Chapter 10
Transiting Chiron Square Lauren’s Natal Venus
By the time I reach the farthest corner of my backyard, I’m regretting living on a one-acre lot. Fortunately, my painkillers have started to work their own brand of magick.
Jan follows me, just out of sight but within earshot. I hear her praying to Jesus for my protection as well as my daughters’—Rhiannon far away at finals week at college and Sonnet at her dad’s mansion behind fifteen-foot-tall gates—and Christabel’s safety. I’m sometimes defensive about people either praying for me or working magick for me, either on my behalf or what they see as my behalf. To me, there’s not a lot of difference between magick and prayer—they’re both focused energy—though I’m sure others see it differently. Both magick and prayer can change lives, and I believe there is an ethical boundary that must not be crossed or else I am changing someone else’s life without their permission. I know because I’ve been guilty of it myself in the past.
Jan has the best of intentions, though. She always has. She sees nothing wrong with working her kind of special connection to a Higher Power if it brings me a better life. The problem is, we’ve sometimes disagreed on what a better life for me looks like.
Once, when Jesse was new in my heart, she’d intended only the best for me, and yet her actions conveyed the impression of smug, arrogant, moral superiority. Without meaning to, she treated me as a stupid child who didn’t know my own heart or what was good for me. That might’ve made sense during my marriage to Quent when I was struggling with both childhood and adulthood shadows of abuse, but not after I purged much of that and started a new life. We had a godawful argument over it, one that caused a long rift that pains me to this day.
That was the reason Jan wasn’t invited to our wedding.
Tonight, however, is different. I don’t mind Jan’s prayers for protection. I’m praying for safety as well and working my defensive magick to that end. There is a vast difference between begging God to take Jesse away from me and praying that the horse-faced thing will leave us alone.
Sometimes I wonder if Jan’s prayers had anything to do with what happened to Jesse five whole years later, but then I realize that Jan’s prayers were not successful because Jesse and I had a beautiful five years together in the truest partnership I’ve ever had in my life. Five happy years, filled with laughter and hope and—yes—occasional turbulence and grief, but the support we had given each other was worth more than half a lifetime with Quent had been.
Even though I’m forty-eight, I still have a hard time accepting the fact that all relationships have expiration dates. If they don’t end in dissolution, they end in the death of one before the other. There is no escaping that, and the older I get, the more I have to admit that, with any new relationship, I will always feel that my time is running out because it’s doubtful I’ll ever have as long with any one man as I did with the one who made me miserable.
Barefoot, I pause in the overgrown grass that Sonnet was supposed to have mowed over the weekend, and I look at Jan. I look really hard. She gazes back at me, and I know she’s reading my mind. She smiles sadly at me, and I smile back. I love her to death and then some, and I should tell her more often.
I cross to my driveway, to where the line of black salt began, and complete the circle of salt. “Come on,” I tell Jan as I sniff the night air. “Christabel is waiting for us with a bonfire that smells like rosemary and dragon’s blood.”
In the backyard, Christabel is standing, facing the fire, barefoot on a flat stone placed directly to the North of the fire pit. She stands with her eyes closed, face tilted skyward, arms to her side but palms outward as if soaking up all the energy I’ve left in that plate of rock for the last decade.
She senses our approach and opens her eyes. “Did I do the fire right?”
Of course, she did. This isn’t the first time we’ve been together in circle and not the first time we’ve been together in my backyard. She’s asked me to teach her, and to start a coven again, or at least a teaching circle. Even without the Center of Light. If I were going to do that, Christabel would be my first student.
How can I nourish the talents in others when I’ve stopped nourishing them in myself? I’m not ready to take on students again.
Christabel glances down at her bare feet on the stone. “Oof! Sorry!”
Realizing she’s standing on the altar stone—my spot—she hops off of the half-buried slab and starts to move to the stone in the West before realizing she’s moving counterclockwise. She stops and runs back to the North and then around the circle through the East and to the stone in the South where she will be opposite me. The fire roars between us.
“Miss Lauren? I mean, Raven.” She remembers to use my craft name within the circle. “Do you want me to call the quarters? I’ve been practicing and learning about the Watchtowers.”
I shake my head. “No calling the quarters tonight. It’s not that kind of ritual.”
She looks both disappointed and eager at the same time.
Jan takes her place in the West. She doesn’t believe in the Watchtowers, but she’s fine with me calling in angels because they’re in the Bible. She’s even more comfortable with me not calling in anything at all and instead simply holding energy in a circle.
Tonight, instead of standing, I sit on the altar stone of the North, the boat-sized menstrual pad underneath me like a thin pillow. I cross my legs, with my bare feet on either thigh, and place my hands palms up on my knees. Both Christabel and Jan watch and copy me.
