Echo, p.8
Echo, page 8
part #1 of The Elan Series
“He’s smooth,” I said to Hannah as we waited for the next couple to take the stage. “And cute. I swear I’ve seen him before.”
“Yeah,” was all Hannah could say.
My self-centered little sister-gaga over a boy, I thought. How sweet! Just like in middle school when she had a crush on Scotty Lykerman.
“Don’t embarrass me with stupid middle school stories, Tara, please,” Hannah begged. The music started and the second couple began their dance.
“Okay, dammit,” I snapped, ignoring the looks from the people sitting closest to us. “I know I didn’t say anything that time. Something is going on Hannah?”
“Tara, please,” Hannah said, her shoulders slumping, embarrassed that I was making a scene.
“Come with me.” I stood and grabbed her hand to drag her to the restroom.
“We can’t, Tara. We’ll lose this table and it’s the best one in the room.” Her eyes begged me not to make her leave.
“Fine. But when this night is over, we’ve got to talk.” I tried to push down the anxiety rising in my chest, but the weirdness of the past couple of days was weighing on me.
Three other couples performed routines that I paid no attention to. All I could think about was the fact that my sister had been responding to things I never said aloud. I glanced at her face now and again and saw her lips pulled tight in a smile that I knew was forced. What could possibly be happening to us?
Hannah turned to face me, a quizzical look on her face.
“What?” I asked downing the rest of my drink.
“Nothing,” she said. “We’ll talk later. Here comes another couple.”
“Next,” Drew announced, “we’ll have some amateur and student dancers showing off the skills that they learned with our professional coaches here at Heartbeat Dance Studio.” The spotlight dimmed and the silhouettes of a couple made their way into the center of the dance floor. Drew continued, “First up is a couple who have only been practicing for four months. Their stamina and hard work have helped them to become the quickest studies according to their coaches. Plus it doesn’t hurt that they are still so hot for each other after twenty-five years of marriage, as displayed in the dance and attire they chose for tonight.”
The spotlight was lit and aimed at a couple in such flamboyant costumes that at first I didn’t recognize my parents. Dad had on tight black pants that hugged his waist and legs. His long sleeve shirt was blood red and glossy. A thin black tie dangled from his neck. Mom wore a black, body hugging halter dress that flared from the hips to hang loosely around her thighs. The hem was edged in the same red as Dad’s shirt. Her heels were also red and sparkled with sequins whenever the light hit them.
“Jill and Rob McAllister will be dancing the rumba,” Drew said.
A hush fell on the crowd as Mom pressed her back against Dad’s torso. A steamy Latino rhythm beat from the sound system and Mom and Dad began dancing around the floor. My face flushed crimson at their sensual performance.
“Wow,” I whispered to Hannah, “did you know they were this good?”
“No idea,” she whispered back. “But I’m not surprised. They come here at least once a week.”
My mouth formed a small ‘O’ as the applause rang out at their finale. They took their bows and hurried from the hardwood.
Two other amateur couples danced, one did a traditional waltz and the other a tango, but neither couple were as good as Mom and Dad. Though, I could have been biased in my opinion since they were my parents.
“And for our last act,” Drew called out, “we have the owners of Heartbeat Studios, Hector and Helena Thomas, their son and my brother Aaron with partner Danika Mitchell, and coaches Henry Osburn and Natalie Doekum in an original choreographed number to get your heart racing. They will be dancing a rumba.”
The three couples took the floor, each pair a point in an invisible triangle. I recognized Henry and Natalie, though they had on different costumes, and I guessed Hector and Helena since they were the oldest pair out there. But when I looked at the third couple, I thought I was hallucinating. Aaron Thomas, who was standing not fifteen feet from my table, was my Aaron from the Rocksville concert.
Actuary, n. – a member of a mystic religion that is born with inherent
supernatural gifts, unlike Procurants who earn their gifts through
the practice of other nonmainstream religions.
Chapter 6 - Derek
Doraleigh waited until after the family dinner to corner me in the shed and lay into me about Tara.
