Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of 10 · 43-minute read

September, almost a month later

Monday – New Moon in Virgo, Waxing

Men around me cry like babies. Some scream. Not me.

Physical therapy hurts like hell, but I’m determined to make the most of every moment, especially these fucking leg presses. One way or another, I will get back up off my knees, metaphysically and physically. It’s been four weeks since my Third Degree Elevation, and the power boost from the Old Gods has been a huge help.

After six or seven months of my warning my bosses that eventually I’d have to spend some time in physical therapy and that I had not taken time off for sick leave when they were busiest, I reminded them throughout the month of August that I was taking all of September—the least busiest time for my current office—to take care of my knees. By the end of August, particularly after I’d returned from the Grand Coven meeting, my knees had suddenly gotten so bad again that I could barely walk at all. I hadn’t had a choice but to take time off for my own health.

I hate that I seldom take care of my own needs until the situation is dire, but that’s just who I am as a woman, wife, and mom. I’ve been well-trained over forty-two years to put everyone else first, and now I have no alternative. As always, I reach that point where pain forces me to pay attention, but maybe one day I’ll put myself first on a regular basis. I’m making progress. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be in physical therapy now.

An hour before I was to leave work for day one of medical treatment, when tears streamed down my face as I tried to walk from my desk to the mail room, my new supervisor gave me a hard time because the former supervisor had approved my leave, but the new one had not. Worse, every employee in my office had either quit or been reassigned elsewhere, leaving me as the only one to do the job. My consulting workload had risen to 300 percent, with no additional pay or perks and three times the stress. While going through a divorce. Even though they’d known about my planned medical leave for months, they’d done nothing about it. When I announced I was leaving for five weeks of physical therapy, they railed against me for leaving them in a lurch.

Before my… rebirth… I would have cancelled my physical therapy and somehow hobbled to work, even though I was almost to the point of crawling. It took twenty minutes to walk up the steps—sideways—into my building, and that just wasn’t acceptable. Even walking from my desk to the bathroom and back took thirty minutes of little baby steps. I was on my last leg, so to speak, and I both literally and symbolically could not stand anymore.

I’d waved a signed leave slip in front of my new supervisor, reminding him that my leave had been approved many months in advance and he’d known this fact before he accepted the job. He tried to guilt me into staying, but I refused, even though I was a tiny bit worried about how taking care of myself would affect my future pay and promotions. For once in my life, I was starting to take care of myself instead of everyone else, and I’d done it feeling slightly worried but without feeling the least bit guilty. If anything, I felt angry at the attempts to manipulate me.

Not hurt. Not guilty. Angry. And that’s an improvement.

My plan had been to spend the whole month of September writing non-fiction book proposals and witchcraft companion guides for the new career I crave, but I’m well into September, and I still haven’t written a single page. My divorce has become a full-time job just to come up with the necessary paperwork to fight Quent. I don’t know how I could have kept up if I’d been working at the office this month.

Quent has done everything possible to slow-roll the divorce proceedings, thinking that every minute he delays me is another minute he can talk me out of untangling myself from him. The minute my lawyer asked for certain paperwork, Quent became angry and distraught again. I think he’s still surprised that I’m going through with the divorce. Maybe I am, too.

In retaliation, he’s insisted on certain paperwork from me, including every transaction I’ve made for the last three years. He can’t get to my clients at my day job because technically they belong to the company I work for, but he can nose around my side-career as a writer and teacher. He wants names, dates, addresses, lists of people I’ve sold my books and courses to. He wants to interview my editors and publishers from over the years to see if they’re holding back any money from foreign editions. He wants to interview the students who’ve taken my courses to see if they paid me “under the table.” He knows the money isn’t there, but he also knows that the paperwork exercise will burn my time, incur more legal fees, and leave me angry. Plus, who knows what he might do with information on people interested in my witchcraft products? Best case, they’ll avoid doing business with me in the future if they don’t want their privacy invaded. It’s yet another way of manipulating and controlling, and I’m sick of it.

The physical therapy is good for working out my agitation. I slam my legs hard against the weight of the leg press, shoving outward for the last ten times. In less than three weeks, I’ve worked my way up to 140 pounds. Now that my injuries have improved enough that I can move my body more, I’ve also dropped fourteen pounds. My knees are no longer swollen, or at least not as badly.

Cindie, my perky physical therapist, praises me to the high heavens for my progress. I’ve gone from being scared to death of even standing on the treadmill to being able to walk 2.5 mph. I’m still not able to take stairs well, and I can go up them a little easier than I can come down, but I’m working on it. It hurts. Every day hurts. Three sessions a week for an hour-and-a-half each, with ice and electrical stimulation to keep down the swelling.

“I’m worried,” Cindie tells me as I finish the last leg extension. “We’re just not able to drive out all the swelling. I’m still concerned about that. You have too much pain in your knees right now.”

I’m not like the other students she has at the same appointment time. In particular, a college girl stops her exercises the minute Cindie leaves the room, and the girl thinks it’s funny. She doesn’t realize that she’s cheating herself. She refuses to do anything that might hurt, even a little. But me, I take it on eagerly and get a little stronger each time.

Cindie bites her lip. I figure it’s bad news. “I really think you might want to ask your doctor for some anti-inflammatories.”

“Don’t want them,” I say. “I’m not a big fan of pills. The physical therapy is doing me more good than anything else right now.”

“True,” Cindie admits thoughtfully. She’s about my age, dresses mostly in athletic shorts and tank tops, and bares all the long, lean muscles of a track star. “Still, have you asked your doctor? I don’t understand why he didn’t offer them to you.”

