“Oh, goodness. I’m sorry. You’re so young.”
“Yes, well, it was several years ago.”
“Oh, but the pain lingers, doesn’t it?”
“It really does.”
We sat and talked for almost an hour-and-a-half. We went back and forth, telling each other stories about our families and our pasts. I found myself entranced by her history and conversation just flowed so naturally between the two of us, as if we had known each other for years.
“Well, I should get going. I know a young lady like you probably has much more important things to do with your day than talk to an old lady like me.”
“I do have some things I should do, but it was actually great talking to you. I don’t have a lot of people I enjoy talking to.”
“Well, that’s good. Remember, if you’re ever hungry, just knock on my door and say, ‘Joanne, I’m hungry’,” she said with a smile.
“Believe me, I will definitely be taking you up on that offer.
Joanne left a short while later, and I found myself trying to fix the appearance of my home. I began straightening some things up and looking for cleaning supplies to scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom. As I was wiping down the counter by the — now broken — microwave, a piece of sharp plastic sliced at my thumb. I winced and pulled the plastic out, then tossed it into the trash bag in the kitchen and continued without another thought. However, as I continued cleaning, tiny blood droplets appeared. I pulled my hand to my face and observed the minor cut.
Sure enough, it had not healed. Again? I thought. Was it already time for another Mortal Night? I tried to remember back to the last time I had one, date wise, to see if there was any correlation. It was much like tracking the last menstrual cycle. After a few moments, you think, who cares, either way it’s here now. I rinsed my cut and continued cleaning. Every twenty minutes or so I found a new microscopic cut to examine, ensuring that it was truly a Mortal Night. How odd though, it wasn’t nighttime, it was daytime. Perhaps Mortal Night was a figure of speech. I wondered if they lasted a whole day or just a few hours, until midnight, or several days. I stood in the kitchen tapping the counter, when Caro’s advice began to echo in my mind. She had been right. I did have resources that could potentially answer all of my questions. Resources I had neglected for a very long time. I sighed and made my way across my apartment to the box near my bed. I pulled the book with the red binding out, that was the one with the rules, she had told me.
I flipped through several pages. All of it was handwritten; however, it was less of a journal and more of a guide which cited abilities, rules, and examples with some small illustrations to help. She had clearly intended this to help her and to help someone in the future. That person was me, and I had barely looked at it after all these years, although I had gone through so much trouble to get them.
I scanned through the book and found several sections that piqued my interest, one on calming your shadow, another on different facets of the healing place with tips on transforming it, and warnings about inviting people’s essences into the healing place. It said if you invited someone’s essence into a place without proper healing that in order to resume healing, you would have to extract everything about that person from your mind. Apparently, my great grandmother had done this twice, but intentionally, to rid herself of the memories of people. Before she did, however, she left herself important notes in her journal to never go looking for the specifically named people. She mentioned once she regretted it because there was something she wanted to remember but had no way of recovering. The idea sent a little chill through me. Creepy. Toward the back I found a section of advanced concepts that spoke of things like using other gifted people as catalysts. I remembered the palm reader telling me that was what had happened with the young boy in the hospital, however, that was completely unintentional. She said that there were ways to combine gifts and use them, but that it was extremely difficult and exceptionally dangerous.
I found the section titled: ‘Mortal Nights’. The first things she mentioned confirmed my suspicions that Mortal Nights didn’t necessarily occur at night or a twenty-four-hour time frame. I laughed to myself as she, too, compared it to predicting a menstrual cycle. She said that if your Mortal Night occurred on the tenth of October, the following month it would occur on the ninth of November. Scheduled Mortal Nights were always thirty days apart. They would always begin at some point during that day, as early as first thing in the morning until the last minute of the day. If they began near the last minute of the day, it was likely it would run several hours into the following day. However, she mentions, at times of increased shadow distress, Mortal Nights will manifest randomly, but not more than once a month. She goes on to explain how an unexpected Mortal Night could be exceptionally dangerous and to be self-aware at the duress your shadow might be enduring.
This made me think that, because of what had occurred the night before, it had somehow caused my Mortal Night that day. I checked a calendar on my phone to see when we had been bailed out of jail: October 20th. Today was November 17th, two days before I was scheduled to have my Mortal Night. That would mean, if my great-grandmother was right, I would have one today, then the day after tomorrow. I continued reading to see if there were more contingencies and what exactly Mortal Nights entailed.
As
