Joy of Witchcraft (2 page)

A dull rumble of thunder echoed in the distance, and I shoved down an uneasy mix of fear and excitement. Samhain was the time when the barrier between the arcane world and the mundane was thinnest. Ordinary folk remembered that magic by going out in the darkness, defying their fear with costumes and offerings of sweets. This night was Halloween to most people, All Hallows Eve to some, and Samhain to the witchy few.

I gestured to Neko, bidding him to step forward with his reed basket. As he raised our offerings, David swept his sword from his scabbard.

The other warders reacted to the sound of metal scraping free, becoming more alert, more
present
. Each took a stand outside our sacred circle, automatically spacing themselves along the perimeter that had not yet been defined by magic. My students and their familiars clustered inside the nonexistent boundary, each watching with expressions that ranged from wary to enraptured.

I nodded to David, and he strode to the eastern corner, to the cardinal point dedicated to the element of Air. Neko followed, moving with confidence. He produced a candle from the basket, a fat column of red wax that he set on the small marble plinth at the precise eastern limit of the circle. Passing his hand over the wick, he raised up the twisted fiber, readying the candle for the magical energy that would pass through it, consuming it slowly and steadily for as long as we witches used our powers.

When Neko stepped back, I took his place, raising my palm over the scarlet wax. I could already feel the potential energy in the offering, the power ready to be unleashed. “Guardians of Air, light our way,” I cried, and the fresh wick kindled. I collected the light in my cupped hands, carrying it toward my eyes as a gesture of humility toward the entire natural world. As my fingers brushed against my forehead, I felt a breath of air, the softest memory of the storms that had ripped across this clearing not an hour before. We were in the presence of Elementals of Air.

Dropping my hands to my side, I walked with David to the next candle. He traced the tip of his sword just above the grass, and the metal seemed to magnetize the air, raising up a shimmering curtain of steel-grey fire. Power sizzled against the damp lawn, sparking away the sodden remnants of the storm. The energy arched above my head, wavering in time with my pulse.

Neko placed the second candle. “Guardians of Fire,” I proclaimed. But before I could entreat, “Light our way,” another voice rang out across the circle.

“Hold!”

I grabbed Neko’s shoulder, forcing him close to my side. His latent abilities opened before me. His entire being
shifted
to echo my magic, to reflect it back to me like a thousand mirrors casting back the light of a single flame.

Adrenaline jangled my fingers, and my ears were filled with a high-pitched whine. I wanted to fight. I wanted to flee. I waited for the assembled warders to react, for David to step in front of me, offering the physical protection of his body and his sword.

But David didn’t move.

“Stop this ritual right now, Jeanette.”

And then I understood why David wasn’t reacting. There was only one person in this world who called me Jeanette: the woman who’d given me that name on the day I was born. She’d abandoned me a year later, leaving me to be raised by my loving grandmother. I’d grown up believing my mother had died in a car crash. Clara Smythe had only walked back into my life four years ago, the summer I discovered my arcane power.

David didn’t move to protect me from my mother because he wasn’t just
my
warder. He was Clara’s warder too. For that matter, he guarded my grandmother as well, on the relatively rare occasions when she engaged in witchy activities. He’d volunteered for the unusual triple assignment when I first forged my unconventional ideas about witchcraft and community. Hecate’s Court hadn’t intervened to say he
couldn’t
do the job.

I planted my hands on my hips. My fingers still trembled in the aftermath of adrenaline, but I tightened them to hide my annoyance. “Not now, Clara. We’re busy with an important working.”

“I know, Jeanette. But this is a matter of life and death.”

“Life and death,” I repeated wryly. Clara could turn a hike in the woods into high drama.

“You cannot cast your circle here,” my mother said, striding past my astonished students to stand before our centerstone. “This is a place of danger.”

My mother and I often disagreed about arcane matters. She had a soft spot for auras and astrology, for claptrap that had no place in any self-respecting witch’s arsenal. I could only imagine what hocus-pocus she intended to fling at us now.

