Chapter 25
Lauren’s Natal Jupiter Conjunct Donna’s Second House of Possessions
I stare at the words on the last letter from Donna.
It isn’t right. You should forget Jesse and the healing center and move here. If you can’t legally take the girls out of the State of Florida, give Quent custody for a few years. They’ll be fine. Your place is with us.
Every day, you withdraw more and more from the people who have supported you for years. You never would have gotten away from your ex-husband if it weren’t for us. The only reason you have a new life to start is because we gave you one. Your future belongs to us. You belong with us physically, too.
You’re not really happy. You just think you are. It’s not possible for you to be happy. Even if you get your sweet-ass doctor. You are not someone who can be happy.
But the spells didn’t work. Maybe I didn’t read them thoroughly or maybe I was too resistant, thanks to my rift with Jan, to allow more criticism of Jesse to seep through my defenses. Not that I haven’t occasionally sabotaged myself by speaking my fears into being, but these letters-of-intention hadn’t had the desired effect.
I had been happy. A solid five years of a solid partnership with a man I loved and who loved me back. We had shared our dreams and realized many of them. We had our ups and downs, and life was not perfect, but we were happy. We also had moments of despair, especially after the miscarriage. Jesse had almost let his depression engulf him, but together, we had come to terms with not raising a child of our own. He’d started more powerful medications and found his groove again. He’d become an amazing and involved stepfather. The girls had been happy. Life had been fulfilling for all of us, safe, meaningful. Not perfect, but my life was well-lived since leaving both the Grand Coven and the Elders’ Coven and I was happier than I had been at any point in my life… until I lost him.
I don’t want to think that my happiness depended on Jesse, but losing him drove a lot of my unhappiness this spring. That’s normal, isn’t it, when you’re grieving? I’ve come ungrounded without him, and I’m doing my best to feel the solid earth under me again.
I gather the unfolded letters in both hands, and one by one, I crumple each sheet of paper and pitch it into the firepit as hard as I can. Each page catches fire, burns to a blackened ball, and falls between the coals. I won’t feed them to the flames as a stack that won’t burn all the way through and leave charred sheets that are still legible. I want all of Donna’s handiwork gone. I want the bond severed completely, and I want whatever other handiwork might be stalking me to be just as gone as her elegantly devised prose.
When I’m done, I throw the souvenir box onto the coals and watch it turn to ash. Even at this distance from the firepit, the flames warm my face.
Can I do this? Can I release Donna and the Elders? I’m furious after reading the magickal letters again. I didn’t even realize what they were the first time I read them. Will my anger send out attachments to Donna so that I cannot release her? I guess I’ll find out.
Pausing to settle onto the soft blanket over the altar stone, I turn over the events of the last ho’oponopono-based ritual in my mind. This ritual will be the same except for those I call in. They’re all the same, yet all different. I’ve performed this ritual at least a dozen times, and every time, the template of releasing and forgiving is the same. What’s different is the person and their bonds. Given how tightly connected the Elders’ Coven is, I’m nervous.
“Hear ye! I invite those of the Elders’ Coven who still have attachments to me to come forth.” My voice trembles.
Thick smoke rises from the coals. Nothing feeds the flameless smoke as it billows toward me, but it rises from somewhere under the coals. I stand quickly as the smoke takes shape.
Donna. Only Donna.
I wait but no one else appears. It seems the rest of the Elders’ Coven have either forgiven me or they’re no longer interested in drama. Donna, however, is front and center, all four feet, eleven inches of her and her now-graying strawberry-blonde hair. The smoke fades into the dark sky, and the shadow in front of me seems as solid as my own body.
“How dare you call me after all this time,” she hisses. “I have waited five years to hear from you. Why now? I gave and gave and gave to you to get you away from your husband, and cutting me off is the gratitude I get?”
Hmmm. Fair, maybe. From her point of view. I did cut her off, as she says.
My point of view is different. I use different terms for it, like “setting boundaries.”
I’m not here to argue or to become friends again. I’m here to banish a monster that was sent to destroy everything I love.
“Donna. Lady Lynx, High Priestess of the Elders’ Coven. I, Lady RavenHart, release you from all the hurts, both real and imagined, intentional and unintentional, seen and unseen, that you have done to me from the beginning of time until the present. I release you from of all these.”
