Chloe had shared her mind with one other person before—Bailey, who had the same gift that she did—and it had been an uncontrolled sort of thing, memories and feelings flooding between them until Bailey nearly caught sight of things Chloe wasn’t ready for Bailey to know. This time, it was more careful than that; but the moment that Bailey reached out and took Piper’s offered connection, Piper’s eyebrows crept up and her eyes grew misty.
“Oh… Bailey, I’m so sorry…” She whispered.
Not now, Bailey said over their link. She could feel Piper’s guilt, misplaced, and wanted desperately to address that but they had to stay focused. Later; I promise.
Piper nodded. On her end, Bailey now knew precisely what she had to do—focus on one howling star of power among the rest, until it was looming before her like an inferno. Gods, was that how Bailey looked to her? Or to the rest of them? Like something about to go super-nova?
“Never,” Piper whispered, feeling Bailey’s worries.
“We’re ready,” Bailey told Leander, Chloe, Aria, and Avery, who had arrayed themselves around her and Piper.
Some of it was familiar magic—Bailey opened herself to the intelligence and spirit of the Caves, as she had countless times before. The difference now was that she no longer had to supplicate; her new magic was a kind of mantle of power to which the Caves acquiesced more readily. Maybe the reason they had never quite managed to understand the whole picture of the Caves was that they’d never been able to account for the primal magic that she now held.
Whatever the case, the presence arose beneath them like a whale slowly emerging from the depths of the sea—part of it but apart, it’s arrival bringing with it a growing mound of power as magic came before and behind it.
Piper sucked in a breath, and Bailey took her hands. They were trembling.
“Don’t be afraid,” Bailey said.
Piper was no doubt feeling the spirit of the Caves the same way that Bailey did, or at least a pale reflection of it through their shared sensations. It was at terrifying power, really—even as weak as it was, it was mammoth and being at peace with something so vast was difficult to accomplish even when it meant you no harm. A benevolent behemoth was still a behemoth.
“Ready,” Bailey told the others around them.
Avery and Leander worked first, crafting their strange geometric constructs while Aiden looked on with interest and concern, his wand already out in case it looked like something might be going wrong. Piper’s eyes flickered around to things she couldn’t see but which Bailey could sense, confused by the gap between experience and appearance.
“Wizard’s magic,” Bailey said, smiling. “Perks of being queen, I guess.”
“Can you see it?” Piper asked.
Bailey shook her head. “Not really, but I can feel the shape of it and sort of… sense it in the corner of my eye.”
When Avery signaled the witches, Chloe and Aria began to chant as they each lit bowls of reagents, and wove their fingers together over the smoke. They stood, and circled the outside of the makeshift circle, sealing the construct, the wizards, and Bailey and Piper inside. The smoke followed them, weaving and curling, always seeming to be on the verge of blowing away but hanging in the air and never quite blown free.
Once the barrier was established, the smoke wove itself inward in a slow spiral, tendrils reaching out to find the construct the wizards had made, easing along the complicated threads of it into eldritch angles that made the eyes water to see. Like a glass filling, the construct became visible from the outside in as the two magics mixed.
By and by, Bailey’s awareness of anyone beyond the circle, and then beyond herself and Piper, vanished. It was disquieting, and she saw the same nervousness in Piper’s face that was probably in hers.
That was when Bailey knew it was time to do the rest of her part. She reached below them, into the magic of the Caves, and spooled it up toward them until it hummed in their feet and began to spiral up their legs. Piper shivered, and her hands clasped Bailey’s tightly.
“Stay calm,” Bailey whispered. “My magic is… surprising, but it won’t hurt you.”
Piper glanced down at the unseen power that she could no doubt feel sinking into her bones, saturating her native magic in preparation of mixing it with Bailey’s.
Bailey was more protected both by experience and by the nature of her new power, and had to will herself to open up to that same saturation, sharing the font of primal magic in herself with the Caves, and with the encroaching spells provided by the four practitioners around her.
