A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (14 page)

36. MELODY

I knew I should be exhausted after doing all the yard work
that Gram piled on me, and especially after being up all night, but beneath my
fatigue a bright thrum of energy coursed through me. I suspected it was from
spending so much of my day outside, with my fingers in the dirt – I had really
enjoyed feeling the earth’s energy as I plucked weeds from the garden. And
there was the strange black stone I had found as well. It was black, about the
size of my thumb, and it buzzed brightly when I touched it. Its edges were a
little sharp, but it was covered in dirt and I couldn’t tell much else about it
until I washed it off in the sink.

I turned it to and fro in the early evening sunlight and
figured that if there was one person in our household who knew what it was, it
would be Gramps. Shower first though! I didn’t want to wander into his workshop
stinking to high heaven.

A little while later, clean and smelling of soap, my hair
towel-dried, I wandered downstairs and into the back of the house where Gramps
had his workshop. Weaving through stacks of old books and boxes of antiques, I
stopped outside his workshop door and knocked on the jamb.
“Gramps?”
I called.
“You in there?”

“Melody!” he called from the back, “Come on in. I’m back
here.”

I found him in the back, bent double over his work bench, an
acetylene torch in one hand and a hunk of metal held between clamps in the
other.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He stopped, put out the torch, and flipped up his visor.
“Oh, you know me and my experiments. And what are you up to, my dear? No more
jaunts to the casino, I trust?”

I felt my cheeks flame. “Gram told you about that?”

“Oh yes, she tells me everything. Of course I need her to,
you know, since I don’t get out on my own very well anymore.”

“I trust my brush with the law brought you some amusement?”

“Would you have it any other way?” He waggled his brows at
me and sat back in the wheelchair. “What brings you back here on such a lovely
summer’s evening?”

“I found this rock while I was weeding the garden – and
since you showed me how to feel the energy of things… it sort of jumped out at
me as a more than ordinary rock.” I handed him the black chunk of stone. “Do
you know what it is?”

“Ah, yes. You have acquired yourself a piece of natural
obsidian.
Quite rare to find something like this here in
Texas.
It is fairly common in Oklahoma though.” He handed the rock back
to me. “Tell me what it felt like when you picked it up.”

He squinted up at me while I pondered his question. “It
buzzed a lot, like what I feel from putting my hands or feet in the earth – but
more pronounced, stronger. And it had a pulling feeling? Almost like a magnet,
but different.”

Gramps
nodded,
his smile wide. “My
girl, you are a natural. Obsidian is one of the strongest stones for drawing
off negative energy. That is what you felt when you said a pulling sensation.”

“Like what kind of negative energy?” I cleared off the table
opposite his desk and sat on it, the obsidian firmly in the palm of my left
hand. Even now, the buzzing of the stone was quite strong. I liked how it felt.

“Obsidian grounds you. You learned in school about
batteries, right? And how you should not store batteries on the ground because
it will draw off the energy in the battery until
it’s
dead?”

 
I nodded. I had heard
that – never store a car battery on the garage floor. Always put something
underneath it unless you want to have a dead battery on your hands.

“Obsidian is like that. It draws negative energy off of
things – specifically off of your etheric body – your aura. It grounds you. It
can help draw off dark emotions when you are feeling down, especially if you
are under attack–”

“Attack?”
What?

“Psychic attack, when an entity or individual is feeding off
of your energy field, obsidian is one of the stones that can help prevent
that.” He turned back to his task, pulling out a rasp to smooth the edges of
the metal hunk he had been working on.

I thought back to the little pog that Esme gave me, and my
hand went to the necklace I still wore with the ring strung on it. There hadn’t
been any more attacks like that since I had been wearing it. “So it works like
this thing does, then?” I pulled the necklace off and handed it to Gramps.

He put down the rasp, took the chain with the pog on it and
examined it closely. “Who gave this to you?”

“Esme did. She said that I was being attacked. Will obsidian
work like that?”

“In a way, yes.
Obsidian grounds
you and it’s natural. This item here is a positive orgone device and will not
only help remove the negative energy but transmute it to positive energy. It’s
a valuable thing to keep with you, especially if you are already experiencing
attacks.”

“What do you mean
already
?”

Gramps pretended to be busy studying Esme’s ring.

“Gramps, what do you mean already?”

He sighed and handed the ring on the chain back to me. “If
Esme gave this to you and told you to wear it, then you should definitely do
that. You should also keep the obsidian piece with you in your pocket. Both are
useful, powerful tools. And just because Gram said it was time for you to learn
some things, doesn’t mean I am going to spill all the beans in one day.” He waggled
his eyebrows. “If I did that, you wouldn’t come back to visit me in the
workshop tomorrow to ask me more!”

