by Mindy Klasky
And Teresa Alison Sidney did not disappoint. “Welcome, sisters,” she proclaimed, and her voice was even more resonant than it had been before—deeper, coated with more power. She traced a pentagram in the air. Everywhere her finger passed, a silver streak persisted. “Our midnight Coven is met.”
The assembled witches repeated, “Our midnight Coven is met.”
Teresa Alison Sidney raised her voice and intoned, “Let any who would betray us discover the true power of the Coven.”
The witches took a step closer to their Mother and to me, and chanted all together, “So mote it be.”
Teresa Alison Sidney lifted both hands into the air. “Let any who would harm us receive the true wrath of Hecate.”
The witches took another step, and said in unison, “So mote it be.”
“Let any who would wrong us know no end of earthly grief and loss.”
The Coven surrounded the two of us. Neko poked me between my shoulder blades, and I joined in the chant. “So mote it be.”
Teresa Alison Sidney looked pleased that I had found my voice, but she did not interrupt the ritual. “Hecate’s Daughters, we gather this evening to celebrate our sisterhood. We gather in a circle. We gather in a pentagram of power.”
Each of the witches stepped back, until they ringed the Coven Mother, Neko and me. Then, each woman traced her own circle in the air, followed by a personal star. I joined in, only a little behind the others. Neko leaned against my side as I moved my arm, and I felt him mirror back my magic, helping me find a steady flow as all my would-be sisters watched.
I wished that someone had given me a cue book before the stroke of midnight, so that I would know what was coming next.
The Coven Mother looked around our group, smiling benignly. “We are all sisters in the Coven. Let any who would speak to Hecate’s Daughters do so now.”
A woman stepped forward immediately. Clearly, her movement was expected; it was probably on the same page of the program as the pentagram tracing I had just missed. This witch was as poised as every other one in the room, as picture-perfect for the Junior League yearbook. Her chestnut hair was cut very short, covering her head like a spiky cap. Her eyebrows were plucked into surprised arches. Her face was tanned, golden, as if she had spent the better part of the summer lying out on a beach. Her lips gleamed in the dim room, and I wondered if she used gloss, or if she had just licked them.
“I would speak to my sisters, Coven Mother.”
Teresa Alison Sidney smiled at the woman, and I immediately realized that the expression was different from every other one I’d seen inside this house. This smile was real. It was true. It was the sort of smile that I might share with Melissa—that I would share with Melissa, if I ever got a chance to tell her about this entire bizarre night.
“Yes, Haylee,” the Coven Mother said. “Speak to your sisters.”
Whatever friendly smile Haylee shared with Teresa Alison Sidney, she cast a harsher look at me. It wasn’t angry, per se. It wasn’t rude. It was sharp. Like a knife, cutting through to some essential core, Haylee cast a look at me, and then she said, “Coven Mother, there is a new witch among us. A sister who asks to join our circle.”
“The circle is open to all of Hecate’s Daughters.”
“All of Hecate’s Daughters must prove themselves to the Coven,” Haylee said. She relished these words, thrived on them. I thought of my brief, unsuccessful experience rushing a sorority in college. Haylee was the membership chairman, pledge coordinator and social secretary, all rolled into one.
I pasted a smile on my face, trying desperately to remember that I was long out of college. I didn’t need to worry about the silly social games of a bunch of party-hearty girls.
Neko brushed against my arm, though, and I realized that I did need to worry about these women. Like it or not, I was a witch, just like they were. I was a witch, and I needed my Coven. I needed the protection they could offer against arcane challenges. I needed the education they could provide, the wisdom gathered here in generations. But most of all, I needed their acceptance, their imprimatur, which would allow me to continue owning the treasures in my basement—the books and tools and Neko.
Teresa Alison Sidney was acknowledging Haylee’s words. “It is true. Each of Hecate’s Daughters must prove herself.”
