An hour and a half later, after spending a good third of that window aimlessly driving back and forth inside the labyrinth of unmarked streets just outside of Bozeman, Lilah finally noticed the one landmark they’d been missing: a narrow side road that snaked across one of the many pine-covered hilltops, eventually connecting with the street below. There was no signage to indicate the turnoff from the main street, and the inconspicuous gravel road – which was clandestinely tucked between sprawls of drooping pines – was almost completely blanketed by fresh snow.
“This has to be it,” Jace said, gripping the wheel as the truck tires spun through the slush.
“I don’t understand why none of these streets have signs,” Lilah grumbled, clinging to the grab handle above her head with both hands.
“Or numbers.”
“If this road doesn’t lead to 291 Ashbury Lane, I give up.”
Jace glanced at the dashboard. “I don’t want you to have to give up, but I will have to head back into town if we don’t find this house soon,” he said, tapping the fuel gauge. “Otherwise we might be pushing the truck to the nearest gas station.”
“Look over there!” Lilah cried, pointing to a lopsided wooden sign that had been nailed to a dead tree on the side of the road. Its brown paint was cracked and peeling, but the numbers clearly read 291, with an arrow pointing up. “Judging by the muddy tire tracks heading in that direction, it looks like there’s a little dirt path. Just to the left of the sign,” she added.
“I won’t be able to take the truck on that,” Jace frowned. “It’s too narrow. And with all that snow and ice, I’m worried we might spin out… Are you okay to foot it up the hill?”
Lilah glanced at the new boots her father had gotten her for Christmas. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
A fresh wave of anxiety gripped her stomach as she regarded the snow-covered forest outside her window and wondered what exactly the thick copse of trees was hiding within. Don’t chicken out now, she admonished herself. You’ve already dragged him all this way.
Jace pulled onto the side of the muddy road, parking as close to the trees as he could without tipping the entire truck into the steep ditch that separated the forest from the makeshift gravel road.
“Here, come out on my side,” he said, offering his hand to Lilah once they’d parked.
She took it shyly as she crawled over the console, nimbly balancing on one knee as she reached behind her to grab her backpack from the seat. She tugged on it and frowned; one of the nylon straps had caught on the gearbox. As she yanked on the bag to shake it free, she lost her balance, spilling headfirst out of the cabin and right on top of Jace, who toppled backwards and into a tall heap of powdery snow.
“Oh god! I’m so sorry!” Lilah cried, trying to scramble to her feet. “Are you okay? Is your ankle okay?”
From beneath her, Jace was laughing. “There’s so much snow in my pants! I can’t feel my ass!”
Lilah burst out laughing as she tried to help him to his feet. But as she tugged, her boots slid out from under her legs and within moments, they were both on the ground again, covered in more snow than before. They lay side by side for a long moment, wheezing hysterically.
When she eventually hoisted herself on an elbow to try and sit up, Lilah found herself mere centimeters from Jace’s face. A dusting of snowflakes had covered his sandy blond hair, and his cheeks were red from laughter. As he grinned up at her, his blue eyes even more piercing than usual against the white snow, her laughter abruptly stopped.
Kiss him! a voice in her head shouted, startling her with its intensity.
Are you nuts? another voice shouted back. Don’t even think about it!
“Can I ask you something?” she blurted out.
Jace nodded. “Yeah, anything.”
“You and Benny’s sister—” she started, then snapped her mouth shut. The warring factions in her head were going crazy: Go ahead, ask him! No – you’ll ruin everything! As a result of that internal argument, a long pause dangled awkwardly in the frigid air between them.
What the hell is wrong with you? A third voice shouted. Don’t just stare at him like a goat!
Jace cleared his throat. “If you’re asking about Nikki, she’s just a friend. She and Benny live across the street from me and they’ve been giving me some, um… advice… recently.”
“Oh,” Lilah replied dumbly. As an elated shiver ran down her back, it suddenly occurred to her that they were still lying in the snow – which was starting to seep into the seat of her pants. She scrambled to her feet, dusting the snow from her backside. “Here, sorry, let me help you,” she said, extending a hand.
“Thanks,” he smiled, taking it. As soon as he stood up, she dropped his hand and shyly looked away.
“I’d better get my stuff,” she mumbled, walking over to the truck to gather her backpack from the front seat. When she slung it over her shoulder and turned around, Jace was standing in front of her. Their eyes locked as he started to say something, but a deep voice cut him off.
“Can I help you?”
The two of them jumped as a man appeared between the trees. He was middle-aged and slender, with long, gray-streaked hair that hung limply across his shoulders. Despite the chill, the man wore only a purple t-shirt, thin, khaki-colored harem pants, and, to Lilah’s surprise, no shoes. As he approached the truck where they stood, she watched, mesmerized, as he wiggled his bare toes in the freshly fallen snow.
“Coldness is but an earthly affliction,” he sniffed, following her gaze. “The spirit need not heed such corporeal ailments.”
Lilah let out a small gasp. “M-Mike Hastings?”
“That is my name, in this reincarnation, at least.” He clasped his hands together pleasantly. “Now then, I had a vision of two sets of callers today. Are you the malignant visitors or the benign ones?”
