Chapter 38

Chapter 38 of 48 · 8-minute read

Transiting Saturn Trine the Chaos Witch’s Natal Pluto

Christabel matches my pace. I don’t mean to outrun her, but I’m in a hurry now. I splay my fingers in front of me, feeling for familiar energies. I usually can’t sense my own—sort of like being nose blind to scents in your own home. Even though I can’t feel my own energy from earlier in the day, I can feel the energy of certain possessions of mine, especially those that have been consecrated as magickal tools. For example, I might not sense my own energy on an athame, or ritual blade, that I use daily, but I can sense the separate energy of the athame itself.

Beside me, Christabel mimics my open hands. “What are we feeling for?”

“See if you can sense my energy, other than my visit today.” Christabel looks confused, so I explain. “We’re looking for a necklace she took from my altar. If I’m right, it will be near the ground, but possibly very faint.”

We pass the colony of RVs, but I barely look up. Christabel takes in everything. I trust her to be my seventh sense.

My fingers tingle in the direction of the lake. The tingling turns to stinging, like fire ants. Slapping my hands against my thighs until the stinging subsides, I keep moving toward Circle Lake.

Christabel feels it, too. She keeps one hand out in front of her but grabs my wrist with the other.

“This way,” she whispers.

She tilts her head in the direction of one of the tiny homes, the one that caught my attention earlier today. Christabel keeps one hand in front of her, fingers wide, almost as if it were a beam of light showing us where to walk. She stops short of the small plot of land that the RV is on.

“You stopped there.”

I shake my head. “I didn’t go that far.”

“Hmm, well, something with your energy on it sure did.” From a distance, she raises her palm to the steps and then waves her palm like a scanner across both sides of the entrance. “Just the steps. Nowhere else. Is it… is it safe for us to get that close?”

Good question. The energy around this tiny plot of land and the RV is not unlike my own wards. I don’t see a circle of salt in the sand or even black, red, and white peppers mixed together, ground, and dispensed in a slow steady stream of protection. I’m not sure what this ward is made of, but as I start to cross the threshold, I sense the resistance. It reminds me of pushing on the side of a “bouncy house” at a kid’s birthday party.

Christabel, on the other hand, walks right over the threshold and up to the steps. “It stops here. It doesn’t even go up the steps.” She points at a disturbed spot of dirt immediately in front of the bottom step. The steps themselves are nothing but concrete blocks arranged three high into a landing rather than a porch.

Of course!

The ward is to keep out anyone who means her harm. I mean her harm. Christabel, however, doesn’t hold the same intentions I do. She’s along for the ride and to provide support to me where she can. I’m not sure, honestly, if I mean to do the chaos witch harm or if I simply want justice. To her, there’s probably no difference.

“Are you sure you feel my energy in that spot?”

It’s the same reason that some witches use the bones of powerful witches who have gone before them or relics from their graves. The witches’ bodies held that energy for so long that anything the bones touch is bathed in it. The relics vibrate with the energy long after the living witch is gone. Just because a grave has been robbed or an ancient crypt plundered or a piece of jewelry stolen from a witch doesn’t mean that the energy is any less than if she still held it in her hand.

“Hell, yes, I’m sure! Your energy is so serene and comforting. You know how often everything in my life has been pandemonium, but I could come over to your house and fall asleep on the living room floor? Inside your house is full of your energy and has always felt safe. I would recognize it anywhere.”

“Okay, then. Whatever’s there in that spot, I need you to dig it up for me.”

Christabel hesitates and steps backward. “Um, but what if there’s something else buried there? You know, a skull, or a dead bunny rabbit or something. I don’t know. Something dark. We already know that she likes that dark stuff.”

“Dark doesn’t mean evil, Christabel. Dark can be the, let’s say, texture of defense as well as protection.”

And if it’s dark in a sinister way, I don’t mind going there if I have to, though I don’t say that aloud to my soon-to-be apprentice. Magick is like fire or electricity to the person who wields it: it has no inherent intent but instead can be used to cook or warm or destroy. As I learned long ago, a witch who can’t kill can’t cure, meaning that if a witch has the power to destroy, she also has the power to prevent destruction.

I scrutinize the outside of the RV and the garden plot next to it. Summer squash with yellow blooms, green stalks of corn, string trellises of scarlet runner beans, cages of reddening tomatoes. A witch with a thumb greener than mine. I ignore a twinge of jealousy and gesture at the collection of tools leaning against the far end of the RV.