“He did. I refused them. I told him I preferred for pain to be my guide so I don’t overdo it, and he said okay, that’s the way it should be.”

“But you’re still in pain. That part’s not improving. Who was your doctor again?”

“Matthews,” I answer.

Her receptionist, Ginger, snorts from across the room. She’s young, maybe mid-twenties, married with a couple of children, and the opposite of Cindie. Ginger always has a frown on her face, even when she’s happy.

“That’s funny,” I tease. “He says such nice things about you guys. He’s the one who recommended your office to me.” Actually, he’d recommended Cindie. Dr. Matthews had never said a word about Ginger. It wasn’t just a matter of convenience, though Dr. Matthews’ clinic is only two doors down from the physical therapy office.

“There he goes now,” Ginger says, nodding toward the plate glass windows behind me.

I turn my head and see the taillights of his Porsche.

“Leaving early as usual.” Ginger grates out her complaint. “And speeding as usual.” She lowers her voice. “Jerk.”

Cindie exaggerates clearing her throat, then goes silent.

“Don’t shush me. You know I can’t stand him.”

I’m dying to ask why not, but something tells me not to.

“Ginger!”

“I said, don’t shush me!” Ginger mouths back something and straightens some files on her desk. She glances at her watch as she does every day at almost five o’clock, which is the time I’m done with my session and about the time they start their closing procedures. “I’d love to see him stay here past five just once.”

“He comes back,” Cindie argues. “He goes to a fast-food place for dinner and to be alone, and then he comes back and works until the wee hours of the morning. He doesn’t have to be here at five to leave when you do.”

Ginger narrows her eyes to squint. “I’ve never seen him here after hours⁠—”

I almost laugh. I doubt Ginger’s ever been in the office after hours. She’s already tidied her desk in preparation for me to leave.

“Cut him some slack,” Cindie says. “Dr. Matthews is having a rough time right now.”

I wait expectantly, hoping for an explanation. I take my time gathering my belongings.

Ginger finally shrugs and turns to me. “He told Cindie last Christmas that he loves chocolate fudge. I made some one day and brought it into the clinic to him and took it down to his office. I was just trying to be sociable.”

Cindie laughs. “You and Royce were separated at the time. You were trying to be more than sociable, and everybody knew it.”

Ginger shrugs again. “Anyway, he wouldn’t eat a bite of it. Not a single bite. Said chocolate makes him hyper and asked me to take it away.”

The thought of it tickles me and I laugh. “Hyper? As bouncy as he is? How would anyone know?”

Cindie laughs with me, but Ginger is still sullen in that spurned lover kind of way that seems to drift around her now. She presses her lips together and squints. She doesn’t aim the hateful look at me. She’d never do that to a patient.

But something clicks in my mind. Ginger made a play for the doctor. While she was separated. And he turned her down.

“What he needs is a keeper,” Ginger persists. She finishes cleaning up her desk area and fumbles with her purse, just waiting for the wall clock’s hand to jump to the twelve. “It’s probably a good thing that things happened like they did with his wife. I’m glad she dumped him. If you ask me, the last thing that man needs is children.”

“Ginger! Stop it. He and his wife went through hell, and it destroyed their marriage, and it almost destroyed him. So a little compassion, please? The man is struggling to find hope for a future.”

I try to wrap my head around what I’ve just heard. Dr. Matthews is no longer married? He’s going through a difficult time, too?

“So, Lauren,” Cindie changes the subject quickly, “are you planning to evacuate?”

“Evacuate? For what?”

“The hurricane. Ivan. It’s supposed to hit here on Wednesday. Within forty-eight hours, they said. I heard somewhere that it’s going to be a Cat 5.”

Ginger snorts again as she pats the top of her purse impatiently. “This is—what?—the third or fourth hurricane within a month? Feels like somebody’s trying to wipe Florida off the map this year.”

Wipe Florida off the map. Oh, Gods.

Not quite a month ago, Mariah had said something about how Dragon manifests things. She hasn’t been able to get through my shields in the past month. Is she trying to bring other things in that can get through my shields? Including a deadly hurricane? She does rituals, according to Mariah. Ones that sometimes ask that her enemies simply have her wrath visited upon them. Sometimes, it’s in the form of thunderstorms. Sometimes fires. Almost always by working with natural phenomena.

“What’s wrong?” Cindie asks. “You just went pale as a sheet.”

I suck in my breath. “I have to go. Now.”

Ten minutes later, I’m in my car and on my way home. Somehow, whether or not he was speeding, I catch up with Dr. Matthews’ car as he exits a gas station. I wave at him, but he doesn’t see me. He seems distracted. There’s a sadness all around him. I can tell it in the way he holds his head. I wish I knew more about what Ginger meant about his wife and children, but that’s a conversation for a later day. Maybe the next time I see him, we can talk more and be a comfort to one another.

We sit at the red light, waiting, our cars side by side. For a second, he looks up, and I think he sees me, but he doesn’t. He looks right past me. A dozen crows light on the traffic light in front of us and on the wires leading to it. He looks up at them and smiles. Then the smile fades, the light changes, and he zooms off ahead of me.

What would he have to be so sad about? I wonder. What happened in his marriage? He’s a good-looking guy, early thirties, pleasant personality, seems to get along with everybody. Ginger being, to my knowledge, the only exception. And, I suppose, his wife.

Ex-wife?

I’d thought he had a couple of kids. At least, I thought so until Ginger and Cindie’s gossip. I’ve heard on several occasions that his wife was pregnant with twins last year, but I don’t know for sure, and I’ve never seen photos in his office. Nor has he ever spoken of his children, which is odd. He’s the kind of man who would revel in his kids, and I’ve seen how good he is with my girls and with other young patients.

