Waiting for Sunday

chapter 11 - devotion or damnation

"You're sure this is the address he sent you?" Moses asks.

Lillie sits forward to peer through the windshield. The GPS has brought her, Moses, and Mira to a suburb Lillie has never seen before, where the homes all resemble period drama colonial estates and the grass stretching across the rolling hills looks just a little too green to be real. The car sits in the dusty road not before one of these estates, but behind it, where a barn with faded red paint sags into the meadow like a sleepy old man. There's a hand-painted sign outside of it, tilting in the wind, that reads Redwine's Healing Services.

The eerie silence surrounding the barn is interrupted by the sound of gravel popping beneath rubber tires, and Lillie looks up as a light blue Subaru pulls in next to them. Behind the driver's seat is a redheaded woman Lillie has never seen before. In the passenger's seat is Felix.

Lillie says, "Looks like we're in the right place," and climbs from the car.

"I hate this already," Mira says, but follows her automatically.

The air smells faintly of woodsmoke and soil, the sky above their heads gray, but dry. Felix leaves the car first, rolling up the sleeves of his sweater to his elbows. The woman follows, combing her hands through her hair, the undersides of which shimmer a shock of blond in the sun. "Quincy," Felix says as Lillie approaches, and clears his throat, as if preparing to give a speech. "This is Lillie, her brother Moses, and her friend Mira. Guys, this is Quincy, my best friend."

"I've heard good things," says Quincy with a nod, hands in the pockets of her pinstriped pants. "I mean, besides the weird magic poetry, which doesn't seem to be a good thing for you, Lillie. But I've heard good things."

Lillie tries to catch Felix's eye at that, but he's not looking at her.

"How do you know this Shay person?" Mira asks before Lillie can reply. "How do you know she can do what she says she can?"

"We were roommates for a semester of college," Quincy answers with a shrug. "Honestly, I don't know. I do know she kept too many suspicious things in our dorm room for her not to be up to something, though."

At that, Mira's face washes over with blatant terror. Her hand goes to her brow. "Oh my God. We're gonna die. You brought us all the way out here and we're gonna die."

"We're not gonna die, Mira," Lillie says, touching her friend's shoulder. "At the very least, it'll be a chance to talk to someone who knows more about this than we do."

"Unless she doesn't," Moses offers, and when Lillie gives him a sharp look, he just raises his palms in surrender. "I'm just saying! There are a lot of self-proclaimed specialists whose degrees came from YouTube and delusion. That's why I don't wanna mess with this stuff."

"Yet you're here," Lillie says.

"Because you told me I had to be," Moses says, giving her ponytail a quick yank. "And because it's kinda my job not to let you do stupid shit alone."

"Heartwarming," Quincy says, then nods her head at the barn door. "Now, shall we?"

Quincy leads the way, her heavy hiking boots crunching in the grass, which ages and grows yellow around the barn's entrance. Lillie watches her raise a hand as if to knock, but she reconsiders, pulling the door just wide enough to stick her face in. "Shay? It's Quincy."

The response is a utterly catastrophic-sounding crash, like ten pots simultaneously plummeting to the floor. Quincy jolts back from the door, and a second later a woman Lillie assumes must be Shay pokes her head out, blinking at all of them from behind dense, frameless glasses. "Quincy?" she says. "Quincy French?"