VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

Author:Cherie Dimaline
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

20

Everything in Threes

Meena had found the note tacked to the motel room door. It took her a long minute to decipher Lucille’s terrible handwriting.

Coven heads back to Salem by 9 a.m. to start looking for the witch in the bowl.

Send the new girl to Pennsylvania—she needs to see Rattler Ricky and seek the spoon while you concentrate on the witch. Also, the Maiden stopped by the bar late last night. She says, “Hurry the fuck up.” —L

“Christ,” Meena said. “She wants us to use divination bowls to try to find the last member and thinks maybe she hasn’t even gotten to the spoon yet. And Rattler Ricky? Half the time you end up waiting on her for a week. She comes and goes at her own pace, and you never know when that’ll be.”

“Who in the hell is Rattler Ricky?” Wendy sat up in the messy bed, one eye glued shut with sleep. She reached for the aspirin and water she’d left herself on the nightstand.

“A powwow woman.”

“Powwow? As in, jingle dresses and big drums? Ooh, can we go?” She was suddenly animated. Even the thought of steady pounding that matched the throb in her head didn’t put a damper on her excitement.

“No.” Meena crawled back into bed beside her naked wife. “I wish. It’s not that at all. Pennsylvanian powwow has nothing to do with Native powwows, or even Native people at all. They’re German originally, very old thoughts and ways—prayers and charms together.”

The women held each other under the wrinkled sheet, pulling against each other, skin to skin, with sore limbs and goose pimple flesh, bruised from the inside out by gin and revelry. This was the state Lucille sought for them—this brokenness, this vulnerability. She needed them unarmed to get to her answers. But that brokenness also made lovers ache for each other. Lucille clucked her tongue at one-night stands, not for any moral reason, but because she thought that such a delicious state was wasted on strangers too new to each other to get to the power of it all.

“We have to get up soon and hit the road,” Meena whispered into Wendy’s hair.

“I know, I know—just five more minutes.”

“C’mon, we still have to break it to Lucky that she’s been called forward.” But Wendy bit the side of her breast, rubbed her cheek over the small indents, and laid a kiss on top of it, and Meena forgot what she was worried about, what she had to do, what she would ever have to do outside of this bed. She rolled over, pinning Wendy with her weight, and holding her arms above her head with one hand. She moved the other over her stomach. “Maybe just five more minutes.”

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