Divine by Blood

“And here it is. All my weirdness. Chronicled for the enjoyment of the masses.” She bowed her head and waved her hands, as if accepting grateful accolades from a crowd. “No…no…your applause is too much. Really.”

“Morgie! Hon! Do you need some help in there?”

“Grandma, no! I’m fine.”

“Want a glass of sweet tea?”

Morrigan sighed again, but she smiled and made sure the smile touched her voice. “No, Grandma. Don’t worry. I’ll be done in here in a little while.”

“Okay, well, your friends will be here pretty soon. So if you need me to help you—”

“Mama Parker, leave the girl alone. If she said she’s fine, she’s fine…”

Morrigan giggled at her grandpa’s gruff voice and at her grandma’s soft reply. G-pa always seemed to know when she needed some time to herself. Not that she didn’t love her grandma and appreciate her. But G-ma tended to…well…hover. And an eighteen-year-old girl who was packing to go away to college didn’t need hovering. Or at least not all the time.

She picked up another journal and thumbed through it restlessly. It was hard to think about going away, though. Sure, Oklahoma State University wasn’t that far away. Only about an hour and a half. But it wasn’t here. It wasn’t home. And she’d have to meet new people. Make new friends. Morrigan frowned. She just wasn’t good at that. New people didn’t get her. She tended to be shy and quiet. People misunderstood that and assumed she was stuck up. So she felt like she always had to force herself to act against her personality—to smile and say hi when she just wanted to sit in the background and watch what was going on until she felt comfortable joining in. That’s why she’d gotten into drama. She’d even been in several of the school plays. She and Grandpa had come up with the plan in middle school that she should take Intro to Drama so that she could learn to “act” in her daily life.

Okay, it sounded wrong and kinda even deceptive. But it wasn’t. Morrigan had needed a way to fit in. And not just for herself. It was important to her grandparents that she had friends. That she acted normal. Even though she wasn’t. They understood her. But no one else really did.

So she’d learned to act. And she got into dance and made the Tigette Dance Squad for all four of her high-school years. And she dated (mostly football players or wrestlers—they were the guys G-pa approved of). She gave the appearance of normal.

But inside, where it really counted, Morrigan was far from normal.

She tossed another journal in the storage box. It flipped open, and the childish handwriting caught her eye. She picked it up and read from the open page.

April 2 (28 more days till my 9th birthday!)

Dear Journal,

I really, really think G-pa and G-ma are getting me a horse for my birthday!! And not just because I’ve been asking and asking for one, and being sure I show them that I’m old enough to take care of one all by myself. The wind tells me. She whispers that my horse is coming and that I should always love and cherish my mare. The wind is almost always right.

I guess I should tell G-pa that the wind talks to me, but

Morrigan didn’t need to flip the page to remember the rest of the long-ago entry.

She could recall all too well the little girl she used to be. The girl who’d loved, more than anything, the trees and the earth and the beautiful dappled gray mare she did get for her ninth birthday. The girl who didn’t constantly look into shadows for bad things, but believed that all the voices in her imagination were good, her special friends, and that she wasn’t a total and complete freak for being able to sense spirits in the land.

Not today. She wouldn’t think about that today. She shook her head. Today she had enough to deal with as she packed to leave her home and then went on one last road trip with her friends before they scattered to different colleges. The battle between good and evil would have to wait till after she was settled in the dorm. She wasn’t Buffy. Morrigan snorted. She wasn’t even Eowyn, although she’d give just about anything to be a Shieldmaid of Rohan.

Was there really a battle between good and evil? Could it just be something her aging, eccentric grandparents had made up?

“No,” she said firmly, shoving aside the fact that she didn’t know if those last thoughts had been her own, or had been whispered to her on the wind. To distract herself she flipped the journal ahead to the April 30 listing, and let herself smile and relax as she read her childish excitement.

Dear Journal Dear Journal Dear Journal!