Her expression shifts from annoyance to anger. “You release me?” She bellows, the force of her words painful in my ears. “I’ve done nothing but be supportive. All those times I called you and talked to you for hours and hours to keep you from being lonely!”
Again, a matter of perspective, and one she’d refused to hear. I wasn’t lonely. I was busy. With breaking free of Quent, with the girls, with my job. I didn’t have time for those three-hour conversations every night about nothing, but Donna guilt-tripped me if I tried to cut the conversations short or didn’t answer the phone. When I set boundaries, she tried harder to control me, and for that, I finally ended what had been a close friendship.
I’ve never seen her this mad. Her fists are shaking with anger, mine with fear. Six years ago, she was the more powerful witch. It might serve me better if I try to be more diplomatic. Just because my powers have increased since my last Elevation doesn’t mean that hers haven’t grown in equal proportion. We might still not be equals and I’ll suffer the consequences for this perceived infraction.
Then I make a mistake. My words tumble out in my effort to speed up the ritual. I forget to sever the attachments from her first.
“Donna. Lady Lynx,” I continue, “High Priestess of the Elders’ Coven. I accept your release of me for all the hurts, both real and imagined, intentional and unintentional, seen and unseen, that I have done to you from the beginning of time to the present. For all of these, I… I—” I swallow the rising fear and stumble on the words. “I accept your forgiveness. I mean, I accept your release of me.”
“No! Forgiveness not granted! Release not granted!” She steps forward out of the smoke.
For the first time, I notice the attachments between us. Not strings dotted in blood. Not gold chains or ropes. Something else. Something horrifying. How attachments present in the ritual is unique to each person being released, but this?
Holy shit.
Donna’s monochromatic form not only takes solid shape, but color as well. Even here in the dimness of the firelight, I can see the color of her clothes, her skin, her eyes. She reaches for me but falls short. Then I realize that it isn’t her arms that are wrapped around me, hanging onto me.
Beneath her sternum is a wide opening I can see only now. Her intestines stretch from her body to mine, enveloping me in her metaphorical blood and guts. They’ve grown into place over time. Some fresh and still pulsating. Some putrefied, stiff, stinking from having been latched onto me for so long.
I gasp and try to back away, even off the altar stone that offers me extra protection. I can go nowhere. I’m stuck, not in a web of string like with Dragon’s attachments but in a web of intestines and veins. I try to slice through the mesh of guts with the side of my palm but cannot break the bonds.
I close my eyes and concentrate. It’s been years since I was a new practitioner of witchcraft and needed wands, athames, or ceremonial swords to help direct my magick. I had been an experienced High Priestess, an Adept, for so long that I could do anything and everything magickal in my mind. But suddenly, I need more.
Concentrating on my right hand, I visualize my fingers curling around the hilt of a dagger engraved in protection runes. The astral weapon materializes in my fist. I swing it across the attachments between us, severing them in one swoop. The pulsating intestines and veins fall away from my shoulders and back but also fall out of this eerie form of Donna’s, leaving behind gaping holes of rot. I shrug off the dried intestines that have formed a shell around my back and shoulders, and that, too, falls to my feet. I bathe myself in golden light, healing where these unhealthy bonds have been attached for so long without me realizing how strong they were.
Donna glares back at me in shock and hurt. “It’s not fair! I gave so much to you! You owe me.”
I sense the servitor stalking in counterclockwise circles around my home. It stops at the southernmost point and scratches with one hoof at my shields.
“Call off that thing you sent.”
Donna smirks. “I’m offended that you would think I’m the one who sent that to you.”
“Because you can’t be manipulative?”
“Because it’s not my style. I may not be happy with you, Lady RavenHart”—she grinds out my magickal name— “but I would never hurt your children, and I would never kill you.” She folds her arms across her chest, across the gaping holes left by the fallen attachments. My actions have left her with open, bleeding wounds.
My jaws clench involuntarily. “And Jesse? Would you hurt him?”
“You know what the Grand Coven taught us both: a witch who can’t kill cannot cure.”
Smoke wafts in my face. I cough. I can barely breathe. Is she saying this to hurt me? Or is she trying to tell me something in her usual cryptic way when she’s angry?