“B-Benign, I think,” Lilah replied, taking a step closer to Jace. He was gripping the open truck door as if he were thinking about leaping back inside.
“Yes, I should say so,” the shaman said, eyeing her up and down. “After all, you both seem substantial enough – much unlike the disgruntled spirit who made quite the racket last night… So, how might I be of assistance?”
Lilah and Jace exchanged nervous glances.
“We, uh, we were wondering if we might ask you some questions,” Lilah said, hearing her own teeth chattering against the cold.
“Ah, yes, you seek my counsel. Of course. Follow me to my domicile and we shall address whatever ails you over tea.” With that, he turned and walked up the snowy hill, leaving nothing but bare footprints in his wake.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Jace whispered, still gripping the door handle as he watched the man disappear into the forest.
“No,” Lilah replied.
“Come along,” Mike called through the trees. “In anticipation of your arrival, I’ve already set some Reishi and limeflower tea on the stove.”
With one last helpless glance at Jace, Lilah slung her backpack over her shoulders and traipsed up the hill after the shaman. After a moment’s hesitation, Jace slammed the truck door shut and hurried after her, shoving his frost-nipped hands in his pockets while muttering protests under his breath.
Lilah nervously pretended to sip her tea, trying not to think back to the Dateline episodes her father had made her watch about stranger danger. She found herself scooting closer to Jace on the small, patchwork couch they shared, while a serene-looking Mike Hastings sat across from them on an old wooden rocking chair, warming his bare feet near the woodburning stove that sat in the center of the room. The three of them had been sitting in uncomfortable silence for several minutes by that point, and Lilah had begun darting nervous glances around the room from the corner of her eye.
In her entire life, she had never seen a house like the shaman’s; for one, there were no dividing walls to separate the rooms, so everything from the bedroom to the kitchen was haphazardly jumbled together. Yet it wasn’t the layout of the house that was most peculiar, but rather the bizarre contents it housed inside. The far-left corner of the cabin boasted a towering four-post canopy bed made from the boughs of four coarse pine trees. The shaman had left their topmost branches intact, draping them with rainbow-colored scarves, garlands of herbs and dried flowers, and long strings of multicolored glass beads. Directly beside the outlandish bedstead was an olive-green refrigerator and a small oven. The oddest smells were wafting from the pots that simmered on the stovetop – some of which Lilah was able to identify as molasses, patchouli oil, pine needles, onion, peppermint, and bacon. It was a combination of smells that Lilah had never smelled before and never wanted to smell again.
From the bed to the “kitchen” to the couch, every inch of the cabin’s four walls was covered in parchment: there were posters of stallions galloping alongside majestic waterfalls, inked charts depicting the human body and its seven chakras, and hand-drawn pictures of various plant leaves and stems. Where the shaman had run out of room, he simply layered pictures and prints on top of each other. And the bookshelves! Made from raw pine, they towered against the longest wall beside the couch, from dusty floor to wood-vaulted ceiling, filled with thick, leather-bound journals, glass jars with dried mushrooms, wooden plaques with pinned insects and reptiles, dusty mineral specimens and colored crystals, and a half-dozen incense burners that all had thin coils of smoke rising up from them, each with a different scent that lambasted Lilah’s eyes and sinuses. She wasn’t the only one who felt discomfort; beside her, poor Jace kept stifling a cough into his jacket sleeve.
“You need to protect your energy field,” Mike remarked suddenly.
“Sorry?” Jace replied, smothering another wheezing cough against the inside of his elbow.
“Your Solar Plexus Chakra is clearly out of balance, leaving your entire energy field vulnerable to negative chi,” he explained, sipping on his Reishi-and-limeflower tea matter-of-factly.
“That or all the smoke in here is irritating my bronchial tubes,” Jace muttered.
“Nonsense. Lobelia and licorice are natural asthma remedies,” Mike said amiably. He shifted his weight in the chair, focusing his attention back on Lilah. “Now, tell me what ails you, child. I sense you have sought me for a reason.”
“You don’t say,” Jace mumbled under his breath.
Lilah shifted in her own seat uncomfortably, wishing there was some place to dump her untouched tea. It smelled vaguely like Pine Sol and was making her eyes water.
“Well, you see, Mr. Hastings—” she began.
“Please, call me Shaman – or Shaman Mike, if you prefer.”
Jace stifled a snort, which turned into another small coughing fit.
With a sideways grimace and a heavy sigh, Lilah pulled her backpack onto her knees, then fished out the stack of papers about Willow and Celeste. “Shaman Mike, we were wondering if you could tell us anything about these two women,” she said, stretching out her hand to pass him the articles.
“Hmm,” he said, taking the pages. As he ruffled through them, a small line began to form between his eyebrows. “Oh yes… ohh, yes.”
Lilah leaned forward excitedly, but Mike offered nothing further. After a moment, she cleared her throat.
“I remember Celeste and her daughter as though I had spoken to them yesterday,” he replied, thrusting the pages back at Lilah. “Something terrible haunted those poor women – something not even I could rectify.”