THEY DID GET ME A HORSE! I knew it! She’s the most beautiful, amazing, incredible thing in the world! She’s only a two-year-old. G-pa says that’ll give us time to grow up together. (G-pa is so funny.) She’s an awesome dappled gray that’s so light she’s almost silver. I think I’m going to call her Dove because she’s so pretty and sweet. AND SHE’S MINE!

G-pa and G-ma are the best! It doesn’t even matter that they’re old.

Tonight while I was brushing Dove G-pa told me all about a horse goddess named Epona. She’s also goddess of the earth and trees and rocks and everything. He said if I’m really happy about my new horse then maybe I should thank Epona, because she probably pays attention when someone gets her first horse of her very own. I thought that sounded like a cool idea, so after dark I snuck out to the big tree in the front yard (the one rightoutside my bedroom window) and I said THANK YOU to Epona. Because that’s a really big tree and I figured if she’s goddess of trees she probably liked that one a lot. Then I pulled one of the lawn chairs over and stood on my tip-toes on it so that I could reach to put my favorite shiny rock (the one I found when I was weeding the garden last summer) as far up as I could. I told Epona the rock was for her.

And do you know what? I swear I heard someone laughing up in the branches of the tree! A girl someone!

“And the next day the shiny rock was gone,” Morrigan whispered. And that’s when her relationship with Epona had started. The older she got, the more often her grandparents mentioned the Goddess. And the more often Morrigan thought about her.

Morrigan didn’t remember exactly when the woman’s voice in the wind had become that of the Goddess to her, she just knew that soon after the rock disappeared she’d started thinking of the voice in her mind, the one that sounded like music, as the whisper of a goddess.

Until the day she had finally admitted to G-pa that the wind spoke to her. She’d never forget the look on his face. He’d gone from laughing with her about something Dove had done, to being pale and serious within the space of just a few seconds. Then he’d sat her down and given her The Talk.

Had The Talk been a big, embarrassing lecture about sex and periods and that kind of stuff? Unfortunately, no. It’d been a talk about good and evil, and how both might touch her life.

Morrigan put away the journal she’d been reading, and sifted through the others until she found the one she wanted. She didn’t have to thumb through many pages to find the entry she’d made after The Talk.

September 13

Dear Journal,

I guess the whole thing about the 13th being unlucky is true. I told G-pa about the voices in the wind today and he really freaked. And the stuff he said kinda scared the s**t outta me.

Morrigan closed her eyes. She didn’t have to read the childish version of the conversation. She remembered it all too well—and without the cushion of childhood’s innocence to soften the impact of his words. The three of them had sat at the kitchen table.

“Morrigan, I want you to listen carefully to me,” G-pa had said. She’d known he was dead serious because he’d called her by her full name instead of Morgie or Morgie old girl. She remembered that the tone of his voice had made her stomach hurt.

“You think I’m crazy because I hear the wind,” she’d blurted.

“No, hon!” G-ma had patted her hand. “Grandpa, tell her we believe her and don’t think she’s crazy.”

“Nope, nope,” he’d grumbled. “You’re not crazy. We believe you can hear voices in the wind.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “It’s like how you used to draw pictures of rocks and trees with hearts in them when you were a little girl. Remember what you told us about that?”

Of course she’d remembered. “I told you that I drew hearts in them because I knew they were all alive.”

“Right,” Grandpa had said. “The wind talking to you is like you knowing the trees and rocks have spirits.”

“The wind is just another spirit in the world?” Morrigan had brightened, thinking that if the voice was like the trees and rocks then it should be okay. Maybe one of the voices, that really pretty girl voice, was Epona!

“It’s not that simple, hon,” G-ma had said.

“The rocks and trees are good. But the voice you hear—”

“Voices,” she’d interrupted. “It’s not always the same voice, but I always think of it as wind.”

G-pa gave G-ma a long look before he continued. “You know that there’s good and evil in the world, right?”

“Yeah, we’re studying WWII in history. Hitler was evil.”

“That’s right.”

“And lots of kids believe in Satan. He’s evil.”