Joy of Witchcraft (16 page)

As soon as we settled into our working circle, I could tell something was off. Emma’s eyes were red when she sank onto the couch, and her gusty sigh could have fueled windmills. When I asked how she was doing, she offered up a feeble smile and a shrug. “I’m feeling a bit manky today, to tell the truth.”

When Raven walked behind me to take her seat on the couch, she muttered, “Boy trouble.” I’d imagine Emma’s relationship with Rick was under a fair amount of stress. It had been one thing for the magicarium to adapt to the firefighter’s one-day-on, two-days-off schedule when everyone lived in the farmhouse. It was another thing entirely when Emma shared dormitory life with the other students. I couldn’t imagine any of the witches was thrilled about a male guest hanging around, especially one with Rick’s impressive persistence. And Emma, of course, had barely been allowed to leave the premises.

Not my circus. Not my monkeys. My students’ love affairs were none of my business.

Cassie’s pale face, on the other hand… That I definitely worried about. “How you doing?” I asked, as she settled back on the ladder-back chair she’d dragged in from the kitchen that morning. She swore the hard seat made her concentrate better. I would have been writhing in agony after the first hour of spellwork sitting on that torture device, but to each her own.

She shrugged and rubbed her hands together, an unconscious gesture I’d caught her repeating hundreds of times since our first working. I couldn’t be certain because she never talked about it, but I suspected she twined her fingers together when she thought about the satyr, when she flashed back on the memory of that terrible night. At least that was my speculation, because she usually glanced at Zach as she tugged at her knuckles. Sure enough, she was checking out her warder now, her gaze pinned to the increasingly ragged cast on his arm.

He’d apparently drawn the short stick for this last session of the day. Even though David was taking the lead on watching over all our sessions, the other warders rotated in on a regular basis. I’d done my best to convince my students this was standard operating procedure, although Raven and Emma knew it was not. They’d worked with me last semester, when I hadn’t worried about a snake in our midst. They knew that David generally took days off, that he wasn’t bound to every single session I led. I wondered if they’d talked about the change back in the dormitory. I worried that our traitor was even more wary than she might otherwise be.

Alex sat apart from the group, her chair pushed back from the imaginary line of our circle. Skyler was on her cell phone. Bree was in the midst of telling some story to her familiar, a dirty joke, from the way she lowered her voice and raised her eyebrows.

No one cared. No one was paying attention. No one thought we could possibly complete our working.

“Ladies!” I said, and my voice was too sharp. I was as tired of the stupid candle-lighting spell as they were.

Alex cleared her throat, immediately snagging my attention. The other witches studiously avoided her, and I realized she’d been appointed their speaker, the one selected to deliver bad news. She rubbed at her tattooed biceps, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere but in my living room, surrounded by her fellow inmates.

“We were talking just now,” she announced, her tongue stud tapping her teeth on the “t” sounds.

“About what?” I truly didn’t intend to sound like an ice queen. But I felt singled out by their private conversation, as if they’d all gotten together to point at my ugly haircut and call me names behind my back. Not that Neko would let me walk around with bad hair.

“If we’re going to spend weeks working on a single spell like this, maybe we should just go ahead and follow the Rota.” When I didn’t respond, Alex glared at her sister witches, clearly demanding additional support before she brazened on. Her ears blazed scarlet beneath their rows of piercings. “Look. We thought we were going to learn differently here at the Jane Madison Academy. We thought we wouldn’t have to do the repetitious stuff. The boring stuff.”

Here it was. Open rebellion in the ranks.

I glanced at Neko, hoping he could translate the level of seriousness of this protest. He could at least reach out to the other familiars and gauge their concern.

Except Neko was fascinated by the seam of his jet-black jeans. He stared at the stitching as if it carried a message from the past, as if aliens had used the fabric to convey all the secrets of the universe.

Traitor. Even if he was only expressing the same revulsion for the candle spell that I felt.

Well, it wasn’t fair to leave Alex hanging. And I wasn’t going to let her take the fall for the group, even if my students had other ideas. “So?” I asked everyone. “Is this the way all of you feel? Is Alex the only one who’d prefer to go back to the Rota?”

