Chapter 34

Chapter 34 of 48 · 7-minute read

The Chaos Witch’s Natal Anti-Vertex Conjunct Natal Venus

“Hey, Mom. Did you grab my glasses from my car?”

“Hi, Miss Lauren.”

The girls are curled up on opposite ends of the sofa, each with a different book from my personal library: a law of attraction guide for Sonnet and a book of advanced witchcraft techniques for Christabel. They only glance up at me at first, then lift their heads to see why I don’t answer.

Jan stands at the window, holding watch as usual. “Lauren? Honey? Did you have another run-in with that demon or whatever it is? You’re shaking all over.”

I don’t answer but drop Sonnet’s glasses onto her lap and stride toward my bedroom. I can’t answer. I can’t find my voice.

My pulse thunders in my ears. My knees threaten to fail me as I force myself forward toward my bedroom closet.

“Honey?” Jan hovers behind me, almost bumping into me. I frown over my shoulder at her, and she makes more room. “What are you looking for?”

I tug at the pull chain on the light bulb in my walk-in closet. A decade ago, I turned the small room into a professionally organized space. Shelves climb all the way to the ceiling, each with gaps for boxes of shoes, sweaters, workout clothes, T-shirts, shorts. The hangers below categorize my blouses and skirts, my heavier coats at one end and my dresses at the other.

I don’t see my red dress that I wore to the Winter Solstice Manifestation Ritual at the healing center. The one I wore to dinner with Jesse when we celebrated our last anniversary. The one I wore to a charity fundraiser event where Jesse and I were guests of honor for all our local community work. My favorite dress. Jesse’s fav of mine as well.

Hoping against hope, I pull boxes from below where the dresses hang, tumbling them to the floor. I slam them one by one across the rod into the wall. Nothing. Sinking down, I bury my face in my hands. I don’t want it to be true.

But I can feel her here. The drama queen. In my closet. In my bedroom. In my house. I’ve noticed this energy before, but misinterpreted it. Now I know what else she was doing in here when she left the witch bottle tied under my bed.

Jan lowers herself to the floor to sit with me. She doesn’t ask questions this time but waits for me to compose myself.

“I knew someone had been here,” I say at last. “It was my birthday week. The week I went to that conference in Minneapolis and met up with Belinda. Sonnet stayed with her dad and Candy and griped the whole time about it because she was in school and couldn’t come with me. Do you remember?”

Jan nods, sadness in her eyes. No matter what she feared about my future with Jesse and how much her protests created a chasm in our friendship, now she’s silent.

“I came back from the conference and knew the minute I walked through the door that someone else had been here. I could sense the energy like a left-behind fragrance. Jesse was already gone by then. I accused Sonnet of hiding out here from her dad with friends of hers and lectured her on having people in my house without my permission.”

I feel bad about that now.

Jan sniffs the air around us. “The other witch was here?” Then she nods. “The other witch was here. But why? And how did she get in?”

“She stole my dress to impersonate me. She used a glamour spell to steal my identity.” I shake my head in disbelief. I keep seeing the bank’s photos in my head, the drama queen’s hand in Jesse’s. “She used it to fool the bank. And Jesse, too. He was there with her while she was pretending to be me, and he didn’t know. She tricked him. He thought he was with me.”

The hot tears come again. I may be a powerful witch but sobbing on the floor of my closet, I don’t feel strong at all. All the power in the world can’t keep this hurt at bay.

“Use it,” Jan offers. “What you’re feeling. Channel it to send that demon back to hell.”

“It’s-it’s not a-a d-demon. It’s a thought-form. A servitor. You can’t send a thought-form back to hell.”

“Then send it back to its maker and let it torture her instead.”

I steel myself. “I intend to.”

“I’m really sorry, honey. Jesse was a good man, and you meant the world to him. I didn’t mean to try to separate you from joy. All I could see when I looked into the future was you, here, right now, crying in your closet, and him the cause of it. I didn’t know why. Only that he was the reason you were crying. Not just here either. I saw you in the woods near the lake, hurting so bad, and other places. And Jesse the cause of all of it.” Pity in her eyes, Jan presses her lips into a tight line. “You need clarity. Once you have it, you’ll know what to do.”

“Wait.” I jerk my head up. “I do know what to do!”

My hands are still shaking when I sit down at my computer at the little desk in the kitchen. I flatten my palms on either side of the keyboard and press hard against the wood surface of the desk. Still, my fingers don’t stop trembling.

“Mom? Is there something I can help you with?”

I hate the idea of having to accept help from anyone, especially my seventeen-year-old daughter. I’m supposed to be the strong one, for her. If there is anything I hate more than having to ask Sonnet for help, it’s hearing the worry in her tone.

“The security system, sweetie. I need to look at footage from the week I was away at a conference.”

Sonnet takes my place at the computer, and with a few keystrokes, displays the home security backup website and logs in.

“Front door or back door?”

“Both.”

Leaning over Sonnet’s shoulder, I peer at the oversized screen. I set up the cameras last year on the front and back porches because I was paranoid about Quent or Candy duplicating Sonnet’s key again without her knowledge, so they could sneak into my house to try to find evidence to use against me in court.

I don’t record everything—only initial movements and then the next forty-five seconds. For a small monthly fee, I store the backup for three years on the security provider’s servers, all accessible with a few clicks of a mouse. Sonnet flips the calendar icon back to the exact week without me telling her the date.

Before I ask her how she can be so exact, she mutters, “It was the week of our first senior party. Dad wouldn’t let me go.”

I could remind her that it was also the week of my birthday or the week we went car shopping, but I let her words stand unchallenged. She knows what was most important in her peer-pressured life.

She starts with footage from the first day I was gone. I watch myself close and lock the front door, then drag my carryon luggage to the car, all the while pleading with a mopey Sonnet to move faster so I could drop her at her dad’s and still make my flight.

Later in the day, a bunny hops across my fire circle and to the back porch before retracing its tracks off-camera.

Christabel, Jan, and I lean over Sonnet’s shoulders as she places the cursor over the event arrow and clicks. She goes too fast, and suddenly we are on the day of my return. We watch the scene from my front porch as I pull my carryon luggage out of my car and Sonnet runs happily ahead of me to the porch.

“Really? Tomorrow, Mom? You’ll take me car shopping?” The old clunker was all I could afford, but she was getting ready to go into her senior year, and I couldn’t keep on chauffeuring her everywhere. We had reached an agreement that she would pay for her own insurance and gas, and we would go halve-sies on the cost of whatever vehicle we could jointly afford. I had also felt guilty for leaving her with her dad for a full week, knowing how miserable she was going to be.

Sonnet hits the pause button and goes backward in time again, more slowly now. Back to that morning. To the back porch.

Two does and a young fawn meander across the backyard, triggering the security camera attached to the back door. A few minutes earlier in the day, one doe and the same fawn wander across the screen. The scene elicits a chorus of ahs and oohs from everyone but me. I’m too anxious.

Going back in time, the next scene begins with a man closing my front door and locking it. His face is out of the camera angle, and soon enough we see his back as he makes his way to a black car parked at the end of the driveway.

“Mom! Who was that? He could have been in the house when we got home!”

“I don’t know, baby. Go to the previous video.”

Sonnet backs up the video in spurts, one scene at a time, moving fast then freezing. I watch with dread as a man I don’t know circles the premises, caught on video from both the front and back porch cameras. He doesn’t wear a tie, but he’s dressed in office attire, including a sports jacket that looks a little too warm on a warm spring day.

“Mom!” Sonnet wails. “Who is that?”

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