The lettuce head crumbled beneath my angry hands. I sent a succubus after him. I wanted him to pay. It shouldn’t even have been possible, should it? When you cast a curse on someone you don’t do it thinking it will work, it just makes you feel better. I didn’t need to be told I’d done wrong. I could see it written on his face. Damien confirmed then, without saying it, that I was a True Witch.
“Were you worried?” asked Damien. His words showed concern, but his interested eyes conveyed amazement—and fear.
Ever mind the rule of three, I thought.
“I worry every day,” I said.
But I regret nothing.
CHAPTER 19
As soon as my confession left my lips, a huge rock was lifted from off my chest. I hadn’t told anyone about what I did to Kyle. Not even Eliza. And we tell each other everything, or at least we used to.
I shuffled to my room after finishing with the fruits. My hands were sore and wrinkled and I smelt like a builder, so I hurried myself into a steamy shower and washed the dirt and sweat off before settling on my bed with a plain, untouched, and unlined black book.
On the first page I wrote:
A Book of Shadows
By…
I didn’t know what to call myself. I needed a pen name with which to scribble down my thoughts, experiences and spells. A name other Witches would recognize me by. After twenty minutes I still wasn’t any closer to a name I liked. The internet would’ve come in handy right about now.
A light, quick rapping at the door caught my attention. I closed the book and sat up straight, cross-legged on the bed. “Come in?” I said.
Damien pushed the door open and stood by the hall, staring at me for a moment longer than necessary. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I smiled. “What’s up?”
“Mind if I come in?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He came into the room and closed the door. I noticed the backpack on his shoulder.
“Going someplace?” I asked.
“No, I’ve just got a few things for you.”
He sat his backpack down on a rocking chair in the corner of the room and walked up to my bed. For some reason I couldn’t fathom my heart decided to pick up speed. A warm tingle radiated outward and upward from my stomach.
“Sit down,” I said, patting the bed.
Damien put a knee on the bed first and then sat down. He wasn’t wearing shoes. His hair was wet, and I noted a few damp patches darkening his long-sleeved black top. The dampness made the fabric stick to his body, accentuating the tone of his body. I turned my face away and bit my lower lip. What the hell was wrong with me?
“Some day, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah, maybe next time you’ll think twice about accepting an invite from me… anywhere… there’s usually a fair amount of heavy lifting involved.”
“I’m sure you’re not that heavy,” he replied, smiling at me from the corner of his mouth.
I swallowed to contain my fluttering stomach and begged my cheeks not to light up like Christmas trees. Laughing at Damien’s obvious joke helped.
“So, already bored of not having access to the internet?” I asked.
“No, I just, I figured since you’d read the books I gave you, maybe you wanted some tutelage?”
“You want to make magick happen with me, Damien?” I asked. That was a lame joke. An echoed moan sang through the corridor and immediately illuminated the reason for the slight awkwardness in the room.
“Awh fuck,” I grumbled.
“Don’t even worry about it,” said Damien.
“I swear, I told them to cut it out this time.”
“It’s okay. They’re clearly really into each other.”
“Yeah, but they can be into each other more quietly. I’ve got half a mind to go in there and say something,” I said, standing.
“No, don’t,” Damien took my hand. “Amber, there’s no problem.”
I stared at my hand in his, horrified and excited at the same time. We slipped apart and I didn’t know what to do with my arms. Let them hang by my side? Fold them? Put them on my hips? Oh god, I wasn’t wearing a bra! I settled on folded.
“I don’t blame you,” I finally said, “I wouldn’t want to have to listen to that on my own either.”
“You two seem pretty close,” said Damien.
“We are, she’s like the sister I never had. My real sister moved out east a while ago. We don’t talk much.”
Damien smiled. “So? What do you say?”
“Well… I have had questions,” I said, conceding.
“What kind of questions?”
I sat back down but remained painfully conscious about my lack of a bra. “The books you gave me,” I said, “They described Magick as a kind of old religion; the oldest.”
