Joy of Witchcraft (3 page)

Reaching out to her familiar, Cassie gathered the grounding she needed. Tupa leaned in, actually butting his head against her arm, and the tendril of green strengthened, winding its way toward the centerstone and the waiting frame. Green light wrapped our structure from top to bottom, again and again, until a dozen strands formed a warp suitable for weaving.

“Lift the shuttle, feel its weight,
” I continued, my voice warming with approval. Neko did his part again, thinking an invitation to another familiar, and a sturdy russet strand of energy flowed from the next student, Bree Carter. Working quickly to increase our momentum, I chanted the next line: “
Wrap the new thread, figure eight
.” Neko pulled another student into the working, Alex Warner, who offered up a skein of indigo energy. “
Now the shed stick, straight and true
,” I intoned, raising my voice to do battle against the storm outside our protective arch. Skyler Winthrop and her cobalt blue magic came into our circle.

All that was left was bringing our concentration together, gathering the energy of all eight witches. Working together, we could create a fabric of light, passing Bree’s thread-filled shuttle along the straight line created by Skyler’s shed stick, tamping down Alex’s first thread in our weaving and preparing the warp for another pass at the loom.

Even though we remained separate, each strand of magic apart from every other, we were working toward a common goal. This wasn’t the true power I would ultimately offer my students, the true melding I knew we could achieve. But it was a start. I took a deep breath and cried, “
All our powers, cloth imbue!
”

There was the expected flash of darkness, the moment when the physical world shifted out of existence, overwhelmed by magic’s force. For one timeless instant, my heart ceased to beat, my lungs stopped breathing. I couldn’t worry about my students, couldn’t fear the consequences when David sliced open the cordon, when my magicarium emerged to face Hecate’s Court and Teresa Alison Sidney and the increasing rage of the storm.

As quickly as the world disappeared, it returned. Every witch’s eye was trained on the altar. We all waited to see the cloth we had crafted with our effort.

But there was no cloth.

Instead, there was a shadow, darker than the stormy night outside our shield. The
absence
swirled above the altar, seething, reaching out with clinging tentacles.

“The hellmouth!” Clara shouted, and adrenaline fired through my body.

Somehow, the shadow deepened, becoming a darker shade of black. It contracted, sucking in its outer edges, swirling tighter and tighter, like a tornado determined to bore its way through the centerstone. A blast of rain battered the steely shield above us, a sudden downdraft strong enough to dent the protective dome. At the same time, lightning forked directly overhead, shattering across the cordon as if it sought the heart of the altar.

The warders’ arch vanished beneath the direct hit.

Before I could blink, my burgundy gown was drenched. The thunder was literally deafening. The silver lightning afterglow bleached my vision.

But none of that mattered, because the shadow had disappeared above the altar. And in its place, very real and very mad, was a full-grown satyr, tossing his head and looking like he was ready to murder every single witch who had called him into existence.

You probably know your mythology: satyrs have the top half of a man and the bottom half of a goat, with the goat’s horns firmly placed on the human head, just for good measure. If you grew up reading children’s books like
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
, you might be thinking of a faun—a sweet, somewhat absent-minded creature with the same man/goat blend.

Satyrs aren’t fauns. There’s nothing sweet about a satyr. Nothing absent-minded, either. Satyrs have one thing on their mind, and because they don’t wear pants, that thing is pretty obvious.

Our magical visitor was no exception. Engorged, erect, he scraped his hooves against the altar as he hunched his shoulders, snorting and tossing his head like a bull maddened by a red cape. But there was no red cape in our Samhain circle, only innocent women. The satyr cackled as he searched for his victim, and the crazed sound made the hair rise on the back of my neck.

He chose Cassie.

Maybe she made some noise, a shout or a whimper, something the rest of us couldn’t make out above the chaos of the storm. She might have been the first to move, to recover from the paralyzing effect of the warders’ broken shield. Perhaps the beast was drawn to her child-like innocence, her wide eyes, her fresh, freckled face.

