Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of 56 · 10-minute read

Mid-May

Friday – Full Moon in Scorpio

The visions returned last night. Nightmares. The same ones I always have whenever I plan to visit this place.

Like the Old Gods are reaching deep into my memories to warn me of the darkness I still carry with me and where it was conceived.

Maybe it was the anticipation of seeing my mom for the first time since my dad’s funeral and the guilt for not making it home sooner. Or maybe the fact that I fled this little town as soon as I turned eighteen and never looked back. Or maybe it’s the memory of all the abuse that happened here in my childhood home, those demons of trauma that don’t need a witch like me to conjure them.

But my mom needs me. She won’t say why, of course—and, starting today, I have three months of long-awaited downtime when I can rely on passive income to pay my bills while I transition into the much-anticipated next phase of my life.

My car sputtering, I pull into the driveway of my mom’s old farmhouse, still sitting pretty on five hundred acres of farmland, cow pastures, woods, and swamp. Immediately, my heart is in my throat. Tall grass and weeds have overtaken her beautiful flower gardens, and her formerly immaculate front yard hasn’t been cut in enough weeks to choke a commercial mower. The yards need to be cut soon or before the next storm. Actually, the grass needs to be cut now, not later.

I’ve been paying a lawn service monthly for this?

Dread twists in the pit of my stomach. Why do I feel so anxious?

I don’t sense my dad’s presence here, but his oppressive energy hovers over the farmhouse like a mushroom cloud. I’ve been back home only once since he died five months, one week ago and that was to meet up here with my brother as well as my daughters, Rhiannon and Sonnet, and their partners for the weekend funeral right before Christmas. I’d stayed a week afterward to help my mom handle the legal affairs and begin the probate process in rural South Georgia.

When he died, Mama wasn’t the one who had notified me. She’d been too lost. Not in grief. Just lost as if she didn’t know how to function without Daddy ordering her around.

The moment I got a call from a stranger telling me of his passing, I jumped in my car and made the long drive up from Florida. I hadn’t shed a single tear for him. Until now, that first visit after his death was the only time I’ve ever come home and he didn’t meet me at the door with some silly prank designed to humiliate me or some harsh criticism saved for the presence of one of my former spouses.

This will be the second time he doesn’t meet me at the door to both welcome me and emotionally crush me before I can cross the threshold. I should be relieved, but I’m not. The ghosts of my childhood are too strong here. I’m a grown woman with multiple college degrees, two fulfilling careers in the rear view mirror, and two adult daughters who are overachievers in their own right. I celebrated my half-century birthday last year with a solar return ritual open to the public in the town where I lived and loved for almost three decades. Amazing how it doesn’t matter how old you get or how grown-up you are in the eyes of the world, your relationship with elderly parents can make you feel like an inept child again.

The only thing worse than always being an abusive father’s never-good-enough daughter is realizing that you’ve become a mother to your elderly mom. These last few years, I’ve seen both the broken child in her who never healed and the subsequent parent who poured all of her darknesses and fears into her own children while failing to protect us from the real devils in the world. I’ve done my best not to make the same mistakes with my own kids and not to repeat her relationship dynamics with my new partners… which is probably why I’ve not remarried after losing my sweet Jesse three years ago.

Time is my friend, I tell myself.

Rolling down my car window, I momentarily park out front under the two large oaks that dwarf the old farmhouse with its screened-in porches. The farm is unnaturally quiet today, except for the buzz of honeybees around some special-ordered flowering bush I can’t name. A burst of warm air hits my skin, and the breeze tastes of honeysuckle and magnolias.

My car is loaded to the gills with suitcases, packing boxes, and all my worldly possessions except for what’s in a portable storage container in Atlanta where it waits for me to give the moving company my final destination. I’ve read psychological studies that say once a person begins to declutter, they feel lighter emotionally and that often translates into physical weight loss. Since I made the choice two months ago to become mobile and sold my house and furniture, I’ve lost fifteen pounds I can’t explain.

Figures.

All those visits back home to see my parents during times I was dieting like crazy and working out three hours a day and pleased as punch to have lost two pounds, and this time I won’t walk through the door only to have my dad immediately ask if I’ve gained weight or tell me I’m getting old. If I could get rid of the heaviness of the baggage from childhood, I swear I would be so light and airy that I would simply float away.

I steer around the driveway toward the backyard and kill the engine under the smaller oak near the back door. The front door is only for salesmen and strangers and hasn’t been opened in so long that it sticks from the Georgia humidity. The last time I recall it being used, a local politician soliciting votes had knocked repeatedly until my mom finally heard him and sent him to the back porch so she could hear his pitch. The back door is for people she knows and welcomes, and she’s been known to meet uninvited strangers with my brother’s hunting rifle, a scowl, and a head full of bristly pink hair curlers.

I don’t recognize the car parked on the other side of the garden shed, half-hidden by six-foot tall azaleas and a fig tree I feared as a kid because of the summer wasps. Uneasiness coils in my stomach. After my dad died, one of my good-for-nothing cousins I hadn’t seen in thirty years tried to move in with her because she couldn’t say no. They managed to walk away with all the cash she’d had on hand, plus the contents of her medicine cabinet before I could get a court order to keep them five hundred feet from her property at all times.

There’s a reason I use my magick on a regular basis to ward my mom’s home and farm. Too many scammers preying on the elderly, and some share ancestors with me.

I leave everything but my keys in my car and exit barefoot for a closer look. The dark red car is a luxury model, new and freshly waxed. Its polished surface gleams like a beacon in the sunshine.