A tragedy.

I’ve been so caught up in my own traumas that I failed to notice his, especially with his persistent attempts to be light and friendly around patients with their own miseries. Who would suspect if they didn’t know? The last few times I’ve seen him, he’s seemed so sad, even when he’s been all smiles on the outside. All the times I’ve seen him staring up at crows and smiling, he, too, has been hoping for wonder and finding it wherever he could.

Then again, I suppose, so have I. To the outside world, it would have appeared, for the last few years, that I had everything I could ever want. To the outside world, anyone would wonder what could make a man like Dr. Matthews so unhappy when he, too, seems to have so much. He doesn’t show it, but I suddenly see something in him that startles me. He is alone in the world. For all of his smiles and jokes and light-hearted manner, he is as wounded by life as I am. I have no idea what’s happened to him or to his family. I have a feeling I’ll find out, though, when the time is right.

When I arrive at the house a few minutes later, the sun is low in the sky. Both girls are home from school. I’m glad. They give me the usual hugs, ask about my knees and about my appointment, and tell me what they did during the day, all while I check the weather news to see about this new storm on the horizon.

Sonnet presses her hand against her stomach, precisely against her third chakra, and I know she’s feeling ill as she watches the TV screen. “It’s not coming this way, is it, Mommy?”

My poor kids hate storms. We were trapped several years ago in our car, on an interstate and in the worst storm I’ve ever seen in my life. Sonnet cried and screamed and wet her pants through the whole thing.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” I say, “but it’s a powerhouse. If it comes this way, we’ll drive up to Grandma’s farm.” Assuming Quent won’t have a fit about my taking the girls to a safer place without him.

Sonnet seems to take in my words but then stares off into space. “No, Mommy, it’s coming here. We better leave tonight.”

It feels right, what she’s saying. In my gut, it feels right. She’s gifted, but I fear she’ll shut it down rather than listen to it. Life is scary, and sometimes it’s easier not to know. Ignorance is bliss, and all that.

“It’s that dragon woman, isn’t it? She’s making it come here.”

I suck in a deep breath but don’t answer. I don’t want to lie to my daughter. As the Elders told me, Dragon has a way of manifesting things. We’ve had far too many hurricanes this year crisscrossing the State of Florida as if to X it off the map. We don’t live extremely close to the Gulf, so I’m not really worried about flood damage. But winds? At 160 mph, will the winds leave anything standing?

I need a new roof, but we can’t afford it right now. Quent hasn’t paid child support for either August or September. I’ve spent every penny of my after-tax salary to pay bills Quent didn’t pay over the summer. Not to mention buying the kids clothes for school and property tax and car insurance. Expenses are mounting up, and all my assets have been frozen except for my salary. I’ve already had to borrow grocery money from Jan. Meanwhile, Quent lives in the nicest furnished apartment in town, and his mommy cooks for him twice a day. All our so-called friends in town look at me like I’m a terrible person for leaving him while they call to check in on him and invite him out for dinner to cheer him up. Or so the kids tell me. All I hear from our friends and neighbors is their disapproval.

I sigh. We can’t possibly have another hurricane right now. My schedule simply won’t allow another crisis, and I’m far too stressed to even think about it.

“Mommy,” Sonnet asks, “isn’t there anything else we can do to keep that dragon woman from bothering us and sending the storm to get us?”

Anything else we can do? Aw, sheesh, little one.

Sonnet, of course, does not know how much I have been doing. Keeping my shields up. Feeling nightly for Dragon’s pings against my force field. People who don’t believe in psychic attacks have never had that kind of crap to deal with. They’ve certainly never felt the silent writhing of energy in the Ether like maggots. It’s easy to say it doesn’t exist when it hasn’t been in your frame of reference. Though I didn’t not believe in it, I didn’t really appreciate it until I upset Dragon. She’s settled down in the past few days, at least. But now I know why—she’s manifesting storms.

I’ve known for the past month, since the time someone—Tyler—sent me that package about Dragon’s underhanded dealings. She’s terrified of a federal tax audit, and she’s already in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. I’ve visited the IRS website to download their forms on penalties of tax fraud. I made copies and posted them strategically around the house near the entrances and thresholds. If Dragon wanted to astral in, she’d see those and know that I know her secret. It must have worked. Within a few hours of posting those photocopies around the house, the pinging had stopped, and I felt her recede. Donna and the Elders had gotten a kick out of my tactics. But now, if Dragon is indeed manifesting storms, she is fighting back with something bigger than the IRS—Mother Nature.

“Rhiannon,” I say, turning to my other daughter who is busily flipping through TV channels in search of other news on the hurricane, “go to my altar supply trunk and get some things for me, please. A very small black candle, a very small red candle, and a very small white candle. Bring them to the kitchen.”

While she’s gone, I bend down to the floor, knees popping all the way down, and stand on my knees in front of Sonnet. “Sweetheart, I want you to listen. I’m going to give you a shielding technique, okay?”

“Will it work around Daddy?”

I laugh unintentionally. “Yeah, it will work around anybody. Daddy, Dragon, anyone.”

“Great. What do I do?”

“Okay, I want you to think of a flower. You love roses, right?” She nods. “All right, I want you to think of the biggest, most beautiful crimson red rose you can imagine. Got it?”

She closes her eyes. “Got it.”

“Okay, well, that great big, beautiful rose? That’s you, sweetheart. That’s everything about you that makes you you. Everything that makes you special and beautiful. Okay?”

She nods.

“Now I want you to imagine that rose blossom folding up into a really tight rosebud. Can you see that as it folds up really, really, really tight?”

She nods again and scrunches up her eyes as she does.

