Chapter 35

Chapter 35 of 48 · 9-minute read

The Chaos Witch’s Solar Return Ascendant in Scorpio

Sonnet finally lands on what must be the beginning of the series of video captures of this man. The black sedan pulls into my driveway on the video, triggering the beginning of the recording. The driver sits in the car long enough for the video to pause.

The video stops momentarily, but begins again as the car door opens and the driver steps out. Straightening his jacket, he strolls toward the front door and removes his sunglasses, dropping them into his chest pocket.

I can’t get a good look at him yet. Not until he is directly in front of the security camera.

“Mrs. Matthews?” He rings the doorbell that connects to my security system.

“Yes?” A feminine voice, but not mine.

“Mrs. Matthews? Your bank sent me over to appraise your home? I need to verify it’s worth more than the equity you want to borrow against it. It’s all that’s needed for the bank to finish the paperwork.”

“I’m at work. Look, use the key that I gave Frank. Do you have it?”

The appraiser fishes in his pocket, brings out a single key and holds it up with a smile, his hand blocking the view of his face. The key is sheathed in red plastic—Jesse’s old key. Still, I can see enough of his face to know that I have seen him around town more than once, usually talking to a banker or real estate agent. If someone tried to take out a loan against my house, it would be unlikely they could do it without verifying its value first by researching the records and then with an in-person visit. This reeks of a formality.

Except that I never applied for a loan.

“Good, good! I’ll call the bank later to make sure everything’s squared away.”

I watch a stranger, invited into my home by a stranger who somehow has access to my security system. The same app is on my phone and on my computer but passworded, and only four people have ever had access to that password: my daughters, Jesse, and me. I have no doubt that the woman’s voice belongs to the chaos witch, even though I can’t recall ever hearing it except when walking around in my memories of my surprise pizza delivery at the clinic.

I can blame her, but I have to blame myself a little, too. It’s like having someone steal from your unlocked car. Had I left the door not only unlocked but wide open? If I had kept my wards up, if I had not given up on using any and all the tools that I’ve worked so hard to excel at, then none of this would have happened. I would have been more aware psychically of the threat. I would’ve had stronger wards around my property. I would have seen what was happening to Jesse that I hadn’t wanted to see. If I had been paying more attention and using my talents instead of sticking my head in the ground out of worry over the future, I would have been aware and this never would have happened.

None of it would have happened.

I catch Jan glaring at me. “Stop blaming yourself, kiddo.” She’s reading my mind again. “If you had been in a car accident that had left you in a coma, would you be blaming yourself for that? We all have times when we either can’t or don’t take care of ourselves like we should. This whole mess has put you into an emotional coma to protect yourself. You can thank the dysfunctional way you were raised for that. The only way you could have responded to your fears objectively is if you didn’t have any emotion at all. And if you didn’t have any emotion at all for your loved ones, then you wouldn’t be you. Your grief is only as deep as your love.”

Christabel’s eyes water at Jan’s words. She turns to hug me tightly, but I stiffen in her arms instead.

“Sonnet? Keep going backward. I want to make sure we don’t miss any other visitors.”

I have a bad feeling. Now that I can discern the fragrance of the drama queen’s energy, I’m realizing all the places I’ve felt it before. The clinic. At the Thai restaurant. The woods. The lake. My house.

The ritual circle at the Center of Light? Yes, there, too. But just outside the circle, not part of it.

Sonnet backtracks through the videos in fits of forward and stop. More deer and bunnies in the backyard. They represent new starts and innocence and taking a leap of faith.

In the front yard, a red fox skulks along the drive up to the house, pauses at the front steps, then sits in the grass. Its eyes glint in the sun as it watches my front door. Finally, it pushes up from its haunches and saunters out of sight of the security camera.

Feminine magick. Slyness.

In the next scene, still going backward in time, a young woman with long black curls dancing at her shoulders lightly descends the steps of the front porch like a cat on stairs. She glances backward. It’s midday, so the video is clear enough that I can see her profile, then her face.

The same face as in the stills from the bank surveillance system, same date. The same face as the woman at the lake. The same woman in the memory I’d walked around in until I could see her behind the door, her claws wrapped around Jesse’s arm.

Standing on the steps to my house, she laughs as if she’s just heard a joke. Before she can turn and continue walking away from my home, Sonnet hits the pause button. The image of the chaos witch freezes on the screen, and Sonnet zooms in.

“Mom! I know her! What’s she doing at our house?”

“H-how do you know her?”

Too busy with the security footage, Sonnet doesn’t look at me. “She comes into the ice cream shop all the time. It’s weird. She knows my name.”

Blood rushes to my face. Is this it? Is this the answer?

