Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 151630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 758(@200wpm)___ 607(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 151630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 758(@200wpm)___ 607(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
I smile his way. “But I like the feel of the earth between my toes. And the sky above me.”
My father grows serious and he stares my way, his eyes going dark. “Because you are earth and sky. You are the bubbling cauldron we were all born of. When you need him, call his name. He always meant to find you again.”
I blink and I’m back in my adult body and the floor is dry again, but I look to the Drowning Woman.
She sent me that message. Why? She never has before.
Or has she and I was too afraid to see it?
I am earth and sky. I stand in the mud and feel the tug of a thread that runs to the core of the planet. I tilt my head up and that thread runs from me to the heavens above. Earth and sky. Moon and sun and all the planes.
Power bubbles up. I can feel it.
And it frightens me.
“Shy?” My husband stands in front of me, gently tilting my head up. “Are you all right?”
“She sent me a vision,” I say quietly.
“She?” Lee asks.
Cassie gasped. “The she? The creepy water spirit? Is she here?” Cassie turns, machete in hand like she can fight a non-corporeal spirit. I know she would try for me. “How is she here?”
“She found a way to follow me.” I look past Cassie but the Drowning Woman is further back now, or perhaps she used up energy sending me that vision. She’s not as solid as she was before and sounds more distant. “What are you trying to tell me?”
The hounds have taken space around me, like they’re letting me know they are there for me.
Why would the hounds specifically want to be with me?
Why would Matilda, the crone, call me yr un sanctaidd? The sacred one. I thought she was trying to pull me, to get me to do what she wants, but now I wonder. Had she been the trap for me? Or for Myrddin Emrys and the king of this plane?
I see a hand come out of the water as though she’s trying to touch me, and then she’s gone.
“Well, that’s frustrating.” I look to Rhys. “She’s gone. She somehow sent me a vision of my father.”
“Why would she do that?” my husband asks.
I’m not sure. “It started out as something I remembered. My father would go fishing in this pond on our land and I would sit with him. I would sometimes play in the mud, and he would tease me for being feral. But then one day I cried because that seemed like a bad thing to be and he told me to never think that. He told me I was made of earth and sky and I had found my way to him.” Tears pierce my eyes as the memory flows over me. The sweetness of my father laying down his pole and getting into the mud with me. “He told me I was a gift to my family, a gift from the old ones, and that one day I would understand.” I shake my head. “How did I forget that? He told me I was made of earth and sky, that I should never apologize for liking to play in the mud. But he wasn’t talking about mud. He knew. He knew I would have these powers.”
“Your father was a telekinetic,” Rhys points out.
I love that he listens to me. My family might no longer be on the Earth plane, but Rhys knows them through my stories. He encourages me to keep them alive even when it would seem easier to forget. It was one of the first ways I knew he cared about me. He was a teenaged boy and he would sit up late with me and ask about my family and tell me about his. We bonded through loss, but it became something beautiful. “He was, but every now and then he would have the sight, as my grams would call it. Not divination. He would see something as it was rather than as it wished to be seen. He could see trolls through their glamours. I think he saw me that day.”
And loved me. Wanted the best for me. Wished for me to step into my power and use it for good.
“So there’s a weird ghostie in here with us?” Lee shudders a little. “I’m not sure I wanted to know that. Can’t you send it along, Shy? Like you did with my uncle?”
He really understands nothing, and he doesn’t listen. He was probably either thinking about his next meal or who he could hit on when I explained the first time. “Your uncle was ready to move on. The Drowning Woman is not. So she follows me. When she does what she needs to do, she will find her path.”