“Now, is that rosebud still the same thing as that flower?”

Sonnet nods.

“It still has all that beauty and all that specialness in it, right, that the open rose blossom had?”

She nods again.

“Except that now it’s held in really close and tight. You know all that specialness is still there. It just can’t be seen or touched by anyone else while it’s closed up, right?”

“Right.”

“Sonnet, whenever you’re around someone who makes you feel upset and tense, I want you to imagine that great big rose blossom of yours closing up into a really tight bud. You’re still just as special on the inside and just as beautiful as always, but you’re holding that in very close where that person cannot touch. Got it?”

She shakes her head yes, grins, and opens her eyes, blinking. “Got it, Mommy!”

I pat her head and tell her to go grab her favorite pillow so she can sleep in the car. I barely take a breath before I, careful of the missing deck at the back door, dash outside to pick up any loose objects in the yard. In the past, I’ve seen toys, bikes, grills, and swing sets blown against the back porch. At least this year, we don’t have a neighborhood construction site full of tin. I race to shove lawn chairs into the nearest shed and then zip back to my kitchen on creaky knees. I’m speeding against the dark, and I know I’ll be driving all night.

“Will these do?” Rhiannon asks as she returns with three candles.

They’re exactly what I wanted. Just the right size—about as big around as my middle finger and just a bit longer. Being a working mom who’s unable to sit at home by a candle for hours on end, I prefer the small candles because I like for my spell candles to, well, burn out during the course of a spell.

I send Sonnet after a baking pan, and she brings back her favorite cookie sheet for making her chocolate chip specialties. I place it on the countertop, safely away from any papers or other fire hazards. I dress the three candles with dragon’s blood, which is one of my favorite oils. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Lady Dragon or Dragon Hart. It’s a power booster for my spells and has that rich aromatic texture you’d find at a Roman Catholic altar loaded with myrrh and frankincense.

With a lighter, I melt a little wax on the bottom of each candle and stand them straight up on the cookie sheet from left to right: black, red, white.

“What’s the spell for?” Rhiannon asks as I pick up a box of sea salt.

“Transmutation. We’re going to transmute some energy. A very cool witch named Dorothy Morrison mentioned it in a workshop of hers that I attended.” I smile at the memory. Dorothy and a popular Neo-Wiccan author, Slither Serpent, had co-hosted a seminar at a little pagan shop that was a good three hours’ drive away. Dorothy had been well worth the drive and the sneering from Quent when I’d insisted on going and going alone. Lord Slither, on the other hand, had seemed a little too interested in a girl sporting a Kali tattoo.

“Who’s Dorothy Morrison?” Sonnet pipes up.

“She’s written a lot of books about witchcraft and magick, and she’s fascinating to listen to. Anyway, I’ve modified the basic spell to suit my own needs, so this is only a small part of it, but once you know how the whole thing works, you can take any part of what she teaches and tailor it to your own needs.” Like most teachings I’d encountered. “For example, I don’t remember what color candles she recommended, but because these three colors are important to Dragon—and she’s the one interfering and sending negative energy—I have a directly symbolic reason for using them.”

“But what’s it for?” Sonnet joins me at my elbow and echoes Rhiannon’s interest. “What’s transmogrification?”

I laugh. Her sister’s been reading old comic books to her at her Dad’s. “Transmutation. It’s a spell to shift energy from one form to another, and it can be used for any purpose. Here, my intent is…”

Both girls look over my shoulder as I write the words on a piece of paper:

TO SHIELD ME AND MINE FROM THE STORM

“What’s the salt for?” Sonnet asks.

I pour a thick trail of sea salt from the black candle on the left to the red candle in the middle. “Negative energy is being directed our way,” I explain. “Although energy really isn’t negative itself. Energy is just energy. However, there’s an intent that’s been associated with this, and that intent is negative.”

I don’t have to explain whose intent it is. The girls know.

“As the three candles burn, the negative energy will move from the black candle where it comes in and follow the trail of salt to the red candle. The red candle will transmute the negative intent of the energy.” I pour a second trail of sea salt from the red candle to the white candle. “As it’s transmuted, the energy will flow from the red candle to the white candle, making that energy pure again.”

I pour a third trail, winding from the white candle, all around the cookie sheet, to a space in the far corner where I’ve placed the paper with my goal on it. “Then the energy that is now pure follows my trail of salt all the way to my goal to help make my intended goal possible, to help it manifest.”

Rhiannon laughs. “So any of the negative stuff that Lady Dragon sends to you⁠—”

I nod and finish her sentence. “—Is turned positive and helps to fuel my spell for extra protection.”

“Cool!” both girls exclaim together as I light the black candle. Then I light the red and finally the white.

The three candles burn quickly. I’d expected to wait an hour, but they’re done in less than ten minutes. They’ve never burned so fast and hard.

As the candles burn, I send the girls to pack a suitcase so we can stay with my parents on the farm in Georgia for a few days while we wait out the results of the hurricane. It’s a day’s drive away, but I don’t want to repeat the catastrophic events the morning Hurricane Opal had hit, and we’d been stuck on a four-lane highway with every lane headed north and nothing moving because we’d left too late… because Quent had to visit his mommy before we fled for our lives. My instincts told me that Ivan was coming straight for us, a repeat of Opal. Hurricane Opal, coming in as a Category 5 and dropping back to a Cat 3 just before it made landfall, had still managed to wipe out a huge number of homes on the Gulf Coast, right down to the slabs—and less.

The girls pack quickly. Before they can put their suitcases and way too many stuffed animals into the Mercedes—which is too small for anything anyway—Sonnet reports back to the kitchen. I’m busily unplugging the hard drive to my computer so that at least if we lose everything else, all my books, courses, and financial information are saved and I can access them easily as long as I have electricity. I can’t count on my connectivity at my mom’s, and her technology is extremely basic.

