Chapter Nineteen
RationalKatherinecamebackwith a second wind, trying to bashstupid fairy tale girlinto oblivion. A psychic, a ghost whisperer, and a witch? Just how? What? This was just plain crazy…
Hans interjected my thoughts.
“Feeling not thinking, remember? Throw the clockwork thoughts out of the window, and let your intuition guide you.”
I must have been open-mouthed. The battle was still raging inside me.
Hans read it in an instant.
“It’s interesting don’t you think? How you are coping so well with the supernatural elements of the people around you, but not of the ones in yourself?”
“I’m not sure I’m coping so well with anything,” I told him.
“That’s not true, sweetheart. You’re coping extremely well with everything. It’s an awful lot to comprehend.”
Sweetheart.
Mysweetheartwas a vampire. A bisexual, murdering, vampire. A stunningly handsome vampire with a monster cock. And I was his witch. I wasn’t sure whether my cackling laugh was aloud or in my head.
He pulled me into his arms and kissed my forehead.
“I ask you again,” Hans said. “Do you not think it’s interesting how you can accept the supernatural elementsaroundyou, but notwithinyou?”
I heard my grandma’s screeching voice in my head.STUPID GIRL! STOP IT WITH THE DAYDREAMING!
Memories came back like a typhoon, running savage through my mind.
A teddy cat when I was a young girl, given to me by one of our neighbours. Me convinced he was a familiar called Goblin, and casting pretend spells with him, using one of Mum’s big cooking pots as a cauldron.She’d gone ballistic and thrown him out with the trash. STOP IT, KATHERINE! NO GAMES ABOUT WITCHES!
Me telling Mum about my dream where Grandma had a nasty fall in church at the harvest festival, later that week. Please make sure she’s safe, I said. I don’t want her to hurt herself!
STOP IT, KATHERINE! I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT ANY MORE OF YOUR STUPID DREAMS! THEY AREN’T REAL!
I’d been right, though. Grandma had tumbled and knocked herself out on one of the pews.
“That’s why you haven’t realised,” Hans said softly against my ear. “You’ve been told you’re crazy for feeling the truth of things, ever since the day you were born.”
“But how can it be like this?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matterhow. All that matters is that youare.Embrace it, Katherine. Let go of the fight and accept who you truly are.”
“How can I embrace it? How can I accept who I am? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or who I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what being a psychic, or a ghost whisperer, or a damn witch even means.”
Or do I?
The thoughts tickled and prickled inside me.
“I promise you, sweetheart,” Hans said. “You have a huge number of skills you can learn to use. Spellcraft, divination, and communicating with the spirits of the dead. Reading astrology, channelling energy, tuning into psychic waves. They are all there ready and waiting inside you.”
The truth in Hans’ words was beginning to hit my heart. My guts were churning, senses on alert to the max. The trapdoor was rattling.
Hans rocked me gently in his arms. “Let yourself run with it. Allow your intuition to guide you, not your mind.”
I took a breath and let myself sink into the sensations, the spinning of the bathroom disappearing. I listened to the trapdoor rattling in the distance, but this time I didn’t run away from the sound.
I was on a woodland path, in the cool breeze of day, not drowning underwater, desperate to swim to the surface. The trapdoor was ahead of me, with its dark lid of wood sunk into the earth.