“Her name. What’s her name?”

“No idea. She’s never said.”

“When did this start?”

Sonnet shrugs. “I dunno. It was still really cold weather the first time she came in. Like, right after Christmas? No. Right before? She came in every single day for weeks and wouldn’t buy from anyone but me. She used to order the peppermint crumbles in her hot cocoa, and we stopped offering those as of Christmas Day. Oh! Yeah, it was the day after the Solstice ritual because I had just gotten home from a holiday cruise with Dad and Candy and got called into the work before I could even change clothes. We were swamped that day with the new ice cream cakes for Christmas. The reason I remember her is that she bought a cake and wanted to talk to me while I decorated it special for her. All she wanted to talk about for a solid ten minutes was Jesse and if he was really a doctor and how I knew him and stuff, and how you met. That night, I found the whole cake in the trash. All that effort I put into decorating that cake, and she never even tasted it.”

Is that how she knew so much about Jesse and me? She’d been ferreting out information from my daughter?

“Miss Lauren?” Beside me, Christabel shifts from one foot to the other. “I know her, too. I mean, I’ve seen her. Not just in my Tarot readings. She came to the WizMer—I mean, the Winter Solstice Manifestation Ritual at the healing center. Remember?”

I shake my head. I’d been busy preparing for the ritual and then leading it. I’d managed to shove down my worries over my health for a single night, and I’d put on my beautiful red Solstice dress, the same one the chaos witch wore into the bank. We’d had over five hundred participants in our big event this year, and we’d had to put them in the ritual space in a circle three-deep.

My Winter Solstice Manifestation Ritual is the most popular public ritual we do with non-magickal participants—or used to do before the Center of Light closed. Unlike other rituals, I call in Archangels to represent the four quarters and then I have the participants honor and say goodbye to things in their lives that no longer serve them before welcoming in the things they want for themselves in the new year. Winter Solstice is the first degree of Capricorn and therefore the best time for stating intentions for the coming twelve months. The Center of Light, under my leadership, held this ritual in the powerful first degree—the first full day—of Capricorn as a more formidable alternative to New Year’s resolutions.

What did the drama queen set her intentions for? Or whom?

“I don’t remember much about her, Miss Lauren, except that she was in all black except for a red scarf over her head because it was cold until we all got warmed up in the ritual circle. I didn’t make the connection between the Queen of Cups, reversed, and her because it was so long ago. That night, she and Dr. Jesse—” Christabel pauses.

“Say it. It’s okay. I need to know.”

“She was flirting with Dr. Jesse when he was, er, herding the guests for you. The more he ignored her, the harder she tried to get his attention. I was helping him get the guests lined up to enter the circle while you were clearing the space of negativity, remember?”

I hate to admit it, but I’ve been performing public rituals so long that I can’t keep them separate in my head. Snippets of some, no recollection at all of others.

Then Christabel nods furiously. “Oh, no, you probably wouldn’t remember her there because she didn’t actually make it to the circle.” Christabel squeezes my shoulder. “You weren’t there when it happened. It was about five minutes before the ritual started, so there wasn’t time to make accommodations. She pretended to fall and faked a sprained ankle. Kept asking Dr. Jesse to carry her. He took a thirty-second look at her ankle and put her in a lawn chair outside the circle so she could watch, even if she couldn’t participate.”

Unfortunately, I don’t remember. For all public rituals, we accommodated where we could. Attendance was free, but we couldn’t promise an easy path through the grass to the fire pit by the lake. We did make room for wheelchairs and camping chairs for the great-grandmothers who came to all our rituals and anyone with a disability, but that took some advance preparation. One of our vendors usually stood in the circle with me to provide sign language interpretation. Again, that took advance preparation, and when we advertised the public rituals, we plainly asked that anyone needing a little extra help contact us no later than noon that day.

But situations like accidents five minutes before the ritual or someone calling us to ask if we could delay because they were stuck in traffic were generally something we didn’t accommodate, especially not with five hundred participants. Once the participants were inside the circle and I had energetically closed it for the ritual, I wouldn’t open it and allow the energy to fluctuate until I was ready to release the quarters and send the participants home.

In private rituals, I am quite careful about whom I mix my energies with. In public rituals, my agreement with the quarters is that they keep out anyone who would negatively affect the outcome of my magick.

“Miss Lauren, she was really shielded. Most people at your gatherings are wide open. Ha! Most don’t even know how to shield or deflect. This chick knew how.”

I clutch at Christabel’s arm to steady myself. It makes sense now. “That’s why we weren’t able to read her energetic signature. She was using her shields like a cloaking device. But now that I know her energy, I can find her.”

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