Page 38 of A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums

I tried to drink fast, but the stuff still steamed. No matter. I chugged and gulped until I’d finished every drop.

“Good, good… close your eyes,” she directed. I closed my eyes. “Now take slow, even breaths in and out.” Right. In and out. I breathed, feeling a calm wash over me as soft words in some distant, foreign language reached my ears, knowing that Agatha spoke those words. “I need you to dial back the years as if flipping back a calendar.”

In my mind, I pictured a calendar, flipping back in time.

“I need you to go back to when you were born.”

The calendar flipped back through the years until I reached the time of my birth, or, I thought it was my birth. It looked well past my twenty-five years in a time period I failed to identify. A woman with raven hair, brown eyes, and a smile full of love held me in her arms. She spoke in a language I didn’t speak, yet I understood her.

“My Simone,” she said. Okay, well, she definitely used my name. A man stood next to the woman, one arm wrapped lovingly around her, the other brushing gently over my head looking down on me with his warm brown eyes. His hair he wore long. The brown strands tied back with a strap. He and the woman and I all shared the same tan skin tone. They made such a handsome couple. All I felt was love until suddenly, the man and woman whipped their heads up, fear on their faces.

The woman I’d spoken to in my dream stepped into the movie frame playing in my mind. “They’re coming. Get her out.”

Then a different man’s voice filled the room. “Give the babe over.”

The man I knew to be my father charged, the woman I’d spoken to in my dream grabbed me from my mother, and then we were surrounded by darkness, as if we’d traveled through a dark tunnel.

An explosion ripped through the room. My eyes opened in time for me to see splinters of wooden door shrapnel flying at Agatha and me. Connor dropped his man form, charging the intruder, whom I couldn’t see because I was trying to keep the wood from getting in my eyes.

Agatha’s eyes glowed warm orange, the color of flames, but she didn’t wield fire. The tea made me too sluggish to move with enough effectiveness to help them out. Still, I managed to think that Connor, Agatha, and I needed to get out of there.

The next thing I knew, the three of us landed by the base of a tree just inside the woods at the back of Agatha’s property. I saw the house in the distance.

“How did we get here?” Agatha asked.

“I told you I can manifest,” I said. “I thought that we needed to get out of there.”

She looked at me in amazement. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No spells. No chants. No teas or tinctures? You certainly have witch power, but you are no witch.”

“Well, we already knew that.”

“Did you see anything?” she asked.

“I saw my mother and father. But it felt like a time way in the past. So it couldn’t have been me or my parents. The woman I talked to in my dream showed up. Someone attacked and she grabbed me from my mother, then we were surrounded by blackness. That’s the last thing I saw.”

“Does it trouble anybody else that at the moment Simone is attacked in her memory, we were attacked here?” Connor asked.

Yes. That troubled me. It also troubled me that Agatha was seeing my mate naked.Connor needs clothing,I thought and it took everything I had to try to make that happen but I couldn’t. Agatha’s tea packed a punch.

“Someone is following you, Simone,” she added. “You and Connor. You can’t go home.”

“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked.

“Whoever they are, they know I tried to help you now. It’s not safe for us to keep going.”

“Then we’re back to square one,” I said, sighing.

“No. You need to go talk to my ancestor.”

“Your ancestors? How would I go about that?”

“Get to Ireland. I’ll tell you whom you need to seek out. She’s a relative and she’ll help you reach the ancestors. Do you have your phone?”

I fished into my pocket to pull out my phone, unlocking it for her, then handing it over. She opened the note app and typed out a name, then handed it back to me.

“Now, go.”

I looked down at the name and tried to manifest us out of that treeline.

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