It mixed slowly, honey dissolving into cold water. The enchantments took up the thick yarns of the blended energy and swept them into weaving currents that spread out, and curled in, and passed through impossible angles in other planes, and then finally completed the circuit.
Piper and Bailey were suspended over a depthless dark, together.
“It’s hot,” Piper breathed.
“I know,” Bailey said quietly, sympathetic. “But it’s like… a pepper; it only feels like heat but it won’t really burn you. You’ll get used to it.”
Piper only nodded.
She could feel Bailey’s power, and Bailey could feel hers. The witches around them came into view first—not images, precisely, so much as distinct lights that somehow managed to convey identity. There was Chloe, and Frances, and Aria. There were the Australians. Deep in the heart of the rock below were the two lights of Rita and Anita. Off in the distance was Riley.
As Bailey adjusted, though, and took Piper’s gift down into the depths of her own power, more lights appeared. Avery, and Leander, and just a few yards beyond, Aiden. It confirmed something to her—Riley did have magic, and it was in the same current as the witches. That, or Piper was so connected to him that it didn’t matter.
Piper gasped, though. “That’s Ave! And Aiden, and your fath—ah, Leander!” Piper’s embarrassment and Bailey’s dismissal of the slip met at the same time and canceled one another out.
“We’re going to go further,” Bailey said. “Try to concentrate.”
Piper did, and Bailey felt the familiar pattern of exercises she’d learned in her first weeks of practice come into place in her friend’s mind. The calm, deep ocean, all the waves of the surface disappearing as they sank together deeper and deeper.
Bailey took her magic and Piper’s and reached through the magic of the Caves, putting a new, third lens over their awareness. From there, Piper helped her—she made a peculiar sort of movement with her mind, as if stretching out with her eyes to focus on something far away.
“There,” Piper breathed. “Oh, Bailey… do you see this?”
Bailey did.
There were hundreds of lights at first. Then there were more, and more, until there were thousands of them scattered all around the sphere that was the Earth. Distinguishing between Witches, and Wizards, and anyone else was an academic matter only at that moment. She could sense the different currents in each of them, but she could also sense the common thread; the origin of all their magic.
The thread led back to Bailey now. As if all the magic in the world passed from wherever it called home, through her and into circulation. It became more evident than ever before, and she knew, just then, why it was she hadn’t felt like herself when she looked in the mirror.
She wasn’t herself. Where she had once been, something had been dug out, to make way for this other thing—this river of primal magic. And around the edges of the river, the banks were slowly eroding away.
“No,” Piper said. She held Bailey’s hands tighter, and pulled her close. “Don’t think that. Don’t give up, Bailey.”
Bailey was brought back to herself, and she nodded before she leaned her forehead against Piper’s. “I’m trying not to, Pipes.”
“I don’t know how much time we have,” Piper said, “but we’re here to do a job. Call them. All of them. We’ll deal with whoever shows.”
“Right,” Bailey said. She turned her atten
tion back to the field of stars, and reached out to all of them as easily as reaching for a mug and pouring coffee into it. Come to Coven Grove, she told them. Come to the United States. To Oregon. To Coven Grove and… your queen. Come and stand with me. Come to help us save our world, our people, and magic itself. Come and fight.
The message was heard. Like throwing a stone into a pond, she saw the ripples it left behind. She felt the stirring in those lights—the shock, and the fear, and the hope and excitement.
Bailey wanted to stay here and watch the lights forever. These were her people, far and wide. She’d been thinking about it all wrong before. She wasn’t just the queen of the Witches. She was the Queen of Magic. Maybe there had been a language barrier in the translation of the title.
It didn’t mean that she wanted to rule them all—far from it. But as she felt their minds, their spirits—some lit up with magic, others quiet, as if their magic had been long dormant—she did realize that it meant she had to protect them. No matter what the cost was, these people felt like her children. And she couldn’t let anything happen to them.
