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Field and ran the path to the
Golden Gate Bridge. After a few weeks, I was able to run across the
bridge as a part of my regimen. My afternoons were left open, and I
spent that time running errands, touching base with my office and
working in the garden.
    Although I was feeling better, I wondered
what Elsa had in store for me next. She’d asked me not to tell Lily
about her, and so far, I had honored her request. Lily was pretty
busy with her own life, but eventually she would want to spend time
together. One afternoon as Elsa and I were having tea—she’d banned
coffee from my diet—I asked if I could see Lily.
    “Not yet,” was her reply.
    “Why?”
    “Because you need to focus,” she said in a
schoolteacher’s voice. “If you bring your friend into this, she
will only distract you.”
    “Distract me from what? It seems as if your
work is almost done here,” I said, feeling confident. “I am
exercising, I feel great.”
    “We are a long way from being done,” Elsa
said. “This is simply the conditioning you need to get physically
ready. We have yet to unlock your senses and see how they
work.”
    “No,” I said. “How can allowing myself to
feel more possibly help?”
    “You will not help yourself by remaining
ignorant,” Elsa said. “The reason you feel well is because I’m
here, and because you’re not in the direct path of the demon. The
minute you step back into your office, you will experience the same
problems again.”
    I didn’t know what to say. I did feel better
and I was growing used to Elsa, although I knew next to nothing
about this woman living in my guest room.
    “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I know
you said my grandmother summoned you, but why do you have to
stay?”
    “I don’t have to stay,” she countered.
“But as a spirit guide, my job is to help you escape danger. My
work isn’t finished yet. And, I have business with the Council that
keeps me here.”
    “So you aren’t necessarily staying for me,” I
said, certain there was something she wasn’t telling me.
    “Why are you so anxious to see me leave?”
Elsa asked. “We have much work to do. I sense you have a great
power, Olivia,” she said. “I feel the energy in you. But you are in
danger as long as you fail to use your instincts to see what is
happening around you.”
    “I’m afraid,” I said. “This gift you keep
referring to has made my mother’s life difficult. I don’t want to
become like her.”
    “Mother, father, sister, brother,” Elsa said
shaking her head. “We cannot escape the bonds of our family, their
blood is our blood.”
    “I don’t have any of those except my mother.
I never knew my father and my grandparents are dead.”
    Once again, Elsa paused for a moment as if
she were acknowledging something important in my statement. “Your
gift is passed through the women in your family, so it matters
little about the rest. My mother was a shaman in our village, as
was her mother before her. These skills pass through one generation
to the next. One day, you will have a daughter.”
    “Stop,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m not
getting married. I’m not having a child. Look at me. My life is out
of control. I am having a conversation in my kitchen with a ghost
about how to beat the devil at his own game. How on earth can you
talk about a future with marriage and children?”
    Elsa looked amused, but not in a good way.
“Technically, I am not a ghost and I have never seen anyone beat
the devil at his own game,” she said. “You are nowhere near ready
to do that. I am asking that you take responsibility for your own
life and use the tools you were given. By all the goddesses of the
known world, I have never seen anyone reject her bloodline so
readily. This wasn’t a choice when I was your age. People in my
tribe, in my village, depended on my mother to seek out the spirits
to learn about the harvest, to heal the sick and protect our
elders.”
    “What about you,” I