by Jenica Saren
I had never felt more alone in my life. The only family I truly had was missing, gone without a trace. They had simply vanished.
The Day the World Went to Shit
"For the hundredth time, Marcia," I snapped through clenched teeth at the woman on the other end of the phone. "Yes, I'm sure they didn't just go out."
The High Priestess's voice came through the other end robotic and monotonous. One was because of the sound distortion on the phone, the other was just the way she sounded on a regular basis.
In my mind, I could see her, with her long black hair, red lips, and fair skin. And, most importantly, the permanent expression of utter boredom in the face of any situation
"I'm not saying that you're crying wolf, Kismet, just that I think there's a little more to the situation than it seems," she replied in a bored tone. "I'm sure they'll be back soon, so stop worrying so much."
I covered the microphone on my cell and screamed in frustration at the empty house. "Marcia, it's literal hours before the ritual - the most important ritual of the year to our family - and they're not here," I hissed. "Do you really see my blind grandmother missing the chance to see her family again? Really?"
Marcia sighed, a pitying sound that made me want to reach through the phone and rip her throat out. "Would you just calm down and stop being so dramatic? If it's so important to them, they'll be back in time for it, surely." And with that final sentiment, my High Priestess hung up the phone without so much as a farewell or blessed be. Just hung up on one of her subordinates in a time of distress.
Getting her removed from her seat, like some others were talking about, was sounding a lot more appealing at the moment than it had when I thought the bitch actually gave a damn about any of us. To clarify, that was about four hours before the shit hit the fan.
"Mom, Gran, where are you?" I whispered to the empty house as I dropped the phone and buried my face in my hands.
Kismet.
My head snapped up in an instant. "Gran?" It was her voice. I swore I heard it. "Gran, are you there?"
What if something horrible had happened to her? And my mother? I couldn't just sit around hoping that they would arrive safe and sound, and I clearly could not rely on High Priestess Marcia to do anything about the situation.
I was given two hands of my own for a reason.
Resolve hardening and anger peaking, I rushed out of the living room, where I was seated on the old floral sofa that smelt like comfort and frankincense. I flung open the front door and made a mad dash for my car, gathering up the remaining ritual supplies as quickly as I could.
Gran and my mother always drilled into me that I needed to make sure that I always got extra supplies, just in case.
This happened to be one of those cases and some of the ingredients I gathered at the shops were exactly what I needed.
Two by two, I hauled all of the big brown bags down to the basement, somehow without falling on my face until I reached the top. Every time. By the time I had brought the last bag down, my chin was scraped up, my cheeks felt bruised, and my white-blonde hair was in all sorts of disarray.
I dug through the bags for about twenty minutes each before finding the St. John's Wart, poplar buds, untouched dandelion oil - all things that helped when trying to track, locate, or confirm deaths. Not that I thought they were dead, but I wasn't taking my chances with not knowing.
A brief chill ran through the dank basement and I shivered in my thin jacket. It was my nerves, most likely. That horrible twisting in my gut, the chills, the insane paranoia and hearing voices. It was just nerves. It had to be.
Without having any help setting up an extravagant circle, I dusted salt around the circle, placed my candles at each of the four directions while holding the spirit candle, and mixed my herbs together with consecration oil to make a light paste of it, which I dabbed onto the backs of my hands and on my third eye.
Sucking in a deep breath, I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind before extending my senses to reach beyond the physical plane. It wasn't quite astral projection because, quite frankly, I was lazy as hell and wanted to reserve my energy in case of...
Well, I didn't really want to think about that.
In the misty, dark haze of the only part of the spirit plane I could access without reaching into the veil, I pushed against the bands of my spirit and felt around for my mother and grandmother.
The world was made up of innumerable dimensions and planes, some of them much like the one I lived in every day, others were pretty strange. Some of them were inhabited by weird, unfamiliar creatures while others were inhabited by familiar, yet still freaky and weird creatures.
One such world, my mother and I had visited whilst she was teaching me how to astral project as a child. At that particular age, I had a strange obsession with penguins and my mind was not entirely as focused as maybe it should have been. Okay, as it definitely should have been.
I had ended up stumbling into a world mostly inhabited by the lovable, flightless birds, but they had their own elaborate civilisation and were, truth be told, pretty big assholes. That little detour was how I'd also learned to seek out energies, since that's how my mother found me, nestled into a penguin's nest and shivering uncontrollably with a sardine shoved into my mouth. Talk about a memory to forget.
Thankfully, that wasn't going to be an option on the itinerary for this mission of mine. My only objective was to find my family, the only family I had now or ever. Excluding Whitney, of course, because it was impossible to think of her as anything less than the sister I'd always wanted.
Trying to rein in my wandering thoughts, I imagined my intent as a sure arrow, true to its mark and unwavering in its own determination. There was something urging me to hurry along, but with my mind cleared there was no way to rush.
Magick had that going for it, at the very least.
There was no way of telling while I was toeing the edge of the veil in spirit and mind, but it felt as though I had been searching for a couple of hours at least by the time I finally felt as though my energy has reached its maximum capabilities.