“What? Of course I would.”

He flipped his visor down and turned on the torch again,
using the clicker to light it. “Well,
good
then. Come
back tomorrow and we will talk some more about this. It will give me time to
dig some things out of boxes to show you.”

I sighed. “
Oookay
,” I said like I
had when I was little. I put the necklace back on, shoved the black rock into
my pocket and waved at him as he got back to work on his project. I decided to
see what Tara was up to – I wondered what she would make of the chunk of
obsidian.

37. TARA

“It’s really cool,” I said, handing the obsidian back to
Melody. “I don’t feel the super buzzy thing you’re talking about, but then you
don’t talk to the big computer in the sky, so I guess we’ll just have to take
each other’s word for it.”

Melody grinned. This was the happiest I had seen her in a
long time. Dread fluttered in the pit of my stomach, but I tried to ignore it.
Now was not the time to remind her about her dead brother and the picture I got
from the Akashic Records, of her taking his hand.

“What’s that like?” she asked, idly playing with the black
stone.
“The Akashic record thing?”

I considered for a moment. What was it like, really? “I
guess calling it a computer is the closest I can come to relating it to
everyday things. I mean, it’s bigger than that, you know, and it’s not at your
fingertips, but as if my brain is jacked into it somehow, like a hologram
unfolding, and as soon as I think of something, I can see the answer. I’ve been
practicing, too.”

“Yeah?
Can I ask you—it—a
question?”

“You mean you want me to go all Rain Man on you for a minute
so you can ask the universe a question?”

“Well, when you put it like that –”

“Sure, why not? I haven’t tried it with anyone else since
that first time with you, and that was totally on accident. What do you want to
ask? Wait – no don’t tell me. Wait until I am in the zone and then ask your question,
but be very clear with the phrasing. Getting the information back really is a
lot like using a computer.”

We were sitting on my bed in my room, which was perhaps not
the most ideal place to try this kind of thing, but I figured that I wasn’t
always going to be in the ideal place, so this would be better practice than
doing it on the lawn in the summer sun. I pulled my crystal out of my pocket
and looked around for a good place to put it so it would catch the light. I
settled on propping it up on the window ledge and scooched down to the floor so
that my eyes were only slightly higher than line of sight with it.

I crisscrossed my legs, used the bed to brace myself, and
practiced grounding like Esme showed me – linking the energy of my spine and my
chakras with the energy of the earth by sending a tap root, like a tree, into
the ground. The blue energy of the earth spiraled up the tap root and up
through my spine until my forehead felt tight– my third eye chakra was charging
and I could feel the top of my head opening up… expanding outward like a lotus
flower.

I focused my gaze on the crystal in the window, and the rest
of the room faded away. The chime sounded in my head. “Ask,” I said aloud at
the same time as the velvety voice spoke in my mind.

“Why can I feel the energy of the obsidian and Tara can’t?”
said Melody.

The voice came to me, and I repeated it to Melody. “The Sage
is the Fullness. The Light is a torus. Their functions differ, yet they are of
a compatible nature.” After the words, I saw an image of two circles, at a
distance, one nestled inside of the other. The image pulled in close and I
could see that the inner circle was more like a donut that folded in onto
itself, and the other circle was a never-ending loop.
A
spiral that wound upon itself.

“I don’t understand, what is the Fullness?”

“The Fullness of knowledge of the
beginning and the end, the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning.”
The outer circle, the spiral, became a speck of light in the darkness that
blossomed into a four-armed galaxy that flared for a moment before spiraling in
on itself.

“What does that have to do with feeling the energy of a
piece of obsidian?”

“Nothing at all, and everything.”

Vaguely I heard Melody sigh, but I did my best to push the
stray thought away. I could maintain a sort of soft focus when the information
was not coming in a stream, but if I wasn’t careful, I would fall out of the
transcendental moment and lose contact. I framed my own question and asked it
aloud.

“Who is the Sage?” I asked.

“You are,” said the voice while I repeated it for Melody.
The nested circles were beginning to fade.

Melody rustled as she sat up, suddenly alert.
“If Tara is the Sage, then who is the Light?”

“Melody Ann Walker,” I said in time with the voice in my
head. I tried not to get excited – even though I could tell we were on to
something. The circles were gone now, and the slate of my mind was active, yet
empty.

“What is the function of the Light?” I asked carefully.

“To complete the circuit,” the voice said and I repeated. A
burst of light focused itself in my mind’s eye, with Melody at the center. She
was the energy – it pulled up from the ground, through her feet, and shot out
the top of her head like a fountain. As the light rained back down around her,
it fed back into her feet again.

