Witches Read online

  Othernaturals Book Six:

  Witches

  Christina Harlin

  Author’s Edition

  Copyright 2019 Christina Harlin

  Visit the author at http://www.christinaharlin.com

  Cover Design: Yvonne Less @ www.art4artists.com.au

  Author’s Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  For the Hendrix family, whether they like it or not.

  Special thanks Jake and Bruce, extraordinary inventors of mountain ghost stories

  and Kaye, the best little editor ever.

  Prologue

  Beddes Hospital

  Oklahoma, 1989

  Kaye Vera Kohn Whittington was only 18 years old, yet she and her baby Milo were dying. If the doctors could get Milo out of her in time, they might at least save him. Kaye wanted to save Milo and herself too, but they were scaring her so badly now that she did not know what to do, or how to help. The freezing operating room terrified her with its looming lights. There were more people in here than she could understand the need for: her own obstetrician, an obstetrics specialist surgeon, three nurses, an anesthesiologist. That should have been six people, and yet twice that many rushing bodies were in the room, green surgical masks covering their faces, turning them all into beady-eyed goblins.

  Kaye was belted and strapped every which way, with monitors, and IVs, tubes and wires and tape. Because each one of these things monitored Milo, she held her panic at bay and suffered. They had tried to anesthetize her, but anesthetics would not knock her out, so violently was her adrenaline thrumming. They were performing a C-section with an epidural and even the epidural was going wrong. She felt like the lower half of her body was being roasted on a dull fire. Her head pounded so violently she could barely think.

  She heard alarming words from behind masks. “I can’t find the fetal heartbeat.” Another voice said, “Mom’s pressure is still rising.”

  When they said “Mom,” they were talking about her, a fact that seemed preposterous. They were frantic in this cold glaring room. Well good, finally, everyone was as frantic as she was, furious and frightened by their voices.

  A wave of movement through the room, and Kaye had the revolting sensation of her insides being shoved around. “There we go, we’ve got him.” She heard the angry wailing of a newborn, an enraged little person finding himself being passed around in this white cold place.

  That’s Milo, and he’s okay. This should have been an encouraging thought.

  One of the goblins shouted, “We’re hemorrhaging!” There was an audible gasp along with the sound of something thick splattering on the floor. Kaye knew with grim certainty that it was her own blood.

  How had that happened? Had she erupted like a volcano?

  Someone cried, “We’re losing her. We’re losing her!” Medical staff bunched around her in an imploring knot, blocking out the light. It didn’t matter. She had left her body and no longer needed to see.

  *****

  Eight months before, Kaye and her husband Martin held hands while they stared at the stick of a home pregnancy test together. Neither of them was yet old enough to order a beer – not that they would, they were Pentecostal Christians and did not drink. They had been married for only six weeks. They both came into marriage as virgins. No one had taught them anything much about sex and no one had taught them anything at all about birth control, so it was not surprising that their explorations together had resulted in pregnancy almost at once.

  Kaye was afraid that Martin would be scared or mad, becoming a father so soon after becoming a husband, but he was as excited as she was. Martin had scoffed at her worry. “I’m scared of nukes, not of babies.”

  Kaye knew that Martin wasn’t really scared of nukes, although they’d been raised hearing that the Russians were going to nuke the world. They didn’t really believe that God would let such a terrible thing happen. They shared many such earnest beliefs.

  Most important, Kaye believed in God’s plan for their lives just as faithfully as did her husband, though it seemed like everyone said they were too young to marry, and that life would be very hard on them. To Kaye, her union with Martin was inevitable. She had been solemnly in love with Martin Whittington since tenth grade when he’d asked to sit with her family at the Homecoming football game. In that night’s faint but constant rain, she’d seen droplets gathering in Martin’s dark blond hair and shining there making a halo almost as bright as his smile. Something in her heart had just buckled with happy certainty.

  She felt that buckling again, when the pink “plus” sign appeared in the pregnancy test stick.

  After that came the best five months of Kaye’s entire life. She and Marty, in their tiny apartment, with their tiny baby growing inside her, found everything to be funny, or dazzling, or lusty. Kaye felt beautiful and alight. Their sex life went from being fun and sweet to being sizzling hot. Marty went with her to the doctor to watch the sonogram. “It’s a boy,” said the technician, but Kaye had already known that. They short-listed names. Daniel, Adam, or maybe Timothy. They bought a used stroller and a new car seat.

  “We’re acting like we’re the first people to ever have a baby,” Kaye teased.

  Martin agreed, wondering, “Do you think our parents acted like this?” They couldn’t bear to imagine it.

  God’s plan for their lives was not what Kaye had assumed, however. One night Martin went out to get their dinner, promising to return with salty fries and a chocolate milkshake for Kaye. A confused madman came to the fast-food joint with a gun and the intention of killing his ex-wife, who worked there. Being drunk spoiled the man’s aim. In gunning for his former spouse he had shot four people. One of the victims died: nineteen year-old Martin Whittington, who was just standing in line. Martin was buried next to his great-grandparents, because his parents and grandparents were all still alive. People aren’t supposed to die when they are nineteen years old.