Piper tugged at her. At first, her voice was distant, quiet; but it came rushing into Bailey’s awareness, growing louder until she heard it with her own ears, from right in front of her.
“Come back! Bailey! Bailey Robinson, you have to stay here!”
Bailey blinked, and the lights were gone. Piper was sweating. The darkness turned itself into patches of shadow broken by vague shapes, and those shapes became people, and those people became familiar faces.
Piper’s knees gave out, and Bailey ducked to catch her. Together, they slumped to the ground.
Bailey panicked, shaking Piper gently. “Piper? Wake up. Piper!”
“I’m… okay,” Piper murmured. “Tired. Long… trip.”
Aiden knelt, and pressed his wand to Piper’s forehead, muttering as he waved his hand over her face. When he’d done whatever diagnostic he was doing, he took the wand tip away. “She’ll be fine. She’s just exhausted. Probably from losing the support of your magic and the Caves’.”
“Look,” Bailey said softly, and brushed Piper’s bangs aside.
There was a lock of hair just behind that had turned white.
“She’ll be alright,” Aiden repeated. “Let’s just get her somewhere to rest. I’m sure we can all use it after that…”
Bailey looked around. “Is everyone okay?”
“Oh, sure,” Frances said. “But I think we were probably closest to the bullhorn.”
“We all heard you,” Chloe said. “Loud and clear. Do you have any idea how many witches you called to?”
“And wizards,” Leander said, smiling wearily. “Don’t forget them.”
“All of them,” Bailey said simply.
“All of them?” Aria asked. “Which is… how many?”
Bailey stood as Aiden and Avery took over Piper’s care. She folded her arms, and looked up the ceiling of the Cave. “Thousands, maybe,” she said. “Not just witches and wizards. Everyone with magic. I called to all of them.”
Leander’s jaw dropped slightly before he recovered it. “All… people with magic? Why?”
“Because,” Bailey said quietly, looking at each face in the room in turn, “there will be no more divisions. No more broken old traditions. If I have to be Queen, then I’m going to be the kind that does away with those old taboos and biases once and for all. From now on, we are all of us connected, siblings. I’m tired of the secrets and the infighting. We have bigger things to worry about.
“Everyone is coming here,” she went on. “And when they get here, we’re going to show them our new way. Different practitioners working together. And it’s that new way that’s going to help us win.”
“What do you plan to do?” Alkina asked.
Bailey shook her head. “I don’t know yet. But I will. And soon. For now, we wait for them to start arriving, and focus on dealing with our other problem; the hunters. I have a feeling they’re going to act fast, so we need to be ready. This isn’t a fight we’re going to win with force; not anymore. So instead, we need to focus on winning a contest of hearts and minds.”
“And for that,” Bailey said, smiling, “I do have a plan.”
Chapter 14
“Something occurred to me when I was connected to Piper,” Bailey said when they’d reconvened at the Bakery.
Piper had gradually come back to her senses and was nursing a cup of coffee and texting her husband that she was probably going to be out late. The process of disconnecting herself from Piper had been clean, but she could still feel echoes of the connection they’d shared.
“When I connected my mind to Chloe’s,” Bailey said, “and then this time, when I connected to Piper, we shared things that each of us knew to be true.”
“You can’t lie over a psychic link,” Chloe said.
Aiden cleared his throat. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting,” he said, “then I don’t think you’re quite seeing the forest for the trees.”
“You said yourself you didn’t want to go messing with anyone’s mind,” Frances added.
Bailey nodded. “It’s true, I don’t.”
Aiden shrugged. “Then how can you be sure anyone in Coven Grove will believe you at all, rather than get angry that you’ve touched their minds against their will? Or at least without permission?”
He’d caught the gist of it, but wasn’t thinking big enough. Bailey shook her head slowly. “That’s not quite the plan. With any one of you, I could connect directly, mind to mind, as long as we were both willing and open to it. With other people, it’s one way—I could hear them, but they wouldn’t hear me.”
