Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of 48 · 12-minute read

Lauren’s Solar Return Neptune in the Sixth House of Health, Conjunct the Descendant

“Mom,” Rhiannon asked me on her most recent phone call from college, “do you think you’re cursed?”

I laughed and played it cool. I didn’t want my daughters to know the same thought had crossed my mind—or how real the possibility was. I’ve made way too many enemies of powerful witches, and even though I’ve not spoken to any of them in five years, they all hold grudges.

Someone once told me that the Gods loved me so much that They were willing to strip away all my illusions to give me something real. But just because it’s real doesn’t mean it’s pretty.

Or that it lasts.

“But, Mom, what happened to you?” Rhiannon asked me next. “You used to be a magickal badass, like, for years, but since Winter Solstice, you’ve lost all your powers.”

I changed the subject. Nothing she could ask me that I hadn’t already berated myself for.

Did I let my guard down and fail to protect myself and the people I love? Is that what happened? Hard enough when relationships between regular people dissolve, but when practitioners of magick break up, it’s a whole new level of ugly.

I close my eyes against it all. Against the sterile room and the smell of antiseptics. Against the hardness of the thinly cushioned exam table and the fluorescent lights above me. Against the cute poster taped to the white ceiling tiles, the one with cartoon boobs and a calendar and the words, DON’T FORGET TO TOUCH YOURSELF EVERY MONTH. The lights flicker, even though my doctor—Sondra—swears they’re not cheap and that normal people don’t see that subtle, nauseating strobe light.

“Your brain is wired funny,” her faraway voice tells me. “Energy cycles through fluorescent bulbs at around sixty cycles per second, higher if they’re really good bulbs like these. You shouldn’t be seeing that flicker at all, but your brain perceives the cycles. It’s called critical fusion frequency. Your perception of it may be unusual, but it’s real.”

I squeeze my eyes shut against the tiresome pulses of light. Sondra’s just making conversation, trying to distract me from the pain between my legs. It’s crazy how much of my confidence in the future hinges on this biopsy. From this position, with my feet in stirrups and a gigantic paper napkin between us, I can’t see her, so she tries to make a comforting connection through her voice.

Sondra doesn’t have to tell me how my brain works. I know the flickers I see are real. I also see spirits, energy, and sometimes visions of the past and future. Those are all real, too, but I don’t dare tell Sondra about those. Instead of sending me to an optometrist, she’ll have me Baker-Acted for the next seventy-two hours in the hospital’s mental health ward next door, and Quent will use any perceived failing to try to get custody of Sonnet. I know better than to talk about the otherwise invisible things I’ve been able to see for the last six years since I was Elevated to Third-Degree High Priestess of the Dragon Hart Grand Coven. My magickal gifts—magick with a k for witchcraft—have grown ever since, in ways I could not have imagined.

Good thing, too. I’m not sure I could’ve held it together these last few months without supernatural talents.

The humming of the lights grows louder, drowning out Sondra’s voice as she chatters on nervously. You’re not helping, I want to say. How can she expect me to stay relaxed through Scary Medical Stuff if she’s broadcasting how nervous she is on my behalf? She’d given me a choice of seeing her in the surgical outpatient center under general anesthesia or opting for a quicker but excruciating procedure in her office. I chose the latter because I’m terrified of anesthesia and its side effects on me. I don’t tell Sondra that, though. I tell her it’s because I have work to do and, without my beloved Jesse at home, I have no choice but to do it alone.

Jesse.

Just like that, the tears are hot behind my eyelids. I don’t know if it’s anger or hurt or grief, but the only way I can function is to keep my emotions boxed up and try my damnedest not to think about it. I’ve been over it in my head a million times, and I still can’t figure out what happened or why. How can I be this psychic and still not see what was happening? What kind of magickal badass can I be and fail at something so fundamental?

Unless I really am cursed.

“There! All done.” Sondra pauses. “Oh, sweetie! You’re crying! Let me get you a tissue. I am so sorry for the pain, but I made it both as quick and as thorough as I could.” She fumbles and presses a tissue into my closed palm, but it catches on my wedding band with the single diamond. “Now let’s hope the pathology results are good and that we got clean margins this time. You’ve been incredibly lucky thus far, staying one step ahead of cervical cancer.”