“Derek, she isn’t like us,” she said. She stood near the door, not wanting to get her flowery dress dirty with all the oily car parts lying around. “She practices witchcraft for God’s sake. That’s about as lame as you can get.”
“I don’t care, Dori,” I said, putting back the spark plugs I’d taken out of the four-wheeler. Dianne’s boy, Jett, wanted to go riding once his momma said he was done eating, and I was just as ready to get away from Doraleigh’s pissy looks. “The Quickening was completed last night. Or didn’t you see that?” I glared at her as I flipped the switch to start the ATV. I revved the engine, drowning out anything she was about to say. When I thought I’d gotten my point across, I cut the engine and wiped down the seat.
“I didn’t have to see it to know you’d be stubborn and hunt her down to finish it, smart ass.” Her face reddened as her anger and irritation washed over me. She hated to be wrong and out of control. I watched as she closed her eyes and breathed slower, probably trying to figure out how to deal with me.
“Then why are you standing here trying so damned hard to convince me that I shouldn’t be with her?” I wiped my hands on the grease rag and leaned back against the four-wheeler seat. “You know it can’t be undone. And it’s killing you that there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Watch your tone, Derek.” She cleared the space between us in two seconds flat and jabbed her finger in my chest. “Don’t think I won’t tell Momma that you’ve got yourself involved with an older woman. She’d put an end to it with the quickness.” She took a step back before she did something she’d regret and closed her eyes. Her eyelids wiggled back and forth, then she spoke. “In the past, the Elders held a Severing Ceremony and the Quickening links were cut. If the joining was hasty or unevenly matched, like to a non-practitioner, then the bind can be dissolved.”
“How do you know that?” The skin on the back of my neck rose. Had our great-great-grandparents forced their brothers or sisters to break bonds with their élans?
“I just saw it, Derek.” She opened her eyes to look at me. They were a lighter shade of gray from the effort it took to use her gift. “Noni’s mother linked with an ordinary, and her father had the bond dissolved.”
“We live in different times, now.” I rested my head in my hands. I wasn’t going to listen to this. “Things aren’t as strict now. Besides, you said yourself Tara was a practitioner.”
“She practices Wicca, Derek. She’s a Procurant. She wasn’t born with her gift.”
I lifted my head and looked at her. “She has a gift?” Well then, there’s Doraleigh’s proof that we’re evenly matched, I thought.
“She’s a Seer, but not like me.” Her look flattened, her way of trying to be in control. “She wasn’t born with it like we were. She got it from practicing that sorry excuse for a religion.”
“God, Doraleigh, you are such a snob!” I threw the rag on the tool bench and ran my hand through my hair. “Just because people don’t spend every waking minute studying their family history or believing the way we do doesn’t make them bad people.”
“But it doesn’t make them as good as us, either,” she said. She stood up straight, ready to finish arguing her point. “We come from a long line of mystics, DJ, with gifts that run in our blood. If we keep allowing outsiders in, having children with them, then we are eventually going to lose those gifts. Our bloodline is going to become so diluted that the gifts will be lost.” Her voice got soft and she took a step toward me. “You do want to pass your gift on to your children, don’t you?”
I’d never really thought of having kids. I mean, the only woman I’d ever been with was Cheyenne, my high school girlfriend, and I’d made for damn sure that she didn’t get pregnant. But that’s as much as I’d ever thought about it.
“Besides, why do you want to settle? The Quickening can be so much more if you linked with another Actuary.” Her voice softened like the times when she tried to convince Darla that there wasn’t a little Japanese man living under her bed. “And you two could combine your gifts. With that kind of link, you could gain another power.”
“Dori, no offense, but what do you know about the Quickening? You haven’t linked with anybody yet.” I knew I sounded like a butthead, but I was tired of her ego, thinking she knew everything there was to know about the Quickening.
She blinked and turned away from me sniffling. When she turned back to me, her eyes were sparkling. I almost told her I didn’t mean it, but thought better of it. Doraleigh needed to be put in her place every once in a while.
