Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
“Lor, your home is utterly brimming with regret and pain and sick, sticky dark energy that needs to go.”
“Yes,” he agreed without hesitation.
“We need to fill it with light and positive energy, and it needs to be protected and blessed so that you, Cass, and James can thrive here.”
“And how do we do that?”
“First, I’m going to need you to take this,” I said, passing him one of the rosemary cleansing bundles I’d brought in from his car, “and second, you’ll need to light that, get some thick smoke going, then start in the basement and go up to the top floor and repeat the phrase love and light, light and love over and over as you go. Eventually, you’ll pass by Cass, who is doing the cleansing part to the blessing piece you’ll be doing. Each of you will go over where the other has just been. The house needs to get done, and this is the best way.”
“And what you mean by that is it’s best for us to do it instead of you.”
“Yes, that’s right,” I replied, so pleased with him for intuitively knowing that.
“It’s because we live here, not you.”
I was probably beaming at him like a simpleton, but I didn’t care. He really was quite extraordinary, and I needed to stop moving him back and forth in my mind from good guy to irritating guy. He needed to stay where he was, squarely in the amazing category. All things considered, it was time to trust him. “We’re also going to thank the house for sheltering all of you, but it’s got to be clean first before you can make friends. Do you understand?”
“No,” he replied honestly, giving me a lazy grin that made my stomach flip over. “But I don’t think I need to.”
Oh, how I appreciated his willingness to trust me as he used the lighter on the wand. It was smoking in seconds. “I need you to get every corner of every room, high and low.”
He nodded, then left me and his brother alone.
Closing my fist, extinguishing the fire, I took a seat on the coffee table and faced James.
“How come you need a lighter if you have fire in your hand?” he asked logically.
“That’s sacred fire, illuminating fire,” I explained. “I can use it to light my way, draw things from the darkness, but I can’t incinerate something with it. It’s not a fireball out of the movies to be hurled at my enemies, nor is it a Zippo lighter.”
He chuckled. “I’m losing my mind, right?” he asked sincerely, smiling and shaking his head. “I figured I’ve been going crazy for a while, and I finally—”
“No. What you’ve been doing is grieving, which I one hundred percent understand. You love and miss your wife. My grandfather was the same.”
He nodded.
“But do you know where you and my grandfather diverge in your grieving?”
“I can guess,” he whispered.
“When my grandmother passed, there was no one for me to lean on. We had kind neighbors, but no one at home, in our house, with me and him. He was all I had.”
“Sure.”
“I was nearly the same age as Cass,” I murmured, lighting the palo santo incense stick with the lighter he’d given me earlier. Once it had curls of smoke lifting into the air, I plunged it into the glass bottle and swirled it around. “So if he’d broken down, I would have been lost. He was my anchor.”
“Of course.”
“Even though he was grieving, he had to stay present for me.”
He nodded again as I lifted the stick out and held it between my fingers like a cigarette as I poured the rice into the bottle.
“I can hold that for you,” he offered.
“Thank you.” I passed him the stick, noting the shiver that ran through him the moment he took it from me. “Now, you know as well as I do that it’s been Lor who’s been caring for Cass, and while that’s been done out of kindness on his part, it’s also allowed you to retreat from the world.”
“It has,” he agreed, sitting up a bit straighter.
“You’re haunting this house, and you left him to do the heavy lifting with her, and I need to ask…would your wife want that?”
He exhaled deeply. “You have no idea what it’s like to lose the love of your life.”
“No, I don’t. But not living for your child seems selfish to me. It seems like she should be your first priority, not your own grief.”
He closed his eyes hard, and I let him sit there, inside himself, thinking, feeling, ruminating on all he was. I got up and carried the bottle full of rice to the front door, went outside, and set it to the side of the doorway, in the frame of one of the windows that were like decorative bookends.