“The sisters have met, Coven Mother. We have determined a test for Jane Madison. We have decided what she must do to join our ranks.”
Great. Now I was going to hear it. I could only hope that my initiation would be as easy as drinking a pitcher of hideous blue cocktails. Or wearing a toga for a week, pretending to be the slave for any of my so-called sisters. Or calling all the cute boys and asking them out to a party on behalf of the juniors and seniors.
Suddenly I remembered Neko’s admonishment the week before, when he first told me that Teresa Alison Sidney had phoned. My initiation wasn’t going to be over in a mere week. It wasn’t going to cost me a handful of sleepless nights, a few hungover days. The witches would wait for a major festival. A major celebration.
I racked my brain, trying to calculate the next major event in the witch-bound year. We’d already celebrated Beltane; Ostara was long past.
Samhain.
Halloween. The traditional marking of the new year for witches, a celebration of change, of transition.
A little more than eight weeks away.
Teresa Alison Sidney’s smile was slow, and I realized that she already knew what Haylee was going to say. She already knew the price for my entrance into the Coven. “Speak, Haylee. What have the sisters determined? How will Jane Madison prove her worthiness to join our ranks?”
Haylee’s answering smile was almost feral. Something about her next words made her vicious. “She will set the centerstone, Coven Mother. When the sisters gather beneath the moon of Samhain, Jane Madison will set the centerstone for our new safehold.”
7
I stood in the dimly lit kitchen, juggling a plate of finger sandwiches and a glass of punch, contemplating whether I could manage to slip a petit four onto my plate without collapsing my entire carefully balanced little world. It wasn’t just the food that I worried about, of course. I was wondering about the witches who surrounded me.
Centerstone? Me? Just what the hell was I supposed to do to set a centerstone?
For the thousandth time, I glanced over my shoulder at the front room of the house, asking myself what the men were doing in there. Hadn’t they heard the end of the witches’ ritual? The loud crack of thunder, as Teresa Alison Sidney traced another pentagram in the air with her whole hand while she intoned, “So mote it be.”?
None of the other witches seemed concerned that their warders were absent. In fact, none of the other witches even acknowledged the familiars slinking around the edges of the table. I had already shot Neko half a dozen glances, silently remonstrating with him that he was not allowed to eat the entire platter of tiny crab cakes, that he could not fill his teacup with cream, that the cream puffs had to be eaten in their entirety—white, fluffy filling and pastry.
I was scowling at him again, trying to get him to back away from the artful skewers of grilled shrimp, when Haylee stepped up to my side.
“No hard feelings, right?” she asked, extending her perfectly manicured hand and flashing me a smile. Now that she was no longer encircling me with ritual power, I could see that she was as thin as a model. Her collarbones stuck out with a vehemence that I’d never seen in person, only on the glossy cover of Vogue. I took her fingers as she said, “Haylee James.”
“Jane Madison,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous. Every woman gathered around this midnight feast knew my name. I was the reason they had come. Me, and my new mission regarding their centerstone.
“I hope that you don’t think I was calling you out, trying to give you any sort of special grief.”
I had thought just that. I had thought that she enjoyed standing in the center of the circle of witches, that she’d take
n pleasure in my flash of confusion, in my lack of understanding. I’d thought that I was transported back to the worst bits of elementary school, of high school, of college, and I had not appreciated the sensation that every other witch in the Coven knew what was going on while I was attempting to ad-lib from a very old, very outdated version of the play we had decided to stage.
“Of course not,” I said, and I managed to smile.
Haylee reached past me and took one of the petit fours, popping it into her mouth without worrying about balancing a plate and a glass, without worrying about anything at all. When she had swallowed the morsel, she leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially, “Teri always does such a nice job with these get-togethers. Half the time, I think that’s the only reason we let her be the Coven Mother.”
Teri.
Teresa Alison Sidney, to me. Terrifyingly powerful, all-knowing leader of the Washington Coven, to me.