  People said a lot of things to Kaye after her husband was murdered. She remembered little of it, only that she was told she should be grateful to have Martin’s baby, a “piece of him to go on living.” Daniel, or Adam, or Timothy, now became Martin Jr. – whose choice had that been? - though Kaye could not say the name “Martin” aloud. She called the baby Milo for short, for comfort’s sake, her kicking hiccupping mystery-Milo. He was the only thing that mattered.

  Kaye didn’t cry, or sulk or grieve – no time for that. Martin had a modest life insurance policy through his job. Moving at the speed of honed denial, Kaye took half of it and made a down payment on a compact but well-built house. She paid for some Vo-Tech Nurse’s Aide classes with the rest. She worked herself morning to night with school and with preparing the little house for Milo. She told everyone that she was fine and strong. Everyone said she was brave. She claimed that God was with her, busying herself so thoroughly that she had no time to check the truth of that statement. She didn’t have a real, personal thought in her head for two months. Then one day as she was loading the dishwasher at her mother’s house, she fainted and her family could not rouse her, nor the paramedics who were summoned. Her blood pressure was so high they feared she could die at any moment. She woke in the hospital just in time for the doctor to tell her how much trouble she was really in.

  Kaye had been a buoyantly healthy girl all her life. Even her scrapes and bruises healed so fast that her family assumed God’s hand at
work on the child. Now her own body was self-destructing, taking Milo with it. No medicine they gave her could combat the fury of her own blood. She did not know how to fix herself. She was too young to understand that grief can’t be mended that way, too proud to admit that she was caving into despair. She’d never failed at anything before and this threat to Milo felt like the ultimate failure.

  The ob-gyn told her, “We can’t wait, young lady. You’ve got to have this baby now.” Seemingly without her consent or even her opinion, they started taping things to her that morning so Milo could be removed and brought into a dangerous and unfair world.

  *****

  Kaye felt dreamy and faraway and like she was dropping weights from her body and rising into the air. She separated herself from the chaos of the operating room. The noise was unbearable anyway and none of these goblins could help.

  Would she still go to heaven if she died now? Martin was supposedly in Heaven waiting for her. Shouldn’t that make her happy? She did not want to leave her Milo behind, and for the first time in weeks she also considered her own life, her own future, the rest of her family too. Weren’t there many good reasons to want to go on living? In this painful exhausted moment, everything felt impossible.

  “Kaye.”

  The voice spoke to her from the only empty corner of the room. There stood Martin. He wore the letterman’s jacket he’d earned for speech and debate. Right over his heart, a bullet hole was burned through his shirt, and presumably the through flesh underneath. She winced at the sight of it, though it seemed just an afterthought to him. His face shone beautiful and yet a bit distant, so a shot of uneasiness lanced through her. Had he already forgotten her? He couldn’t have, or he wouldn’t be here.

  Without precisely moving, she was suddenly at Martin’s side and gazing at him. She asked in wonder, “Are you in Heaven?”

  Martin put his arms around her, his ghost and her ghost embracing so hard that most of the noise of the operating room disappeared. He said, with disconcerting furtiveness, “It’s not like they said it would be. It’s different, and bigger, and stranger than you could ever even imagine. But it’s not for you, not yet. Lookee there.”

  If she’d doubted for a moment that this was really Martin, the “lookee there” cemented her certainty that her dead husband truly stood before her. The colloquialism almost made her laugh, a miracle on this awful day. She “look-eed,” followed his gesture across the room and saw in the corner that two nurses were caring for a wrapped bundle of bossy, angry, flailing fists. Both nurses looked in distress from the baby who, freed of his mother’s failing body, was strong and lively, to Kaye’s bloodily ruptured, lifeless form.

  Kaye despaired but Martin said, “You can heal yourself. You still have a chance.”

  Shame was a new emotion for her. Still, she admitted, “It’s too much. I’m too tired.”

  The faintly disconnected concern in Martin’s face changed to faintly disconnected surprise. “I’ve never heard you say you couldn’t do something.”

  “I’m sorry. I want to. But I don’t know how.”

  “They don’t know how.” Martin’s derision had a note of humor to it, as he indicated the scrambling goblins, doctors and nurses who, for all their medicine and technology, could not stop her terrible blood loss, which her skyrocketing blood pressure had made all the worse. The rupture was too deep inside her; they’d have to open her to reach it and there was no time for that. Kaye understood instinctively what was wrong.

  “That needs to be mended fast,” said Marty, “and there’s only one person here who can do that. My Kaye won’t go out this way.”

  So he said, but reality was growing distant. Now it seemed as if she stared down a narrow hallway with a frantic operating room at the end, and the hallway was creeping and growing longer.

  She felt his hold on her loosen. She begged, “Please don’t leave me.”

  He was already leaving, though. The moment he released her, she was no longer standing beside him. Back inside her failing body, she was jarred by the difference, the darkness.

