The Old

“We’ll drive you back to college,” Lewis said. “If you want. You’re on the way back home.”

“Thank you,” Loreal said. Her head was on her cousin’s shoulder. “I can’t go back tonight. No one’s going to understand.”

“No, no, of course,” Lewis said. “That’s why I said we’ll take you back. We’re all staying. We can take you back tomorrow or the day after.”

“You’ll bring me back for Nine Night, right?”

“Of course.”

“Grandma said I need to be a priestess. She said I need to be initiated, or none of it, none of what she did will mean anything.”

“What she did,” Lewis said, “her blessing, it may turn on you without proper training.”

“Will you initiate me?”

“Me or Owen. It is time for you to be taken into the clan. At the moment I am training Seth as well.”

“That’s the thing,” Loreal said. “I know everyone has a grandma that dies, but right now I just feel like no one would understand. But what she did, the change. I can feel it, and I feel different, different from all the other people I know, like I only make sense here with you all. I feel too different and too strange right now to go back to campus.”

“Of course you do,” Lewis said.

“I’m so tired,” Loreal said, “I don’t even know what to think.”

“Go rest,” Lewis said. “Go to your room and take a sleep. Owen’s going to go out and get dinner.”

“When I wake up, will I feel better?”

“You’ll feel better than if you hadn’t slept.”

When she awoke, she could hear singing downstairs. It was low and stately and strangely jubilant, and there were no instruments. She lay on the bed, blinking up at the ceiling and listened to them down below.

“Come, come with me out to the old churchyard
I so well know those paths 'neath the soft green sward
Friends slumber in there that we want to regard
We will trace out their names in the old churchyard.”

She rose from bed lightly, almost like flying, but there was that moment of remembrance, when she came out of her reverie and was struck by the sadness of Grandmother’s death. The moment she awoke she felt less tired, clear headed, sitting in the dark bedroom she’d always had in her grandmother’s house.

As she walked out of the dark room and down the darkened hallway, she could hear them singing and there was a light on in the hallway and one in the old bathroom, but out of all the darkened bedrooms, a low light came from her grandmother’s, which she entered while the singing from downstairs moved through the floors.

”Mourn not for them, their trials are o'er
And why weep for those who will weep no more
For sweet is their sleep, though cold and hard
Their pillows may be in the old churchyard!”

The family had cleaned the room and changed the sheets and made the bed, and on the comforter of the bed, hands at her sides, in a white gown, white hair fanned out across the pillow lay Susanna Dunharrow. Noble she seemed, and full of power, merely in a deep rest. A candle burned on the table at the side of the bed, and another tall taper before the great dressing table, reflected in its mirror. They must have all done this while she was asleep, and though Loreal had to look, she did not have to stay, and she bowed to her grandmother, and then turned to go downstairs.

“….And I know that the joy of life is marred
When we follow lost friends to the old churchyard.”

The room was filled. Not only were Lewis and Owen, Seth, Mother and Eve there, but neighbors from all around, and the friends of her grandmother and some who looked, like Grandmother had, wild and of the country, more at home in the trees than in the cities, both black and white and some neither. Which of these were witches, Loreal could not say. But as Lewis, beside Seth, raised his glass, then, in a high tenor sang, she remembered her grandmother saying, “Without initiation, my blessing means nothing.”

Owen got up and moved around the group of mourners sitting in the candle lit room singing and passing bourbon about, and came to Loreal.

“There is chicken in the kitchen, with potatoes and biscuits, and if you don’t feel up to it, there is soup and a macaroni casserole too.”

“I don’t really feel up to anything,” Loreal admitted.

“Well, that’s fine too,” Owen said.

Loreal looked around.

“Where’s Eve?”

“Oh,” Owen said with disapproval, “she’s gone. She had other things to do. She’ll be back for the funeral after Nine Night.”

Loreal felt the same disapproval, but she only said. “I think I need to go outside. I feel hot in here.”

Owen nodded and kissed her on the cheek.

She sat outside on the back porch, and for just a moment she started. Then she shook her head. She had taught herself to take serious so many illusions. Her grandmother had said illusions were how the truth that did not want to be seen looked, and for a moment she had seen a man sitting outside plain as anything before she realized it was the old dead lamp post, and its shadow on the old bench in the yard.