Damien nodded.
“It also said Witches diluted their knowledge and passed it down to humans for them to form the basis of their religions. Why would Witches keep the real truth away from humans?”
Damien considered my question. “Alright, consider this as an example. The book Eliza has, the one James sent you.”
“Right?”
“Eliza can’t read it. She said she couldn’t understand the words.”
“But unless I’ve developed the ability to read Finnish, the words in that book are in English.”
“They’re English, but Eliza isn’t a True Witch.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the human mind throws up a bulwark against the truth about the universe. They weren’t meant to know how things work.”
“And we, Witches, are?”
Damien nodded. I loved the enthusiasm he showed when he talked about Magick. He’d bob his head and give me this sly, knowing smile. He enjoyed bringing me into his world, and I wasn’t about to complain.
“But… why us?” I asked.
“Because every herd needs a wolf,” said Damien.
“I don’t understand. So we herd humans?”
“No. Well yes, in a way. It’s like, humans are children. We’re the adults. We deal with the problems they can’t understand so that they can live as they were meant to.”
“That seems unfair.”
“Is it?”
“I guess not. But I still haven’t—”
“Done any real magick? I’m not surprised.”
“Oh? And why’s that?”
“I didn’t know where to start either. I had all this power, the kind of thing people only dream of, and I shied away from it.”
I shot Damien a stern look. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Do you want me to show you more magick?”
Oh god yes. My chest eagerly inflated. “I don’t want you to show me. I want you to teach me how to do it myself.”
“Alright, that’s your altar isn’t it?” he asked, cocking his head toward the dresser on the side of the room.
I nodded.
Damien stood and walked to it, examining the crystals and the decorations. Distant grunting and moaning filled the silence. “This is pretty cool,” he said, ignoring the sounds.
I followed him, arms still folded. “Thanks, it’s nothing really.”
“No, it’s good. It’ll help you with the transition.”
“Transition?”
He turned to me. “You’ve been Wiccan for a while. Now it’s time to become a Witch.”
“What do I do?”
Damien pondered, scanning my room. “Okay, well, the first thing to do is to re-enact what you’d normally do when casting a spell.”
“I guess it depends on the spell… normally I lay a bunch of pillows down on the floor in my attic first.”
“For comfort?”
I nodded. “We have a bed, though,” I said, walking toward it and sitting on the mattress.
Damien followed and made himself comfortable behind me.
“And just what are you doing?” I asked over my shoulder, eyes narrow.
“I’
m going to teach you how to cast a circle. Face forward.”
I smiled and directed my attention to the foot of the bed. Inside, the beating of my heart was getting louder. When Damien took both my hands, I couldn’t even hear myself think. He shuffled closer to me. I could feel his warm breath on the nape of my neck.
“Comfortable?”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“What you’re going to do is invoke the Watchtower of the East,” said Damien, “But you’re going to do it quietly; in your mind.”
How the hell was I supposed to call the quarters with this kind of distraction? I shook the thought out of my head and took a deep breath in, and out, in and out.
“Imagine the Currents,” said Damien, “Feel them with your mind and then call the Watchtower.”
“What do I want the magick to do?” I asked.
“I want you to blow all the candles out.”
“You’re joking.”
“Imagine it. Call the Watchtower. And do it.”
I nodded and closed my eyes. Damien, controlling my right hand, started to draw lines in the air. Hail unto you, O’ Guardians of the Watchtower of the East, powers of air and inspiration. I invoke thee.
I imagined a steady wind kicking up inside the bedroom, swirling around in a circular motion. My hand, with Damien’s acting as puppeteer, mimicked the motion of the wind currents in my mind. Astonished, I continued to repeat the invocation, over and over again.
Damien’s nose nuzzled into my hair, his breath so close to my skin he could’ve puckered his lips and touched it. The air in the room grew lighter. A strange chill materialized from out of nowhere and surrounded us both. I opened my eyes to see the candles flickering in a breeze I was conjuring with my mind!