I nod, opening my eyes and blinking at the trembling lights. My anxiety is so thick, I can barely breathe. I’ve been living with this fear for the past six months, ever since my last outpatient surgery in Sondra’s office the day before Thanksgiving. A quarrelsome pap smear on my forty-seventh birthday last year, a concerning biopsy with high-grade squamous cells later in the year, a recurring HPV infection over the summer and autumn, and finally a “small surgery” to remove the precancerous tissue on my cervix. But that surgery hadn’t been entirely successful, resulting in a second, deeper procedure today. Hopefully the last.

“Lauren, do you have someone to drive you home?”

I shake my head. Jan can’t drive. I’ve cut myself off from everyone else. Sondra knows Jesse can’t be here by my side. They used to share a medical office, and more than once she’s filled in at our healing center for him. I don’t hold it against her that she had to distance herself back in March to keep from poisoning her career.

“Does anyone else know you’re here? Friends? Family?” She grimaces as I shake my head. “You used to have so many friends. It’s a shame you’re alone now. What about your daughters? Have you even told them? I remember when you and Jesse had a miscarriage right after you married, and you both shut yourselves off from everyone else. Lauren, you need to share your burdens. The people who love you deserve to know what’s going on, and you deserve to have their support.”

It’s not the same, I want to tell her.

“No. Rhiannon’s prepping for finals week, then she’s in Europe for the summer semester. I don’t want to upset her when her grades are so important.” No reason for both of us to be stressed, and especially if this turns out to be the big nothing I keep trying to manifest. “And Sonnet—” I bite my tongue. “Mm. You know how it is. She’s seventeen. A gazillion school activities. Friends. Her job. She’s finished most of her schoolwork so she’s pulling double shifts at the ice cream shop. She’s at that age when her mom is the last thing on her mind.”

Sondra looks worried. “I could call a taxi for you.”

“No need. I’d have to come back later to get my car. I’d rather go home now and take a long nap.”

Jesse used to take me everywhere, whether I needed a driver or just emotional support. I never had to ask. He simply knew what I needed. If he could, he would have been in the room with me today to hold my hand, just as he did at my first surgery six months ago.

He should be here with me now. Telling me everything will be all right. I need him like I’ve never needed him.

My doctor frowns. “Well, okay, I guess you can drive home since it’s not far, but you have to promise me you’ll take it easy. No going to the gym or lifting anything heavy until after your follow-up. I need you to stay off your feet this week.”

“Can do.”

What I mean is that I can do it, but I won’t.

“‘Can do’ or ‘will do’?”

Damn it. “Okay, okay. Will do.” I’m always good for a promise.

“Great. I want you back here in two weeks so I can see how you’re healing. We’ll have your labs back in a few days.”

Patting me gently on one shoulder, Sondra motions for me to get dressed and leaves the room. She feels sorry for me. She thinks I’m all alone in the world.

My best friend, Janice Duley, squeezes through the door before it can close. I have Jan to thank that I’m here at all. How often had I complained about my heavy periods and cramps only to watch them fade into my past, along with my fertility, three years ago. I’d embraced that part of menopause, and it had felt like joyous freedom… until the time Jesse and I made love the night of my forty-seventh birthday, and afterward, I bled on our white sheets while we slept.

I hadn’t even realized it until Jan showed up at dawn after Jesse had gone to work at the clinic. She’d fretted about a vision she’d had, and that I needed to get checked out immediately. Still rubbing sleep from my eyes, I’d pulled back the covers, and there was the evidence she’d seen in her psychic dream. As a result, I’d shown up at Sondra’s clinic as a walk-in before it opened that morning, and my gynecologist had known by the look on my face exactly what was wrong.

We women spend our fertile decades hoping either that we’ll bleed or that we won’t, waiting each month to exhale our pregnancy fears or hopes. But after menopause, unexpected spotting is a harbinger of blind terror.

Jan fingers the small cross around her neck and whispers a prayer. She’s as Christian as I am Wiccan, but for most of our friendship, we’ve been respectful of each other’s beliefs. I light candles for her, and she prays for me.

“What did your doc say? Everything okay, doodlebug? I stayed in the waiting room to give you privacy.”

“You could’ve stayed with me. I don’t mind.”

I hobble bottomless to the curtained corner of the room with the shelves of paper vests and paper sheets that are never big enough to cover everything I want covered in an exam room. I don’t bother to cover myself up as I cross the room to the changing area. At forty-eight, I’m long past modesty with doctors or my dearest friend.

