells to get. But the spells only gave her confidence, right? They allowed her to be assertive, to live life on her terms. Her spirit guides? All in her mind, too. She supposed she explored parts of her mind she never knew existed.
But her instructor, her grandfather, always told her the magic and the spirit guides were real. But it didn’t matter what she believed—how she explained it was her own business. Everyone saw the universe differently. Everyone had their own version of the truth. The key was not to deny things one observed that were inconsistent with one’s truth, but instead to reshape one’s worldview. To do otherwise is cognitive dissonance—the biggest enemy of the shaman. So, he said to come up with any explanation she preferred, but to always keep in mind that her worldview needed to be flexible.
So how does she explain this?
She’d learned biology while studying for her bachelor’s degree at Cal State-Bakersfield. But nothing prepared her for this.
Jocelyn could only conclude her magic was as real as the cold from her sweat. How else could she explain the premonitions from Skunk and Saint Michael that something was amiss with the world? Sure, magic helped her life in so many ways, but that didn’t mean it was real. It could merely focus her mind on the important tasks and goals and give her the confidence to achieve those goals. But if her magic was all in her mind, she never would have understood that something bad had happened.
As Jocelyn rinsed the blood off her sword, she recalled that her grandfather’s will had specified that she was to inherit his sword. She also recalled how her grandfather admonished her at age seven for openly talking with Pepsi, the family dog. He told her she was special and that she had to hide how special she truly was. The mundane world, as he called it, didn’t understand such things. Instead of treating her as special, they would treat her as an outcast. The vast majority of people didn’t understand that magic actually works.
But she didn’t need to hide her abilities from him. He had those abilities, too. In fact, he taught her how she could communicate with Pepsi without
