By Sun Page 8

  “Don’t drag this out, Jack,” Lucy said.

  “Sorry. I mean, every coder has those days, right? Where things flow?” He looked at both women. Lucy nodded. “But this was different. It was as if something else had taken over me. Like something else was driving me and the code. And then… This is going to sound so weird.”

  Lucy actually snorted. “You’re talking to two witches, Jack.”

  Right, he thought, then nodded again.

  “Can I have a sip of your tea?” he asked. Lucy handed him her mug, silent. He took a sip of lukewarm beverage. Some kind of herbs. Maybe mint?

  He handed the mug back, fingers brushing Lucy’s knuckles. He tried to ignore how good her skin felt. No distractions.

  “And then, in the middle of it, this man strode through everything. A vision. Tall. Blond. It was like he was a God, or a hero, or something.”

  “You could see him?” Brenda asked, sitting up even straighter, as if she was suddenly on alert.

  “Yeah. Clear as day. He was a broad-shouldered white dude, kind of tan. His hair moved like lightning and he was really bright, bright like a flash. And he carried a spear. And I’ve been seeing a spear or…spear shapes in the code. It all feels connected.”

  He paused for a moment. Both women sat preternaturally still now, waiting.

  “Feels like he’s someone…like someone I should know. Do you know who he is?”

  Lucy and Brenda exchanged a look and Lucy shrugged.

  Brenda looked thoughtful, coiling a lock of her hair around one finger. She finally spoke. “It sounds like Lugh. He’s an Irish God. A maker and craftsman, a poet, an artist…”

  “Then why the spear?”

  “Lugh is also a warrior,” Lucy said. “In the stories, that’s actually his main gig, right?”

  “Metaphorically, he fights the old order.” Brenda took up the thread. “He fights that which came before that needs to change.”

  “Now,” Lucy interjected, “to be fair, some people think he was one of the colonizers. That he helped conquer the people who were originally on the land. But the stories aren’t a hundred percent clear and there is no way we’ll ever know. But yeah, it sounds like Brenda’s right. Looks like it’s Lugh, and he’s probably here to help you, at any rate.”

  “Help me do what? So far, it just feels like he’s just stuck a spear in my back. Plus, he fried all my monitors.”

  Brenda paused for a moment, one finger on her lips. Thinking. “He can help you face something that needs to fall, or to face a battle that needs to be won,” Brenda replied. “Do you have any idea what that is?”

  Jack rolled his shoulders, wincing at the sharp pain still embedded under his left shoulder blade.

  “I don’t want to. I don’t want to know,” he said. “But I think I have to. I mean… Sorry I’m being so opaque here, but it’s all pretty confusing for me, I hope you can understand.”

  He looked at each woman in turn, taking in Brenda’s blue eyes and Lucy’s rich brown. They both just waited. They were good at that. Must be a witch thing.

  “But yeah, I feel like I know exactly what I’m supposed to be facing, but I’m still just not sure how.”

  “It’s that thing we talked about?” Lucy asked. “ICE?”

  Jack swallowed, and nodded.

  “Yeah. ICE,” he said. The fucking government, as if I’m some kind of damn hero. And myself, which feels like the hardest thing. And whoever this Lugh person is, which is pretty freaky. And you, Lucy, he thought. The other thing I need to face is you.

  Although after their conversation the day before, and the cool reception today, he wasn’t sure he would have the courage to keep trying.

  17

  Lucy

  Lucy had slammed into her truck and and torn off like the proverbial bat out of hell, racing away from Jack and Brenda. All of a sudden, while listening to Brenda coax more of Jack’s story out, Lucy knew who she needed to see for help.

  She had said something to close the conversation about her hands and about Jack’s weird Lugh encounter, which she was sure they’d process later. She just hoped whatever it was had made sense and that the weird look Tempest threw her on her way out of the shop hadn’t meant she was acting too strangely.

  When she arrived at her destination, Lucy texted instructions to all of her job sites, letting them know she’d either be by later in the afternoon or would see them in the morning. She felt the displeasure from some of the workers, but they’d just need to chill. This charge from Tonantzin took precedence.

