Chapter 45

Chapter 45 of 48 · 7-minute read

Sun and Pluto in Opposition in Lauren and the Chaos Witch’s Davison Synastry

I roll my eyes. Naturally, that’s what she wants to do next. Queen of Cups, reversed. Drama queen.

With a single fluid movement, she waves one hand in a semicircle above her. The back of her long fingernails skim the protective shield she wears around her, leaving a trail of pale pink sparks. Her shield pulses a translucent pink before fading to clear.

I shrug. “I have no intention of fighting you. I don’t need to. You want my husband? You can have him. I’ve released him.” Energetically, if not legally.

Her face flushes scarlet in the firelight.

Ooooh, sore spot.

“I-I don’t want him.”

“Not anymore.” I hear the words even if she doesn’t speak them aloud. “What a fucking waste!”

Of course. There’s nothing he can do for her now. Jesse had been the key to everything she wanted: the local prestige of being married to a handsome and well-loved physician, the owner—or mortgage payer—of the clinic and the Center of Light, the partner in the community who could place Bianca in the role of head witch with five hundred participants in a single public ritual, a nice house she assumed initially that he owned, a nice sports car, probably tons of money in the bank. Jesse had represented an easy life with more power than she’d ever had and a ready-made community to support her dreams.

My community. Not even a beneficiary of my hard work but a thief of it.

But unlike most men she’d met on her cross-country pilgrimage, Jesse had rebuffed her advances. When she’d tricked him with a glamour, he’d desperately thrown money at her to make her go away. When that didn’t happen and he dug himself into a deeper hole, he’d transformed into a quivering pile of anxiety and regret.

She hadn’t expected that underneath his sweet, upbeat, outgoing exterior was a fragile man who held his beautiful world together with daily medications for his depression and anxiety—or that he’d stopped taking them. He’d been so desperate to make all his worries go away and to feel better that he’d quickly become hooked on her home-brewed drugs, but they still weren’t enough to cut through the metaphysical mountain of concrete and rebar crushing his soul. He’d finished an entire pot of her special “flying broomstick” tea meant to be sipped from shot glasses or paper condiment cups stolen from a fast-food restaurant—and had lost his senses.

For fuck’s sake, she’d warned him that more than a single glass in a night could cause brain damage. He’d told her he didn’t care anymore about anything but either feeling better or feeling nothing at all, right before he finished the mind-numbing tea. Afterward, he felt better, like floating in a dream.

She glares at me. In the wake of her silence, I hear her words in my head.

“No point in sticking around here.”

She’s used up Jesse—body, mind, bank accounts. He’s merely a casualty of her ambitions. Thanks to her connection to Jesse, she’s managed to tap into my financial assets through fraud. She keeps it all in cash so there’s no audit trail. Most of it is buried behind the RV, in a hole hidden under a layer of plywood beneath the generator. She’s planning to dig it up tonight and leave this place behind—including Jesse, including all the havoc she’s wreaked in both our lives and the lives of people I love—and hit the road again.

She’s got a real-life vision board now to rely on to manifest a future she wants. She may not have the dream of my life, but she’s seen what it looks like and she can copy it now in some other small town where she might buy a house and start her own healing center and find a man who’ll love her like Jesse loved me.

I nod. “You failed. You thought Jesse could give you everything you wanted, but you pushed too hard. You drove a good man over the edge without meaning to. You tried, intentionally, to drive me over the edge. Why? I never did anything to you.”

It’s an old fault of mine that I assume people do mean things in retaliation and not because they want to or they’re bored. It’s because I would never harm another unless they harmed me first or to stop them from doing harm. I swore an oath to that effect long ago, to harm none.

Although the definition of harm is morally gray enough to include binding others who would do harm. Even the definition of binding has varying meanings. Regardless, I have my own set of standards I live by, and I typically live and let live until someone decides to test me and finds out they shouldn’t.

Bianca disagrees. I can see it in the fluctuating colors of her aura. To her, my existence means I’ve done something to her that calls for my destruction.

“Ah. I get it. I stood in your way. Even without knowing it. That was enough for you to want to punish me.”

Clenching her jaw, she unfurls both fists against the force field around her. It sizzles like fading fireworks against the night sky above us. She’s showing off because she knows I’m right, but all I can do is raise my brow and cross my arms with a sigh.

“You can’t hurt me!” She leans into her force fields and juts out her lower jaw. “I’m more powerful than you are!”

She’s not more powerful, though. Power requires more than just declaring that you have it—you actually have to have it. She hadn’t learned from the Grand Coven or the Elders. My teachers were control freaks but also among the best. I could tell that her confidence exceeded her education. I know magickal tools she can’t imagine. I allowed her to be more powerful during a time when I needed to shrink from the world, but that time is over.

“No, you can’t hurt me. Not anymore. I won’t let you.”

“Really? What? You think you can stop me? I can have everything of yours. All I have to do is reach out and take it, and it’s mine. Just like I did with him. And the bank. Wearing your face was like trying on your life, and nobody saw through me. The people at the bank had no idea who you really are. I probably didn’t even have to waste my energy on a glamour because they wouldn’t have known who you were without Jess. And Jess? He was so distracted that he was even easier to fool. I didn’t even have to do much—all I did was give him what he wanted to see. If he hadn’t fucked up with tea, I’d be living in your house right now, and you’d have nothing and no one. So no, you can have him back. I’m done with him.”

I refuse to say I’m too old for anything—under normal circumstances—but I’m too old for this bullshit. It’s past time to put a stop to Bianca’s games with other people’s lives.

“You want my magick? Then reach out and take it.” My voice comes out low, guttural, as if I’ve uttered a curse.

Bianca grabs at me but her hand sinks into the protective bubble around her. She tries again, each time surprised that she can’t punch through a shield of her own making.

Arms still crossed, I step forward. Without effort, I breach the larger bubble of energy around the RV and campsite.

“H-how are you doing that?” She repeats herself, an octave higher.

I shrug. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

She backs away, putting the campfire between us. “You’re not that kind of person. You wouldn’t hurt me. I won’t let you bind me!”

My skin tingles from the tip of my head to my bare toes. The euphoria, the sting of beads of perspiration on my forehead, the surge of heat like the world’s mightiest hot flash—my magick seeps through my pores. I rarely see waves of magick, even my own, but tonight I glow in a sphere of white light.

A grin spreads across my face. I must look terrifying! I can barely talk because I feel as if I’m going to float away, like giggles are lifting me by the throat and under my arms.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Bianca. I’m not going to bind you either. I’m merely going to let your magick return to you. You sent something into the universe, and I’m sending it back to carry out the purpose you gave it, only directed at you rather than at me.”

Realization dawns on her face. So sweet to watch her understand!

“How did you know my name?”

“Friends. I had a little help from the other side, and from this side, too. That was the one thing I needed to turn your tools against you—your real name. Bianca Wilemon.” I smile broadly. “May your mistakes follow you for the rest of your days.”

I snap my fingers, and the servitor materializes from the shadows behind me. Stalking forward, it pounds its hooves into the ground.

Bianca retreats, at first walking backward and then turning to run.

The last I see of them, Bianca is screeching through the underbrush of the woods with the servitor snorting smoke and fire behind her.

And then there’s no sound at all. Just a rising tranquility with no drama to be seen or heard.

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