Teri, to Haylee.
I was up against more than the most popular girl in school, here. I was up against the entire Old Girls’ Network.
Once again, I shot a glance toward the front room. Why hadn’t David warned me about this? Why hadn’t he told me who I’d be dealing with?
And then I thought, maybe he hadn’t known.
Well, that was absurd. He’d been affiliated with the Coven his entire life. Warding was the family business, he’d told me. He’d even been drummed out of the warders corps, on a temporary basis, for breaching the witches’ rules. He knew what was going on here. He had to.
If only I did.
Haylee flashed me a sympathetic smile. “It’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?”
I tried to match the quirk of her lips, pretended for just a moment that I had her devil-may-care flair. I shrugged and attempted an airy “Just a bit.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Really?” I realized how plaintive I sounded, and I hurried to cover my wistfulness. “It’s just that I don’t have any idea what’s coming next. I don’t know what people expect of me. What they want me to do.”
What was I saying? Why was I talking to this woman? Had she cast some spell to make me confide in her?
As if to confirm that dark thought, Haylee raised a perfectly manicured finger to the base of her throat. I realized that she wore an ornament there, a delicate amulet that rested on a silver chain so slight that I could barely make it out in the dim light. I could not keep myself from stepping closer, from staring at the device.
A torch. The same torch that I had seen on David’s key chain. “What is that?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
“This?” Haylee touched the jewelry again, and her voice conveyed a shrug, almost as if she were saying, This old thing? When I nodded, she said, “My Torch. The symbol that I’ve dedicated myself to Hecate.” She looked around the room. “We all wear them. Teri presents them to us, when we’re accepted into the Coven.”
Teri again.
“Oh.”
Well, that response made me sound absolutely brilliant. Like I was a shrewd judge of witchcraft. Or jewelry.
I must be even more tired than I’d thought. As soon as those words crossed my mind, a yawn began to grow at the back of my throat. I thought that I could hide it, that I could swallow it away, but I could tell from Haylee’s arched eyebrows that I wasn’t quite successful.
“I know,” she said in a voice that wasn’t quite sympathetic. “It’s all strange when you’re new to the Coven. Your mother certainly wasn’t able to keep up with us.”
“Clara?” My voice cracked with incredulity. When had Clara come to the Coven? When had she met the witches? And, far more importantly, why hadn’t she said anything to me? “What happened with Clara?”
“Let’s just say that she wasn’t given any major assignment, shall we? No centerstones in her future. Poor thing’ll be lucky if she learns how to read jade runes.”
“She’s actually quite skilled at jade runes!”
Why was I defending Clara? Well, it was one thing for me to challenge her, to say that she was a lousy witch and a worse mother. But I wasn’t about to let a perfect stranger get in on the game.
“Really.” I could tell that Haylee didn’t believe me. “Well, I suppose we might have been mistaken. Some women are just so nervous when they come before the Coven. It didn’t help that your mother was so worried about your grandmother. I don’t think that either of them had stayed up past midnight in a long time.”
Either of them. So Gran was in on the silent conspiracy as well. Anger rose up in my chest, competing incongruously with another yawn.
Apparently oblivious to my distress, Haylee went on, “I suppose it’s possible that we all drew the wrong conclusion. We might have been thrown by neither of them having a familiar.”
Well, of course, neither one had a familiar. Neither one had known she was a witch until I’d spilled the beans last year. And it wasn’t as if Gran or Clara could have marched into Macy’s to snatch up a magical helpmeet or two.
Familiars, I knew from my reading in the past year, were only created with the expense of a great deal of magical energy. When a particularly gifted witch died, she could encapsulate her power in an animal, feeding her spectral energy into its body, storing the raw stuff of magic for other witches to draw upon. Not every witch had a familiar—the valuable resources were generally allocated only to the powerful within any given Coven. So it wasn’t at all surprising that Gran and Clara had no familiars.