Whatever the creature’s reasoning, he lost no time in his pursuit. He leaped from the altar and landed on the drenched grass with the legendary sure-footedness of his hircine half. The downpour did nothing to slake his lust; he fell on Cassie with a craven howl.

Cassie’s protector, Zach Spencer, lunged for the creature’s shoulders, tugging at the human torso in an effort to free his witch. I leaped forward, determined to help my student, but my progress was checked by a strong arm across my belly. Caleb was there, Emma’s stalwart warder. I’d known him four months; I’d already trusted him to protect me in dozens of other workings. Now, I wanted him out of my way.

But before I could snap a command, I realized the warders had formed a wall with their bodies. All of us witches and our familiars—everyone but Cassie—were safe behind the bulk of their bodies, protected by their brawn and bared swords. At least three of the men faced out, in case the satyr wasn’t the only magical manifestation attacking this night.

Caleb had me, because David had joined forces with Cassie’s warder. The two men were struggling to get a grip on the satyr in the rain. The space was too tight for swordplay; they were forced to grapple with their bare hands, lest they harm Cassie in their effort to free her.

The satyr was not so far gone in lust that he forgot to butt at them with his sharp-pointed horns. He forced both men back whenever they seemed close to dragging him to the ground. His hooves landed half a dozen blows as well; I heard David’s curses above the roar of the storm as he took a direct kick to his ribs.

Raven’s warder, Tony, launched into the fray, using his sword where Zach and David had hesitated. He timed his thrust perfectly, employing a two-handed grip to slam the edge of his blade against the satyr’s spine. Bronze sparks flew as if the sword were being held to a grindstone, but the blade made no meaningful impact. The satyr snarled and kicked back with another fierce hoof, but was otherwise unaffected.

Cassie put up her own fight, shoving the heel of her hand into the beast’s face. She smashed his nose with enough power that he was forced to back off. As he shook his stunned head, she tried to follow up with a knee to his groin, but she slipped on the grass, falling beneath the ravenous creature again.

Her hands pushed at his chest, but she couldn’t get the leverage she needed. Her fingers wove a pattern in the air before the satyr closed once more, a spell I did not recognize. Whatever it was, it required strength and concentration. She might have been able to gain both from her familiar, but the satyr’s sharp hooves kept Tupa from getting anywhere near his mistress.

Cassie could not work her spell. But I could try my own.

I raked my hand through my hair, sluicing rainwater off my face as I planted my feet in the slick grass. I didn’t have time to bring my students into the working, couldn’t worry about demonstrating my novel approach to spellcraft. Instead, I shot out my hand and gripped Neko’s forearm, pulling him out of the scrum of desperate, shouting witches and familiars.

He lapsed into his role immediately, bracing his own feet for a better purchase and stiffening his arm to give me a stronger base for working. I tugged on the astral bond between us, and he was ready, waiting, a reflecting well of power for me to use however I needed.

My eyes closed, and I pictured one of the most obscure books in my collection. It was bound in forest-green Moroccan leather, and the cover was set with a trio of cabochon-cut emeralds. The title was picked out on the spine in gold leaf:
On the Bynding and Banishment of Magickal Creatures
.

It contained spells to counter wayward familiars and ravenous bookworms, rebellious cockatrices and invading dragons. And somewhere toward the end, between rocs and trolls, there was a spell to banish a satyr. I took a deep breath, trying to summon an image of the ancient writing. I exhaled slowly, using the motion to center myself as I once again offered up pure thought, pure speech, and pure belief. I sent tendrils deep into Neko’s reserve and drew on his reflective power to bolster my own as I chanted:

“
Half man, half beast, figure of a goat,

Sharp of hoof, hard of horn, sleek and shiny coat.
”

I was only two lines into the spell, but I knew I didn’t have enough power to make it work. Not with this monstrous creature that was shielded against traditional warders’ weapons. Not with a beast I’d never seen before, had never completely believed in before. I couldn’t master the spell with the battle raging in front of me, with Cassie’s warder knocked onto his back, his arm canted at an angle that even in my panic I could diagnose as a fracture.

