By Moon

by T Thorn Coyle

  Breathing into their hand for a moment, Selene fought to slow their breathing down.

  Focus on expanding your belly, then the lungs. Feel your feet. Let the boots ground you.

  Here, seventeen stories up, in a building built on a mountain, it was easy to feel as if there was no ground.

  Selene rocked in the thick-soled boots. Breathe in. Two. Three. Four.

  They watched Tabitha as they breathed. Out. Two. Three. Four.

  Blond hair tangled around her face. She’d been sweating at some point. Her skin was so pale, with bright red dots on her cheeks.

  Hectic. That’s what Selene’s mother used to call it.

  Tabitha, lying there, inert on the cantilevered bed, stuck with tubes and surrounded by machines, should have looked quiet.

  But she didn’t. She looked as if her soul was off running a race somewhere. Or maybe she was panicking, trying to get some very important thing done.

  Selene dropped their hand and walked toward Tabitha. A gray, padded chair sat near the head of the bed, angled just right to look at Tabitha’s face. That was good. It meant people had been visiting, right?

  Visitors were good.

  Selene pulled out the chair and sat. They spent a moment finding their center. That place deep inside that acted as an internal compass when a person was in touch with it, and that waited, patiently, for the witch to return if they wandered off, astray.

  Breathe in. Two. Three. Four.

  The hospital sounds and smells didn’t exactly recede. They just became less important as Selene focused on their inner landscape.

  Drop your attention down. There. That place between navel and pelvis. Breathe. Then open.

  Selene opened their awareness outward, seeking Tabitha’s spirit. It felt so far away. They could definitely sense the panic. Some sort of battle was going on inside their friend.

  Eyes open, but softly focused, Selene scanned Tabitha’s ætheric body, the energy field closest to the skin, and then widened out to include her aura, the luminous body everyone carried around them. An egg-shaped sphere when a person was healthy, sometimes the aura looked like a cracked and shattered mirror. Other times it was misshapen, bumpy, a sure sign the person was trying to fit themselves into someone else, and the fit was not a good one.

  Tabitha’s ætheric body felt weakened. There was a brittleness about it, the way things got when they’d been battered too long and were trying to hold on. And the larger energy field of her aura?

  Selene closed their eyes and tried to see. Not their strongest tool, but one they’d been working on.

  Tabitha’s aura was usually a bright, sunny thing, bursting with creative flow. A swirl of color and light, except for when she had a cold or something. Then things slowed down. But Selene had only ever encountered Tabitha slightly dimmed at worst.

  This? It was as if someone had taken a brightly dyed cloth, and, before the dye had set, soaked it in a pail of water.

  Tabitha’s aura looked as if someone was slowly leeching her natural life force—and the life force she’d fought to build for herself—away.

  “Damn it,” Selene whispered into the sunlit room. They looked at their friend’s face, at the too-pale skin, and those hectic dots. Tabitha was only half there. And now Selene knew why.

  “Tabitha?” they murmured, leaning in close to her ear. “I’m going to try to help you. Please know it’s me, Selene. Let me in.”

  Let me in so I can follow any traces I find, and then hunt this bastard down.

  Selene placed a gentle hand on Tabitha’s forehead, strengthening the link between them. And, amazingly, they felt a shift in Tabitha’s ætheric field. As if it had softened, just a little. Welcoming Selene in.

  Taking their hand away, Selene allowed their own spirit to enter Tabitha’s energy field. Traveling into someone else’s personal space was tricky, and Selene shouldn’t have been doing it on their own. A voice in the back of their mind was screaming that they should wait. Call Brenda. Get an expert in here.

  Selene slowed their breathing further, felt their ætheric body separate from their physical form…and flew.

  They sent their spirit out and in and the same time, a thing they weren’t even sure they knew how to do.

  Focus. Breathe.

