“Yes,” I said. Not as big a lie as the first one.
“And are you committed to advancing the positive image of witch culture, politically, spiritually, and in whatever other way may become necessary?”
“Huh?” I asked. I felt like I’d missed a step somewhere.
Autumn rolled her eyes and switched back to her normal speaking voice.
“Basically,” she said impatiently, “I want you to promise that your actions will not perpetuate the popular notion that witches are nothing but delusional, crunchy fuck-wits. Or, alternatively, that we are dangerously powerful, psychotic heathens bent on world domination.”
“Uh—” As I struggled to keep a straight face, I got a glimpse of Kellen, just a bit behind Autumn, doing exactly the same thing.
He caught me looking at him and winked.
I frowned back, irritated by the familiarity, and turned my attention to Autumn.
“Uh, sure, I guess I can promise that . . .”
“Good. Welcome to Witchtown.” Autumn clapped her hands. “The circle is undone, but let it never be broken.”
She grinned at me, and all the trappings of ritual disappeared from her face.
“Now we can drink.”
It was over. I had done it.
I sat down shakily on a log. I hadn’t allowed myself to feel the full extent of my nerves during the ritual. If I had, I wouldn’t have had the strength to stand there, vulnerable, letting all of that magic get channeled around me. The young people of Witchtown were a powerful lot. That much even I could tell.
But none of them had realized there was a Void in their midst.
“Drink?”
I jumped at the voice, and looked up to see Kellen offering me a plastic cup.
I took it and he sat down, uninvited, on my log. About an arm’s length to my left. He had removed his black robe and was wearing jeans and a gray cotton jacket. It made me feel a little bit overdressed in my crimson robe. The robe was making me feel a bit hot, as it was a pretty warm evening, even for June. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to take it off. There was a strange kind of safety in its velvety soft pleats.
I took the cup and peered suspiciously at the mystery liquid inside. It was too dark to get a good look at it.
“Wine,” Kellen assured me. “Witchtown’s finest. Did you know we have a winery here?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, as a small movement caught my eye. The girl in black emerged from the trees on the other side of the grove. She stood still for a moment, just inside the circle of torchlight, then turned and sat down against a tree at least twenty paces from the nearest group.
I nodded toward her.
“What’s with her?”
Kellen leaned forward to follow my eye line. “Talya? Don’t know, really. She’s only been here for about a month or so. She keeps to herself. Doesn’t like to participate in rituals.”
“Is she a Solitary?” I asked.
“She says so,” he said, and leaned toward me, affecting a melodramatic tone. “There’s a rumor that she’s a Void.”
“Oh?” I said. And that made up my mind about the wine. I took a drink, hoping that it would wash down the slightly choky feeling in my throat. “Is she?”
“Nah,” Kellen scoffed, his voice returning to normal. The dim torchlight made his profile look very sharp, almost angular. “I mean, I’ve never seen her channel, but that doesn’t mean she can’t. I’m pretty sure Autumn started the whole ‘Void’ rumor after Talya wouldn’t let us initiate her.”
I raised my eyebrows. It hadn’t occurred to me that getting initiated was a choice, but it had occurred to Talya. She had defied Autumn and gotten away with it. That gave me a surge of respect for her.
I must have given my thoughts away with my expression, because Kellen laughed suddenly.
“I know, right? Autumn doesn’t hear the word no very often.”
“Not from you, anyway,” I quipped. “What are you? Like, her lackey?”
Kellen choked in midsip. “Excuse me?”
I scanned the circle until I found the forceful brunette. She was making out with Royce on the other side of the grove. Actually, there were quite a few people making out. That had a tendency to happen after rituals. Something about raising all that power. So I’d been told.
I inclined my head toward Autumn.
“You were pretty much doing her bidding today,” I pointed out, thinking of the torches, the candles, and the rest of the setup, which had obviously been his doing.
“So?” he said evenly. His face was hard to read.
“So why would you do that?”
“Do I need a reason?” he asked. He was watching me curiously, in kind of an amused way. “I’m a nice guy, Macie. I help out. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I said, staring at my wine. “Nothing at all.”
People who are legitimately nice don’t have to spell it out like that.
I wasn’t sure why I was being so hard on him. The only thing I could really accuse Kellen of was not being the person I had thought he was at the farmer’s market. Which was hardly his fault. Maybe the wine was clouding my judgment.
But I doubted it. My instincts were telling me there was something here that needed figuring out.
Kellen took another sip of his wine and sat forward on the log. He was a few inches closer to me now than he had been, and I caught a whiff of a woodsy, piney scent. Juniper, I thought. But I wasn’t sure if it was coming from Kellen or from the trees around us.
“I have a knack for ritual,” he admitted. “I’m good at it. Autumn is our self-appointed High Priestess, which makes Royce the High Priest by default. But they’re not very good with details.”
“And you are?”
He grinned.
“Maybe.”
I’ll bet you are.
I grinned back at him. He was quite good-looking. In a decidedly non-Rafe kind of way. The thought made something in my chest start to ache.
I ignored it. This was strictly professional. All business. Nothing that should wake up the sinkhole.