“You think Di settled?” I asked. “She’s happy, Dori, and we all know Huey’s definitely not one of us.”
“She got married at eighteen because she was pregnant. She was trying to piss Daddy off.”
I didn’t know that, I guess I was too young then to figure that one out. Still, it didn’t matter, she was happy with Huey and her life. And I wanted that with Tara. “But still …” I tried again, but she threw her hand up to stop me.
“Just forget it,” she said, waving her hand at me. Her shoulders slumped as she turned to leave. She looked back at me and added, “Do what you want. You always do, anyhow. I’ll try to help when you get in over your head, if you’ll let me.”
“Dori.” I stepped toward her, knowing that I had hurt her.
“No, really,” she said backing out the door. She didn’t even finish, just walked back to the house.
I stood in the shed trying to decide whether to go after her or not when Jett came running from the house. “Mamma said I could go for a ride if we made it quick,” he said shoving past me and climbing on the four-wheeler.
I watched Dori say something to Dianne on the front porch, then she entered the house and let the screen door slam. Dianne looked at me and shook her head. Her disappointment hit me a few seconds later.
“DJ, come on,” Jett called as he started the ATV.
I wasn’t going to be able to get Dori to understand about Tara right now, so I followed Jett out of the shed. A few minutes later we were heading down a trail that led to Lake Cherokee.
I brought Jett back to the house just as Dianne was getting ready to leave. I parked the four-wheeler by the front door to let Jett off. Sitting there, not wanting to face either of my sisters, I thought about how I was going to tell Dori I was sorry.
“You finding what you’re looking for, staring so hard at that gas gauge?” Dianne let the screen door shut quietly behind her.
I looked up at her and smiled. Di always knew how to make me feel better. “Not really. But I wasn’t really looking for an answer to anything.”
“Well, the way I hear it,” she continued, “you’re looking for a woman who could change your life. Who could be your life.”
My heart beat faster. Had Dori told Dianne about Tara? It’d be just like her to try and get every one of my brothers and sisters on her side, to gang up on me. First, Jesse. Now, Di?
“Nah,” I said. “I think I hurt Doraleigh’s feelings and I don’t know if I should talk to her about it or not.” I climbed off the four-wheeler and took the key. “She’s just so stubborn sometimes.”
“Who in our family isn’t?” She pointed to her car. Jade, her baby girl who was only three, was tugging hard on the car door handle. Jasper, her six-year-old boy, was on his knees on the ground jabbing a stick in the dirt, totally ignoring his sister.
“Do you know about my élan?” I dug my hands in my pockets and looked at her. She nodded, and I continued. “Then you know that the Quickening has been completed, but Dori wants me to cut it, to end it, whatever?”
She nodded, again, staring at me hard before answering, “And you don’t want to.”
“No,” I replied. I swallowed a growl, annoyed that I didn’t know the words to explain how I was feeling. “It’s not even that. I can say ‘No, I don’t want to cut ties with her,’ but it’s more than that. I don’t even know if I could cut the ties. She’s connected to me, you know?” I didn’t expect her to know, since she had coupled with a non-practitioner, but she nodded again. Her smile softened and she reached out to rub my arm, love rolling from her.
“Come stay the night at my house,” she said. “Huey’s on the road ‘til Wednesday, and you need someone who’s been in your shoes to talk to.”
Dori stuck her head out the door. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll tell Momma where you went when she wakes up from her nap so she won’t worry. And I’ll get Joey to help her get the little ones off to school in the morning.”
*****
At Dianne’s house, Jett and Jasper flung the car doors open and ran to the backyard, leaving Jade in her carseat screaming to get out.
“I gotcha, baby girl,” I said, unbuckling the straps and setting her on the ground. She ran as fast as she could to catch her brothers.
“They’re getting so big.” Dianne slammed her door shut as she watched Jade round the corner of the house. I slung my duffle bag over my shoulder and followed her inside the house.
