“Thirty days, or just over the cycle of the moon,” I said, looking at Nellie.  I looked for signs on her face that it meant something, a flaring of the nostrils, a widening of the eyes.  I am not trained at that sort of thing, but you do pick up a little here and there just by being a real person talking to other real people.

“Three times ten,” she agreed.  She shrugged.  “It is a hard burden, carrying a piece of death in your heart.”

I was about to say, “I can imagine,” but put the kibosh on it pretty quickly.  Yes, I could imagine it, quite clearly, but I couldn’t really feel what she was feeling.  Imagine kissing someone with a ticker of doom, knowing that you can’t quite reach the (wo)man you are loving because they are not whole in themselves.

Of course, if I put it that way, maybe it’s easy – a lot of people aren’t “whole in themselves.”  I let my body go a little more than I ought for my intellect, and I don’t give my emotional feedback a lot of say in how I do things.  Too often I’m an observer in my own body, so I can’t even say I’m giving my all to a lot of projects.

Funny, if you’d asked me I would say that passion drives a lot of the practice, and really, it does, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily in touch with your emotions.  I mean, I’m the sensitive new-age nice guy your mother warned you about in spades, but most of the time I have just the same amount of trepidation and concern for what others might think of me that cripples most of us in the social arena.

On the other hand, I know more than those outside the practitioners’ knitting circles and theory sessions that hesitation can equal death.  It’s the only thing I might have in common with those in the armed forces.  It’s just a lot harder for someone like me to focus that feeling into closing a door.  That’s something the heavy hitters can do – they can make that tear for your departed father or that angst for the unreciprocated love and, well, make magic out of it.  Me, I can get excited over doughnuts, but I don’t generally know how to hold that and put it into slamming a door to the outside shut.  Maybe it’s something I can learn, but probably not from the exorcism teacher.

I just looked at Nellie.  “I will see what I can do.”  It was all I could promise.

She knew.  She wasn’t going to get her hopes up. She took a small card out of the purse that was under her chair.  She passed it to me, and then got up.  “I must go.”

It was the name of a restaurant, closer to downtown Denver.  Viktor said something in what I presumed was Russian, and Nellie shook her head.  She and her purse and her sorrow left the room.

Doloise stood up.  I looked at the Realm curiously.

“They are done conducting their business with you, ” she said.

I looked at Andrei.  “The,” and then he used a phrase I didn’t understand, “is not a poet,” he said with a smile.

“It translates to… lord’s house,” Artur said, unexpectedly.

Doloise smiled at him.  Artur seemed to shrink an inch in on himself.  Good boy.  Realized she wasn’t the hottie you thought she was, did you?  I didn’t ruffle his hair, but the fact that I was tempted was channeled straight from my dad.

Maybe I carried a bit of the dead inside me, too.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting the lot of you,” I said.  Adding the, “Insane sorcerors though you are,” would have almost been redundant.  Of course, none of them had actually done any magic I had noticed, but that didn’t mean anything.

I walked out with Doloise, nodding at and this time catching the name of the woman at the desk.  I wanted to talk to someone about this, maybe do some research on if there was some clue as to the afterlife I could expect contact with, but Doloise wasn’t the right person.   I didn’t want to call Maggie.  Ed would have been off work and hard to get on the cellphone.  I thought of and discarded another handful of people in the business.

I guess the internet was going to have to be my solace.  Maybe I’d sign up on a dating site.  Was there a witchy version of the ones on TV?