Chapter 4
Fixed Star Algol Conjunct Ascendant in Servitor’s Natal Chart
My heart is in my throat, not because I’m staring into otherworldly red eyes but because I know from my premonition that the third shot is meant for Christabel.
“I banish you, Lady Dragon, and I bind you to do no harm to me or mine.” My voice is little more than a whisper, yet it’s solid and unwavering with power.
I fully expect her messenger to shrink away from me. She should know by now that I won’t put up with her shenanigans, neither the mundane ones nor the magickal ones. It’s been six years, for Pete’s sake. Six! It’s time for her to let go of me.
The noise that comes back at me starts as a snicker and morphs into a deep-throated laugh. The form in front of me takes another step backward, into a clearing. Blue light bathes it, giving the form substance. Though it’s a moonless night, the lamp atop a nearby utility pole is high enough and bright enough to illuminate the gaps in the trees, even though the bulb itself is going bad.
“You cannot banish me.” Laughter again. “To banish me, you must name me, and name me you cannot.”
It takes yet another step back into the light, and I gasp. Lady Dragon has used astral projection to send her avatar to me in the past, but those avatars have always been of her signature totem, a dragon. I’ve heard of others in the Grand Coven using similar tactics, but their avatars have always been bears, tigers, even unintrusive bunny rabbits.
But not this. Never this.
The form of shadows solidifies in front of me. Not only does it become solid, but it seems to grow in height, maybe eight feet tall, then looks down at me and snorts. The face is dark and hairy like half a man, half a horse. Upright on its hind legs. What little skin I can see is pale. The rest is covered in thick black hair. It wears a black robe like a judge or a priest or a tenor in the Baptist Church choir, but the robe doesn’t close all the way. Directly in front of me, slightly lower than eye level, hangs the largest penis I’ve seen on man or animal. I stare as it hardens and rises to point at me. Its owner only laughs.
This time, I’m the one who takes a step backward. If I didn’t feel a proper sense of terror before, I do now.
All the things that have gone wrong this year and their steady crescendo? Are they related to this dark threat? My “spidey” senses tell me yes. The awfulness that had happened to Jesse? The threat of cervical cancer? Having to close down my beloved healing center? Even my car trouble and phone battery? I can’t blame all my recent bad luck on this supernatural presence, but I sense a talent for agitation from whatever it is. Not only is it focused on hurting me, but on everyone I care about.
My heart skips a beat. Sonnet. I reach out to her empathically and feel myself slam into a wall. She’s on the other side of it. Unreachable.
In danger.
“My daughter.” I mean to sound commanding, but it comes out in a croak. I clear my throat and try again. “My daughter. What have you done to her? And Christabel? Is she dead?”
I remember the third shot in my premonition and the third shot only seconds ago. I reach out with my psychic mind to my young friend and again to Sonnet. I sense Christabel, alive but lost in darkness. And Sonnet? Behind some kind of force field. Kept from me.
The thing in front of me laughs. “I’ve not been charged with the slaughter of innocents, witch. Only with the destruction of your peace of mind.”
“So, they’re not hurt?”
“I didn’t say that, now did I? I am charged with destroying your peace. I can cause as much pain and harm to your loved ones as I wish to achieve that objective. I can haunt their dreams if it suits me. I can convince their friends to turn on them. I can even rip them limb from limb as long as I do not kill them.” It bends forward and taps my forehead with a long, gnarled nail. “You, Lady RavenHart, for you there is no such exclusion. I am charged with stripping you of all you love, and when there is nothing and no one left, I am charged with stripping you of your life.”
Sonnet. Rhiannon.
I can barely breathe. I’ve already lost Jesse in every way that counts, but I still have my girls, and a precious few friends. The healing center is gone. I’m fighting to keep my house.
Aw, hell, I’m fighting to keep my faith.
And peace of mind? When I was younger, Jan, being significantly older than I am, used to talk about how she wanted peace so badly in her life and how important it was to have peace in her home and in her surroundings. I didn’t really understand it at the time. I wasn’t searching for peace. I was looking for love, happiness, enough wealth to feel safe, success, the opportunity to use my gifts, the opportunity to lead. But peace had never been one of the things I had scrambled after.
Ever since getting my Third-Degree Elevation from the Dragon Hart Grand Coven and the sudden blooming and flourishing of my supernatural talents, I’ve found that almost anything I wanted to manifest is there for the creating, while my need for and desire for a peaceful life has mushroomed into an all-consuming pursuit. The one thing I hadn’t really considered that important in the first forty years of my life has become the holy grail of midlife. Peace is now the foundation for any success and any joy. No more witch wars. No more fighting with my ex. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid was based on safety and survival as a foundation to reach self-actualization.
And to be myself and optimize who I am, I need that solid foundation of peace. This thing in front of me, whatever it is and wherever it came from, has been sent for the sole purpose of kicking that foundation out from under me.
It stops laughing. A split second later, a fist shoots toward me. Fingernails dig deep into the flesh under my jaw on either side. I grab the hand, digging my own fingernails into the space between the hairy fingers, coughing, gasping, trying to pry it away from me. Instead, it lifts me up, until I am on my tiptoes.