As if she could read my mind, Clara tugged at her silk caftan, drawing herself up to her full height. “You’re standing on the edge of a hellmouth that can destroy the entire world. You must not seal the circle, Jane.”

Jane.

Clara
never
called me Jane, not without a dozen exasperated reminders that I’d long ago set aside my birth name, that I’d built a life on my own, that I didn’t need her, didn’t want her interference. If she called me Jane, she wanted me to listen.

But hellmouths were only myths, stories invented in the Middle Ages to keep wayward children in line. There was no such thing as a gaping hole to a different dimension. No one had ever seen a passage between planes of being, a maw that released ill-formed ravening fiends into the world around us.

Nevertheless, my students reacted to Clara’s pronouncement by stepping toward their warders. They settled anxious hands on their familiars, looking around our magical clearing as if they expected demons to spring from the sodden ground.

If a hellmouth actually existed, I surely would have felt it as I’d prepared our circle.

Wouldn’t I?

Of course I would.

Clara was merely being her usual dramatic, disruptive self. I nodded tersely to David and said, “Proceed.”

“Jane!” Clara cried.

To David’s credit, he merely shifted his grip on the quillons of his sword, resuming his stance to carve out the next protective quarter of our circle. I met his eyes and said, “There is no hellmouth here.” To all who listened, my voice was as hard as marble. No one would ever know how much comfort I took from his tight nod of agreement.

Lightning flashed in the distance, illuminating the heavy clouds that once again covered the sky. Automatically, I started to count: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four. Thunder growled, low and urgent.

I knew a cue when I heard one. Ignoring Clara’s whimpering, I rushed through casting the rest of the circle. I set a candle at the southern edge and called on the Guardians of Water. I lit the last wick on the western point and drew in the Guardians of Earth. David traced the outline with a matching urgency, pouring his warder’s energy into a steely arc.

He was three strides away from closing the circle. Two. One. And then I heard my name again, shouted across the field, from the direction of the house. “Jane! Jane Madison!”

Even as I gritted my teeth against the new interruption, I recognized the voice. Teresa Alison Sidney.

Teresa was the Coven Mother for nearby Washington DC, a woman widely regarded as the most powerful witch in the Eastern Empire—at least until
I’d
come into my own. I’d first met her three and a half years before, when my greatest magical dream had been to join her prestigious coven. When I’d watched her lead a ritual in her classic black cocktail sheath, with her perfect strand of pearls across the pulse points in her throat, I’d felt as if I were watching the ghost of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or Grace Kelley, as if Kate Middleton herself shared a bit of magic she’d never quite admitted to the British royal family.

Teresa Alison Sidney’s veil of sophistication was so strong that virtually everyone called her by all three names, the way people referred to certain movie stars. Or serial killers. But always contrary where authority was concerned, I’d made myself the exception to that rule.

She’d never forgiven me for walking away from her coven. And she’d never stopped lusting after the Osgood collection, the arcane library I hoarded in the farmhouse. Only two months ago, I’d discovered her magical powers bound up in a document meant to destroy me.

She was my enemy, and now she stood on my lawn, accompanied by her warder and her familiar.

Clara might have interrupted our working out of a misguided fear of a hellmouth. But Teresa certainly had a more selfish motive. All she had to do was distract me for a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at most, and the rapidly returning thunderstorm would do the rest. My untried students could never complete a ritual in the midst of a downpour like the one we’d already seen that evening. Without a proper opening to our academic year, my magicarium would stand in violation of its charter, and my magical belongings would be fair game for any witch daring enough to pluck them from my grasp.

Teresa would finally get the magical goods she’d craved from the moment we first met.

I nodded tersely to David. He slashed with his sword, closing the circle before the Washington Coven Mother could make herself heard. Through the shimmering cordon of warder’s magic, I could see the rigid lines of David’s back. If I squinted, I could just make out other figures beyond the curtain of power—four robed and hooded forms on the very edge of darkness.

