A Vision of Green (Florence Vaine #2) (19 page)

A moment later the door opens and a young woman emerges. She looks to be in her early to mid twenties with short black hair and pretty blue eyes. She takes in the four of us warily, holding the door open just a small bit with the toe of her black Doc Marten boot.

She's wearing a crumpled white t-shirt and black jeans, you can see her red bra through her top beneath the words “Keep Calm and Carry Garlic” with a little picture of a bat. Some sort of joke about vampires, maybe?

“
Um, who are you?” she asks, addressing our group.

Hayley steps forward. “I'm here to see Rita, I'm Hayley, I was a good friend of her mother's. I spoke with Alvie over the phone, he said I'd find her here.”

The woman's face loses its wary edge and the ghost of a smile touches her lips. “Right. Sorry. You can't be too careful around these parts. Alvie's out at the moment and Rita's in bed, but you can come in if you like. I'm Tegan, by the way,” she puts out her hand for Hayley to shake.

“
Hello, Tegan. This is my partner John, my foster son Frank and his friend Florence.”

Tegan gives us each a polite nod and ushers us inside. The living area is quite spacious considering it's in a glorified caravan. We all sit down on whatever seat we can find. Tegan offers everyone tea and puts the kettle on.

“
So, how do you know Rita?” Hayley asks Tegan.

She pulls out a chair, flips it around and sits on it backward, her arms resting on top of the back of it. I keep watching her because her aura is amazing. It's a multi-coloured explosion, human but not quite. She's got all the scarring of a person who's battled through crap situations and has come out the other side a little damaged but all the more stronger for it. She's sharp, intelligent and just so full of feeling that it makes me want to pick her apart and study each piece with rapt curiosity.

“
We're friends, met a few years back,” she answers casually. In her colours I can see that the story is a whole lot more complicated than that, but she's not going to go into detail about it with a bunch of strangers. Her eyes dart to me, like she sensed my attention. She stares at me quizzically.

“
You okay there? You look a bit pale - Florence isn't it?”

I swallow and answer a little sheepishly. “It's Flo. I'm fine, s-s-sorry for staring at you, it's just, um, nothing...,” I trail off and feel my cheeks redden.

Frank puts a hand on my shoulder and gives me a concerned look.

“
What is it Flo?” John asks. “Do you
see
something?”

The way he emphasises the word “see” informs me he's not referring to seeing in the usual sense.

“
It's her aura,” I reply quietly. “It's different. In a good way. A wonderful way.” I find myself unable to hold back. New auras have always enthralled me, and I've come across quite a few in recent weeks.

“
My
aura
?” Tegan asks, her blue eyes lighting up with interest.

“
Flo's an Empath,” Hayley explains. “She can see people's emotions through their auras, she also has the power to heal people with negative emotional states. I brought her here because I thought she could do something to help Rita.”

Tegan acknowledges Hayley's explanation before focusing back on me. “What do you see? Can you tell me what I am, or
why
I am what I am?”

“
Y-you don't know what you are?” I say.

Tegan pulls back a little. “I sort of do, but not entirely.”

“
I can't give you an answer, but I can see that your aura's not completely human.”

Her eyes narrow. “You can't give me an answer, or you won't?”

I shake my head profusely. “I'm not h-h-hiding anything, I actually
can't
tell you, all I can see are the colours of your emotions. I'm not able to identify what you might be.”

Tegan rubs her temples. “Oh, right. Sorry for snapping at you. It's just that there are a lot of puzzle pieces that I need revealed. I thought for a second you might be able to tell me.”

“
I know that feeling, but sorry, I can't,” I reply quietly.

Silence ensues as Tegan regards me with cool interest. She doesn't ask any more questions, instead she gets up and finishes making the tea.

“
I'll go and try to wake Rita,” she says, after we've finished our refreshments. “I'll warn you though, she's in a pretty bad state. I don't know if she'll be up to coming out of her room.”

Hayley half rises from her seat. “Can I...I mean, would you mind if I went in to see her alone? I've been her mother's best friend since we were teenagers and I used to babysit Rita a lot. She knows me well, I think it would be better than dragging her out here in front of three strangers.”

“
Okay,” says Tegan. “Go on ahead, her room's just through there,” she gestures to a narrow wood panelled door. Hayley slips through and closes it gently behind her.

After a minute or two, muffled sobbing breaks out. It sounds like Hayley and Rita are both crying. Hayley for her lost friend and Rita for her dead mother. A familiar feeling stirs inside of me, a deep empathy pushing me to use my powers to heal. The mobile home that once felt quite spacious now seems suffocatingly small. My heart is thrumming with this need, this need to take away the grief that seems as though it's dripping from the walls like water.

I stand up and go over to open one of the windows for some air, sticking my head out as much as I can and taking deep gulps.

“
What's wrong?” Frank asks.

It takes me a while to answer and he places his hand on my neck, making soothing motions with his thumb. “It's her grief, the girl in that room. I can feel it s-s-so sharply.”

“
Maybe we could take a walk?” he suggests.

“
No, I'm good. It's sort of magnetising, you know, the emotion. It's like it's pulling on me. It would probably b-be worse if I tried leaving.”