“There’s a message on the house phone, Mommy. It’s from Miss Donna. I think you need to go listen to it. Right now.” Sonnet’s voice cracks. She’s heard something that has her alarmed.

“Here,” I say, handing her one of the photograph albums of her and her sister when they were babies. “Put this in the car’s trunk for me, okay?” I pat her head and kiss her forehead as if nothing’s wrong and send her on her way.

I punch in the code for voice mail and wait. My stomach’s knotting up again. If I didn’t have my Third Degree Elevation, I’m not sure how bad it would be.

“Hey.” Donna’s voice is strained. “Look, I’ve been talking to Barbara and Mariah and Jenna and some others and, well, we think you should evacuate. I don’t have time to explain right now. We’re… I’m on my way to Barbara’s. I’m driving all the way over there. Tonight. So we can do a ritual, just for you. You’d said you welcomed any help with shielding from Dragon, so we’re going to gather and send you a little extra energy. I still have your cord where we took your measure at Initiation, so we’ll use that to send you some extra power. I swore when you went through your Elevation that I’d never let anyone come between us, but what Dragon’s doing now… I don’t know.” She laughs without amusement. “We may have to drop her in molasses and freeze her. Anyway, I still have some contacts left inside Dragon Hart. I heard from them today, and I don’t like what I heard.”

She could have been talking about Leo, but I doubt it. Even though he’s clairvoyant and must certainly have seen things about her, he still adores his M’Lady Dragon and would do nothing against her as long as he’s still in the Grand Coven. But Tyler, his partner? Tyler is likely the one feeding Donna information, even though Donna has never mentioned his name and she’s not one to keep that many secrets.

“Dragon’s made some big changes in the past month,” the voicemail continues. “Raven, you need to know that. She’s cinched up the Grand Coven. Demanding utter loyalty. She’s also announced that she took back your Third Degree. Revoked your status. I know, I know. She’s always said that whatever the Old Gods bestow, a mere mortal cannot take away, but she’s damned sure decided to try. Oh, I know she hasn’t taken it back, but she’s saying she has. She’s saying she took it back from you because you were intentionally deceptive, and you lack integrity. Like Belinda.”

What? My jaws clench. I can’t help it. Integrity’s one of my hot buttons. I hadn’t known for certain I’d be leaving Dragon Hart until I saw Dragon’s abusive nature for what it was.

“Anyway,” the recording continues, “she sent out a message, and I’m sure she thinks it’s going to get back to you, and I guess I’m the one letting it get back to you, but the message is, you need to remember that in the old days, when a witch betrayed her coven, she was put to death. I’m not saying that to scare you, but she is saying it to scare you. She is doing some things that, if I were you, I’d be a little nervous about. You need to pump up your shields as much as you can and be—” The message cuts off.

Donna’s voice resumes in the next phone message. “Anyway, Raven, you need to use every trick in the book because, trust me, she’s going to. Now, you’ll be fine. Mariah’s boyfriend, Payne, is a talented psychic himself, and he says you’re going to be okay, but I don’t think you want to be in your house when Hurricane Ivan hits. Okay? You don’t need to be hanging out in the living room and playing board games, he said. Call me when you get to your parents’ farm. I know that’s always your backup plan for whenever the shit hits the fan. If you can’t reach me, leave a message on my machine so I’ll know you’re safe. Okay? Love you!”

Damn it! I pound the wall with my fist. Sonnet, walking into the room, sees the impact of my hand against the plaster and stops cold in her tracks.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. Just keep putting things in the car and… do it faster. Okay?”

Damn it! Why is Dragon doing this?

She is one of the most powerful witches in the country, and yet she’s focusing all her time and effort on me? Why? Because of ego? Because she’s pissed that I left her group? I would have loved to have stayed in the Grand Coven, but I couldn’t. There was something that made it wrong for me to do, something that made it impossible to do whatever this great mission is I’m supposed to do. I had to leave. I don’t fully understand it yet, but I do know that I couldn’t stay.

And I resent that she’s wasting her time and energy on me.

And I resent I didn’t have time to really enjoy getting my Third Degree and bask in its afterglow because I’ve spent so much time having to shield.

And I pity her.

And I’m angry.

But most of all—most of all—I see all the wonderful things that she could be doing with all the energy and the power that she does have, and she’s wasting it over nothing!

What is wrong with all these “big” witches that they get caught up in all their petty little witch wars all the time and stuck in all their ego? It’s not about them. It’s about getting the word out about the Old Gods and about service and about helping other people with our magick.

How will non-witches ever take us seriously if we can’t get our act together? What right do we have to call ourselves good if we’re constantly trying to hurt each other?

And damn it, I resent the time that I’m spending shielding. There is so much other work I could be doing with that energy right now and so many better places to put my energy other than keeping Dragon’s nightmares away from my children.

And she has the audacity to question my integrity? Sheesh. What else can possibly go wrong?

“Mommy?” Rhiannon gestures at me to get my attention, but she’s clearly nervous. “Um, Mommy? Daddy’s at the front door.”

Argh! Good grief. I roll my eyes. All I have to do is ask what else can go wrong, and he appears. Speak of the devil.

“Fabulous,” I mutter through grated teeth.

“Something wrong?”

I startle. I’m not expecting Quent to be standing there, a few feet behind me. In my house. Why does he have to do that, just walk right in like that? Oh, yeah. Control.

I am this close to losing my shit.

I spin to face him. “I’ve decided to evacuate. It looks like Ivan’s going to be a Cat 5 when it hits here.”