  She could hear him still, and Martin spoke firmly, urgently. “Do it now, Kaye. You won’t fail because you can’t. It’s your last chance.”

  She had a thousand questions, but only time for one. She desperately cried after him, “Will I find you again someday?”

  “You won’t need to,” was his confident, and ever-after mysterious and perplexing, answer.

  So, failure was not an option today. When she called on some deep, hidden well of nearly terrifying power within herself, when the healing exploded from her and burned the hands of those who touched her, she thought she heard Martin’s satisfied laughter. Later, a spooked nurse with a hushed voice told Kaye about the events in the operating room and divulged, with a sideways glance, that it was Kaye herself who had been laughing.

  *****

  Twenty-six years later, Kaye was brought back a second time from a close brush with death. This second time bore some rather eerie similarities to the first: she was bleeding out, she was able to heal herself at the last minute, and she was coaxed back from the brink by a man she loved. The second time, her throat had been torn out by a preta zombie. Rather than a hospital operating room, she’d been on the floor of Irving Howell’s cabin in the Colorado Rockies; rather than a staff of hospital goblins, she was surrounded by the Othernaturals team. The man shouting for her to heal herself was Stefan McCandless instead of the ghost of her dead husband.

  Since Martin had died, Kaye had led an active casual dating life. She’d always had plenty of attention from men when she wanted it, and a few sexual relationships that were quick, clean and unimportant. But nothing had ever made her feel like a cheater until she let another man coax her back from death – as if poor long-lost Martin would begrudge her second revival. This little pang of guilt, much like Martin’s visit to her on the night of Milo’s birth, was a secret she kept to herself.

  Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

  April, 2015

  Four weeks after Kaye had almost died from a preta zombie attack, she was a picture of health and giddy joy, waiting in the terminal of the Will Rogers Airport for Milo to appear among the crowd. The plane landed right on time, thank God; she was already loopy with excitement to see her honey-bunny and delay would have been miserable. Travelers trundled down the walkway dragging their rolling cases, adjusting backpacks, scanning the crowd for people they knew. It was a Thursday morning so many of the flyers were attired for business with serious expressions to match. Still, Kaye watched some scattered happy reunions: a kissing couple; a tall teenage daughter waving her arms in the air as her even-taller dad emerged; a mother and a small child rushing into the arms of some cooing grandparents.

  Nobody made quite as much noise as Kaye Whittington, who ordinarily considered herself above public shouting but couldn’t keep from shrieking in excitement when she saw her son step from the shadowy tunnel. She dashed to him laughing at herself, at the surprise on his face. His mom yelling in an airport? He’d never imagined! Just as she prepared to apologize for making a ruckus Milo caught her around the waist, picked her up and spun her around, her momentum and his strength twirling them a second time until they were both laughing. It was fortunate they didn’t knock anyone over. They hadn’t seen each other in person in seven months, the longest separation they’d ever had.

  “Hugs, hugs!” she cried, clutching him. “Oh look at you, you’re just gorgeous!”

  Milo held her at arm’s length. “You look great too! You’ve changed your hair a little bit.”

  “So have you.” She touched his wiry black locks, which hung nearly to his shoulders.

  “No, just no time for a haircut in months.”

  Milo was a surgical intern that year, and he had little time for anything but work. Kaye could see the stress of it cut into his beautiful face, making him look like more of an adult man than he ever had before.

  Though she’d always hoped he’d grow into the image
of his father, instead in almost every way Milo looked like her: he was tall and deep-chested, fair-skinned, hair black as a raven’s wing and eyes of only a shade darker green than her own. He was so handsome that people turned to watch him. They might well watch, but she was his mother, and she noticed at once that he was too thin for his rangy frame. He looked tired, but in a gratified way. She was ridiculously proud of him, ridiculously worried about him, ridiculous over her Milo in just about every way. They spoke each week on the phone – Milo was dependable in that – but talking wasn’t the same as getting her arms around him. This was her baby. They had been a duo all his life. He was on a long weekend, five days off in a row: his first days off in months. He had come home for his 27th birthday.

  They chattered all the way through the airport. He’d been afraid yesterday that he’d get snagged for on-call duty this weekend but luckily his boss liked him and had a little mercy. He’d had no time to do any laundry, though. He’d brought her a present – no, she must wait until they got back home. Kaye played it cool as they strolled across the roof of the parking garage. Milo was clearly scanning the cars for her reliable Volvo, and when she opened the trunk of a slick, candy-red convertible, he did a double-take.

  Even in jest, lying to Milo had always been impossible for her. “It’s just a rental. But I thought it would be cool for the weekend.”

  “Let me drive it!” he asked.

  “That depends on whether you’ve remembered to keep your driver’s license current.”

  For a moment he was confused. She’d done what she could to teach him how to live on his own, but between his schooling, internships and his general male-ness, there were things that slipped through the cracks. He pulled out his wallet and checked. “Ha! It doesn’t expire until next year. You thought you had me on that one.”