  Now she stood on a cracked concrete sidewalk in one of the sketchier parts of Gresham, the town just east of Portland. Portland and Gresham actually segued pretty seamlessly together, something most Black and Latinx denizens of the cities knew. Most middle-class white Portlanders wouldn’t have anything to do with the area.

  But for Lucy? Having grown up in the wilds of the southeast Portland neighborhood known as “the numbers,” Gresham felt like home.

  She stood on the sidewalk, a sheen of sweat on her upper lip, wondering what to do as she stood in front of a shop she hadn’t entered in far too long. Izel’s botánica.

  Cracking burgundy paint surrounded the wood façade. The windows needed cleaning, which was new. Used to be Izel hired a houseless man to wash them once a week. The giant plates of glass were still clear enough that Lucy could make out a giant statue of St. Lazarus, a cascade of burning candles, and all sorts of shells, metal amulets, and trinkets.

  Lucy felt a tingle along her face, as if a ghost had brushed by her. Izel must have noticed her. That woman was the most powerful witch Lucy knew.

  You need to learn to close your mind, Izel always said. But nothing Lucy ever did made any difference. To a powerful clairvoyant like Izel? Lucy would always be an open book. She scuffed her boots on the sidewalk, staring at St. Lazarus, also known as Babalú Ayé, compassionate one, protector of the sick.

  “Chicken shit,” Lucy muttered to herself. She shook out her hands, including the right one that Brenda had insisted on wrapping despite Lucy’s protests, then shoved open the heavy glass door. The toc toc toc of metal bells affixed to the inside handle greeted her. She shut the door carefully, making sure not to bang it, and breathed in the cool dim light of the botánica and the familiar scents of frankincense, benzoin, and myrrh. A fountain burbled and the rows upon rows of candle flames made her blink.

  She felt a tension she hadn’t even realized she was holding release itself and let go.

  “Lucy! Sobrina!” Izel looked up from a shadowed corner near the back of the shop. Sitting tall in her electric scooter, the old crone held what looked like a large vulture feather in her right hand. Sharp eyes set deeply into an otherwise soft, round face stared at Lucy, framed by perfectly arched eyebrows. Despite her elaborate makeup, Izel had a butch haircut with a pure white streak shooting through the black, short hair as though a comet’s tail had kissed her. Lucy knew the older woman had always had that streak, and that it began at her right eyebrow.

  Izel was truly touched by the Powers and had always known it. And despite the friendly, expectant look on her face, she still made Lucy quake in her boots.

  Izel navigated her whirring scooter through the altars and goods for sale, setting the feather down on the end of the long wooden sales counters as she passed. Lucy watched her come, forcing herself to stand motionless.

  “You look troubled, girl. And it’s been too long. Come, help me dust the high shelves and talk to your tía.”

  Everyone called Izel “Tía” as an honorific, because when Izel first opened the shop she swore she was too young to be called Madre. No longer young, she remained Auntie to every teen and child in the neighborhood, and to half the magic workers and Santeros in the Portland area.

  Lucy picked up a dust cloth, dragged a foot stool from beneath a shelf, and began carefully dusting around a dazzling collection of religious objects, herbs, shells, feathers, dried roots, and shining beads.

  Izel bus
ied herself at the counter, doing her own work, which consisted of rubbing oil onto one blue and one white taper candle and flapping the feather upwards toward the dormant wicks.

  Lucy had no idea what the vulture feather was for. Tía Izel’s people had a different relationship with magical objects than the witches of Arrow and Crescent coven, and that was fine.

  “I need counsel, Tía.”

  “Of course you do, Lucinda. Why else would you come to visit?”

  The barb was mild, but Lucy felt it all the same. She had been neglecting some of her duties without realizing it. Running her own business took up all her time. She barely saw her friends outside the coven anymore.

  As she gently wiped a layer of dust from a small statue of St. Michael, Lucy opened up her psychic senses, making sure that the shop’s protective wards were in place.