“We don’t have any answers yet. If it’s like the last round of surgery, I’ll have the lab report back by the end of the week.” I pluck a sanitary napkin from the beribboned basket on the bench and freshly line the panties I wore into the exam room, then pull on my long, black skirt.

Jan paces the room while I dress. Normally, she wears her graying hair loose and dyed burgundy, but this month, she favors a deep lavender and a flowery bandana she claims celebrates spring and the coming of summer. She’s traded in her red-rimmed glasses for two pairs of bedazzled readers hanging from beaded chains around her neck. She makes me smile because her mismatched, colorful attire reminds me of Sonnet when she was barely old enough to pick out her own outfits for kindergarten. Much to Quent’s horror, I let our little girl go to school dressed however she wanted, so I can hardly judge Jan for being herself.

“All right, Jan, say it. I know something’s on your mind.”

She shrugs.

“Tell me. You know this anxiety will eat me up until I hear back from pathology.”

Jan is psychic, and except for one particularly brutal period in our long friendship, she’s always been right.

“You see something, Jan. Don’t you?”

Finally, she nods. I see things, too, but I can’t always decipher them for myself. Intuition and self-doubt both originate in the third chakra, two sides of the same coin, and I can never tell if that antsy feeling is my intuition saying something’s wrong or my long-ago insecurities telling me nothing can be right. I’m too close to the subject when it comes to Scary Medical Stuff, and I can’t tamp down the anxiety long enough for clarity, no matter how many Tarot cards or blocks of wood with runes carved into them I might drop onto a divination cloth.

“You can’t see… it?”

“See what?” I hold my breath. I feel sick to my stomach.

Jan reads the fear on my face as I grab my purse and head for the door. “No, not this. Not medical stuff. This will be fine.”

It’s what I want to hear, yet I don’t completely trust Jan’s psychic insights anymore. She was wrong about Jesse.

“Then what do you see?” We step into the corridor. I can hear Sondra greeting a patient in the next exam room over from mine. “Not here, Jan. Tell me in the car.”

I schedule my follow-up at the checkout desk and pick up the bottle of painkillers Sondra told the clinic pharmacy to have waiting for me so that I can take my first dose as soon as I’m safely home. Jan follows me to where I’m parked under a massive oak tree. I’m tired. I just want to go home and take a nap, cursed or not.

Jan settles into the passenger seat and folds her hands in her lap. She looks nervously around the car and presses her lips together in a hard line.

“Okay, Jan. Spill it. What are you seeing? Is it… is it cancer?”

“The future keeps changing. It’s what I saw the first time you bled, but now I don’t. I think your gynecologist got it all, and you’re going to be okay. I was able to warn you before it turned.”

I want her prognostications to be a relief, but the fear clings to me still. Six years ago, I trusted Jan with my life and my children, but five-and-a-half years ago, her psychic talents failed her, and I can’t forget that. I won’t be satisfied until I see the lab reports, and even then, I’m not sure I’ll ever be completely free of anxiety about good cells going bad and bad cells turning deadly, all unseen deep inside me. It probably won’t matter how much reassurance Sondra gives me, either.

“Okay, so what’s bothering you that I can’t see? Am I cursed? Because it sure seems like it these days.”

“Not exactly. But Lauren, I’ve been seeing something for weeks now. Months. Kiddo”—the words come out in a rush— “something dark is following you.”

“Yeah. Scary Medical Stuff.”

“No.”

I shrug and shift the car into reverse. “There’s plenty of other dark stuff following me these days, if you haven’t noticed. Quentin and his new wife threatening yet another custody battle for Sonnet. The nightmare with Jesse. Having to shut down the healing center. The possibility of losing my home. The⁠—”

“No. There’s a dark force around you all the time now. It’s getting stronger. Don’t you see it? How can you not see it?” Her eyes widen. “Of course. You’re looking in the wrong place!” She leans forward and taps the rearview mirror.

I squint into the glass. Nothing. Just the thin sheet of dead oak blooms on the rear window and the sunny parking lot beyond.

Exasperated, Jan taps the mirror a second time. “No. You’re looking in the wrong place! Look again! Closer.”

Fine. I grab the mirror in my fist and yank it around.

Something stares back from behind my seat.

Chapter 2 →

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