I wasn’t surprised that Bree had the guts to meet my eyes immediately. Honesty seemed to come as easily to her as snow in the high plains. “She’s not saying she wants the Rota. None of us want that. But we don’t want to repeat the same four-line spell every day for the rest of the year.”

Skyler found her own voice, locking her jaw and drawling her Boston vowels. “We know your method works for small groups. You told us about finding the balance with your mother and grandmother. Raven and Emma said they made it work. But maybe seven is too many. Maybe it’s a type of magic that can’t be spread that thin.”

“Emma?” I asked. “Raven?” Because
I
knew the magic wouldn’t be spread thin. If we found the balance, the magic would be deeper than anything my students had ever experienced. The overwhelming harmony of seven witches reflecting their powers off seven different familiars… The sheer energy, echoed from woman to woman, repeated across the circle… I could imagine it, like a color I’d never seen before.

Raven surprised me by answering before her sister. She chose each word with uncharacteristic diplomacy. “It’s not that the magic will be too thin. Maybe the balance will be too hard. Maybe we can’t do what you’re asking of us. Maybe we don’t have the skill.”

I heard what that admission cost her. I heard the blatant yearning in her voice. She
had
felt the power of a joint working. She could imagine the new music we’d write, the unheard notes we’d discover when we finally reached our proper pitch.
If
we reached it.

“You do have it,” I swore. “Every one of you.”

“How can you be sure?” That was Cassie. Her voice was tiny, folded in on itself. Her freckled face looked pinched, as if even those four words had cost her too much. Her question hung in the air, a desperate plea that clenched my heart more than anything else I’d heard. Cassie had paid a higher price for my new scheme than anyone else sitting in the circle. She’d been threatened in ways the rest of us had only seen in nightmares.

I understood why they all asked questions. They’d applied to my magicarium, and I’d chosen them. I’d interviewed everyone, of course, selecting the four newcomers from a pool of two dozen eager witches, all with a tolerance for quirkiness, all attracted to the Jane Madison Academy’s unheard-of Second Class ranking after only a semester of existence. They had all been willing to take the chance that the magicarium would disband at the end of its first or second semester if we failed to complete our scheduled Major Workings.

They’d thought it would be easy because they were working with the chosen, with the elite. They hadn’t signed up for monsters. And they hadn’t expected the academic rug to be pulled out from under them before the semester ended.

I knew I could teach these women. They just had to have faith. They only had to find the balance once, and then they’d be able to work the spells forever—like riding a bike.

But we had to succeed by sunset, or Hecate’s Court would shut us down forever. I glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was already a few minutes after four. The winter sky outside was already growing dark.

I finally allowed myself to look at David. After all, he was the only other person who knew our true deadline. I’d sensed him listening to my students, plumbing their questions, their protests, as if those words alone would let him identify the traitor. I’d felt his protective presence, something solid as I fielded their frustration.

I knew that no matter what happened, even if the Court shut us down before the weekend, David would be there for me. He would love me. He would pick me up, comfort me, convince me I could go on in the world, as a witch, as a woman.

But I didn’t want him to have to do that. I didn’t want to break.

“One more hour,” I said. “Give me until sunset tonight. If we haven’t made it work by then, we’ll take the weekend off. On Monday, we’ll go with something new. I promise.” Even now, I couldn’t tell them what that new thing would be. I couldn’t hint that the entire magicarium was at stake. The words were too raw. I swallowed hard and said, “All I ask is that you commit yourself to the process for the rest of today. Give me every single thing you have. Hold back nothing.”

And they did.

For the first time since we’d begun the candle-lighting spell, I found myself overwhelmed by the energy swirling across our circle. There was too
much
power, too much astral force to be contained. More than once, I caught Zach reeling from a stray burst, fighting to keep his feet as we bombarded the room with our collective strength.