We stay like that for a while, me breathing air through the window and Frank doing his best to soothe me.

Then I hear a door open and Hayley's soft voice saying, “Flo, Rita said she'd like to see you.”

“
Oh,” I reply, taken aback. In the back of my mind I never expected her to actually want to meet me. If I was her and my mother had just died I wouldn't want to see anyone, let alone a complete stranger.

I follow Hayley into the small room where a thin woman, about Tegan's age, is lying on the bed in her pyjamas. The narrow single bed takes up almost the entire space. Hayley sits down on the edge of it and puts a reassuring hand to the woman's forehead, pushing strands of her greasy dark hair away from her face.

“
Rita honey,” she says with gentleness, “this is Flo, the girl I told you about. She's going to help you.”

Rita's dark brown eyes regard me hesitantly. I take in her aura and almost drop to my knees. The pain is shattering. It shatters me and I'm not even the one feeling it. Her aura is a deep purple, and the Empath side of my brain whispers,
magic, witch
. Is that what this particular shade of purple represents? I caught notes of it in Tegan's aura as well, although it hadn't been quite so concentrated. Is she a witch too? She didn't seem to really know what she was, and if she did then it was confusing her. Probably in the same way that hearing I'm somehow related to elves confuses me.

I kneel down on the floor next to Rita's bed, maintaining firm eye contact with her. She doesn't seem like she's in her right mind. Her colours are fractured, and there's black seeping in, some kind of darkness that she's struggling to hold back. She doesn't want to succumb to it, but it's eating away at her resolve. She wants to be good, however the temptation to give in to the bad is almost too much. There's one thing that's perfectly clear, she wants revenge for her mother's death. The desire for payback is swirling around in her magical purple life force. Was her mother murdered? And by who?

“
H-hello,” I say. “Your name's Rita right?” She nods ever so slightly. “I'm F-flo, can I hold your hand? It'll be easier that way.”

She lifts her pale delicate fingers and places them in mine. Her temperature is cold, too cold almost. This is nothing like when I'd worked on Derek the other night at the book shop, this is way,
way
different. I feel like I'm being sucked into a vortex. Holding Rita's hand has suddenly plunged me right into her aura, rather than simply allowing me to read it through sight.

There are feelings and thoughts thrumming under my skin, vibrating into me like a sonic boom. This is because she's a witch, my inner Empath tells me, she's not a normal human, and healing her is going to be ten times more difficult than healing Derek had been.

I decide to tackle the revenge first. It's one of those things that you always hear wise people in movies say no good can come from. Perhaps the best thing for Rita to do is to work through her grief instead of getting consumed with some kind of vendetta.

I envision a burst of clear light blue washing it away, but it doesn't work so well. Some of the black retreats, yet other spots linger, too concentrated to be defeated. I reach out and pinch at them, but they resist. I pull and I scrape but they're not budging. One spot in particular drags me in, its darkness is trying to seep into my own aura. I shove it away but it pushes harder. I think of every good colour, every cleansing shade I can imagine and gather them into one pure force, unleashing them on the blackness.

This attempt angers it rather than killing it, and it spreads out in a rainbow of brown and grey and deepest black. Fear grips me. What have I done? My head goes foggy and I find it difficult to stay conscious. All of the effort to rid this witch of that awful black has drained me. My eyes drift shut and my brain turns off, right before I fall to the floor.

I'm dreaming. At least I'm almost certain that I am. You know how your brain works sometimes when you're asleep, the characters in your dreams turn out to be several people in one body. It doesn't seem bizarre in the moment, it's only weird when you wake up and think back on it. Well I'm dressed in my pyjamas and I'm kneeling on the forest floor before a being that is half Green George and half Rita, the grieving witch. My hands are clasped in front of me, and in my palms lies a glistening glass heart. It's ruby red and it shines like crystal.

“
Can you make it smaller?” I ask the God/witch in front of me.

“
Why would you want a smaller heart?” The God/witch replies with curiosity.

“
So that I wouldn't have to feel so much,” I answer, my voice torn with anguish. A tear trickles down my cheek.

“
You were born to feel.”

“
I know that. I just want it to be less – just less. I could live easier with a small one, even if were half its size it wouldn't hurt as much.”

I momentarily wonder why my mind has conjured a combination of Green George and Rita as the magician who could shrink the glass vessel in my hands. Perhaps it's because they both signify some kind of otherworldly power, something with the ability to take my pain away.

The God/witch says nothing and continues staring at me serenely. “Well, can you do it?” I ask in sorrow.

“
Look down,” says the God/witch.

I do. My big glass heart is no longer in my hands. Now a tiny red marble sits there, it's so little. I breathe in relief.
This I could handle
, the words echo in my head
, a heart this size wouldn't cause so much pain
. The dream drifts away and I feel myself wishing that it could be true, that I really could have a marble heart and not the one that currently sits inside my body. Sometimes it feels the size of a football field.

I surface to someone gently dabbing at my forehead with a damp cloth. When I open my eyes I find Tegan down on her haunches in front of me, her face full of concern.