  Tabitha’s inner landscape was not what Selene would have expected. It looked as if someone had wandered through a cozy home, ripped down all the curtains, and stuck a knife into the cushions. There were traces of comfort and home. But mostly, it was all washed out. Bleached again. Scattered. Shattered.

  And in the center of it all, Selene could feel Tabitha. Fighting. Struggling to hold on.

  Where’s the thread? Show me, Tabitha. What’s doing this to you? A flash of rage spiked through Selene. Their fingers clenched.

  Selene wanted to bust through doors and throttle whoever did this to Tabitha and Janice and who knew how many others. But they were inside Tabitha now. Tabitha deserved saving. Tabitha deserved their care.

  Selene imagined turning a dial and slowing. Everything. Down. They needed to be careful here. Meticulous. Selene strengthened their connection to their core and called upon their ally and namesake to help them.

  Guide me, Selene, Mother Moon. Help me see what Tabitha needs me to see.

  Slowly. Carefully. Selene deepened their attention, then extended it three hundred and sixty degrees around. Where in the sacred circle that was Tabitha was the poison, or the threads that would lead Selene there?

  Show me.

  On the very edges of Selene’s consciousness something vibrated.

  The scent of tobacco.

  Damn it.

  Selene slowly turned, seeking through the washed-out colors, the destroyed sense of home. A smear of brown. And not the vital, humming, swaying brown of healthy tobacco leaves shining in the sun. Not the sweet, oily scent of tobacco being offered to the land.

  No. Some magician had taken the spirit of the plant and chained it.

  But there was something…else as well. Something. Where?

  There.

  Not just the resonance of tobacco. Not just a twined brown thread leading backwards to the thrice damned “alchemist.”

  It was something even worse. This alchemist had taken sweet tobacco and made a servitor of it. A servitor was a magical servant, created only to do the work of the magician. They had no will of their own and could be fashioned for good or ill.

  This poor creature—Selene could see it now—was a hunched and sniveling thing. One sliver of tobacco essence fought against the magic, but the rest? Fully chained.

  And its only task was to seek out and poison brightness. Differentness. Art and music, love and joy. The poisoning itself was not the purpose though.

  The purpose was this sick harnessing of life for the maker of the servitor.

  The thick, twining brown rope wasn’t just a link.

  It was a conduit. A funnel. A siphon.

  Shit. How much time do you have, Tabitha? How much time?

  Selene nicked a slice in the rope and touched a finger there. Raising their finger to their mouth, Selene tasted the flow of Tabitha’s life. Tasted her wild paintings and the way she loved to dance.

  Tasted the poisonous nicotine she was bound to.

  With a wave of their hand, Selene closed the slice.

  Then began the process of withdrawing from Tabitha’s spirit.

  One step at a time.

  18

  Joshua

  The day after the shop was closed was usually a good day in Joshua’s book. He felt a bit less rushed, having had half a day off along with some time to catch up on bookkeeping, ordering, tidying, and all the other miscellany required to keep a retail business up and running.

  Except his business wasn’t running well. Only half of his distributors let him cancel his Faerie Fest order. The other half had already packed and shipped the items. It would cost him to return the stock, in more ways than one. Not only was there a return penalty, it undermined t
he good will he’d built up over the past several years.

  And that bullshit “shamanism” teacher still had his blood boiling. It had to be this Alchemist asshole. They just couldn’t prove it, yet.

  Brenda thought they needed to call a grand coven of sorts, though Portland didn’t have one. Basically, she thought they needed a meeting of all the magical organizations in the Portland metro area. The heathens. The OTO. The druids. The other witches. The head of the local Palo house.

  Joshua had argued that they still needed more information. And that calling in a whole swathe of people was only going to make things take longer.

  He and Brenda finally reached a compromise. If they weren’t moving significantly forward in one week’s time, she was going to start making calls.

  Joshua quipped that she should just send out an e-vite. She’d given him a look he never wanted to see again.