Too nice for one of my relatives unless they bought it with stolen funds.

I pause. The air feels charged with power. It makes me tingle. The slightest scent of some other witch’s magick fills the air like honeysuckle in the nearby woods. My hands prickle at an energetic signature I don’t recognize, but I don’t feel afraid of it or even uneasy about it. The magick feels… dark… but not wicked like that of the woman who destroyed my second marriage or controlling like that of my previous two coven leaders, Dragon and Donna. If anything, the magick I sense is more elemental, with a side of both compassion and peace.

Whatever magick is here besides mine, it isn’t harmful. Not to me, not to my close family.

An… an ally?

I tiptoe through the grass for a better look at the car. My senses come alive as the Nature spirits here recognize me, like some kind of prodigal daughter who’s come home again. The grass is cool to my soles. It feels like the blades of grass are welcoming me back, as if they have remembered my presence and their roots in the ground have spread this knowledge throughout the farm. This is my ancestral land where I walked as a child and where centuries of my maternal ancestors have eked out a living among the crops and woods and ponds.

The house seems quiet, maybe deserted. Before I can head to the secret stash where my mom keeps the key, the door opens. An old woman pokes her head through the crack.

“Lauren? Is that you?”

With a lump in my throat, I nod. Her meticulously coifed hair has lost its bounce and faded to a brassy brown at the end of three inches of thin white. Her face is drawn into a permanent frown, and she looks twenty years older than she did five months ago. I stop myself from asking her what happened. Even at eighty, she still has her pride.

Or had it.

While I hadn’t expected to find her primping for a suitor, I had certainly imagined I’d find a happier woman than I had left. For years, she had wanted her freedom from my dad’s tyranny, and his death had finally given that to her. I had planned a series of trips for us after she settled into widowhood and local women’s clubs—a weekend in Callaway Gardens, maybe a week in the mountains in the hottest part of the summer here. I had wanted to make up for all those years my mom had been physically able to travel but couldn’t because my dad both refused to go anywhere and had objected to her traveling without him. Now, one look at her, and I know we’ll never make those long-awaited mother-daughter trips we’ve talked about for four decades.

“Hey, Mom.” I wave feebly. “It’s me. Right on time.”

Even knowing I had a full day of driving ahead of me, she’d asked me to arrive around two hours before sunset, though I have no idea why. Maybe she wanted to make sure she had time to get her house in order or maybe she was scheduling around a doctor’s appointment.

She frowns back at me, craning her neck to look around the door she holds open. Standing on tiptoe, she squints across the backyard as if searching for some invisible visitor.

“Where’s Quentin? And the girls?”

“Um, Mom?” All I can do is blink at her. Finally, I find my words. “Rhiannon and her husband are at their home, but they’ll come visit you later this year after the baby’s born so you can meet your first great-grandchild. She’s on bed rest and not able to travel. And Sonnet and her girlfriend are on tour. I believe they’re in Kansas this week.”

“Oh. Okay. I thought the girls would be coming with you.” Again, she studies the yard. “But where’s Quentin?” Then she glances back to me with alarm. “I don’t remember him coming with you the last time you were here. Was he at your dad’s funeral?”

I stop the humorless laugh that gurgles up from my stomach. “No, Mama. He didn’t come with me last time I was here, and he wasn’t at Daddy’s funeral.”

Did I just call her “Mama” again? As a small child, I called her “Mommy.” Until I was an adult, I called her “Mama,” and then after leaving the drama and dysfunction of our home, she’s simply “Mom.” It’s only when I’m snared in our most emotional bond that she’s “Mama.”

“Oh, Lord,” she bleats. “I hope the two of you aren’t having any troubles.”

I sigh. She said the same thing to me a decade ago when I told her that I was divorcing Quent and specifically why. It hadn’t really mattered to her how miserable I was or how badly he treated me. All she was concerned about was that I might “mess things up.” She’d lived in hell for all her married life and couldn’t comprehend that I was using her as a role model for why I needed to find happiness.

“Mom?” I draw the word out until my voice rises an octave. Maybe she’s been napping and isn’t fully awake. “Quent and I aren’t married anymore.”

Her jaw drops. Her eyes widening in sorrow, her breath comes in short, sharp gasps as if she has been hit in the stomach. “When did that happen?”

“Almost ten years ago, Mom. Are you feeling all right?”

My words seem to sink in. The frown dissipates. She closes her mouth and shrugs. “Oh, that’s right. You’re married to that nice young doctor.”

My breath catches. I don’t understand why she’s so flustered. Maybe I need to talk to her doctor about adjusting her blood pressure medicine again. Neither Jesse nor Quent are subjects I want to talk about.

“Mom?” I pick my way toward the back porch through flat weeds full of tiny brown stickers. “Where’s your car? And whose car is that? Mama, is someone here with you?”

“My car’s in the shop again. I had a little fender-bender with a stop sign.” She cocks her head. “You know, I’ve been seeing that car here a lot lately. It kinda looks like your Uncle Bobby’s. His car was that color. But it can’t be his.”

I step on a briar and gasp, but not because of the pain. The vision—a memory—from last night’s awful dreams slides across my sight. In my mind, I’m back there, as real now as it was then.

Full moon, just as there will be tonight. Shadows through the trees. Hiding in the woods. Holding my breath. Footfalls crunching through dry leaves.

I shake off the vision. Bobby’s been dead for forty years.

I know because I killed him.

With magick.

Chapter 2 →

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