As I pace outside the wards—much like the servitor that circles my own home—Christabel rummages through the tools and chooses a shovel.

“No! Use the trowel. You might cut through it and cause further harm. Think of yourself as an archeologist, not a ditch digger.” I glance over my shoulder, but Jesse’s nowhere in sight and Bianca has yet to return. As anxiety weaves down my spine, I shiver. “But hurry!”

For the first time, I notice the security camera at the edge of the building. Familiar. The exact model as the ones stolen from the healing center back in January.

Christabel bends over the discolored earth and stops after three scoops. Reaching inside the shallow hole, she lifts out a small package of folded cloth. “This is it. It has your energy all over it.”

Leaving the trowel in the hole, Christabel brings the package to me. She easily navigates the wards, but then, they weren’t meant for her.

The loose earth dirties the cloth, which has been folded over several times in both directions and tied both vertically and horizontally with a length of string not unlike my Initiation cords. Christabel runs back to the tool collection and retrieves a small pair of pruning shears that fit in one hand. I clip through the string on both sides. As the cloth falls open, I gasp.

“What is it?” Christabel bends in for a closer look and manages to stick her head between mine and the package until she realizes she’s blocking my view.

The drama queen’s poppet is rudimentary but effective. A popsicle stick for a body with eyes and a mouth drawn with a pen. A second popsicle stick for arms, bound to the first with string. My necklace is wrapped around it. A rubber band functions as a headband around a clump of what looks like a tangle of hair—same color and texture as my own at different times since the Winter Solstice. I vary the color often enough to guess at when she acquired it.

I shudder. She was in my house long enough to find a dress I’d been seen in around town more than once so she could glamour the bank employees, but she’d also left a witch bottle, taken my necklace from my altar, and stolen my hair from the brush on my dresser. All violations.

“Christabel, how was the package positioned? Face down or face up?”

“Um, face down. Why?”

“It’s a way of adding obstacles. As if the whole earth were in front of me rather than a few handfuls of dirt. It’s time now to remove those obstacles.”

Unfastening the necklace, I pull it free of the poppet. Next, I clip the string that binds the sticks together and cut the rubber band that attaches the gob of hair—silver, brown, ombré, and a few blonde highlights. The poppet falls apart in my hand.

“Come with me, Christabel.”

We rush down to the lake’s edge. No sign of Jesse. No sign of Bianca. Just gentle ripples and a late afternoon breeze.

I set the poppet pieces free on the waves and watch them drift away. With Christabel watching, I dangle my silver necklace in the water, washing away all the unwelcome energy of Bianca’s touch, clearing and cleansing it. The heaviness of these last few months seems to drift away, too. Between severing my old coven leaders’ attachments and rinsing away the chaos witch’s poppet magick, I feel lighter and more energetic than I’ve felt in quite a while.

Christabel’s phone chimes from her pocket. She clucks her tongue at a text message, then shoves her phone back into her pocket. I raise one eyebrow.

“That was Mr. Steve’s buddy. We have Bianca’s last name.”

I dry my necklace and drop it into my pocket. In the distance, this Jesse I no longer know floats on his back in the lake. Naked. Too oblivious to my presence to be taunting me, but it feels like torture.

I’m ready to release Jesse.

Tom answers on my first ring.

“This is Lauren. I’m ready for you to file my divorce papers.”

He whoops over the phone. “About damned time! Yes! Praise God! You’ve seen the light. Wh-what, if I may ask, changed your mind?” Tom’s been sitting on the signed papers for the past month, waiting for the go-ahead I haven’t been able to give because I couldn’t admit to myself that Jesse wasn’t perfect. When I don’t answer his question, he adds, “Well, whatever it was, things should get better with your other ex. Justine says Quent’s biggest advantage against you in court to get custody of your daughter is Jesse’s drug and alcohol abuse and making sure he’s out of her life—permanently. I’m gonna drop everything and get the paperwork over to the courthouse before it closes. This is a big day for you, Lauren. And I’m really sorry you had to take Jesse off his pedestal. I wish he could have been everything you needed him to be.”

A big day, yes. But a bigger night. First, I’ll call Jesse’s higher self into my circle for a releasing ritual. Then, I’ll put an end to the servitor and its mistress.

← Chapter 37
Chapter 39 →

You’re reading Rite of Letting Go free, right here in the Library. Want a copy to keep on your Kindle or e-reader? Buy the e-book direct from me →