  He apologized. He wasn’t usually an ass to people he respected, but this whole thing had him on edge. He also couldn’t stop thinking about Selene and the fact that they were knee deep in all of this, and possibly in danger, made him very uneasy.

  Joshua really wanted time to get to know Selene. Time to have fun. To date. To do things he hadn’t wanted to do with someone in years, like eat breakfast, or climb Mount Tabor during spring.

  He wandered through the shop, dusting shelves and putting books back into order. Reaching up to dust one of the fairies flying overhead, he heard the door open.

  “Welcome to The Road Home!” he said, reaching for the second fairy wing. Then he turned.

  There was a large man, white face ruddy, as if he had heart strain. Or imbibed more alcohol than was healthy for a person.

  He just stood there, filling up the aisle. Out of place among the painted birch trees and the bright wish ribbons hanging from the branches closest to the door.

  Oh, his clothing matched. It was as fanciful as the shop interior, and more fanciful even than Joshua’s own.

  A vest, half black, half white, buttoned over a peacock-blue shirt.

  Albedo. Negredo. Cauda Pavonis.

  Three of the alchemical stages. White. Black. Peacock. The Alchemist was here. What an ass. Oh, not that he was dressed like an alchemical dandy. That he advertised that he’d succeeded in his alchemy.

  Knowing a little bit about just how difficult the alchemical process really was, Joshua truly doubted the man had achieved the peacock stage. He doubted he’d done much more than tinker in a lab, pretending.

  Any fool could make a cup of coffee and call it alchemy.

  It took a true practitioner to make the coffee good.

  Damn it. Recognition must have shown on Joshua’s face, because the man smiled, a broad rictus of a grin that made Joshua feel slightly ill.

  “Greetings! I just thought I’d stop by. You didn’t answer my note.”

  He stalked down the walkway, head turning, glancing at the contents of the shelves. He stopped when he got to the hand-blended oils. Sniffed.

  “I don’t see my ointment samples anywhere. I gave you so many, I thought you might have even succumbed to offering them for sale.”

  He looked at Joshua. The man was close enough now that Joshua could see that one ice-blue eye was bloodshot, and the other, clear.

  A shiver ran down Joshua’s back. He ignored it.

  “What are you doing here?” Joshua asked, blocking the aisle. Thank the Gods no other customers were in the store, though he wished Quanice wasn’t still sick. He could have used some backup.

  The man—Joshua really didn’t want to call him the Alchemist—looked around the displays again. Picked up a brown glass tester vial of Choose Love, looked at the label and sneered.

  “How sweet. Choose Love.” He set the vial back down and trained the ice-blue eyes back on Joshua. “I would think that a young man like you would want to choose power. Or knowledge. Or immortality. Or something more interesting.”

  What are you, Faust? Joshua thought.

  The man traced one finger down a bookcase, coming closer. “Though I suppose love is potent enough for magic, if you use it right. Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Use other people’s love to fuel your magic. That’s what the best gurus do, you know. Raise all that love energy and just eat it down.” The man raised his fingers to his mouth, and mimed chomping on a sandwich. “Yum yum yum.”

  The basics again. Feet. Breath. Spine. Center. Hands.

  Joshua imagined he could connect to the earth beneath the shop. Past the city services and down into soil. And further still, to the iron core of the earth itself. He willed the energy upward, filling himself with chthonic power.

  Then he raised his hands. Felt the energy pooling in his palms. A warning. A warding.

  “What. Do. You. Want.”

  The ruddy-faced man stopped. Shrugged. Lifted his hands and shook them in the air, as if to say he meant no harm. That he was simply an innocent person who had wandered into Joshua’s store.

  “I simply came by to see if you enjoyed my gift. And to ask if you knew of any place I could teach a few classes.” The man paused. “My living room is simply growing too small. I had no idea there would be this kind of interest in my small offerings. It turns out that a lot of middle class people want a taste of the exotic.”

