by Tessa Adams
I make it back to the garden just as the ceremony is starting.
My mother stands in the middle of the circle, next to a tall, gold-colored candle. Positioned equidistant around her are my father and siblings.
Rachael, the healer, stands due North, a green candle in her hand and chains with the sacred Eye of Horus around her neck. Bold, determined, protective, she is Earth.
Next to her, halfway between North and East is my father, a purple candle in one hand and a sacred ceremonial athame in the other. He is strength and unparalleled knowledge.
To the East is Nadia. Ankhs make up each loop of the gold chain-link belt that rests low on her hips. A yellow candle floats directly in front of her. Compassionate and kind, she is Air.
Beside her, holding the position of Southeast, is Donovan. His candle is black, his tool a long and wickedly curved sword. He is the silent and omnipresent eternity.
South is Noora. With a crimson candle in her hand, the knot of Isis decorating her robe and her red hair dancing in the wind, she is Fire. Bright, inviting and too often explosive.
To her left is Willow. Her candle is silver, her tool a wand made of cedar. She wears amulets of the lotus flower to signify transformation. She is strong, unbending will.
Standing due West is Hannah. She holds a half-full chalice in her right hand, a blue candle in her left. She is Water, cool and indispensable.
And finally, completing the circle is my favorite sister, Sophia. She wears a headdress with the sacred symbol of Djed. Her candle is orange and she is wild, unpredictable, determined action.
My mother lights her candle with a flick of her wrist and a prayer in the ancient Egyptian tongue. Then she lifts her arms and fire sizzles along her fingertips before leaping straight to Noora. Noora’s candle alights followed by the other eight and then, urged on by my mother, flames race around the sacred circle growing higher and higher until they nearly eclipse my view of my family.
My sisters’ voices join my mother’s and an ancient prayer of thanksgiving fills the air around us all. It is burned into the earth by the fire, carried to the heavens on the curls of smoke that rise and rise and rise.
As the prayer ends, Hannah reaches into her chalice and flicks water from her fingertips onto the surrounding fire. It spits and hisses, grows even taller for one breathtaking moment and then dies in an instant.
The circle has been cast.
Though the crowd all around me is silent, energy throbs between us. It’s always like this at the Winter Solstice when, on the longest night of the year, we celebrate the rebirth of the sun.
I know this ceremony by heart, have witnessed it twenty-six times now, and still the prayer and the power of it take my breath away. Inside the circle, my mother starts a new fire—a living symbol of the bonfire of old—and above us the moon burns bloodred.
Another prayer and seven stars shoot across the sky just as my mother reaches for the dragon’s blood she cut earlier. She casts it into the flame and my father follows suit with mint and myrrh. The smoke mingles, curls, begins to drift outside the circle and into the crowd.
I have no magic, no power, and yet as the smoke reaches me I feel something quicken deep inside of me. It’s happened to me before, when I’m in the presence of spectacular magic but never to this degree. Never this strongly.
I know it’s the herbs, understand that they are used to strengthen the pull of the ancient Heka, but it doesn’t matter. The blood in my veins starts to thrum, to vibrate, electricity sparking along every nerve ending. It scares me a little, has me pulling back as Willow approaches the fire and, with a few murmured words that I have no hope of hearing, casts her own plant into the flames.
The smoke swirls and seethes, spiraling up, up, up to the sky. She has tossed in her namesake, willow, for help in divining the stars.
Then it’s Donovan’s turn. He approaches the fire with arms full of bayberry and cedar—always the protector. But before he can do more than invoke the favor of Sekhmet, a scream rends the air.
It’s followed by a second scream and then a third one, and my nerves catch fire. By the time a fourth shriek rips through the empty field behind me, I’m running straight for the forest and the unmistakable sound of distress.
Five
Others follow me. I can hear their footsteps pounding along the ground behind me. But I’m quick and agile—as the eighth child, I had to be if I had any hope of getting out of my elementary school years alive—and I keep the lead.