My breaths became quick and short. Damien extended my hands and my fingers and urged me to open my palms to feel the air between them. I invoke thee. I invoke thee. I invoke thee. I closed my eyes again, losing myself in the steadily growing wind.
Damien’s hands crawled up my arms. Impossibly, his lips closed in on my skin even further without touching them. My heart pounded against my chest. His palms reached my shoulders and slid down my underarms, fingers grazing the sides of my breasts and crawling down to my ribs. I was beginning to sigh with the rhythm of my invocations, alternating every second between taking a breath and exhaling.
Like a climax, the Currents of magick came surging through me and into the room. I opened my eyes, threw my chest up and clasped my hands together. In that moment the candles snuffed out and the wind disappeared leaving the purple fabric on my dresser and the white curtains gently swaying—and Damien’s lips on my neck.
I arched into him in the dark. His lips kissed my neck once, then a second time. I reached for his hands and urged them to climb up my ribs until his fingers reached the underside of my breasts. My blood was electrified. A steady hum of energy buzzed inside of me, a high I didn’t want to come down from.
A loud knocking at my door snapped me out of the moment. Damien instantly recoiled and I sprang off the bed to answer the door. Eliza.
“Hey,” she said. Her hair was a mess and her cheeks glowed like the sun. “We’re gonna get started downstairs pretty soon. You guys ready?” Clearly she didn’t have time to comment on what, perhaps, Damien and I were doing in a dark bedroom stinking of burnt candles.
“Yeah,” I said, exhaling, “We’ll be down in five.”
She smiled and headed back to her bedroom after having successfully diffused whatever was about to happen in my bedroom, leaving me too hot for my own good and all alone.
CHAPTER 20
The feel of Damien’s lips on my neck and his hands igniting my skin lingered on my body far into the evening. By the time I arrived at the clearing to the west of the house, Eliza had set up a beautiful altar and ritual space for us to pray to the Dark Mother in.
A circle of flickering candles, joined together by colorful flowers, made a perfect circle around a huge black blanket. The blanket was held down by four large stones. At the center of the space where we would be sitting I spied a small wooden table taken from the living room. A brown book, a silver chalice, a wavy knife, four colored candles, and the all-important pomegranate rested on top.
As I stood by the ritual space I was reminded of what I’d learned about Mabon a while back. Eliza meticulously applied the finishing touches, meticulously arranging the red, yellow, purple and black flowers in such a way that they wouldn’t fly off in a breeze.
This is the time of the year where the Wiccan Goddess drops the basket of flowers and picks up a sickle and scythe. As spring turns to autumn, the Goddess takes on the aspect of the Dark Mother—also known as the Crone—and comes to reap what has been sown. The land, then, withers as the world slips into the fall.
Old Wiccans connected this withering to the story of Demeter and Persephone in Greek Mythology. Hades, who kidnapped Persephone, set in motion a chain of events that would lead the earth falling into darkness each winter. Given what I’d learned in the last few weeks I wondered how much of the story was true in a literal sense.
“Do you like it?” asked Eliza. Normally we wore ritual robes during events, but Mabon didn’t call for that kind of formality. Instead we would wear something black with red, purple or yellow accents—the colors of Mabon. I chose to wear my black dress, my black boots, and spent more time than usual on my dark makeup. I even contoured, which wasn’t normal for me.
“It’s great,” I said, “You should’ve asked me for help.”
“Nah, it’s fine, I wanted to do this anyway. I had a vision for it.”
I smiled, but there was docility to my expression.
“Are you alright?” she asked. Her jet black hair waved in the gentle breeze.
“Yeah,” I said, strengthening my smile, “I’m fine. Pretty excited about everything that’s happened.”
“I am too,” she said, hugging me. Her smoky, purple veneer couldn’t hide the afterglow she still had on her.