After one particularly vicious blast, David muttered something, and he paced the perimeter of our circle. I sensed what he was doing with his energy—not offering up protection from exterior forces; the wards around the house did that. Instead, he was setting up a sort of swaddling, a protective layer. He was cushioning us from the backlash of the forces we were raising. He was protecting us from ourselves.

I tugged on my bond to Neko, even though he crouched by Skyler’s feet. I asked him to pull the familiars into a tighter circle, to focus the mirrors they offered up to us witches. I begged him to share how it had felt to work with Nuri and Majom. The familiars’ strange communication network seemed perfectly suited to understanding my communal magic. With their whole images, maybe they could finally explain to the witches what we needed.

Neko scowled, but he did as I asked. And the other familiars clearly attempted to convey the information to their witches. Some of those conversations obviously made more sense than others. I could read Bree’s face more easily than I could scan any book in the basement. I saw the moment when Perd reached out to her, the instant that she heard his horsey thoughts, that she translated them into something that made sense from a witch’s perspective.

Skyler’s comprehension was clear as well. At first, though, she resisted the input from Siga. Skyler seemed not to trust her porcine collaborator. Watching the portly woman’s s insistence, I wondered how they could possibly work together on regular witchcraft. I’d never seen a witch and a familiar who weren’t in perfect sync, who didn’t enjoy completely compatible styles of communication. But Siga insisted, pushing through with a repeat of Neko’s information again and Skyler finally gave a reluctant nod.

Alex got the message faster, but she shook her head. She didn’t see how it would work. I watched Seta reach out to Neko, who shook his head in an unusual display of exasperation. My familiar squared his shoulders, clearly trying another way of explaining the same facts. He sighed when that method failed too, but he tried once more. And somehow, that last image made sense to Alex. She scooted her chair forward so it was in line with the rest of us. She planted her feet on the floor as if she intended to remain engaged.

And that left Cassie. I was captivated by the other witch’s hands. She twisted her fingers as she listened to Tupa, contorting them into painful knots. I watched her swallow, and my throat ached in sympathy, as if
my
lips were chapped and dry, as if
my
belly twinged with nerves.

I would have given anything to take back the terrible events of Samhain. If I could have gone back in time, if I could have drawn the satyr to me, I would have spared Cassie the terror. But there was no way to change what had happened. The only thing I could do was build bridges to the future. I had to show Cassie, had to show all of them, that there were better ways to use magic. Better ways to work together.

At last Cassie’s twining fingers settled in her lap. She seemed to still them with a conscious effort, with a shake of her shoulders and a firm set to her jaw. She might have been listening to her familiar, but her eyes were locked on Zach. He was her strength. He was her comfort. He had saved her from the satyr, and he would keep her safe no matter what horror our current working released.

Which was absurd of course. Because all we were going to do was light a candle. We weren’t working magic in the middle of a hailstorm. We weren’t exposed on an open beach. We were merely sitting in a living room, gathered around a coffee table, staring at a column of pure white beeswax.

“Let us begin,” I intoned, and then I touched my fingertips against my forehead, my throat, and my chest. I watched each of the witches echo my movements, offering up pure thoughts, pure voice, and pure belief. I could not imagine any one of them a traitor—easygoing Bree, aristocratic Skyler, rebellious Alex, tortured Cassie.

First things first. Meet the Court’s demands.

“
Dark shies.
” We said the words together.

“
Light vies
.” I felt energy arc from me to Cassie’s Tupa. I measured
something
through my link to Neko, a pulsing power that he sent on to Skyler.

“
Clear eyes
.” There was a possibility hovering in the air, a
potential
for magic.

“
Fire rise
.” I poured myself into those last two words. I pushed my entire magical being into the phrase, into the spell. Tupa captured the energy I poured into our circle. He spun it into something new, something wider and deeper, like a fleece dragged through dew. There was a flash of darkness, and then the magic circled back to me. An arching rainbow spread across the room. Cherry and walnut and lemon, emerald and sapphire and amethyst, gold and silver and bronze. I didn’t know which colors came from which witch, who poured any specific shade into our working. But they were all there, gathered together, organized, ordered.