I know Donovan will yell at me later about running off when he couldn’t protect me—you can’t break a circle like the one my family formed without observing certain rituals—but it sounds like someone is dying. Every second could count.
Panicked, I remember the vision from earlier, the one I’ve tried so hard to convince myself was a dream. I hit the forest at a dead run, dodging around trees and jumping over roots by memory alone. Thank goddess I ditched the boots along with the witch costume.
The people behind me slow down as they try to find their way in the darkness, but this is my forest. I know every inch of it.
Even so, I pull my cell phone out of my pocket, hit the flash light app so I have a better chance of finding the person who’s screaming. She’s still yelling, so I’m following that sound, but the last thing I want to do is plow right into her because I couldn’t see her.
As I run, I try to figure out what’s wrong. She sounds like a young girl, and I’m hoping she’s just lost. Maybe she got bored at the ceremony and wandered off, then lost her way. Or maybe her flashlight went out. There are a million different reasons for her to be this upset—it doesn’t have to be the one my mind automatically goes to. The one I faced when I was barely more than a girl myself.
Within a couple of minutes, Micah, who knows these woods almost as well as I do, catches up to me via his own flashlight app—who knew there’d be a circumstance when I’m actually glad to see him—and we run side by side until we stumble upon her about five hundred yards into the forest. A young girl about sixteen or seventeen, she is kneeling at the foot of a huge oak tree and trembling uncontrollably.
“Are you all right?” I ask, crouching next to her. “What’s happened?”
“I…she…can’t—” She says more, but she’s crying so hard that those are the only words I can make out.
“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Micah speaks soothingly as he, too, squats down beside her. He takes her hand in his, strokes it softly even as he uses his index and middle finger to take her pulse. “Let’s take a couple of deep breaths together and then you can tell me what has you so upset.”
I pull back a little, let Micah do his thing. Though he was a lousy boyfriend, he’s a hell of a doctor and within three minutes he has the girl significantly more calm. He’s also checked her over well enough to ascertain that she’s not the one who’s hurt and learned that her name is Brenda and that she’s nineteen years old.
I try not to let the coincidence remind me of my own hysterical flight through this forest when I was her age.
When it seems like she’s got the freaking out down to a minimum, I once again ask, “What’s happened, Brenda? Why are you so upset?”
She doesn’t answer at first, but then—in a voice so low I have to strain to hear it over the soft whispers of the wind—she finally murmurs, “Someone’s over there.” She reaches out a shaking hand and points down a path to the left of where we are.
“Someone?” Micah asks. “Did he or she try to hurt you?”
She shakes her head, whispers, “I think she’s dead.”
Micah and I lock eyes over her head and he looks as alarmed as I feel. “Why do you say that?” I demand.
“I was taking a shortcut through the forest, hoping to make it to the Solstice ceremony before it got too late, and I tripped over her. She’s next to the big, lightning-struck tree and at first, I thought she was just drunk, but”—she shudders—“she isn’t moving and there’s a lot of blood.”
&nbs
p; I leap to my feet, head for the path—and the tree—she’s indicated, but Micah gets there first. He blocks me with his body. “You can’t go down there,” he tells me.
“We need to see if whoever she found needs help.” I shove at him a little. We can’t just leave the poor girl out here, bleeding, in the middle of the forest.
He doesn’t budge. “It doesn’t sound like she’s simply hurt, Xandra. You know that as well as I do and the last thing the police need is us tromping around a crime scene. And I’m sorry to say it, but it’s the last thing you need as well.”
I know the words are coming before he says them, even think that I’m prepared for them—at least until they hit me with all the finesse of a two-by-four. He’s right. I know that. I had nightmares for years after I found poor Lucy. Hell, I still have nightmares. What makes me think this will be any different?
And still, “We have to check. What if she’s just unconscious?”