  Joshua’s vision flashed black, then white, then resolved itself again. Rage. Blinding rage. He couldn’t succumb. He breathed and straightened up his spine, feeling his feet sink slightly into the floorboards. Joshua stood as tall as he could.

  “Get out of my store,” he said.

  The man gave a little half smile and shrugged again.

  The door to the shop opened, and a parent holding her small child’s hand trundled in.

  Joshua stepped toward the man and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Get out of my store. Now.”

  “Well!” The man took a step back. “Thank you for your help. But this sort of oil is not what I need. He placed the Choose Love tester back on the shelf and turned.

  The woman crouched next to the child, pointing at some glass-cased faerie statues.

  “Excuse me,” the man said, skirting around them.

  The woman barely looked up, then turned her attention back to the toddler who babbled who knew what.

  The door opened. Shut. The Alchemist was gone.

  Joshua gave his hands a subtle shake and took in what felt like the first normal breath in an hour. The whole exchange must have only taken five minutes, but felt much longer.

  You’ve got to get back in shape, man.

  Joshua willed a smile onto his face and picked up his feather duster.

  “Welcome to The Road Home. Let me know if I can show you anything. We’ve got some soft toys and children’s books on the shelves just to your left.”

  The woman smiled up at him with big brown eyes. Normal eyes. Beautiful eyes.

  Just a human, trying to share a bit of magic with her child.

  Joshua palmed the vial of Choose Love and slipped it in his pocket. It was tainted now.

  He would dispose of it properly later.

  19

  Selene

  Selene sat on a plump cushion inside the permanent circle in Raquel’s attic. Raquel had supplemented the house AC with a portable unit, so at least it was blessedly cool.

  They were tired. There never seemed to be enough time to even eat, let alone sleep.

  Selene felt singed around the edges, and they were nowhere near through. Not for the day, and likely not for some time. All they wanted to do was crawl into bed and stay there for a week.

  But once the cascade of events started, they knew, there was never rest until the magic was either done or had unwound itself. Not that anything was ever fully complete, either. But things had a way of at least being “done for now.”

  That now had not arrived.

  Raquel’s attic had been home to many intense rituals. The slanted, creamy white ceiling carried powerful energy signatures of all the
workings the coven had done over the years. The shelves set into the knee walls held all the external tools of those workings. Everything a witch could need to boost and focus what was inside herself.

  Selene felt all of those workings, reaching down to the dark stain on the broad Douglas fir planks scattered with bright cushions, cycling back up to the vee of the ceiling. Workings of joy and laughter, sorrow and grief, and rituals to take down the people who meant others harm.

  That last was turning out to be Selene’s specialty. One they never would have thought they could have borne, not in their wildest childhood dreams. The dreams where they got back at everyone who had ever bullied anyone, or put them on drugs that made them feel sluggish and stole away their imaginations, or…

  Oh, Selene had read the books, just like so many other small, nerdy, bullied children. The one where a magical horse showed up to tell you that you were so special, so hurting and misunderstood, that they were taking you away to someplace better. The ones where wardrobes opened onto what should have been real life. A life where things were never boring, and what the children did actually mattered. Books that told Selene they could ride dragons, and be brave, and go into battle to save their town.

  But Selene’s magic felt like a burden lately. As if they were filled with nothing but darkness, and the need to strike things down.

  But what if? What if Selene really was the child destined to save their city?

  Raquel set fat beeswax pillars in the center, surrounding some flakes of tobacco. Their anchor to the damn liquid nicotine poisoning their friends.

  “Are you ready?” Raquel asked, breaking into Selene’s reverie. Selene blinked and looked at the others, sitting on floor cushions just like their own, forming a rough oval on the attic floor.

  Tobias. Brenda. Tempest. Moss. No Alejandro or Lucy. They couldn’t make it on such short notice. Their places were taken by Legis, who was somehow connected to this. He held a big-ass sword that glimmered in the light filtering through the attic windows. Selene had no idea why.