As if on cue, Neko chose that moment to abandon his stalking of the food table. He materialized at my side like a ghost, licking his lips. I wondered how many treats he had stolen while I’d been talking to Haylee. Avoiding my dagger glance, Neko cocked his head to one side and scratched at his ear. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d begun to whistle a tuneless little song—anything to make himself seem more innocent.
Apparently unaware of the tension sparking between Haylee and me, he asked, “Do you think that Teresa Alison Sidney will bring out any more of the salmon canapés?”
Haylee sniffed, and I immediately realized that she did not routinely speak to other witches’ magical assistants. “Teri is not in the habit of providing extras for familiars.” Again, I felt that strange instinct to defend someone close to me, to explain away Neko’s hunger. “Especially now that people are heading home,” Haylee added before I could speak.
I looked around, surprised to realize that there were fewer people in the room. The door to the men’s club at the front of the house now stood open. While I couldn’t see inside from my current angle, I could just make out the shadow of a familiar ducking inside and then, less than a minute later, re-emerge with a tall, sleek man.
The warder had clearly been summoned by the black-clad witch’s servant. Confident and poised, the man crossed to Teresa Alison Sidney and bowed smoothly, raising her hand to his lips. She smiled tightly, expressing equal measures of satisfaction at the honor and world-weariness at the familiarity. The warder rose from his gesture and offered his arm to his witch, guiding her toward the door without a glance in my direction.
And suddenly, I knew that it was time for David to rescue me. It was time for him to make his obeisance before Teresa Alison Sidney, to say whatever needed to be said, to do whatever needed to be done. I was falling asleep on my feet, and the notion of waiting one more minute for my warder to appear was almost enough to bring me to tears. “Neko,” I said, but he had already sensed my command; he was moving toward the far doorway.
I turned back to Haylee. “Thank you for your…conversation.”
“I’m afraid that I’ve upset you. I didn’t mean anything negative about your mother or your grandmother. It’s just that they didn’t have the power we were led to expect. Nothing at all like yours.”
“No,” I lied, and then I realized that she might think that I was agreeing with her assessment of my relatives’ witchy abilities. My tongue seemed thick in my mouth as I hurried to clarify, “I’m
not upset.”
“Good.” Haylee smiled and settled the fingers of one hand against the pulse point in my wrist, even as she once again touched the Torch that flickered against her throat. “Because I really do look forward to working with you. Maybe we could get together for coffee sometime. I do a lot of business with galleries in Georgetown—I’m an interior decorator.”
I smiled at the vague invitation. Haylee wasn’t actually so bad. She was reaching out to me. She was being sociable. She was welcoming me into the heart of the Coven, assuming that I would join the sisterhood, rather than betting against me. She was being a friend.
And if I had any doubt as to the goodwill behind her words, Haylee smiled winningly. “You know that you can ask me for help. With anything.”
“Thank you,” I said, and my response was made almost fervent by David’s appearance in the doorway. I was scarcely aware of his steps across the room; I could barely watch him say his farewells. All I knew was that he settled his hand on my arm. I found myself stammering goodbye to Haylee, babbling something to a calm, collected Teresa Alison Sidney. I cut off yet another yawn as I glared at Neko, forcing him to come and stand by my side.
And then, finally, David guided me out the front door of that strange and mysterious house.
The pentagram across the threshold had faded away. As we walked into the wall of humid, late-summer air, I could sense the power that had once been housed in the doorway. Its living, electric thrill was gone, though. The man with the sword had departed as well, and I could not say that I was sorry to miss his shadowy threat.
I was suddenly so tired I could barely move.
I was so tired I did not bother to reprimand Neko as he hissed at another familiar, a birdlike man who hovered by his own mistress’s car door, waiting for her to get settled before her warder turned his key in the ignition. I was so tired I didn’t notice Neko opening the back door of David’s car, ushering me onto the long, leather seat, making sure that my legs were inside before he closed the door and sat up front.