And, of course, began ebbing away from me like the tired, laziness of the sea on a breezeless day.
Reluctantly, I focused on pulling myself back to the physical plane where I could replenish my energy quickly with some food and drifting meditation. Drifting meditation was a form of meditation that focused on nothing, just allowing your mind to drift effortlessly and without an objective in mind - better known as sleeping.
Not that I could actually sleep. Once I pulled myself up from the floor and stood, my body was wracked with a pain that I could only describe as panic. Even if my family had not been in the astral planes, their energies and the signatures thereof would have been detectable, but that wasn't the case and it bode very, very badly.
As I stood in the centre of my circle, I couldn't help but think that maybe I'd done something wrong, because self-depreciation was a lot easier to cope with than the bleak and terrifying alternative. If their energies weren't detectable, then it could only mean one horrible thing, a horrible scenario that I didn't want to even consider.
Of course, what I’d wanted had never matter before.
Another cool, gentle breeze washed over me and I shivered slightly. I had to thank the spirits and be on my way. I needed energy and I needed to talk to someone - anyone - that could possibly help.
One by one, rushing more than could possibly be considered respectful, I put out the candles and gave my thanks to the spirits of the earth that had kindly lent me their essence for my journey. It wasn't necessary to borrow energy so intricately every time a witch performed magic, but I wanted to take zero chances and it seemed best to have as much power at my back as possible. You know, just in case I wound up in another penguin's nest.
I stretched out my sore, stiff limbs and fled the basement, which had always creeped me the hell out, despite the fact that I definitely knew I was the most dangerous thing down there. Next
to spiders, but the ones we had where I lived were a lot less interested in my flesh than they were in the occasional fly or gnat.
Back in the main living area of the house, I made a beeline for the kitchen and started tossing around things for a sub sandwich while trying to not think too hard. That was difficult in its own right, however, since overthinking was sort of a speciality of mine.
While I prepped my food mindlessly, I freed one hand to pull my phone from my pocket and dial Whit's number. If Marcia wouldn't listen to me, I could think of one person that certainly would, since she was next in line for the High Priestess position in her own coven. Granted, she practised in darker magicks than I did, but what did it matter when the issue was just as important regardless of magic types.
As the phone rang on the other end, I waited and crossed my fingers that she would answer as quickly as possible. Our friendship was something of an irregularity since usually covens had a tendency to only stick with their own. Interacting with other brands of witches was inevitable, we were everywhere, but that didn't mean they befriended one another. But Whitney and I hit it off in junior high school, then we just never stopped hitting it off. She showed me some neat black magick tricks that anyone with an ounce of magickal heritage could do, and I did the same for her in return.
When I had my days where I was stuck inside my own head and down in the dumps, she was always right there waiting to help in any way she could. Of course, there were several individuals who didn't particularly approve of our friendship, but we ignored the hell out of them and continued on. People on her side made up every reason to not like me and vice versa, but we didn't give a damn. We stuck together through thick and thin.
More importantly, we were family.
There was not a single thing that I wouldn't do for her, despite the asshats that wanted to shit on our Romeo and Juliet type friendship. We had several juvenile names that we had come up with for them and it made us feel better.
"Hey, Kissy." Whit's voice startled me out of my thoughts and I dropped my entirely too narrow phone into the mayo jar. Gross. The phone thing, not the actual mayo, because that shit is delicious.
"Fucking shit!" I exclaimed irritably. "Hold on, Whit, I dropped my phone in food."
Whitney's laughter rang out from my phone, even through the gooey substance it was halfway submerged in. If I needed a booby trip, like ever, I was going to use mayo instead of quicksand.
Finally fishing my phone out, I grabbed a paper towel and gave it a quick wipe-down. Time being of the essence and all that. "Okay, I'm back," I rasped, my throat dry from exhaustion and stress. And probably dehydration, too, since I basically survived off brown pop and... Well, that was basically it.
"Mayonnaise?" Whitney chuckled. Damn that psychic bitch. "Anyway, what's up, Buttercup?"
I grabbed a glass and quickly ran it under the tap, stalling for time while also steeling myself for what would likely be a whole lot of tears. Well, maybe not tears, because I was tough as nails - not. Taking a deep swig of the metallic-tasting water, I tried to think of a good way to word it all when my best friend made a sound that said she wanted me to get the hell on it with it.
"Whit, something really bad is going on," I whispered, staring down at my glass of water as though it held all the answers. Something niggled at the back of my mind, but I couldn't quite pinpoint whatever it was.
The sounds of shifting and movement came from Whitney's end of the phone. "Bad? White girl bad or end of the world bad?" She asked apprehensively. She didn't sound as though she doubted me, so that was a plus in my book.
"The last one," I replied quietly. I was afraid that if I spoke any louder, things could somehow go from bad to worse. "Really, really bad."
"Okay honey, back up here." My best friend sounded alert and ready to tackle anything, which was amazingly accurate for her in general. "From the beginning, tell me what's going on."