“Holy crap,” said Melody. “That’s what Gramps said.”

“Your grandfather is the Light.”

“But you just said I was the Light.”

“You are the Light.”

“How is that possible?”

“There are many stars in the
sky,
there are many grains of sand on a beach. There are many who complete the
circuit.” The image of Melody as a fountain of light was replaced with an image
of the night sky, each star in the inky darkness, a fountain of light. I
gasped.

And then I lost it, not so much a ‘zap!
Game
over’ kind of feeling—more like a deflated balloon.
I blinked a couple
of times, my eyes dry, and turned to look at Melody, who wore an inscrutable
expression. Now was not the time to tell her about the pictures swimming around
in my head, especially not the image of the night sky – that one I wanted to
keep to myself, like a treasure.

“Maybe we should go talk to your grandparents?” I suggested.

“You think?” She seemed stressed and uncomfortable.

“I always knew you were special,” I said, pretending to be
serious. It only took a moment for Melody to grab the pillow from my bed and
wallop me with it. And just like that, the awkwardness disintegrated into fits
of laughter. I was glad to have this version of Melody back. That feeling in
the pit of my stomach hadn’t gone away, but maybe I could ignore it for just a
little longer.

38. MELODY

Gram and Gramps were sitting on the patio, Gramps in his
wheelchair, Gram on a deep-seated teak chair with big white cushions. The shade
from the live oak fell across them, keeping their skin cool in the late summer
sun, and they had tall iced glasses of sweet tea garnished with lemon to keep
their insides cool. I suddenly wanted a glass of tea for myself. “Tara, you
want?”

“Oh yeah, that sounds good. Your Gram makes the best sweet
tea.”

I grinned, because she was right. I had been plenty of
places that tried to pass off colored water for tea, but you couldn’t accuse
Gram of that. She said her tea was “southern style,” meaning dark and very
sweet. With the appropriate amount of lemon, it was just about the best thing
you could drink on a hot day.

I grabbed a glass for each of us, each one half full of ice,
got the box of vanilla wafers from the pantry, and headed out to the patio
where Tara was already asking probing questions. No ever accused Tara of being
shy.

“Melody showed me how to feel the energy of the earth, you
know, after you showed her.
That
is
really cool.”

Gramps grinned at Tara and motioned to me to hand over the
box of cookies. “Isn’t it now?” He wiggled his naked toes in the grass. “You
two are just beginning to venture down an amazing road. It will get much more
interesting over the next few months, until your bodies dial in on the energy…
then it will feel like it’s fading – but it’s not, trust me. Instead you will
just become more precise with your ability to feel things.”

“What do you mean?” I was excited that I could feel the
earth and the obsidian; I could hardly imagine it getting more interesting than
that.

“It’s like the difference between sensing when a light is on
or off and instead, being able to tell what color the light is, how bright it
is, and where it’s coming from.”

“A lightbulb, naturally,” said Tara.

We all chuckled a little bit, but Gramps went on. “Melody
can feel the obsidian. It is a low vibration stone, which means it vibrates at
a lower frequency – slower – than something else, like quartz, or diamond. At a
certain point she will be able to feel all the frequencies of all the stones,
and then when she’s ‘dialed in’ she will be able to tell you which stone she is
holding without even looking at it – because instead of just a vibration, she
will feel it
specifically
. Like a
signature.”

“So what, you mean eventually I will be able to feel Tara’s
quartz the way she does?”

“You may even be able to feel it now.”

“Will I be able to access the Akashic records too?” My brow
wrinkled, because the impression I got earlier was that Tara and I were similar
but different.

“Probably not – at least, I have never met anyone who could
do both.”

“Why is that?” Tara asked, tilting her head out of the sun.

“We’re not sure,” said Gram, wistful. “There’s so much we
don’t know or understand about how it all works.”

“How what works?” I asked as she stole a glance at Gramps,
who shook his head slightly.

“That’s too heavy a discussion for a day as beautiful as
today. Ask me some other time. Maybe next time it rains.”

“Oh, come on, Gram. You can’t leave us dangling like that.”

“Yes, she can,” said Gramps, painstakingly picking his feet
up and putting them on the footrest of his wheelchair. “Besides, it’s time for
my physical therapy. You girls enjoy the day. Gram tells me we’re having
barbecue for dinner.”

I looked at Tara, who shook her head.

“I can’t stay,” she said. “I promised my mom I would help
her with some chores.”

“Well, you’re welcome to come by after that if you like,
dear. I did make a lemon meringue pie for dessert.”

Tara grinned in that impish way she had. “Maybe I could come
by and have some pie… while you’re telling me and Melody how to protect
ourselves when we use the Spirit Board.”