Hecate’s Court, then. As expected, they’d arrived to witness my working, to verify the operational status of the Jane Madison Academy. The Court had jurisdiction over all witches in good standing. But I didn’t have to like being put under their microscope.

Gritting my teeth, I turned to face my students. “Sisters,” I said. “We are gathered beneath the sky, above the earth, between the fire and the rain. Be welcome and at peace.”

Right. Like any of them would relax during a ritual that began like this one had. Clara fretted beside me, working her hands inside the sleeves of her caftan as if she were auditioning for the role of Lady Macbeth. Emma, the calmer of my first-term students, looked wary but determined. Raven, a firebrand who could give lightning bolts a run for their money, seemed invigorated by the opportunity for something to go awry.

At least Raven had chosen to wear a black robe for our working, forgoing her usual preference for working skyclad, naked to the elements. I was strangely heartened by the violet sash that closed her midnight garment. Its vibrant purple matched the stripe in her hair, underscoring all the ways she and I were different. We disagreed on almost everything, but we’d found a way to work together.

And I would find a way to work with all my new students, to build the bonds of a healthy magicarium. I was their mentor, their magistrix. I could do this.

With Neko at my back, I extended my arms to either side. Emma understood immediately. She stepped forward and placed her fingers against mine, automatically reaching for her sister. Raven followed suit, bringing one of the new students into the chain. One by one, they all matched hands, until Clara closed the circuit to my left.

“Jane,” she whispered, her voice low and demanding.

I merely shook my head. I was committed to this path, and Clara’s imagined hellmouth wasn’t going to stop me. Not when Teresa paced outside, waiting for me to fail. Not when new rain had set up a steady beat against the steely dome above us. The wind had picked up as well; gusts buffeted the sloping sides of our shielding cordon.

We were running out of time.

“Well met, sisters,” I said, faking a confident tone. “Here at the Jane Madison Academy, you’ll be asked to set aside much of what you think you know about magic. You’ll view the world through new lenses, from angles that will make your old practice seem limiting and strange. For tonight, though, all I ask is that you join with me to complete a simple, familiar spell.”

Moving slowly enough that each of my students could follow suit, I touched my fingertips to my forehead, offering up the power of my pure thoughts. I touched my throat, adding the power of pure speech. I brushed my fingers against my chest, giving my pure belief. Raising my voice to counter the steady hiss of rain against the cordon, I chanted, “
Join me, sisters, near the loom
.”

It was the first line of an old spell, an easy one. While mundane little girls were making their first elastic potholders on a plastic frame, young witches learned to weave their fledgling powers into a similar magic fabric. At this launch of the school year, my students and I would weave our powers in and out, creating a cloth unique to the Jane Madison Academy. Down the road, when I taught everyone how to create a
true
merged power, we’d laugh at the simplicity of this working.

As I spoke the first words, I lobbed a golden globe of power into the center of our circle. I nudged the physical manifestation of my astral abilities until a rectangular shape shimmered in the night-time air. When it was stable, I sent a mental invitation to the witches I knew best—to Emma and Raven to add their energy to the uprights of the loom, to Clara to feed her power to the horizontal struts. Purple, silver, and emerald light wrapped around my golden glow, each strand pulsing with unique power.

When I was certain the astral loom’s structure was stable, I drew a deep breath and recited the second line of the spell. “
Set the warp threads, leaving room
.”

I nudged Neko along our arcane bond, urging him to send a message to my new students’ familiars. Cassandra Finch responded first.
Cassie
, I reminded myself. She’d made it clear she preferred the nickname. Her magic was pale green, the soft shade of new leaves unfolding beneath a spring sky. It made me think of young things, fragile things, like the spray of freckles that spotted her cheeks, like her twin braids of unruly blond hair. She bit her lip and fluttered her hand against the shoulder of her familiar, Tupa. I was no expert on the animal roots of familiars, but I was willing to bet the curly-haired, obliviously awkward young man had begun life as a lamb. In fact, Cassie herself had a somewhat disturbing resemblance to Little Bo Peep.