Rapid fire and not skimming a single detail, I explained the events, no matter how insignificant they seemed, leading up to me calling her. She was silent on her end of the phone for a long while as my voice cracked upon telling her that I couldn't track their essence in any of the living realms. However, quiet as she was, she was still listening, waiting, contemplating.
"Have you had any issues with cold spots in your house? Gusts of wind? Hearing things?" Whitney rattled off her questions and a breathed out an odd sigh of relief. If she was asking questions, she had answers.
My immediate reaction was to tell her no to every query, to deny any of those strange happenings, but as soon as I thought it, I froze. "Whit..." I trailed off, an icy fist gripping my heart and squeezing the air out of my lungs. "Yes. Yes to all of those things."
Those were all classic signs of hauntings. My coven never particularly dealt in the affairs of ghosts and such, demons, angels, and other celestial beings and deities were our specialities. But Whitney came from a coven that thrived almost purely off of the use of and interaction with spirits and everything to do with the other side of the veil. If my mother and grandmother were missing and I was being haunted, did that mean...
"Whitney, be honest with me, please," I begged. Desperately, stupidly, I clung to the hope that it wasn't my reality, that I was going completely insane and the only family I had and had ever known was about to walk right back through the front door.
On the other end of the phone line, however, my best friend left me sitting in an agonising silence with no answers and nowhere to go. My throat felt as though it was closing, my vision went blurry, and my stomach roiled until I was sure I would lose everything that was in and around it.
"Honey, it doesn't sound good, not one little bit," Whit finally said. Her words, her simple, pity-filled words sent my heart plummeting into a void.
There's no way. I can’t lose them, not both of them. Not at once and not like this.
Then, there was the complicated matter of how. The car was home, my mother's phone was home, the house was unmarred, unaffected. What could have happened? Could a wendingo have somehow crossed through the wards at the perimeter of our coven's land? A wendingo could make people vanish almost without a trace...
"If they're dead," I started, my voice hoarse with tears that I refused to allow free. "They're in the veil."
There was a short moment of silence on Whitney's end again before she gasped in realisation. "Kissy, no!" Whit exclaimed. "You already said one witch can't do that on her own. Hell, it takes all of my brothers to help me contact even one entity on the other side! You can't risk it, please babe."
I heard everything she was saying, every word. But that's all it was, just words and more words. My mind was made up and I knew that I had to try. I had to do it for my family.
"I'll call you later, Whit." Without another word and ignoring her shouting protests, I hung up the phone and stared blankly at all of the makings for an epic sandwich that were laid out on the counter in front of me.
If I was going to do this, this terrifying thing that had a pretty good chance of killing me, I was going to go out with a good sub in my belly. Some people had their addictions to cheese, coffee, or chocolate, but my love was with sandwiches - you could never go wrong with a sandwich.
While I prepped my food absently, I mulled over what I knew of the ritual. My grandmother had been particularly adamant about me memorising every single detail, which was why I'd been sent to collect the herbs with only a mental list and no help from the shopkeepers. The spell was easy enough and had very few words that needed to be spoken, so that was something at least.
In all reality, aside from the herbs, salt, and correct candle placement, there wasn't much to do for the ritual. It just took a lot of power. This particular spell would take a lot of power though, which is why we needed three generations and help from the spirit element. If I was lucky, which I rarely was, the spirit element would kindly lend me enough energy to find my mother and grandmother - if they were on the other side at all, that is.
; By the time I finished my sandwich, I was left standing confused and lost. First of all, I didn't even remember eating my sandwich, which was depressing as fuck because I had wanted to enjoy that sandwich so much. Secondly, I was doubting myself.
The odds were either pretty good or pretty bad that my mother and grandmother were on the other side, depending on how you looked at it. I wasn't a necromancer and had absolutely no magickal ability that would allow me to revive them if they were there, but at least if they were there I would know. Not that it would ease my mind or warm my heart at all.
Reluctantly, uneasily, I pushed away from the counter and made my way to the basement again, trying to steel my resolve and focus on being determined. I could do it, I knew it. It was just a matter of getting back, really. Once back in the dank basement, I paid close attention to my salt circle and made sure that my existing one hadn't been moved or disrupted in any way. A grain out of place could spell trouble.
Once I had obsessed enough over the circle, I made for the brown bags full of every herb that was needed for the ritual and began crushing them up and mixing them accordingly. After that was done, I put them in their respective iron slabs and lit them, blowing until they were no longer flaming, but just smouldering embers that let off a heavy smoke that clouded the confined area.
With the rich, conflicting tones of the herbal aroma filling my senses, I placed the candles as my mother and grandmother had taught me before placing myself in the middle of the circle, clutching the spirit candle to my chest as though it was the only thing anchoring me to the world of not freaking out. Well, it sort of was, so that wasn't exactly an exaggeration on my part.
"Okay, Kismet," I muttered to myself. People gave themselves pep talks all the time, so it was totally normal, right? Then again, most people weren't toeing the line of the living and dead when they gave themselves said pep talks. "You can do this. It's for your family and you'll be okay, I promise."