I got up and paced the room, counting the members of the coven as they moved to and fro. Sandra moved unobtrusively with the flow, drifting from one place to another, periodically obscured by others. I kept losing sight of her, and if I hadn’t known she was there, I’m not sure I would have seen her at all. My mind simply refused to register her presence. No matter how many times I counted the people in the room, I kept coming up short.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Sinclair said behind me.
It was.
“Okay,” I said to the room at large. “I’m in. Sign me up for invisibility lessons.”
Sandra Sweddon appeared as a solid presence in Casimir’s living room, standing next to a sleek Art Deco–looking bronze sculpture and beaming in my direction. “Wonderful! We’ll start tomorrow afternoon.”
So that was decided.
The following afternoon, I reported to Sandra’s house for my first invisibility—unobtrusibility?—lesson.
The Sweddon place was a big old farmhouse on the outskirts of East Pemkowet. We sat in the breakfast nook in the sunlit kitchen. Outside the windows, chickadees, juncos, goldfinches, and cardinals vied for birdseed at a welcoming array of feeders while Sandra taught me the basics of invisibility.
In theory, it shouldn’t have been that difficult. The visualization exercises I’d done since I was a kid provided me with a solid grounding in the concept. The problem was that for the past several months, I’d been assiduously applying those methods to the shielding technique Stefan had taught me, which was essentially the exact opposite of what you needed to do to make yourself unobtrusive.
“You need to let go, Daisy,” Sandra explained patiently for the umpteenth time. “Allow your aura to disperse.”
“I’m trying!” I protested.
“You’re trying too hard,” she said. “Every time you do, you gather energy. Let it go. Imagine that you’re insubstantial, inhabiting only your etheric body. Envision particles of light passing through your physical being.” She extended one hand into a sunbeam, offering an invocation. “Light pass through me, gaze pass over me.”
At point-blank range, the effect was subtle. Sandra didn’t vanish before my eyes or anything, she just turned . . . vague. When I tried to look directly at her, my eyes prickled and my brain felt skittery.
“Light pass through me, gaze pass over me,” I echoed, willing myself to relinquish the energy Stefan called pneuma.
It didn’t work.
The harder I tried, the more present, immediate, and solid I felt, aware of my heart beating steadily in my chest, the air moving in and out of my lungs, my pulse sounding in my ears, the hard surface of the kitchen chair beneath my butt and my neatly tucked tail. I stared at dust motes swirling in the wintry sun until my eyes dazzled, and didn’t feel one iota less substantial.
“Let go, Daisy,” Sandra repeated. “Let go of the notion of self. Let yourself be of the world and in it. Let yourself be everywhere and nowhere.”
“I’m not sure I can,” I said apologetically. “I’m sorry. Maybe I don’t have an, um, etheric body.”
“Of course you do.” She gave me a thoughtful look. “You’ve got the skill to do it, honey. It’s taking the leap of faith that’s hard. To achieve invisibility—pure unobtrusiveness—is a trade-off. There’s a considerable measure of protection in it, but you have to lower your guard entirely in order to attain it.”
Okay, that might be the problem.
I made a face. “Is the lowering-your-guard part a deal breaker on the whole invisibility thing?”
“I’m afraid so,” Sandra said. “But if you can find a way to give it a chance, you might be surprised. There are strengths you can only find by embracing vulnerability.” Rising, she went to peruse a shelf on the wall opposite the breakfast nook, which held a handful of books and bric-a-brac including decorative antique butter molds and an oven mitt in the form of a gingham-covered chicken. She selected a slender, dog-eared paperback and handed it to me. “Try this. It might help.”
I glanced at it, expecting something Wiccan and New Age-y, maybe with a feminist slant. Maybe Our Etheric Bodies, Ourselves. Instead, I found that what I held was a reprint of the original 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
“Poetry?” I asked. “No offense, Mrs. Sweddon, but do you think that’s going to help?”
Sandra smiled at me. “It worked for Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, didn’t it?”
Bull Durham was one of Mom’s favorite movies, and I knew exactly what Sandra meant. In an ongoing effort to get her seasonal hookup and protégé, rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, to stop psyching himself out, Susan Sarandon ties him to her bed and reads Walt Whitman to him.
Well, among other things, like convincing him to wear one of her garter belts under his uniform and to breathe through his eyelids like a Galapagos Islands lava lizard. Anyway, that’s how it worked in the movie. I wasn’t exactly optimistic that a dose of poetry would have the same effect in real life.
Sandra saw the doubt in my expression. “Oh, give it a try, Daisy. It can’t hurt. Spend tomorrow with Whitman, and we’ll try again the day after.”
I slid the book into my messenger bag. “I’ll do my best.”
To say that Walt Whitman’s poetry was over my head was an understatement.
It’s not that I don’t like poetry; I just don’t entirely get it. Not this kind, anyway. Lacking any kind of discernible rhyme or structure, it assailed me like a verbal deluge.