“What was it?” Lilah asked.
The shaman leaned back in his chair, rocking himself gently with his bare toes. “The woman had her own ailments, to be sure, but it was her daughter who needed my intensive therapies. The poor girl suffered from hysteria, rigidity, hallucinations – all symptoms of an imbalanced Sacral Chakra. I gave her all the usual remedies, my best salves and unguents that had worked for similar patients time and time again.” His eyes grew glassy and far away as he spoke, and he absentmindedly stirred his mug, though he had long ago drained it of its last drop of tea. “But there was something else that ailed her, something her mother took great care to hide from me… If only they hadn’t shielded me from the root of things for so long. I could have intervened. Perhaps even prevented them from meeting such a dire end—”
Lilah leaned forward in her chair. “Does that mean you know what happened to them? Or where they are now?”
“Oh, I tried to contact their spirits using every method possible. Pentagrams, planchettes, selenite crystals… nothing worked. It was as though they were neither in this plane nor the next. But of one thing I am sure – they are no longer of this Earth.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Jace snapped. “The papers say they never found them – dead or alive.”
Shaman Mike shot him a frosty look. “When you have practiced mysticism for as long as I have, you simply know.”
“Yes, but—”
“Would you like some more tea?” Mike interjected. “It’s good for hypertension and woefully malcontent spirits, such as yours.”
Jace did little to hide his scowl as he used his elbow to push his untouched mug of tea to the far corner of the end table.
“As you wish,” the shaman acquiesced, refilling his own mug from the lopsided clay teapot beside his chair.
“Do you have any other information on them?” Lilah pressed. “Any notes you might have taken – maybe a home address?”
“Information on whom?”
“Willow and Celeste!” she replied, stifling an exasperated huff with gritted teeth.
“I have maintained meticulously-detailed notebooks for every client I’ve ever seen,” Mike sniffed, rising to walk over to the bookshelves. As if to demonstrate, he swept a hand across a shelf that was loaded with dozens of dusty spines, eventually pulling out a brightly colored spiral notebook with a flourish. He sat back in his chair, gripping the notebook in his lap as he surveyed Lilah with narrowing eyes. “The question I shall now pose to you is this: what is compelling to you about these particular women? Surely they disappeared before you were even born.”
Lilah wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I guess I just took an interest in their story,” she offered, hearing the feebleness in her own words. She could see the gears turning in Shaman Mike’s mind; her window of opportunity to get information was rapidly closing. She licked her lips anxiously before countering with one final question of her own.
“When you were at their house, did either of them mention anything about a baby?”
The shaman stared at her a long time before answering. Finally, he leaned back in his chair, inclining his head slightly as he spoke. “Why would you ask me that?”
She set her cold tea on the floor. “Because I’m pretty sure Willow was my mother.”
The shaman’s eyes grew wide. “What did you say?” he whispered. As he scrambled to his feet, the rocking chair he had been sitting on nearly flipped over backwards.
Lilah had the sensation of something cold trickling down her back. This was not going the way she’d anticipated.
Meanwhile, the shaman had started whispering to himself furiously, reciting some sort of incantation as though a balloon were deflating through his lips.
“Ah Kha Sama Ranza Shanda Rasa Maraya Phet!”
“What?” Lilah asked, sharing a dumbfounded look with Jace. “What are you—"
“It would seem I was mistaken,” Mike hissed, cutting off both Lilah and his susurrating mantra mid-sentence.
“Mistaken about what?” At this point, she was doing everything she could to keep her voice calm and steady. Beside her, Jace had risen to his feet. He took a deliberate step to wedge himself between Lilah and the shaman, who suddenly had a frantic look in his eyes.
“You are the malignant visitor,” he croaked. “And you must leave – this very moment.”
“But—” Lilah started, rising from the couch.
“Leave, now!” the shaman barked.
Jace put a protective hand on her shoulder. “Lilah, come on. Get your things.”
As she scrambled to grab her backpack from the floor, her knee caught the mug of tea she had set on the ground, sending brown liquid pooling across the shaman’s rug. She tried to grab the cup before the rest of the contents could pour out of it, but her fingers slipped on the wet ceramic, sending the mug clattering to the floor where its handle broke cleanly off. She whipped her head up just in time to see the shaman angrily fling his own mug of tea to the ground, where it shattered all over his intricately woven rug.
“GET OUT!”
Still kneeling on the ground, Lilah let out a yelp and covered her face. Jace could only watch in horror as the shattered fragments of ceramic resting at Mike’s bare feet flew back together, brown liquid sloshing back into it as though pulled by some invisible force. Tendrils of white steam rose from the boiling liquid as though it had just been poured from the kettle.
“No,” Lilah whispered, staring at the mug with glassy eyes. “Please – not now.” She clutched her hands against her head to try and ward off whatever was happening inside of it, but it was no use. It felt like an electrical storm was raging inside of her skull, crackling in her ears.
Jace dropped to the ground beside her. “Lilah! What’s happening? Please – tell me what to do!”
“Take my hand,” she whispered.
She felt his warm fingers squeeze against hers right as darkness fell.