Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of 48 · 9-minute read

Lauren’s Natal Mars Conjunct Christabel’s Natal Moon in Synastry

“Ma’am. Ma’am. Ma’am?”

A young police officer grabs my elbow and hauls me backward. My foot catches on the hem of my skirt as it sags from the moisture accumulated from all the grass I’ve walked through. I stumble as I try to pull away.

“Ma’am!”

I stop struggling and frown back at him. I’m used to people knowing who I am in the community and respecting me for it. I’ve done my share of volunteer work, not for any sort of recognition, but people know me. I’m not accustomed to being told to control myself. This kid is Rhiannon’s age, probably fresh out of college and new to town, and too young to know me. He judges me only as a crazy woman at a crime scene and not as a pillar of the community.

I take a deep breath and try to see myself through his eyes. Of course, he had to step in. From his point of view, I was a frazzled, insane woman trying to run into the midst of a half-dozen police cars and twice as many officers with guns drawn, all aimed at the old farmhouse at the edge of the woods. It didn’t help that I kept screaming Christabel’s name at the top of my lungs.

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to calm down, all right?” He raises his eyebrows and nods, just slightly nonconfrontational.

I take a deep breath and nod back.

“Is she okay? Have you gotten her out?” I sidestep to look past him.

“Ma’am, you need to stay back here. We have an active shooter situation.”

“But Christabel⁠—”

“Who is Christabel? Does she live here?”

I nod so hard that my hair flops into my eyes. “My daughter’s friend. And she works with—I mean, used to work with—with me.” Before I shut down the healing center. “She’s… she’s been living here with her uncle since her mom died a few years back.”

Two gunshots split the air, echoing off the side of the barn.

The man in uniform in front of me, silhouetted against the strobe of red and blue lights, clasps my upper arms to hold me in place. He doesn’t have to be as psychic as I am to know how badly I want to bolt. Other people may run away from the sound of gunfire, but I’ve always run toward it, toward any emergency to try to help, to try to stop whatever bad may happen. In my vision, I saw Christabel’s uncle shoot twice into the ceiling before he fired at her. The officer must recognize the panic surging through me because he is already shaking his head and murmuring.

“Don’t do it, ma’am. You’ve just confirmed that we may have a hostage situation here. Don’t get your friend killed. Anything helpful you can tell us about the people inside?”

Can I?

I’ve never actually been inside the house. Her uncle doesn’t allow her friends to visit. I try to remember all the things Christabel told me about her uncle, both the good and the bad. How he took her in when she was orphaned, even though an extra mouth to feed meant he couldn’t retire as early as he had planned from a job he’d hated as long as he could remember.

“He doesn’t hold his liquor well.” It’s all I can think of. “Say, who called it in?”

I try to visualize the inside of the house, but I can’t. I reach out with my empathic and psychic skills and try to see where Christabel is, but all I feel around her is a sense of… trees?

I squint into the woods on either side of the farmhouse. In my vision I saw her down a long, dark hall with a light coming through a… a door… at one end. I gasp. “The barn! He’s not in the house. He’s in the barn.”

The officer presses his jaw into the shoulder radio and relays the message to his team.

Something hot runs down the inside of my leg. Wet. I glance down to see the red at my ankles. The pain pill I took before my nap is doing its job, but I’ve overdone it. Regardless of what I promised Sondra about taking it easy and staying off my feet, I’d not given my surgery a single thought when I’d run off to save Christabel.

The officer points at my sandaled feet. “You’ve hurt yourself. Did you walk?”

I nod, but my attention is on the edge of the tree line. Something dark moves there. I sense it more than see it.

“Who called it in? How did you know there was an active shooter?”

“Ma’am, that’s police business. I really can’t say.”

He doesn’t have to. I can see it in a cloud over his head as clearly as if I had stood next to him to witness it. A 911 call. A young woman’s voice asking that they come quickly, sputtering an address, whispering that he’s got a gun. But did Christabel get out in time? I can’t see it in the thought cloud above him because he doesn’t know.

I brush my thumb over the redial button, but my phone dies immediately. Weird. I had a full charge when I left my house.

I tap the officer and point at the tree line. “Over there. Someone is in the brush.”

He aims his high-beam flashlight in that direction and shakes his head. “I don’t see anything.”

But I do. A pair of eyes shining back at me. A disembodied laugh.

A shiver snakes down my spine like the opposite of a kundalini rising. I can feel it strongly now, the thing that’s been following me. The sickening churn in the pit of my stomach. The darkness. Jealousy. Hatred. Something supernatural. Not human. But not angelic or demonic either. Something else.