He glares at me. “Might be nice to know where my daughters are. When were you going to tell me this?”

“Oh, about five minutes after I decided,” I pop back at him. “I guess that means you’re going to have to wait about three more minutes.”

He looks surprised at my tone, but then he’s never heard me talk back to him before. My patience is exceedingly thin.

“Oh,” he says at last. “You just decided. All right.”

I know he won’t fight me to take charge of the girls. Not this time. It’s too much work on his part.

“I thought I’d come over and help you prepare for the hurricane. Batten down the hatches and what-not.”

Hmmm, I think, that would be a first since I’m always that one who battens down the hatches for big storms. He’s never in all the years we lived here together put plywood over the windows or taped a single glass pane or closed even one curtain. The most he’s ever done has been to⁠—

“I’ll take care of getting the lawn furniture into the shed,” he offers.

“I’ve already handled that. Most of it, anyway. There are a couple of pieces left. A patio table and two chairs. While the girls were packing, I was already out there putting away anything that might turn into a missile. I left those items only because I saw a wasp on the table.” I’ve cleaned everything off the table—candles, spare firewood, everything except for a pre-packaged fire log with half the paper torn off. “I’ll get the wasp spray⁠—”

Quent waves a dismissive hand as I mention the wasp again. “I’ll take care of it,” he says.

“The wasps,” I try to warn him, but before I can say anything further, he shrugs away from me.

“Poor little wasps never hurt anybody.”

There he goes again! Nothing I say has any validity with him. Not that I haven’t heard this before, but all the anger that everyone warned me would come… has come. I can tell him something a hundred times and be dismissed a hundred times, but let his mother or his siblings or some stranger at his job tell him the same thing, and it’s suddenly gospel.

As he stands in front of me, Quent doesn’t look so familiar to me anymore. There’s something about him that is a stranger to me now. It’s odd, this feeling, like I never really knew him.

Only now do I understand that I never knew him at all. There’s darkness and negativity all around him. It comes off of him in waves. Yes, this is why he was so insistent regarding not moving out of the house. He knew that once I was away from his energy for a while, his control over me would fade. His presence has been like a wet blanket over my fire. The best I could do has been to smolder and steam and suffocate, but now the blanket has been jerked away, and I am just beginning to flame.

It’s like having had my arm submerged in freezing water until numbed to the pain, then withdrawing my arm from the iciness and the feeling rushing back. I am no longer numb. I feel everything I’ve tamped down for decades.

A part of me still wonders why I had to go through all of that with him and why I’m still going through this now, all these changes so abruptly, so fast. There’s a little voice inside my head now—a knowing—that tells me that it had to be this way, that these changes had to come this fast, because there’s something very important for me to do in this world. I can’t take my time to change into the person I need to be to do what I need to do. It has to be fast. That may be hard, and it may be abrupt, but there’s no other way it can be. It’s like that Tower Card, the catastrophe that shakes me to my foundation, and yet in the long run, it puts me in a much better place.

Quent pauses at the kitchen table to flip through the day’s mail that the girls have left scattered across the surface. There’s nothing there for him except for bills, and he leaves those. He pauses at the daily newspaper, flips it open across the table and begins to read the front page. He reads several headlines aloud, announcements about the impending storm, and then rifles through the paper.

“Oh, look,” he mimics. “There’s an ad for Dr. Matthews.” He folds the paper over so that the ad is showing and leaves it on the table.

I glance over his shoulder. I haven’t had time to read the newspaper, and I won’t unless I remember to take it with me on our evacuation. Dr. Matthews’ clinic is advertising his services with a huge, goofy-looking picture of him—one that looks nothing like him—in a suit. He looks uncomfortable, unnatural. If he weren’t wearing a tie and if the shirt had been unbuttoned at the top and his hair a bit mussed, it would have resembled the physician who always meets my girls with a bright smile and funny story and a meaningful glint in his eye to reassure their mom. But there is a part of Dr. Matthews that isn’t what it appears and more depth than in his smile.

Beneath the black and white professional portrait are words in big block letters:

JESSE MATTHEWS, MD

NOW ACCEPTING

NEW PATIENTS

“I forgot to tell you,” Quent says. “I had an appointment with Dr. Matthews last week.”

“Really?” I try to keep my tone even. I don’t want to give away that Dr. Matthews accidentally spilled the beans that Quent cancelled his appointment and that Quent hasn’t seen our mutual physician in quite some time.

“Yeah, uh, remember that physical I had scheduled a couple of months ago? Yeah, Dr. Matthews finally got the results back, and so I stopped in to see him, and I’m fine. I’m just perfect. All my former medical problems have gone away, and I’ve improved since then. He says my diet is perfect, and I need to keep doing what I’m doing and keep playing sports about twenty hours a week because it’s an ideal exercise. He says I shouldn’t change a thing, and it’s too bad more people don’t have as healthy a lifestyle as I do.”

“Really. That’s… great, Quent. That’s really great.”

I’m not even trying anymore.

He laughs. “Yeah. He did try to offer me some samples for erectile dysfunction.” Quent tosses the folded paper back onto the table with Dr. Matthews’ face staring back at me from grainy black and white. “Yeah, but I told him I didn’t need it.” Quent laughs nervously. “I didn’t tell him, of course, that you and I weren’t sleeping together anymore.”

You didn’t tell him anything, I think. And if you had, it would have been lies.

Both girls show up at my elbows. They stand on either side of me like little bodyguards.

“What do you want us to do now, Mommy?” Rhiannon asks.

“Go outside and take down the hummingbird feeders and anything else that might turn into flying missiles in a hurricane-force wind.” I’d forgotten about the bird feeders. Lightweight, sure, but still potentially dangerous and likely to be located later a half mile away.