Damien and Evan came in to view after a couple of moments. I didn’t know whether to smile, be angry or feel guilty; and I guess if you don’t know how you should feel, you shouldn’t feel anything at all. I nodded at the pair as they approached and took my position on the blanket in the center of the circle; the rest followed.
Damien, who wasn’t leading the ritual but spoke for the Watchtower of the North, began to speak over the rustling hiss of the trees. “I ask for the strength of the north as I face my inner darkness… on this, the night of balance.”
Going clockwise, Eliza spoke next in a clear and loud voice. “I ask for the flexibility of the East as I accept my inner darkness.”
I glanced at Damien when it came time for me to speak. “I ask for the fluidity of the West as I succumb to my inner darkness.
Finally, Evan chimed in on his turn. “I ask for the resolve of the South as I receive my inner darkness.”
Eliza stretched for the altar and, striking a match, she lit the black candle and began to recite from memory. “The land is beginning to die, and the soil grows cold, the fertile womb of the earth has gone barren. As Persephone descended into the Underworld, so the earth continues its descent into night. As Demeter mourns the loss of her daughter, so we mourn the days drawing shorter. The winter will soon be here.”
I took the matchbox from Eliza and, Lighting the green candle, I too recited. “In her anger and sorrow, Demeter roamed the earth, and the crops died, and life withered and the soil went dormant. In grief, she traveled looking for her lost child, leaving darkness behind in her wake. We feel the mother's pain, and our hearts break for her, as she searches for the child she gave birth to. We welcome the darkness, in her honor.”
Evan sat on his knees and broke open the pomegranate. He plucked six seeds from the fruit and lined them in a row across the wooden altar. “Six months of light, and six months of dark,” he said, “the earth goes to sleep and later wakes again. O’ dark mother, we honor you this night, and d
ance in your shadows. We embrace that which is the darkness, and celebrate the life of the Crone. Blessings to the dark goddess on this night and every other.”
Damien’s fixed gaze seemed pensive. He shuffled to his knees, took the chalice filled with wine, and raised it to the half-moon high above us. The wind picked up almost in response to his movement.
“Demeter, Inanna, Kali, Tiamet, Hecate, Nemesis, Morrighan,” said Damien, “Bringers of destruction and darkness, I embrace you tonight. Without rage we cannot feel love. Without pain we cannot feel happiness. Without the night there is no day. Without death… there is no life. Great goddesses of the night, we thank you.”
We took turns sipping from the chalice. In the silence I thought I heard whispers coming from the trees, on the wind’s back. I peered around to try and catch the source but found only swooshing darkness. Still, the whispers remained until the last of us had imbibed from the cup.
Damien, however, seemed to share my awareness of the strange sounds coming from the tree line. We returned to our seated positions and took a few moments for quiet meditation and reflection on the negative things in our lives.
I thought about Corey, my sister, and how I wished we weren’t so distant. I considered my turbulent relationship status and why I was so attracted to jerks who didn’t give two shits about how I felt. This was the point in the ritual where we would try and figure out how to turn the negative things in our lives into positives, but when Damien slipped into my thoughts my ability to concentrate evaporated.
CHAPTER 21
We left the cabin at daybreak on Sunday to make good tracks and beat the traffic. Plus, we wanted to distribute the weekend’s harvest and we figured Sunday would be the best time to do it since we wouldn’t be opening the shop. I wasn’t much of a conversation starter on the way down and spent almost the entire ride catching up on some reading. When I wasn’t reading I was glancing at Damien in the mirror, but he wasn’t glancing back.
I didn’t see Damien at class on Monday either, though even long after we’d parted ways he still dominated my thoughts—but Eliza’s good mood back at the book shop in the afternoon saved me from my drooping spirits. She came in to work wearing a black hoody, a pink tutu over black leggings and a pair of hot pink Doctor Marten boots. Eliza only dressed this way when she felt like she could eat the world.