Normally, I would call in my protective Sacred Dead to guard the quarters and assist in my rites but I didn’t have to tonight. They were already here. I can feel them all around me, especially at the edges of my circle. All my ancestors who passed before me. Friends and colleagues. All those who supported me in their lives and now support me in their afterlives.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Palms facing the fire, I focus on the warmth in my hands. I begin by drawing in the heat, light, and energy around me into my fingertips, like sucking air through a straw before blowing out a mighty candle. The energy switches then, coming in through my crown chakra at the tip of my head, flowing downward with a light that I know is brilliant white and filling every cell of my body.
I am but a conduit of energy for the Old Gods.
I turn my palms to each other, and the energy flows from my head, through my shoulders, through my arms, and into my hands. The energy leaves my hands and forms a ball of light between them. I lift my arms in front of me, shaping the ball of light. The altar stone beneath me turns ice cold, and I feel the energy surge like a hot flash through me. I know I’m the one who’s hot and that the stone hasn’t changed in temperature. To the untrained eye, the fire pit may appear to be the center of my property, but it is this rock, this exact location where I sit, that is the center.
The witch is the center of the circle.
The energetic ball of light grows as I open my arms high above me, arms to my side, arms falling wide open with the backs of my hands in the grass beside me. The fireball continues to grow until it encompasses me, with me at the center of the sphere of energy. It grows until I can touch the outer edges with my fingertips, and then, with a ferocious burst of energy that explodes from inside me, the sphere of light pushes outward, rippling over my backyard circle, over my property, and to its perimeters. It pulses outward a few more steps and then bounces back to the perimeter of black salt. To my surprise, it’s the most forceful shield I’ve ever erected.
Christabel squeals beside me as the visible evidence of the shield disappears, and yet the energy holds.
“Raven! It’s… amorphous?”
I smile and open my eyes. We stare at each other across the smoke rising from the fire between us while Jan sits serenely in the West.
“It’s not a normal circle of protection,” I explain. “It’s the most effective circle I’ve ever cast.” What I don’t tell Christabel is that I haven’t cast that many circles recently and that I’ve been stingy with my energy. “When I visualize the sphere of energy moving outward, I think of it like a hedge of light.”
“Hedge?”
“Yeah, you know, like well-trimmed shrubbery next to a driveway or a sidewalk or between fields like a fence. That’s what this is—a spherical fence of energetic light, direct from the Old Gods.”
“But wouldn’t a solid fence of energy be better? To keep out the bad stuff?”
If I ever take on another student, it will definitely be Christabel. She has the insight and maturity I require of anyone who wants to learn from me.
“Exactly. It keeps out the bad stuff and all the other stuff, too. But as a hedge, there are holes in it so I can reach out empathically through the hedge. It’s also—let’s call it ‘programmed’—to allow in only certain people. No one who intends me harm can enter. So yes, amorphous is a good word for it. But you could also call it a deadly hedge. Anything or anyone with ill intent who tries to get through the hedge, it closes down on them and becomes solid so they are either shut out or trapped in the hedge.”
Christabel nods, her hair coming undone yet again and falling in her face. She pulls it back and braids it loosely. Perspiration glistens on her forehead from the heat of the fire, but I am completely soaked through and it’s no hot flash. Jan, on the other hand, doesn’t even notice the temperature around us.
“Miss Lauren. I mean, Raven.” She says my craft name with a sense of reverence I’ve not heard before. Ever. Christabel holds out one palm as if feeling for rain. “Did you feel that? All the crushing heaviness that was around us? It’s gone now. It’s like it dissipated and just floated off into the air.”
I smile back at her. “That’s the sign of good magick.”
“Can I ask you something?” She knows the protective rites have been completed. Even Jan has stopped murmuring prayers under her breath. “If this was all it took to bump up your wards, why didn’t you do it already? I mean, why have you given up on your magick until tonight? You have all these cool talents that you fought so hard to get, but you haven’t been using them. Is that because you’re in, um, menopause?”
For a moment I forget all my troubles and burst into laughter. “No, sweetie, it has nothing to do with hormones or this stage of my life. You and I are both tremendously powerful human beings. We will both for all our lives be tremendously powerful. At some point in your life and mine, our bodies make changes that are dictated by our species’ biology. That’s all. We are just as powerful after our estrogen drops as we are before. Maybe even more so for those of us who are mothers because we’re not as focused on how to keep infants alive, which can be an all-consuming mission for a few years. There’s time to seek wonderful new experiences, but the magick isn’t dependent on our bodies. There’s nothing in the formula to yield magick that says you must have belief and intent and—oh yeah—your monthly cycle. Some of the most powerful witches out there are ones who have passed that stage, the ones called crones because they have all the wisdom of their years as well as the magick.”
“Then… why? Why walk away from your power?”
Christabel probably doesn’t realize it, but she’s reaching out to me, prying, probably completely unaware either that she’s doing this or that I can feel her doing it, but she’s trying to peer into what I’ve hidden behind my armor. Maybe I’m just tired, but she’s through my defenses almost immediately.
“Oh….” Her eyes widen. “It’s because of what happened to Dr. Jesse, isn’t it?”
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