“Yes,” Quent adds with his usual self-importance, “and Daddy’s going to go outside and take care of all the heavy furniture for you guys.” He says it in a sing-songy voice, and I know the girls are rolling their eyes even though I can’t see them where they stand.

“Quent, you really didn’t have to come over to help. I can take care of everything on my own. What I can’t do on my own, the girls can help me with.”

I’m positive he hasn’t thought about my knee problems and how it really is extremely difficult for me to climb up on a ladder to get hanging baskets of flowers down from their hooks. Or to get up and down from the back door to the ground because the back deck had to be replaced and having the rotten wood and steps hauled away is as far as I’ve gotten with the repairman, and it’s a long and very painful step down.

He shrugs. “I’m just protecting my investment. Before our divorce is final—if you insist on going through with the divorce—this house is still half mine.”

Yes. Accountant that he is, he always speaks of assets and liabilities. My income is an asset to him, but my self-professed witchcraft, as far as he’s concerned, is a liability.

“Besides,” he adds, “maybe this hurricane will blow away your roof.”

“What?” I stare at him. He isn’t kidding.

“Yeah. Then you can finally get it replaced.”

I grind my teeth. Yes, I do need a new roof. Just as with the deck, we’ve needed a new roof for years, but Quent refused to spend any money on it. However, since moving out of the house, he’s been pestering me that if I go through with the divorce, I need to get the roof replaced because that will increase the value of the house. What he hasn’t failed to mention is that he expects me to pay for a new roof myself since I’m the one living here—which will run me well tens of thousands of dollars and will increase the value of the house, according to our real estate agent, by that much. Except that I’d have to pay him half of that amount since it would be the value of the increase in the house. So, I’d be out even more money if I put a new roof on the house before the divorce is final. Once again, he is finagling numbers, and I’d be on the short end of that financial stick.

Quent edges out the back door, making a snide remark about the lack of back steps. He hops to the ground while I give the girls further instructions. Sonnet is to go throughout the entire house and place the protection rune, algiz, on each of the windows with a marker that will easily wipe off later. Rhiannon is to take a piece of paper that shows the seal of an angel that protects against the winds and storms and recreate it as a chalk drawing on the driveway. Her dad will think she’s playing and won’t know what it is. The windows in the house are already taped up, though if the winds are raging at 160 mph, there’s not much an X of tape can do except keep the glass from shattering and scattering when it pops out. Later, when Quent’s gone, I’ll take care of the extra shielding while I have the girls close the blinds on all the windows in the house.

I follow Quentin outside, gasping as my knee clicks from the strain of navigating the threshold. “Be careful,” I tell him, “of wasps.” He’s been moved out for almost six weeks, and I’ve noticed several new nests around the premises that have been built since his absence began. I’ve been too busy with divorce paperwork, particularly the minutia Quent wanted me to recite back to him, to knock down the infestations. “There’s a new nest near⁠—”

“I know what I’m doing!” he yells back in a sudden angry burst as I unhook a birdfeeder to move it into the shed. His light switch from charming to angry flips that quickly but never fails to catch me off guard. “You don’t give me credit for anything!” He stomps over to the lawn furniture, grabs both chairs, and hauls them around to the shed.

Both girls are once again at my elbows. They’ve heard his outburst, and they’re feeling protective of me. Again.

“Sonnet will do the windows after Daddy leaves,” Rhiannon tells me. “And I’ll do the driveway after he leaves. We should be out here with you right now. We… we don’t want you to be alone.”

My eyes sting. My babies are protecting me once again. In some ways, I am still very fragile, and they know this.

Quent stomps back around to the lawn furniture. As lightly as the girls and I tend to tread in the grass, it’s amazing to me that he can make so much noise. We can feel the earth shuddering under his footfalls even though he’s a good fifty feet away and on the other side of the yard.

I look up just in time to see him reach for the fire log on top of the patio table where I’d spotted the wasp. Before his hand even touches the log, a brown tornado rises from the table like some demon that’s been summoned. I frown and wrap my arms around the girls to keep them still and close. I’ve never seen anything like this. Then Quent spins and runs screaming across the yard!

Oh. Okay. It’s not a brown tornado. Wasps. Wasps everywhere!

He manages to evade them without getting stung, and to his credit, he doesn’t lead them to us. I guess all those hours running up and down the basketball court and frisbee field have been good for something!

He goes back into the house, finds the hornet spray, and then comes out and soaks both the patio table and the fire log from twelve or fifteen feet away. “I’ll, uh, come back tomorrow or… or before the hurricane and, uh, I’ll, uh, move that table,” he says. “It can stay there for now.” He’s so unnerved he can barely talk, but he leaves. Thank the Gods. He leaves.

Once he’s gone, the girls and I creep near the table. Not so close as to get stung or to step on a writhing wasp in the grass, but just close enough to see what Quent found—or had found him. Just on the inside of the wrapper around the fire log is a wasp nest bigger than both my outstretched hands. In the growing dimness of approaching night, hundreds of dead wasps litter the table.

“Oooh, Mommy,” Sonnet says in a trembling voice, “I’m glad you saw that wasp earlier.”

“I don’t believe this.” Rhiannon shakes her head. “Mommy, we’ve used that table all summer. Especially since Daddy left, and we started doing little cookouts out here. We were out here last night, all around that table. I was talking to Christabel on the phone, and I sat the phone down on that log when I went to get a Vanilla Coke. And one time last night, I actually sat right there—” she points to a spot beneath a few dozen wasps—“and I sat right there on the table while I was talking to her and…”

“I know. I know, Rhiannon. We’ve all been all over that table in the past few weeks, and those wasps haven’t bothered us a bit.” I feel weak in my knees at the thought of what might have happened, especially since Rhiannon is deathly allergic. Had the wasps been there all along? Were they part of my protective shields to protect the property from outsiders? Is it possible that I had manifested them?

