I woke up
late Christmas day with a splitting headache. Along with the hives that kept spreading,
despite Angela’s tea, my joints ached. I spent most of Christmas day sprawled on
the sofa, sipping tea and dozing. The boys got to gorge on all the goodies:
shrimp, cheese ball and crackers, smokies in barbecue sauce, wings, egg rolls.
My stomach did backflips just thinking about the food I was missing. Felicity
and Jake elected to have a quiet, romantic Christmas day at her place, rather
than joining us. I didn’t blame them. I made a bet with myself she would get a
ring for Christmas.
My big
mistake was combining Angela’s salve and tea with antihistamines. I spent the
day in a haze, broken at irregular intervals by strange dreams that kept jerking
me up out of sleep, trying to fly away from something nasty. My strongest
impression through all those twisting, looping, slimy dreams was of something trying
to drill or melt or pound its way through a shield around Eden. Sometimes it turned
into the Wishing Ball, and Divine’s Emporium was inside it.
Friday morning, I woke up before dawn with the worst dream yet. In it, Bethany and Athena were having a sleepover at Divine’s, like they used to do when they were little. The house filled with shadows that reached out tentacles from the walls and tried to grab both girls. That frightened me, because Bethany had made it home for Christmas just before midnight. She and her father, Ben, had spent Christmas day with Angela, who was Bethany’s godmother. I was worried because we had kept her ignorant of her heritage as the daughter of a guardian. Stephanie had died defending Neighborlee from the snake trying make our town its doorway to invade Earth. We had honored her wishes that Bethany not become a guardian. What if the snake or whatever that ugly, persistent enemy really was, had made Bethany a target because she was ignorant and untrained?
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