By now a group of half a dozen other witches has stumbled onto the scene. Among them is Detective Moira Montgomery, one of my least favorite people in the world. From the snarl curling her upper lip when she looks at me, it’s obvious the feeling is more than mutual. I guess now that her father, my beloved Uncle Mike, is dead, she feels like there’s no reason for us to hide our animosity anymore.
“What did you do now, feeb?” she demands in a querulous voice.
“It’s called running. You should lay off the doughnuts and try it some time.” It’s a childish retort, and once it’s out, I’m sorry I said it. But it was a knee-jerk, gut-level response to being called a feeb. As in feeble. It’s a derogatory term for a witch without power and Moira has always thrown it around way too easily. Especially in reference to me.
“And maybe you should stay out of police business.”
“I’m not in police business. This is private property, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything. It belongs to the king and queen, of which you are neither, and as such is protected by the Ipswitch Police Department. But if you’d like, I can run you into the station and we can sort this all out down there. Including whatever part you’ve played in disturbing the peace.”
“Whatever part I’ve played? All I’ve done is help calm the kid down.” I speak through clenched teeth, even as I gesture to Amy, who is still huddled against the tree. I can’t believe Moira’s threatening me when all I’ve done is try to help. Not that I’m afraid of her—she may talk a good game, but there’s no way she’d haul a member of our coven’s royal family into the station house without a damn good reason.
But that’s not the point. Finding the girl, the body, Amy tripped over is.
“So, that’s the statement you’re sticking with?” she asks, reaching into her back pocket for goddess only knows what.
“Seriously?” I demand. “You really want to do this now? A girl is either dead or dying and you want to have a pissing contest with me?”
She barely glances at Amy. “She looks okay to me.”
I roll my eyes, but before I can say anything else—like call her a moron—Micah jumps into the fray, explaining what we know so far.
Moira listens to him as she would never listen to me, then asks Amy to take her to the body. When the girl balks, not wanting to go anywhere near it again, I volunteer to lead the way. Though it’s the last thing I want to do either, I know exactly what tree she’s referring to. As a child, I climbed it a million times and as a teenager, I let Micah carve our initials into its warped and bumpy trunk before I knew better.
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye and from the way he’s watching me, I know he remembers all the things we did at that tree as well as I do. Which is a shame, because some memories are better off forgotten.
“How do you know where the body is?” Moira asks as I skirt Micah. Her eyes are narrowed suspiciously.
“These are my woods.” It’s a simple answer but it’s also the truth.
I weave around a clump of trees in the center of the path and start booking it. That poor girl shouldn’t be out here any longer than absolutely necessary. But I’ve made it only a few yards down the path when I slam straight into the obscene. The whole area stinks of violence and black magic.
From the way both Moira and Micah stop, I know they feel it too. Every instinct I have screams at me to run in the other direction, but I can’t do that. Not when some poor girl went through hell out here. Might still be going through hell.
I push forward, down a small hill and around a curve, aware as I do so that the tree in question is only a few feet in front of me. As soon as I clear the curve, I start sweeping the ground with my flashlight. It isn’t long before I find her.
I see her feet first, encased in a pair of decorative brown cowboy boots. So she’s a witch then, one of our coven—or at the very least a cowgirl who wandered across the path of the wrong dark warlock. She’s facedown in the mud, wearing tattered blue jeans and a ripped University of Texas hoodie in burnt orange. The hood has been pulled up until it completely obscures her head.
Micah rushes past me, starts to roll her over, but Moira stops him. “No fingerprints,” she barks, slipping a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket.
“She might not be dead,” I object, though deep inside, I know better.
Moira focuses her own large flashlight—the reason it took her so long to catch up to Micah and me—on the body, and the huge pool of blood it’s lying in. “She’s dead.”
But she tosses Micah a pair of gloves anyway.
Micah nods in confirmation, even as he slips on the gloves. He feels around her throat for a pulse, pulls back a hand covered in blood. “I think her throat is slit,” he says weakly.