“Sure you don’t want another one?” I asked. Dianne was the momma in the family. When Daddy died and Momma had checked out for a few weeks, Dianne had brought her two boys to our house and had run things. Momma eventually recovered from the loss, but Dianne had held the family together.
“I think about it every once in a while,” she said, “but Huey’s gone a lot and I have my hands full now with these three and the shop.”
I took a beer from the fridge and headed to the living room. Dianne joined me, exchanging my beer for a pop, before sitting in the recliner.
“You’re still my little brother, DJ,” she said. “And I’ll always look out for you. We all will.”
“I know.” I popped the top on the soda can, knowing the Quickening conversation was starting right now. “Dori’s just…too intense sometimes, with the whole ‘we’re Actuaries, and better than everybody else,’ shi…stuff.” I took a swig of pop, listening to Jade squeal at the yelping puppies in the back yard. “She’s so judgmental and wants to fix things. She doesn’t just listen like you do.”
“Well, talk then.” Dianne stood and looked out the window at the kids before sitting and giving me her full attention again.
“The other night,” I began, “when I was at the club with Jesse…” Her forehead wrinkled in disapproval, but she didn’t say anything. So I continued, “I felt this pull, this need to do something. You know, like when you think you forget to turn off the coffee pot, or left the house without your wallet, so you turn around in your car to go back to check and make sure. It was like that.” I didn’t think I was describing it right, but that’s as close as I could get to it.
“I felt that, too,” she said. Her eyes were soft; she was probably thinking back to when she first met Huey. Love drifted from her like steam from a warm shower.
“And then,” I went on, “when I touched her on the dance floor…” I left out the part about her nearly being kidnapped. It would make Dianne worry more, and maybe change her mind about helping me. “A jolt ran up my arm to my chest. Not an electrical jolt, but like a shock of emotion.” I stopped here, thinking back to that night. God, I must sound like a pussy. But this was Di; she’d understand. “I swear to God, Di, I saw fireworks. And you know me – I don’t get all mushy over girls.”
“I know.” She smiled. “But that’s how it happened for me, too. I felt the jolt and the rush, and saw the fireworks.” Jett barreled through the back screen door, grabbed juice boxes from the fridge and flew out again. Dianne turned back to me. “Was that it? All there was to the Quickening for you?” Her voice was questioning, and disbelief floated around her.
“That wasn’t the whole thing. That was just the beginning.” I thought about the night I left Wes’s party early to go back to Jesse’s and finish the Quickening. Lying there in the bed, sending my energy out to the city to try to find Tara’s energy was weird. Not to sound any more pussy than I already did, but it was almost spiritual.
Dianne’s face was hard to read. She was blocking her emotions, too. Ever since I got my gift, my brothers and sisters learned quick how to hide how they really felt when they were around me.
“That was the beginning?” Her face hardened with the question. Her disbelief hit me before she blocked it. She rose from the chair to peek out the window again.
“Yeah. The next night I left a party early to go back to Jesse’s place and search for her, astrally.”
“Astrally?” Dianne turned from the window, confused.
“Well, not really, like, out of body,” I said. Damn, I hated not being able to find the words I needed to say what I wanted to say. “But I sent out, you know, emotional feelers. To see if I could pick up on her frequency.” Dianne understood about the energy frequencies. Her gift was all about reading energies. Any object she touched held the energy of the last person who touched it. She could get all kinds of information about people from the objects that held their energy – what they were feeling, where they had been, if they had sickness. It’d been a part of her since I was little.
“And?” She stared at me, waiting.
“And I found it.” I took a sip of pop before jumping right in and telling her the whole damn story. “I ended up in a dream she was having. I followed her into the woods in her dream and when I touched her, hugged her, all these colors exploded around us like, I don’t know, Skittles or something. And they turned into these streamers of colors. Huge, long pieces of cloth that waved in the wind. Like sheets on a clothesline.” I looked at Dianne waiting, her block still up.