“So, what?” Avery asked. “You want to create some kind of… proxy connection? A buffer, designed to be accessible by people without magic?”
“Close,” Bailey said. “Very close.”
Faces exchanged looks of confusion, and Bailey suppressed a smile. Of course, there was no way they could have imagined what she had in mind. None of them considered it possible; it just wouldn’t occur to any of them.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to enlighten us,” Chloe said, her narrowed eyes suspicious as she felt the edges of Bailey’s excitement.
“It’s easy,” Bailey said. “The solution was right in front of me. In front of all of you, actually.”
She waited, and then allowed herself a smile. “I’m going to give everyone in Coven Grove… magic of their own.”
No one spoke, and no one shared Bailey’s enthusiasm. In fact, she could sense the tide of skeptical worry arising from them.
“Bailey,” Chloe said finally, “doesn’t that seem a little… dangerous?”
“No,” Bailey said. “In fact, I believe it’s the whole purpose of the Throne of Medea.”
Still, faces were studiously blank.
No one understood. Except possibly Piper. Bailey looked to her, and Piper nodded slowly as she stood.
“She’s… not crazy,” Piper said. “I saw it; what we’ve been missing. Bailey is… her magic, I mean… it’s not just different. I don’t even know how to describe it; it’s as though she’s… the source.”
“The source?” Leander asked. He stared at Bailey. “What do you mean?”
“The source of magic,” Piper said. “Not just witch’s magic, either. All of it.”
“That was what the Throne of Medea was made to do,” Bailey said slowly. She folded her arms over her chest and regarded them all. “It goes back to Itaja herself. She connected herself to the root of magic, became the valve that it had to pass through. When the Throne was broken, magic ran free. Everyone took their little piece of it. I have a chance to change that.”
“It wouldn’t make a difference at this point, Bailey,” Leander said. “I can no more do witch’s magic than you could do wizard’s magic. What proof do you have that this is all true?”
“Even if it is,” Frances said, “what gives you the right?”
&nbs
p; “She… has a point,” Alkina said, the words ‘my queen’ clearly balanced on the tip of her tongue before she managed to curtail them. “We are born to magic by destiny, from some power that grants itself to us. You are powerful, and you are our queen; but you are not a deity.”
Bailey surged to her feet. Her magic swelled before she could get it under control—and everyone in the room felt it. Ten pairs of eyes widened, and ten sets of shoulders stiffened.
Calm, Bailey told herself. She took a moment to compose herself. “With respect to each of you, who all have a great deal more experience than I do—I appreciate your counsel, but none of you has any idea what I am going through. What I feel, what I… know, in my bones, as if it’s always been a part of me.”
She looked around at them, and everyone except Chloe and Aiden dropped their eyes. She met Chloe’s eyes and held them. “When the keystones—or ancestral stones, or whatever we want to call them—get here, and I remake the Throne, it will be up to me how to ensure that we are all safe. Not just us, here in Coven Grove, but out there in the world.” She shook her head. “None of you understand the weight of that responsibility. I will extend my magic to our friends and neighbors. There will be ample teachers here to help them when it happens. And together, we will deal with Faerie.”
“And if there are unforeseen consequences?” Aiden asked. “To you? That is a tall order. We don’t know the limits of your power, Bailey, but as Alkina says—we can be reasonably sure that you aren’t a deity.”
“Can we?” Bailey asked.
She felt the shock and the growing doubt in all of them; except for Piper, who had seen for herself, and Aiden, who seemed to hold onto and exude a sense of stalwartness and faith.
Bailey shook her head. “I need to go and rest. Tonight was trying, and I have a lot of preparation ahead.”
Aiden reached out and took Bailey’s hand when she approached.
“Aiden,” Leander said before Aiden could leave with her, “I apologize, but Avery and I have been working on something that I’d like your consultation over. Would you mind staying behind for a short time?”
Witching for a Miracle (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 7) Page 7