Moira nods, then pulls out the walkie-talkie she wears at her waist, orders a perimeter to be set up and a comprehensive sweep done of the forest. The look on her face says she knows she isn’t going to find anything, but I know that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The warlock may be gone, but he might have left something behind.
The next hour passes in a blur. My mom and dad arrive with Donovan, and all three of them try to talk me into going home, but some invisible force keeps me pinned right here, watching as this new nightmare unfolds. I don’t know why it matters so much, but I need to know who this girl is. Need to know what happened to her. Maybe because, standing here looking at her, I can’t help but remember the last body I’d found.
That girl, Lucy Douglas, had been a college student at UT. She’d come to Ipswitch for what she thought was a romantic weekend with her new boyfriend and had ended up mutilated and strangled. It’s been over eight years and I haven’t forgotten anything about that night. Something deep inside warns me that forgetting tonight won’t be any easier.
Donovan and my parents choose to stay with me and just like last time, no one—not even the new chief of police—can get them to move. Sometimes being royalty has its perks. I just wish we could use them for something other than viewing death.
Witchcraft Investigations shows up along with the more traditional CSI team and together they work the murder, taking pictures and measuring the magical signature that still hangs in the air all around us. It is dark and oppressive and stinks of blood magic at its most vile. It’s not familiar to them, doesn’t fit any of the signatures they currently have on record. Not that I would expect it to—warlocks of this caliber know how to disguise themselves.
After CSI finishes taking pictures in situ, Moira crouches down and rolls the girl over. As she does, the girl’s hoodie falls off and there’s a collective gasp from the small crowd gathered here, along with a muttered curse from both Donovan and my father. I don’t make a sound. I can’t. The first glimpse I get of her black hair throws me right back to my hallucination-that-was-really-a-memory-and-now-might-actually-be-called-a-prophecy from this morning. It immobilizes me, has my blood freezing in my veins. The girl in my dreams, the one who had lain battered and broken and bleeding in my parents’ fo
rest, had had the same exact hair.
Had I seen this coming? This morning, if I hadn’t been so busy trying to bury the images, could I have somehow prevented this? Or is it all just a horrible coincidence?
“Do you recognize her?” I ask the group as a whole.
No one answers, and I finally move a few halting steps forward. Moira is so arrested by what she sees that she doesn’t even bother to reprimand me. But she doesn’t know about the hair, doesn’t know about what I saw, and I can’t help wondering what holds her and the others spellbound.
With effort, I yank my attention from her blood-matted hair and instantly wish I hadn’t. One look at her vacant eyes and the gaping tear in her throat makes my stomach churn. No one should ever have to die like this.
“Does anybody know who she is?” I ask again.
Ipswitch is a relatively small town, made up mostly of witches and a few other creatures that go bump in the night. I haven’t lived here in years, so it’s not unusual that she doesn’t look familiar to me. But Moira should recognize her. Part of the role of the small police department in this very low-crime town is to know the citizenry, simply because you can never tell when some kind of weird magic or otherworldly thing is going to happen. And if she doesn’t, Mom, Dad and Donovan should certainly have some idea of the girl’s identity.
When once again no one answers, I creep a little closer until I’m standing on the front line with my parents, Donovan and Micah, none of whom have said anything since the body was rolled over. And now that I’m this close, now that I’m staring at her from this angle, I finally realize what they’re all looking at. Not the wound in her throat or the bruises all over her body. And certainly not her bloodstained hair. No, they are all staring at the large, black mark that covers her entire left cheek, a mark I’ve never seen on anyone else in my entire life.
At my first sight of it, I stumble backward, trip on a tree root and hit the ground, hard. I barely feel the fall. I’m too busy trying to wrap my mind around what I’m seeing. That girl, that poor girl who I’m becoming more and more convinced I really did see in a vision this morning, has been branded with a circlet of Isis.