Devils Roses 05 - Death

Visualize a door shaped in the air that you can walk through from anywhere. The rest will come to you."
    I swallow hard and close my eyes. The earth magic fills me instantly. Like mother earth and I are connected. My body hums. The rough bark heats in my hands until it is the same temperature as my hands.
    I focus on the doorway. Flashes of the shaman blessing the tree fill my mind. His skin is old and dark and wrinkled. He speaks something I don’t understand. His eyes are completely white and his dark skin is sweaty. He rocks and chants and smoke is coming from somewhere.
    His white eyes dart at me. He smiles and puts a hand out for me. I feel myself letting go of the bark and reaching for him.
    My sisters stand in front of him, blocking my view of his face.
    The blue sisters shake their heads. I push past them and find him again.
    "O, don't do this. This is dark magic." Their voices float in the air but I swat at them and sit beside the man. He crosses his skinny brown legs. I cross mine too. He closes his eyes and takes my hand. His skin burns mine. I scream out but I can't take my hand from his grip.
    I can smell my skin burning. He pries open my hand and rubs it into the ground. My eyes fly open. My lips are parted but no sound escapes them. The sun has set. It’s dark. I'm standing in the tree still. My hand is still gripping the branch. I pull it back but the burnt skin from my palm sticks to the branch. I cry out and stop pulling away. My hand shakes.
    "It's okay, O. Just pull it back slowly and then heal it." Oliver is still with me.
    "Did you leave?"
    He shakes his head. "You did."
    I peel my hand from the branch. Tears stream down my cheeks. When I finally have it off I turn my hand over. A circle with a line through it is burned into my palm. The skin is red and blistered. I place my other hand over it and pull the healing from the tree we are in. The hand heals instantly but the scar is the circle with the line through it. The pain is still mildly present.
    "It still hurts."
    He nods. "It will for a while. You've left a piece of yourself here. It's the only way to make a port. It's so that you can find this place again. Your piece of you will pull you here." He takes my hand and kisses the palm. The air moves and we are on the road out front of Lydia's.
    I don’t want to leave him but I know I must. Ari is standing on the front steps. She needs me.
    "See you later." He squeezes my hand again. He lets me go and steps back and then he's gone.
    I miss him already. I feel bleak and weird about the things he's told me.
    I glance at Ari and try to smile. Trist comes bursting through the door. "O, it's like Pretty Woman meets a Miss Universe pageant in there. Phillip has taken ten of them home but there are still like twelve girls we don’t know where to take. They come from poor countries. It's chaos. Giselle is up and about too. She already almost ate a nice girl from Africa."
    I look at the scar on my hand and almost wish I were back at the tree. Instead I walk through the door. Phillip flashes into the hallway beside me. "O, not cool. Leaving us to deal with all this."
    "Guys, mellow out. She's going through some shit." Ari scowls and grabs my hand. She drags me through the house to the back door. The cool misty day makes me shiver. When we reach the bench at the dock in the backyard she lets go of my hand and sits. She stares at the water like she sees something I don’t.
    "You okay?" I ask.
    She shakes her head. "It's a mess. It's all a mess. Aimee and Ben and Luke are miserable without Sam. Hanna is a disaster. Her heart is so broken, my dad said she is blacking out again. Marcus is hiding it from Lorri. Giselle is eating anything she can touch, literally eating. Shane is being brain washed every week because somehow he finds his way back to Aimee. Even Annabelle is dying inside without the little kids. Lydia barely looks at me. Somehow we all have to come together and fight your dad. It just isn’t going to happen."
    I sit beside her and can't fight it. "I agree. We need to find the missing link. Where it all went wrong."
    "Sam. We need him. He is the key to killing your dad. Lydia and Annabelle agree. We need Sam back. Hanna is a mess because of it. Even if he and her weren’t together, her guilt is eating her alive. If Aimee wasn’t here, if she had a normal life, we wouldn’t have the Giselle issue and Aleks would be hunting his dad fulltime. We would have gotten Sam and the kids long