Enough! I have worked too hard all my life and especially over the last six years to get away from abuse. I left an emotionally and physically abusive father at a young age to marry a charismatic but verbally abusive husband. I left him to start over on my own, before I ever fell in love with Jesse. I left the leader of the Dragon Hart Grand Coven because she was as controlling as my previous abusers and her tongue just as acidic. Ironically, all the people who had been so supportive of my leaving my control freak of a husband turned out to be equally control freaks themselves. I left the Grand Coven to form a new coven with the Elders who had been in a witch war with our former High Priestess, and damn it, if they, too, weren’t just as controlling!

They all liked my growing supernatural gifts as well as my vision for a network of healing centers, but it was all fascination and no follow-through. It’s like how people fall in love with someone new because they’re different, and then once they’ve snagged their love interest, all they want to do is make them into something ordinary and familiar. All those who helped me escape Quent and our bad marriage thought I owed it to them to no longer exist in Quent’s image but in theirs. I broke away from all of them, though. Even Jan, for a while.

Whatever drama is brewing among the witch community yet again, I want none of it. Who’s sending this dark messenger to stalk me now? Which one of the so-called “Big Witches” of my past?

I’ve encountered this kind of magick before. Not exactly the same, but close enough. I don’t know anyone else who uses this particular type of magick and has a grudge against me except for Lady Dragon, the leader of the Grand Coven. She once sent a dragon avatar to haunt not only my dreams but my children’s. Normally, she used it for positive reasons, such as checking in on her flock, but if you crossed her, her way of using astral projection and avatars could be vicious.

Gritting my teeth, I shake my head. I am not letting her get away with this again. This fight between us was over six years ago, and if for whatever reason she’s decided to resurrect it, I’m not going to let it happen.

Noise and words blasts on the officer’s radio. “You stay here, ma’am,” he shouts over his shoulder as he strides away.

I frown at the edge of the woods. Eyes gleam back. An aura of light, mostly red, outlines the watcher. I ball my hands into fists. Leading with my shoulders, I march toward the woods. I’m not the shy, middle-aged woman I was six or more years ago, the one who could never stand up for herself. Every day, my skills have grown, and so has my belief in myself. I’m not done with improving my magickal abilities or becoming the epitome of whom I’m meant to be, but daily I gain more confidence in my ability to manifest, even if I have had a run of bad manifestations lately. I’m not going to put up with abuse from anyone anymore, or let Lady Dragon intimidate me with her parlor tricks. No, I’m going to⁠—

Unbidden, an old memory bubbles up. Something I haven’t thought of in years. I am seven years old, and I am pausing at the very top of what all the other second graders refer to as the Big Slide. I’m back in that exact moment, drowning in all the same childish fears I felt then, but none of it is directly related to the present with a pair of watery eyes watching me from the woods.

I remember what happened next at the top of the Big Slide. In that brief moment of pause, one of my childhood frenemies stepped onto the platform with me at the top of the slide. The playground centerpiece couldn’t have been more than twelve feet tall, but to me at that age, the slide seemed like a skyscraper. Iris-Ann grabbed the rails on either side of us, swung out, and planted both feet against the small of my back.

I went flying down the slide with her behind me. A few feet from the bottom, I tumbled over the side. I was not so high up that I would break my arm, but a screw that held the slide to its frame caught the hem of my dress and ripped a long gash in the pastel plaid skirt.

For hours afterward, I sobbed because it was a special dress my mom had made for me. The girl who had pushed me laughed for the same number of hours. Iris-Ann claimed the slide was hers, and I couldn’t play on it without her permission. From my adult perspective, it’s silly and insignificant in the scheme of life, but in my child’s eyes and heart, I’m in despair.

Why am I thinking of that day on the playground? I shake away the memory. What made me think of that? It has nothing to do with how I feel right now.

The form with the glowing eyes recedes into the shadows, but I follow it.

“Don’t you dare run from me,” I growl.

I stomp forward through grass and underbrush. I am not afraid. I’m a magickal badass, and I’m not putting up with this bullshit from my washed-up former High Priestess.

The shadowy form backs further away, deeper into the woods. Letting my anger fuel me, I follow. I know hundreds of spells that will stop this nonsense. I’m not the quivering new witch I once was. I know all the Grand Coven’s old charades, and I am not afraid of anything they can do.

Somewhere beyond the house, somewhere inside the long, dark barn, a third shot rings out.

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