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Elliot didn’t bother creeping when she went downstairs. There was some life in the house, there always was, and that was welcomed. It made her feel safer. Elliot had grown used to living in the city, near the rumbling of the light rail, the constant coming and going of cars and people and seagulls near the bay, and the distant foghorns of the ferries. Some of that was on the island, not all of it, and what was gone stood out like a mental knife jab while Elliot was trying to sleep. The noise felt safe, the quiet a threat. Any form of life was good.
Gimble sat in her living room, a book in her hand. However, she had laid it carefully in her lap and she talked quietly with the ghosts — with Morgan and Ethan, Elliot corrected herself. Elliot hesitated, and then approached. Gimble heard her first, her big ears swiveling, catching her entrance. She turned and offered Elliot a welcoming smile.
“Hello!” Gimble said. “I didn’t expect to see you up. Come join us.”
Elliot nodded, and she sat down, keeping a little distance from the ghosts.
“Are you not sleeping?” Gimble asked. “I bet I could make you something for that.”
“I think it’s the meds,” Elliot said. “They said they were supposed to give me energy. And I have a lot of it right now.”
“Meds?” Morgan said, leaning forward. “Like, for depression?”
Elliot felt her ears drop on her head. “Yeah, like that.”
“Neat!” Morgan said. Which wasn’t what Elliot had been expecting.
“I could have used that,” Ethan said.
“I really could have used that,” Morgan said, matter of factly. “I could probably be someone’s aunt by now.”
“You’d be the weird aunt,” Ethan said, smiling at Morgan. Elliot couldn’t help how much admiration was in that look. Not romance, just that kind of look one gets when they care about someone.
“I would be the BEST weird aunt,” Morgan said, full of energy.
“Uhm,” Elliot started, picking out the words she wanted to say carefully. “How… how did you… go?”
“Oh,” Morgan said. “Suicide.”
“I’m so sorry,” Elliot said, unable to speak the words out loud, just a raspy whisper. Bad question. Stupid question!
“I was in a bad place and kind of seemed stuck and honestly I wasn’t thinking straight. So I jumped in front of a subway train in Delta City.”
Elliot gasped.
“Yeah, I don’t recommend it, it hurt like hell.” And in an instant Elliot could see, just enough beyond the form Morgan had to a broken, twisted body. A flash of pain, and then the smiling fox was back. Elliot swallowed that image like a jagged pill.
“So, I could have used some meds. It would have been nice to think straight before I did something I couldn’t take back.”
Ethan raised his hand. “I walked in front of a bus,” he said dryly.
“We’re in the same club!” Morgan said. “Death by mass transportation! We have a secret handshake and everything!”
Ethan looked amused. “I wish I had had meds too. Maybe I would have asked that boy out if I had, instead of pining over him like an idiot.”
“You’d never. You could never stop pining,” Morgan said. Ethan pushed her playfully.
“You don’t need to sell me on the medication,” Elliot said. “I took it. I’m all for it.”
“We’re excited,” Morgan said. “We messed up and chose badly, and if we had been thinking better, we probably wouldn’t be here.”
“You seem fine now,” Elliot said.
“Time has helped a lot,” Ethan said. “There’s been time to process things.”
“I don’t have brain chemistry anymore!” Morgan beamed.
Gimble, who had been watching quietly from her spot on the couch, finally spoke. “How have you been feeling?”
Elliot considered this. “Better? Better, I think. Like I know I just started today, but I feel like it’s changing me already.”
“I’m very glad to hear that,” Gimble said.
“But that’s bullshit, right? That’s just, like, a placebo? Like, how could I be feeling something I just started taking?”
Gimble nodded. “Do you feel better?”
“Yeah… yeah, I do, actually.”
“Do you feel like the medication is working?”
“…Yeah.”
“Then who cares if it’s a placebo effect or not?”
Elliot started to speak, and faltered.
“The important thing is that you feel better. The important thing is that you want to stick around for a while.”
“Yeah…” Elliot said.
Gimble looked up at the ghosts. “If you will excuse us, I’d like to talk to Elliot.”
Morgan and Ethan both stood.
“You got it,” Morgan said. “Goodnight, Elliot!”
“I hope you get to sleep!” Ethan said.
The ghosts retreated into the house, and they were gone before Elliot knew it. She shuddered, but she felt better about them. They mystique was gone, just a little.
“I promise that you are not in trouble,” Gimble said. She stood too, smoothing out her skirt, and motioned to the kitchen. “May I make you some tea?”
Elliot nodded and followed Gimble to the kitchen. Gimble put her kettle on and began to take tea things out of the cupboards.
“I felt your anxiety spike,” Gimble said. “You’re not in trouble. In fact, I would like to apologize to you.”
“What?” Elliot said. “Me? You? I’m the fuck up here.”
Gimble placed a plate in front of Elliot, a nice selection of pastries on it. “We did a bad job of listening to you. We are all here because we have been through this before. And we wanted to help you. But you were telling us what you needed, and we weren’t paying attention.”
“I still hurt Meryl,” Elliot said. “I could have killed her.”
“A situation that was entirely avoidable had we listened to you in the first place.”
Elliot started to protest, but Gimble stopped her.
“You told me directly that you were worried about your safety. I told you to avoid confrontation. What I did not do is address the actual concern about safety. Meryl filled the void because she was trying to help you. And Meryl is very good at that, but Meryl also has differing ideas about how to go about things, very much informed by her own witch upbringing.”
“I don’t want her to get in trouble because of me,” Elliot said.
Gimble gave her a soft smile. “She has not and will not. Like I said, she meant the best for you. That’s something I should have been leading on.”
Elliot nodded. “I don’t know what to say…”
“You don’t need to say anything. I am very sorry for not listening to you, and we all want to make things right.”
Elliot nodded. She thought for a long moment. “Can we start over?”
“Start over?” Gimble sat back and studied her.
“I want to start over with my training. I think I started badly. And like, I feel better than I used to. I feel like things are different.”
“That sounds like a smart way to do this. But you know how to fly decently, and I think you have a handle on spells.”
“I would love to work on spells more,” Elliot said. “I will beg if I have to.”
“Noted,” Gimble said. “I will put spells on this list.” Gimble stood to collect the kettle, which began to whistle on the stove. She poured water into a tea pot and set it on the table between them. “But let me ask you this: what do you want to learn?”
Elliot sat back. She thought about Locke, and the Chamber, and the wizards, and learning wizard spells with Ilo. She thought about the walkers in the sound, and the banshee, and the ghosts upstairs. And she thought about Ardy, waiting patiently for her.
“Teach me how to think like a witch,” Elliot said.
Gimble considered this. “In what way do you mean?”
“I mean, there has to be more than looking for spells and reading crystals or whatever. There has to be something else to it. What does a coven mean? What actions should we be taking? Like, are people saying something without saying it? Is that a thing?”
“What is going on in the tunnel downtown?” Gimble added.
Elliot’s ears perked, and then sank. She looked away. “Yeah… maybe that too. That is a thing to consider.”
Gimble sat in silence for a moment, staring out the dark windows in the kitchen. And then she said, “Maybe we need to call Ilo and see for ourselves…”
[g]