“Miss Lauren?” A thin, small voice drifts through the woods around me and into the clearing.
“Only you can see me, Lady RavenHart. Tell anyone else about me, and you will prove how unsound of mind you are.” The thing drops me. My knees buckle from the impact. It steps away from me.
And then it’s gone. Just gone. Not even a wisp of energy left in the clearing.
I bend over, choking. My painkillers are wearing off. With more wheezing and gasping, I haul air into my lungs and choke until I think I am going to pee myself.
“Miss Lauren?” A quick hesitation in the small voice in the woods. “Raven?”
Christabel?
Alone in the clearing, I whirl, scanning the woods. “Christabel? Christabel!”
The leaf-laden branches part in front of me. Christabel steps into the clearing, and I lunge to hug her. I lean back, quickly checking her for bullet wounds. She seems solid enough, but I can never tell. Am I gratefully squeezing her in my arms, nodding thankfully at her escape? Or am I, as I am prone to do with these supernatural gifts of mine, grasping at an apparition who doesn’t know her corpse lies somewhere in the pitch-black corners of the long, red barn?
“Raven,” she squeaks out. “I’m okay, but are you?”
How much did she see? Does she think I was talking to myself in the clearing?
“Raven?” She cups my face in her palms.
My body relaxes, and the adrenaline surge flattens. My knees, already smarting from the drop to the ground, tremble as if they cannot hold my weight. She’s real. She’s alive and unharmed.
Christabel has called me by my craft name, my magickal name. No one calls me Raven anymore. All my circles have been solitary since closing down the healing center, my beautiful Center of Light. I’ve not participated in any public rituals in months now. I’m no longer part of the Grand Coven or the Elders’ Coven or even my own coven. I don’t have a local circle that I still lead. And outside of circle and any gatherings with my fellow witches, no one calls me Raven, let alone Lady RavenHart.
I pull her palms away from my face and hold them down in front of me, squeezing gently. “What happened? How did you…?”
Tears stream down her face. Mine, too, I realize at that moment. Then I understand. She called me Raven because she needs an Elder with a capital E. She needs the leader that I am. Not just me as Rhiannon and Sonnet’s mom, but me as the leader of the Center of Light and the founder of the healing center.
Christabel frowns back at me. “What do you mean, ‘what happened?’ You! You are what happened! When you called me, I ditched my studying and ran out the back of the house. I guess my uncle heard me. He had just come home. He has been really upset about money issues lately. Unk already had his gun. He was just—I don’t know—walking around shooting things, and then he came after me. So I hid in the barn. He shot up at the roof twice and then came toward me, and I thought for sure that he was going to kill me, but he couldn’t see me. He kept coming closer to me, and I ran for it, toward the door at the back of the barn. It was open and—”
“And you could see the light outside from the security light behind the barn.” I finish her sentence for her because I saw the same thing in my vision.
Christabel nods furiously. “That’s right. And just as I got to the barn door, I turned to look over my shoulder, and he was aiming right for me. It was Unk all right, but I didn’t even recognize him. He didn’t look like himself. His eyes… and then you were there.”
“What?” I start to ask her to explain or to tell her how wrong she is, but she keeps shaking her head.
“How did you… how did you get all the way out here? You were behind me. You were struggling with him. That’s when I heard the gun go off for the last time, and I ran for the woods.”
“You saw me in there?”
Christabel nods. “Not dressed like you are now. You were in a white robe, like the one you wear when you lead circles.”
Well, I guess I can chalk up another supernatural gift.
Apparently, I’m able to astral-project when someone I care about is in trouble. Too bad, I hadn’t had this talent when Jesse needed it.
Christabel collapses into a bear hug, like a little girl throwing herself at her mommy. The weight of her, a grown woman, pulling at me is more than I can hold up. I extricate myself from her embrace, then hug her very lightly.
In my vision, I saw her as a child, the same age as she was when she first met my daughters. I suppose I still think of her that way. We stand almost nose to nose, brow to brow, looking down at our feet. Hers are bare, with a long, faintly bleeding gash at the ankle. Poor kid didn’t have time to put shoes on, and yet she still followed my instructions. She’s gifted. She’s always been gifted.
“You’re bleeding.” I point to her feet.
She points back at mine. “So are you.”
She doesn’t know about my surgery, and the look on her face tells me she is trying to figure out where the cuts are on my feet when the blood is running down my legs.
I grab her shoulders. I feel faint, weak.
“Raven? I didn’t expect to find you out here. And then I saw you.” She pauses to stare into my eyes. “You were talking to th-that beast, and then it grabbed you by the throat.”
I gasp. “You saw that thing?”
She nods slowly. “Of course. I see everything. I always have.”
This time, I’m the one who collapses into her arms. “Thank you, Christabel. Thank you.”
She pulls away. “Raven? You saved my life in there tonight. Both by calling me before anything ever happened and then by stepping between us and giving me a chance to get away. Now I’m going to return the favor and save yours. Raven, whatever that thing was that had you by the throat, you have to figure out who sent it. You have to.”
Christabel squints at me, but she is looking through me, past me, seeing something that has not yet happened.
“Because if you can’t find out who sent it, it will take its sweet time hurting you even more, and then it will kill you.”
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