He took another sip of his wine.
“Enough about me. What about you? What’s your problem, Macie?”
“My problem?” I asked, not sure I had heard him right.
“Yeah. Witchtown is a refuge. A haven, literally. Lowercase h. And people generally don’t end up in havens if everything is going great for them on the outside. So what’s your problem?”
I stalled, taking several sips of wine as I thought about my answer. The dry, slightly sour taste was starting to grow on me.
“Nothing, really,” I said at last. Then, as an afterthought, I added, “I mean, my mother is kind of a pain in the ass.”
“She’s a Natural, right?”
“Yeah.” I licked my lips. “We move around a lot. I’ve been hoping we could stay in one place for a while.”
I drank some more wine, mostly to stop myself from saying more. There had been a little bit more truth in there than I had meant to throw in. I squinted into my cup, which was nearly empty now, and tried to recall how the conversation had shifted to me.
Because he shifted it, I realized. Maybe I was right to be wary of him.
“What about you?” I countered. “What’s your problem?”
He shrugged innocently. “I’m pretty boring.”
“Oh, really?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Yup,” he said, smiling now. “Nothing to tell.”
“I doubt that,” I said. I could feel my smile fade. I was frustrated at the smirking stone wall that was suddenly sitting next to me.
And a little bit impressed. Most people had a tendency to blab on and on about themselves when given the slightest excuse. I usually counted on that. But this guy . . . somehow he had gotten me to do the blabbing.
Having one of my best tricks used against me put me on edge. I made a face and drank the last sip of wine in my cup before I looked over at him again.
“S
o, I guess we’re the only two people in Witchtown without any problems, huh?”
He cocked his head, seemingly considering this as he moved even closer to me on the log. There were only a few inches separating us now. Just the width of my left hand, which was lying on the rough bark between us.
“I can think of worse things to have in common,” he said.
He was close enough that I could feel his breath on my cheek when he spoke. The juniper scent was stronger now—it was definitely coming from him. It must have been the wine, but for a second, when he leaned toward me, I actually considered what it would be like to kiss him. To pretend, for just one night, to get caught up in the power of my own initiation ritual, drink a bit too much wine, and make out with a cute, mysterious stranger in the woods. That’s what a normal girl my age would do. Wasn’t I supposed to be fitting in?
Then I thought of Rafe, and I jerked back so suddenly that I would have fallen off the log if Kellen hadn’t reached out a hand to steady me.
“I—I can’t. I have . . . I mean, there’s . . . there’s somebody.”
At that moment I felt like Rafe was right there, watching me. I felt it so strongly that I tore myself away from Kellen’s beautiful eyes—wow, they were really, really blue—and looked furtively around the grove, searching for Rafe.
Kellen followed my gaze, looking confused.
“What, here? That was fast. Didn’t you only get here yesterday?”
“He’s not . . .” I trailed off, inwardly berating myself. He’s not here, you idiot. Get a grip. “He’s not here. He’s from . . . before.”
“Oh,” Kellen said knowingly. “So you’re doing the long distance thing?”
“Something like that . . .”
“Got it,” he said, letting go of my arm. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay.” I still could not shake the feeling that I was being watched. I got to my feet slowly, holding on to the log until the last possible second in case the wine chose that moment to catch up with me.
Kellen stood up as well. He had that look of curious amusement on his face again. After a moment, he put his hand out to me.
“It was nice to meet you, Macie O’Sullivan. I’ll be seeing you around.”
“You too.”
“You know your way back? I can walk you—”
“I’ll manage.”
He frowned at this, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flashlight.
“Take this. Due south will bring you downtown. The woods aren’t big. If you keep walking long enough, you’ll find your way out.”
“Thanks,” I said.
At the edge of the clearing, I passed the girl in black. Was she the one who had been watching me? Her eyes seemed locked on something behind me, on the other side of the circle, but when I got within a few feet of her, she turned her head to look at me.
She gave me a very slight nod.
I nodded in return, even though she had already looked away from me. Back to whatever she had been staring at before.
As I walked south, as instructed, I caught my eyes automatically scanning the ground, looking for usable plants. I thought of the last time I had been in the woods at the full moon. There had been a guy there that night as well. But unlike Kellen, he hadn’t tried to kiss me.
Quite the opposite. The first night I had met Rafe, he had damn near almost killed me.
I smiled at the memory. My feet took me through the forest gate, back toward the dim lights of downtown. But my mind was in an entirely different Haven, on an entirely different night . . .
I let myself into the rickety wooden building my mother and I had moved into earlier that day . . . and almost immediately let myself back out again, slamming the door behind me.
My mother was not alone. She and her friend, whoever he was, were getting to know each other. All over the futon that I had staked out as my bed.
Gross.
I rubbed my bare arms to keep warm and walked away from the tiny group of houses, all similarly run-down and in bad need of new paint jobs. I walked toward the rougher part of the Haven, where the trees were.