She checked the messages on her phone and saw one from TJ. That was just this morning, and it was now late Sunday night. Only a few hours ago she had been in a car with Eve, on her way here believing but not quite believing that her grandmother was almost gone, and a few hours before that, she had not even suspected she would be here. She had left TJ in Merlin Hall and gone to bed.

“I have so much to tell you!” the first excited message came. “I mean, not so much, but it’s a big deal, and it’s about last night.”

And then the next message said, “Hello! Hello! Loreal. Where are you?”

Shit. She had meant to leave a message, but her tiredness and her preoccupation had driven it from her mind, and now there was another message from TJ.

“Loreal, if I don’t hear from you, I’m going to call the cops.”

He sounded in equal parts angry and concerned, and this was followed by a message from Meghan.

She couldn’t talk right now, so she texted TJ.

“I had to leave. My sister came to get me. I’m at my Grandma’s house. She just died. I’m sorry I forgot to message you. I’ve been asleep half the day. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Let Meg and the girls know. Love, L.”

Only a moment later her phone whistled with a response, but she didn’t feel like reading it right now. Instead she sat in the dark, and now she looked at the black bench. As she sat staring, she reminded herself of what Grandma had said and how Grandma would also say, “Sometimes we agree to illusions because we are afraid.”

As she looked on the bench, slowly what she had first seen resolved itself into a tall man in black with a slender white face and pale hair, and Loreal told him, for his eyes were downcast, “I can see you, so you can look at me.”

When he did, she suppressed her fear over a power she had not possessed before, and over the power this creature had to hide himself so well. She rose, and she said, “You may come forward.”

Her thin voice seemed more like a little girl’s than ever. She added, “It would be best if you did.”

“I can come forward, young witch,” she said, “but only so far, for this is a house that is not yet yours, and it is not yours to invite me in.”

“Then you a vampire,” she said simply.

“I prefer the term drinker.”

“Why are you here?” Loreal asked, and realized she was no longer hiding fear. She was not afraid.

“I am with a friend. He is inside. He knows I am out here, and outside shall remain.”

“A friend? One of my cousins?”

“Three of them, actually,” he said, “Seth and Owen know me as well as Lewis.”

“Then…” Loreal cocked her head, “My Uncle Owen… he’s my cousin really, he could have let you in. I think. He’s the closest thing to an owner of this house now.”

She said this because she was still suspicious, even though she sensed that the creature could not harm her.

“It’s not only that,” he said. “This is a house of death. Death is something I cannot do, and so I am forbidden from entering it because of that. A woman has died here. She had given up her place in this world and is in the process of moving to the next. It is a sacred thing, and the opposite of what I do. So I am forbidden entering.”

“By whom?”

“By his own taboo,” a voice spoke from behind her, the first voice that actually had frightened her.

“Lewis!”

“They have their rules as we have ours,” Lewis said. “And to respect them, I must stay somewhere else tonight. I am staying with Chris at the hotel down the road. I will be back in the morning.”

“Chris?” Loreal said.

Chris nodded.

She stepped down the from the porch into the yard and offered her hand.

“Loreal.”

He took it, and then kissed it.

“So,” Loreal turned from him to Lewis, “The two of you?”

“Yes,” Lewis said.

“I didn’t even know there were real vamp—drinkers,” she said

“Neither did I,” Lewis said. “And yet, as soon as I met ChrisI knew what he was, and I wasn’t surprised. It was the strangest thing.”

“Yes,” Loreal said. “That’s how I felt too.”.

Lewis was about to tell his cousin goodnight when he sensed that she had something to say or something to ask.

“You two will come back in the morning, right?”

“Of course we will.”

It was Chriswho spoke.

“You love him,” Loreal said, slipping her phone into her pocket.

“I think that means that he should come into the house no matter what his customs are. He is family.”

Lewis could not read the look on Chris’s face, but Loreal continued, “You have to understand, In my whole life Lewis has never brought anyone to a family gathering, I mean, we’re witches. We really don’t like other people, so if you’re here, you must be family.”