“Fine! To answer your question, no, I didn’t hurt Jesse. I needed you to come to your senses and see that you were making a bad decision about him. I knew it would end, eventually.”
Is that the question to be faced in any possible relationship? That every one of them has an expiration date, whether in divorce or with the death of one party or the other? And what’s the cost versus benefits analysis for any relationship that eventually ends, regardless of how? Is it worth the pain of heartbreak if it ends in six months? If it ends in fifty years? If it ends in five? I can keep myself from being heartbroken, yes, if I never open my heart. But I can’t regret opening my heart again after Quent, and I can’t regret these wonderful years I’ve had with Jesse, even if he’s gone now.
“I’d rather run the risk of loss than to refuse to allow myself to feel anything. That’s my choice to make, Donna. Not yours and not the Elders.”
“You could have been really happy if you had moved to Maryland and spent your time with the Elders’ Coven. We could have made you happy.”
“Jesse made me happy.”
Donna rolls her eyes. “Your talents have grown. I’ve felt them from afar. But you’ve thrown it all away. You could have had a whole coven’s help to heal from—yes, I know about your surgery—but you made a choice, and it wasn’t us, and for that, you let your powers grow weak. You lost faith. You let yourself become so distracted by the mundane things of your life with your darling Jesse that you let a chaos witch into your life without even knowing it.”
I let in a chaos witch? Not that I know of. Although, I suppose it’s possible that I may have met a few at some of the healing center events.
“Neither the Grand Coven nor the Elders’ Coven used thought-forms in our magickal toolkits. You know that. That would be something new to us.”
I stiffen. That’s the truest thing she’s said to me. Neither Dragon nor Donna and the Elders liked trying anything new when it came to their magick, and I doubt that’s changed. When I consider it now, I can’t imagine that any of them in a million years would experiment with creating and empowering a servitor to harass and harm me. They have far easier tools that they’ve been using for decades and no inclination to learn new methods of magick.
“This little chaos witch isn’t even that powerful. She could be with some training, but she’s never had much of that. A little guidance from someone more experienced who showed her how to ball up her emotions in the form of something ugly to do her bidding and dispatch it.” Donna chuckles. “And you can’t do anything about it because you can’t name the sender. You haven’t been paying attention. If you had, you would have noticed all the clues and put a stop to it before she could ever spell horse, let alone send an abomination after you.”
“You know who it is, don’t you?”
Donna ignores my question. “Don’t you feel it, Raven? That creation sent to mete out pain to you and yours? Every time you can’t banish it without knowing the creator’s name, and every time you put your magickal resources into banishing it and fail? It gets stronger. How many more times can you perform these releasing rituals to send it back to its creator before you allow it to get strong enough to break through your wards? You’re in deep shit, aren’t you?”
“Do you or do you not know who it is?”
“We loved you. I loved you. Everything I ever did for you, no matter how much we disagreed, was out of my love for you. This chaos witch? There is no balance to her hatred and nothing in your past with her that can temper what she is willing to do to you.”
For a split second, I allow my mind to wander outside this releasing circle and out to the perimeter of my wards. Donna is correct. The servitor is stronger now, even stronger than before I entered this ritual space. I was wrong about Dragon and wrong about Donna and the Elders. But I can’t imagine who else this might be. Who would hate me so much to hurt me this way?
“Donna! Do you or do you not know who she is?”
She grins through the smoke at me. “I do. Oh, she’s not one of mine. I’ve never met her. See, I have nothing to do with her, but I can see her in the Ether. Her name, too. And the reason she hates you.”
“Donna. Tell me, Donna. Please? Please! It’s important. A matter of life and death. I have to know.”
“Yes. Yes, you do. But it’s none of my business, and since we’re not friends, I guess it’s up to you to figure out on your own. Oh, and one other thing I wanted to say to you, Raven. You know me well enough—or knew me well enough—to know better than try any type of magick on me. I have my own wards up, always. You can’t get through for any psychic spying or checking up on me or calling me into a circle out of the blue like this. My wards don’t just keep people out: they hit back. Tell me you remember.”
A tiny distortion of rainbow light quivers in my vision as I squint into the flames behind her. Jagged. Curved slightly like a preschooler’s drawing of a sunset or sunrise with sawtooth rays on the top edge of the sun.
“I remember,” I murmur.
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