  “You think I’m not strong enough to protect my own house?” Izel’s voice was sharp this time.

  “Of course not, Tía. I’m just…involved in some things I maybe shouldn’t be.”

  “You face la migra, no?”

  “Si.”

  Izel made a tsking noise.

  “They tear our people apart. What does La Madre say?”

  Lucy set the statue down, then turned and stepped off the small stool. “Tonantzin says I must help the children. But I’m not sure how. The buildings, Tia…they are filled with anguish and danger.”

  “You have never been afraid of danger when someone else’s life or heart was at stake.”

  Lucy nodded, not sure what to say.

  Izel closed her eyes, and made sweeping gestures with the feather, barely missing one of the lighted altar candles. Lucy winced, despite the fact that the bruja knew every inch of the shop, and her precision was innate. Waving a feather so close to a lighted candle was partially a test, a show. Anyone who came into the shop thinking they could pull one over on the old lady in the motorized ’chair had another thing coming. They soon found out that when she needed to, Izel could walk, and that the cane resting by the counter could crack shins as well as heads. Izel could only walk in brief bursts, mind, but they didn’t need to know that.

  Lucy waited, breathing deeply now, allowing her ætheric body to expand, and her aura to grow lighter and more open. Whatever Tía Izel sought, the more accessible Lucy was, the more information or help she would receive. It was simple: the more shut down a person was, the harder it became to read the situation. So Lucy, keyed up for days now, called upon all of her training to help herself relax even more.

  “You need a bath,” Izel said, breaking the silence.

  “Excuse me?” Lucy stifled the urge to sniff her armpit.

  “In order to do this work, you must first cleanse all of the interference from your body and your soul.”

  The bruja’s eyes snapped open. “Pour one growler of dark beer into the water, and soak for at least half an hour, concentrating on becoming as clean and strong as you can.”

  Lucy had heard of beer baths, but never taken one before. They always sounded kind of disgusting. But Portland was full of locally made beer, often sold in refillable jugs called growlers, so at least procuring the necessary ingredient would be easy.

  “And then?” she asked.

  Izel motioned her closer, and tapped first one shoulder, then the other, with the vulture feather. Then she whisked the feather over the center of Lucy’s forehead, and gently touched it to the edges of each eye.

  “Then you call on the strength and patience of the vulture to pick through the rubble of the world that was, and shit it out, to fertilize the earth for the world to come.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lucy replied.

  Izel gripped Lucy’s jaw in her left hand. The hand looked soft, but Izel was strong and her grip bordered on painful.

  “You are not meant to understand, girl. You are meant to do!”

  She released Lucy’s jaw, pressed the wheelchair’s joystick, and whirred a foot backwards. Lucy swayed on her boots before righting herself again.

  “Now. Leave my shop. Come back only when you are clean and ready. I may have more for you then.”

  “Thank you.” Lucy bent and kissed the bruja on the cheek. For the first time, she caught the scent of death skirting the edges of the older woman’s skin. It startled her, but there was no time to think on that now.

  “Go with the blessings of the mother. And do exactly as I asked.”

  “Sí, Tía. I will. Gracias.”

  18

  Jack

  The Mercado was jumping, the way it always was during summer. Any chance a Portlander had to be in the sun, they took, even though summers had grown more and more punishingly hot in recent years. Luckily, the Mercado had big sheltered canopies, mostly in the form of a towering wooden shade structure that covered most of the picnic benches. The other tables were set either under the white temporary canopy or under the small shelter at the wine bar on the edge of the area where the food trucks were.

  That was where Jack sat, an array of Oaxacan tacos in blue corn tortillas, yuca frita from the Colombian cart, and two pint glasses of lager. The men who had thought to open up a wine and beer bar on the edge of the only truly Latin American food court in Portland were smart.

  Joe was Jack’s other neighbor, he lived on the other side of Raquel’s house. Raquel sometimes called them “J and J.” Joe was Cassiel’s boyfriend. She was another one of the witches. Cassie, Lucy, Alejandro, and the rest were all at some coven meeting. Brenda had said it was a big holy day or something.