At least that explained what we were doing here. I had been wondering all day what had brought us to this Gods-forsaken, broken-down rural Haven in the middle of nowhere, built on land that nobody wanted anyway—the kind of Haven that pro-Witch activists liked to point to as evidence of witches’ second-class treatment. We weren’t going to find much money here. We’d probably end up losing money here.
So of course there had to be a guy in the picture. Why hadn’t I seen that sooner?
I didn’t have the stomach to think about that for long, or the energy to face nursing her through yet another failed relationship. So I just kept walking.
The trees closed in around me and it got darker, but the light from the full moon overhead filtered through the scraggly pine needles just enough to light my way.
There didn’t seem to be much to find at first. Not in this sorry excuse for a forest. I was on the verge of giving up, on sitting down and just letting time pass, when I found the mandrakes.
There were dozens of them, all clustered around the roots of a particularly large pine tree. Mandrakes are unassuming above the surface, just clusters of purplish flowers surrounded by lush green leaves. It’s their roots that are noteworthy. They have a creepy tendency to look like people; gnarled, twisted, scowling people. They are deeply poisonous but they are also very popular things to put on altars. I could always sell them pretty much as fast as I could find them.
I had a half dozen dug up and set out in a line on the ground before I found something else.
One mandrake had claimed a plastic bag by growing a thin tendril of root around it. When I worked the bag free, I stared in disbelief at several clusters of tightly rolled hundred-dollar bills.
I peered into the hole that the mandrake plant had left behind. The glare of moonlight on wrinkled plastic stared back at me. More bags. At least three that I could see, and the hole was deep.
When I reached my hand down to get the rest, I was immediately thrown back. As though someone had shoved me, even though there was no one else there. Before I even hit the ground, a very intense pain blossomed in my middle.
I curled up in the dirt in agony, the money forgotten. I couldn’t move. I was making a horrible sound, something between a screech and a groan. A few endless minutes later, when something prodded me painfully in the ribs, I couldn’t stop myself from being rolled over onto my side. A dark shape loomed over me, and to my pained eyes it looked as gnarled and misshapen as the mandrake roots.
I recoiled as it crouched down beside me.
“What are you doing with that?”
The plastic baggie was yanked from my hand, and the pain stopped immediately. It left me so abruptly that I gasped. When I was able to sit up, the shape was still there. I blinked away black clouds and tried to focus on the eyes that were glaring down at me.
There was a face around the eyes, a guy’s face, made of dark brown skin and framed by shaggy black hair the same color as his eyes. It was a combination I might have found attractive if I hadn’t been pretty sure I was about to throw up. And if the eyes had not been staring at me so murderously.
“Who are you?” he asked, still glaring. “How did you know to look here?”
“I’m Macie,” I told him. I saw no point in lying. My voice sounded hoarse from screaming. “Macie O’Sullivan. I just moved here—”
“Get out of here, Macie O’Sullivan,” he commanded darkly. “And don’t come back. Do you hear?”
I nodded, and stumbled a bit as I struggled to get my feet beneath me.
“Go,” he said impatiently.
“I’m going,” I said unsteadily. Then, when I finally got to my feet, I added, “Jerk.”
I woke with a start, back in Witchtown, back on the previous accountant’s couch. I was clutching Rafe’s jacket to my face and crying.
This is
ridiculous, I told myself, and sat up.
Much as it pained me to admit it, my mother had been right about one thing. I had to let it go. Or at least, I was going to have to fool myself into thinking that I had. There would be plenty of time to cry about Rafe. Later. But now I had to focus. There was only one Witchtown, and I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes here.
I gave the jacket one last squeeze. One last, long inhale so I could commit its scent to memory. Then I stuffed it underneath the couch cushion.
When I lay back down, I took comfort in the slight lump I felt beneath me. It was a crutch, I knew that. I didn’t have the strength to get rid of the jacket entirely. But at least it was a step in the right direction. It was enough.
Enough for now.
Chapter Five
Mayor Bainbridge summoned my mother and me to her office first thing in the morning. To address the tiny, niggling issue that I hadn’t technically been initiated the previous night.
The mayor rectified that by casting a small circle around us on the floor of her office and taking me through the vows herself. It happened too spur of the moment for me to get nervous, and it was over too quickly for me to get more than mildly stressed out about it.
“Cursed Zealots,” she said, after she had closed the circle. “What do they think they’re going to accomplish anyway? They can’t believe they’re going to convert anybody. Not here.”
“Did the guards catch the priests?” I asked.
“No,” the mayor answered, sounding regretful. “They got away in the smoke.”
“The real question,” my mother said, “is how they got into town in the first place. Why didn’t the wall keep them out?”
The mayor bit her lip. This was clearly not a subject she wanted to discuss with Witchtown’s newest high-profile resident.
“We think they might be getting some help. From inside the town,” she admitted.
“You mean, like a spy?” I asked. I was intrigued, in spite of myself, at the thought of a Zealot spy hiding out among the Witchtown residents. There was definitely more to this town than I had thought.
“I wouldn’t be that dramatic about it,” the mayor mumbled. “Those particular clowns have been camped out since we started building Witchtown, and they’ve never done anything truly violent. Yet.”
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