While the girls draw algiz protection runes on the windowpanes in erasable purple ink and decorate the driveway with the angelic seal, I unhook my braided cords from their place in the foyer where the Main Altar sits. I wrap them around me. I’m already thinking ahead to the ritual work I’ll be doing in a few minutes. I take a small glass urn from a shelf in the kitchen in the area I call my “witch’s cupboard.” It’s filled with bright-colored bottles of herbs, oils, and incense for specific magickal needs. I’m careful not to open the urn until I’m in the front yard, barefoot in the grass. I start at the northern corner of the property, taking out a little pinch of the powder at a time and careful not to breathe it in. I scatter it along the perimeter of my property. It’s a Pow-Wow tool that Beverly, one of the Elders, told me about. I’ve mixed equal parts black pepper, white pepper, and red pepper, all consecrated, empowered, blessed for protection and in the primary colors used in Pow-Wow magick, a little secret known by many in Pennsylvania Dutch country.

I sprinkle the Pow-Wow peppers around the border of my property. I also visualize dragon-dogs standing guard at each corner. Dragon-dogs are a thought-form suggested to me by author Edain McCoy at one of her workshops a few years ago, and they’re fiercer than anything conceived in a Harry Potter movie that the girls love so much. Each thought-form has several heads, looking in all directions, standing guard, keeping out intruders. Especially Dragon.

The girls are back in the house and filling the bathtubs so we’ll have water in case of a disaster and then calling their friends so they’ll know we’re leaving in a few minutes. I leave a voice mail for Jan. I’ll call again as soon as I get to the farm tonight, though it will probably be after midnight. I’m sure she and Steve will be working into the evening to secure their home and help their neighbors.

It’s almost dark outside at this moment. We’re running out of time.

I stand before my outdoor altar and face the North as I cast a circle. I cast it around my entire property like a dome over some futuristic city. Instead of calling upon totem animals, Watchtowers, or angels to stand at the corners, I call upon my Sacred Dead: Granddaddy in the East; my old friend Jim in the South; in the West, my grandmother; and in the North, Jan’s mother, who passed a few years ago. Although it is hot and humid in mid-September, I feel the coolness of their energy all around me. The Dead always feel so cold. It’s the absence of energy most people call “Life.”

I call upon the angels in charge of the winds and waters and in charge of protecting against storms and natural disasters, upon all the spirits of this place, and upon the Dark Mother to watch over me and mine, to keep us safe, to keep this place I call home safe. When I’m done, I leave the circle cast.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Sonnet runs out of the house and flings her arms around my waist. Her hair is damp at the forehead from all her hard work. “I was just watching weather news. They’re saying now it’s definitely gonna be a Cat 5, and it’s coming right in here toward us. They’re saying that the landfall is going to be five miles from us.” Her voice shakes. “Is it going to get us if we go to Grandma’s, too?”

“No, sweetie,” I tell her. “It’s not going to get us. Now get your sister and the two of you get in the car. We leave in five minutes.”

They take their last-minute bathroom breaks while I do one more walk-through of the house and pull the switches at the breaker box to prevent a fire in case of excessive damage. I then walk quickly to every large pine and oak in the front and back yards and place my hand on the trunk of each with a command: “Hold!” I give the command a last time to the largest pine, the one directly in front of the house, the one my dad backed into on his sole trip to our house ten years ago. I’m more worried about it than any other because if it falls, it will bisect the house, right through the living room where the girls and I occasionally play board games or work together on puzzles of European castles. If the monster pine falls, it must cross the angelic seal Rhiannon has drawn in bright shades of chalk on the driveway and several secondary symbols, representing the house as being guarded by a Third Degree witch and that any who interfere or intrude will be beaten.

Something here will be sacrificed. I know it. I just don’t know what yet or how much. But there’s a sense of sacrifice needed to preserve the balance of what we won’t lose.

Once the girls are in the car with my keys and purse, photo albums, a hard drive I’ve failed to back up adequately, and anything that can’t be replaced, I walk back to the threshold of the house and, inside, pause at my Main Altar. The mirror wards are still there, set against Dragon and her cronies. Notices of IRS fraud fines and punishments are still tacked up as a reminder to Dragon if she should astral in. If Quent noticed them, he didn’t say anything. Fresh-cut roses from my garden, a gift to The Morrigan, are on my altar as well. The hurricane winds will beat them into the ground if they remain in my garden, so I’ve filled vases of them.

I close my eyes for a moment, holding out my palms on either side, and feel the energies passing through me. My hands tingle and vibrate. I’m scared. I can’t let the girls know, but I really am scared. My life has been so turned upside down and now that I’m striking out on my own, the last thing I need is to find my house destroyed when I return.

I don’t mind starting over. I’ve wanted to start over. But I really don’t want to have to start from scratch. I need a little peace in my life right now. And I know it’s coming, eventually. A prophecy of peace is one of the few things I remember of Lady Zephyr’s reading after my Dragon Hart Initiation. The sooner peace comes, the better. A little less worry, a little less stress. I open my eyes and cast one last look over my shoulder at my altar as I put my hand on the door to leave.

“Spirits of this place,” I call out as loudly as I can, “watch over this place while I’m gone. Keep it protected. Let there be no damage, and if there must be damage, only slight.” I pause and smile, then walk out with a sense that I’m leaving both Granddaddy and my spirit guides behind.

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