  All Jack knew was it was still damn hot out, and he needed to get drunk. He didn’t often feel that way, but after today? More beer was exactly what he both wanted and needed. He’d already downed a pint while waiting for Joe to show up, then they’d gotten their food and Joe had headed off to wash his hands.

  Joe scooted onto the picnic bench across from Jack and hoisted his glass of lager, golden bubbles shining in the sun, and tipped it towards Jack, muscles and pale brown skin rippling slightly beneath the swirling tattooed half sleeve on his arm. The tattoos were some sort of traditional Pacific Island designs, and looked pretty cool. Joe was a handyman and builder who came by his muscles honestly. He didn’t need to puke himself sick like Jack was going to need to, if this current “get in fighting shape” mania continued. Jack liked him anyway. Beneath Joe’s cool dude exterior, he was actually just a regular guy.

  “To your health,” Joe said.

  “To your health,” Jack replied. They clicked their pint glasses and drank deeply. Crisp. Light. Delicious. The perfect beer to pound down after discovering an Irish God had blown up your computer displays and the woman you were hot for had raced out on you with barely a word.

  “So,” Joe said after chowing down on a steak taco, “I know something’s up, man. Not that I don’t like just hanging out with you, eating tacos and drinking beer, but you seem a little off. And it’s not like you to drink much on a weekday and you’ve already downed most of that, and I know you had one before I got here, man.”

  Joe nodded at Jack’s pint. Jack looked at the glass. It was already two thirds gone. He just shrugged and swallowed the rest before setting the pint glass down.

  “I really, really feel like getting drunk. And yeah, I need to talk to you about something. It’s going to sound really strange. I already started talking with Alejandro and Brenda, Lucy, too, but I need someone normal to run it by.”

  Jack was feeling buzzed and wondered if pounding two beers before even starting the conversation had been a mistake. He also knew, though, there was no way he was going to get through this conversation without the buzz, so what you do?

  Joe laughed and wiped his hands on a brown paper napkin and picked up a crispy piece of yuca frita.

  “I don’t know how normal I am. And I’ve seen some seriously weird shit since I started hanging with these witches, Jack. I mean, you know that Cassie talks to ghosts, right? I’ve seen some shit that’s real. So hit me, man. Whatever you
got, I probably heard it before.” Joe popped the fried cassava root into his mouth and chewed, then returned his attention back to the tacos, giving Jack a little space.

  Jack picked up one of his own tacos and bit into blue corn, chicken verde, and radish. Mercado tacos were the best.

  After both men had eaten for a minute, Jack wiped his hands on one of the brown paper napkins, and started wishing for another beer. Instead, he started talking.

  “Your phone powered off?”

  Joe pulled his phone out of his pocket, thumbed a couple of switches, and said, “It is now. What next?”

  Jack held out his little metal-lined bag and Joe slipped his phone in and handed it back to Jack, who slid the whole package into his lined messenger purse. He was glad Joe didn’t ask too many questions. It was one thing Jack liked about him.

  Jack exhaled and looked out across the crowd enjoying the summer sun, and Haitian food, Cuban food, food from Nicaragua and Mexico. A band was setting up under the white canopy now. It felt like a holiday despite being a work afternoon.

  No one was paying them any attention. That was good.

  “Is this about some hacking thing?” Joe’s voice was pitched below, just loud enough for Jack to hear over the buzz of the crowd. “You said you’d talked to Alejandro…”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. But it’s not really about computers. Or at least, I don’t think it is. I was coding today and…”

  “Just spit it out, man. Or hell, go get another beer if you need one that bad.” Joe took another huge bite of taco and, chewing, looked at Jack, and waved his hand as if to motion go on.

  Jack leapt up at that, and went to the bar, which amazingly wasn’t crowded at the moment. He paid for two more pints of lager and made his way back to the table outside.

  Sitting back down, Jack took a swallow of beer. Then another. He was seriously buzzed now, but actually felt steadier.