Gram’s brows rose, and Gramps whistled between his teeth.
“Did you actually tell them that?”

Gram’s eyes narrowed. “I did indeed.”

“Well, then you better tell them over pie, before they get
the idea they don’t need any advice and get themselves into a heap of trouble.”

“Yay!” said Tara as she clapped her hands.

I was excited, too. The whole event at the river boat had
left us hanging. And with the information we got from the Akashic Records being
so cryptic, I really thought our best chance at finding another clue was to
reach out to my brother’s ghost again. Man that sounded weird. As if ghosts
were real. Were they?

It was 8:00 p.m. before Tara was able to make it back over
for pie and the Spirit Board safety talk. I had to admit to being more than a
little serious. All this talk had me stewing all day long. If I had to admit
that my brother’s ghost was a real phenomenon, if I had to admit that I could
feel the freaking Schumann Resonance in my feet… what else did I have to admit?
What else was real that I always thought was make-believe?
Fairies?
Dragons?
Martians?

“Man, this summer has got to be the weirdest on record for
me.
Maybe for anyone.”

“What do you mean, dear?” asked Gram, her back to us as she sliced
the pie across, then across again. She put one thick slice on each plate and
brought them to us. For herself, she just had a small sliver and another glass
of sweet tea.

“All this stuff, this…magic stuff.”

“Magic!” said Tara around a mouthful of lemon meringue. She
had fluffy white blobs stuck to the corners of her mouth as she ate much too
large a bite for her mouth to accommodate.

“What else do you want to call it? We’ve got weird vibes,
energy from the earth, a Spirit Board, a positive orgone generator that scares
away evil entities… come on Tara.”

Her mouth full of her second bite, she just shrugged.
“Magic, I guess. Sort of sums it all up.”

It was then that we noticed that Gram was trying not to
choke on her tea as she smothered a laugh.
“Oh, my children.
You talk about magic like
it’s
some elusive,
mysterious thing.”

“Well, isn’t it?” Tara asked since it was my turn to take a
bite of pie.

“Of course not.
Magic is just a
catch-all word for science that can’t be explained yet.”

“No, it’s not the same, it’s…”

“Think about it,” she continued after a sip. “If you took a
television and a Blu-ray player back to the Spanish Inquisition and showed a
movie to those evil, backwards monsters, what do you think they would have done
to you?”

“Burned us at the stake,” I said quickly.

“For being witches,” said Tara more thoughtfully.

“Precisely.”

“But, it’s not witchcraft… It’s,
it’s
science,” I spluttered. “It’s not the same.”

“Really?
Then what about alchemy
then? You know what an alchemist was?”

“A scholar who was obsessed with the idea
that he could transmute lead into gold.”

“
A gold star for the kindergarten answer
.
You’ve both had chemistry, haven’t you?
Organic chemistry?”

We nodded. Neither one of us had particularly liked the
class, but yeah, we’d taken it.

“And did either one of you notice there’s barely a
difference between the atomic numbers of gold and lead?”

We both shrugged.

“I suggest you look it up sometime. Transmuting lead into
gold is not only possible to
do,
it has been
done
, in 1951. If you had been able to
show that to men from the time of Archimedes, you would have been labeled as
some of the most skilled magicians of the world. And really my
dears, all along, it was
just science.”

I rebelled at the idea that the word magic was
interchangeable for science. It was almost too much to think that all this
stuff was real, and then to have Gram shrug at me, to my face, and say “Yeah
so?” Suddenly I lost my appetite for pie, for Spirit Boards, for weird stuff
altogether. “I think I’m tired,” I said.
“Too much for one
day.
And all this science talk is just making me…”

“Cranky?” Gram put her hand over mine.

“Yeah.
I was going to say bitchy,
but yeah.”

“Okay,” said Tara, not sure what was up, but she knew me
well enough to know when I was about to go from zero to bitchy for no reason.
“Hope you feel better tomorrow, Mel,” she said. “Is it okay if I stay to finish
my pie?” she looked at Gram.

I left the kitchen before I could get waspish. I wasn’t sure
what was wrong with me, but it probably had to do with too much mumbo jumbo in
too short a timeframe. First Matthew’s ghost, then Matthew’s secret stash, and
now magic.
Magic!

I tried not to slam my bedroom door behind me and flopped on
my bed. After an irritated second, I shimmied out of my shorts and shoes and
emptied my pockets onto the bedside table. Last to go was the necklace with the
pog on it. I fingered it for a minute, pulled it off roughly, and threw it
across the room. Dark entities
be
damned; I’d had
enough
magic
for one day.