The satyr tossed his head, butting hard against David’s chest before screaming and diving back to Cassie. I scraped more power from Neko. Knowing I was doomed to fail but needing to try, I shouted the next two lines of the spell:

“
Wise fool, wild child, scrambling to be free,

Hear my voice, know my words, banishéd you’ll be.
”

As I got to that word, though, to
be,
I realized another voice was raised with mine. Teresa Alison Sidney stood across from me, ignoring the rain and the wind. She rested one hand on the shoulder of her familiar, the other on her warder’s forearm. She stared across the line that had marked my magicarium’s arcane shield, smiling serenely.

She was certain I didn’t have the power to finish the working on my own. But she knew the rest of the spell. She stood ready and willing to help.

She understood what it would cost me to accept her aid, how I longed to shake my head, to refuse her offer of assistance. But I didn’t have that luxury. I needed Teresa. And so I nodded, matching her smile with my own grim twisted lips. Her eyes flashed in victory as I raised my arms, letting a wash of golden light ripple to my fingertips and flow toward Cassie and the satyr. Teresa matched me, wave for wave, the ruby glow of her own prodigious powers meeting mine in a fiery line.

Together, we chanted the final couplet of the spell:

“
Satyr leave us, go your way, back from whence you came.

Stay away until the day our powers call your name.
”

Simultaneously, we changed the last line of the spell, making it plural, making it match the magic we wove. The flash of darkness was immediate, that power-filled absence of everything—the storm, the circle, the weight of my body. And when the world lurched back into being, the satyr was gone.

Half-moon hoofprints quickly filled with rain. David sucked in his breath as he pressed his hand against his ribs. Cassie’s warder gritted his teeth, trying to support his broken arm with his good one. Cassie herself collapsed against the ground, her ribcage rising and falling as if she were a salmon plucked from a spawning stream.

David recovered first, snapping out commands to the other warders, ordering everyone back to the farmhouse. The building was warded, protected from all types of marauders, magical and mundane. As my shocked students started to move, David helped Cassie to her feet. Gingerly, he handed her over to the combined attention of Tupa and Zach. At his repeated urging, all of the student witches, their familiars, and their warders began the short trek back to the house.

Only then did David turn to Teresa. Not quite able to bury a lifetime of respect for Teresa’s title, David said, “You too, Coven Mother. To the house, for grounding.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she stiffened her spine. The defiant gesture helped to mask her rapid breathing, but I was willing to bet her pulse was pounding as hard as mine, harder maybe, because she wasn’t on her home turf. “I’ll stay to clean up,” she said.

David’s gaze didn’t waver. He didn’t even look for the tiny shake of my head. He knew I didn’t want Teresa anywhere near the circle we’d created for magical workings. She was not my friend. There’d been no legitimate reason for her to attend our Samhain working. She’d only been present to help banish the satyr because she’d wanted me to fail.

David turned to her warder. “Get her out of here, Ethan.”

Warders had their own rules, their own hierarchies, separate from witchy politics and aspirations. We stood on David’s property. His wards protected this land. His witch had initiated the Samhain working. Therefore, David’s word controlled. Ethan slipped his fingers beneath Teresa’s elbow and guided her toward the farmhouse. Her familiar trailed behind, looking lost in the dim light.

“You,” David said, jutting his head toward Neko. “Get everyone into dry clothes. Make sure the witches eat.”

Ordinarily, Neko would have pressed for David’s permission to gut the refrigerator, to devour whatever fine cheese we might have on hand and to plunder the pantry for high-end delicacies he’d previously conned us into buying for his snacking pleasure. I realized exactly how serious things were when my familiar merely nodded and disappeared into the night.

That left David, Clara, and me.

“You’re okay?” David asked, taking in both of us with a glance.

I nodded. “What happened to Hecate’s Court?”

David’s jaw tightened. “They left as soon as the satyr manifested.”

“What?” I was shocked.

“Their purpose was to make sure the magicarium completed a working. Calling the satyr sufficed.”

“He could have killed us! He nearly raped Cassie!”

“That’s not the Court’s problem.”

Technically, he was right. But the Court should have felt
some
obligation to aid their fellow witches. That was only human nature.