Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Bronwyn arrived ten minutes later.
Mason intercepted her before I had a chance to do more than wave hello. He pulled her aside and whispered something in her ear. She made a face, an expression that landed between annoyed and enamored, and when they broke apart, she followed him to the parking lot.
“What’s going on?” Margaux asked.
“Honesty,” I said.
A few minutes later, we heard his SUV start up, and Bronwyn reappeared.
“Margaux, I need to speak with you.” She flicked her long braids behind her shoulders and said tersely, “We’ll be right there, Betty.”
I left them to their conversation and went inside the garden room. The atmosphere was dense with magic from the coven spell, and the inside of the salt ring looked like grains of sand caught in amber.
If the witches have changed their minds, I’ll have to take the spell down. How do I dissolve this much concentrated power? Break the salt ring and let it trickle out like air from a pinpricked balloon?
No, that wouldn’t work. With my luck, I’d end up flattening a city block.
Maybe I could absorb some of it, remove the floor tiles and direct the rest into the soil. It might be too much, though. Might singe the roots of the growing things in the earth.
Could I absorb it all myself? With Fennel’s help? Cecil’s?
Maybe. I’d need to find a way to siphon it over a few days, so it doesn’t hit me all at once.
Margaux stormed into the room ten minutes later. I was perched on my workstation stool running a scrap of silver chain from a charm through my fingers and staring into the coven spell.
“How dare those stupid wolves try to muscle through your park spell?” She lifted her chin. “Not only is it asinine, it’s not possible. The spell is far too strong.”
“The hunger beast broke through,” I said.
“That thing was from Hades, not a McMansion on the upper-middle class side of La Paloma,” she said, upper lip curled.
“Mason told you about how he personally trained The Org’s assassin army of Betty-haters?” I asked this of Bronwyn, who’d trailed Margaux into the garden room.
She gave me a sober nod. “I didn’t know before. I would’ve told you. Both of you.”
I believed her. She’d kept secrets, sure, but very few that she’d had control over.
“So, now you both know how much danger I’m in—and why.” I stopped fidgeting, dropped the piece of chain into the trash can by my workstation. “And how much you’ll be in, if you connect yourself to me.”
“You’re referring to The Org,” Margaux said.
“And the wolves. And my grandfather. And, apparently, something I may not know about that’s capable of sidestepping my park spell and summoning eyeball-meat demons.
” I took a moment to look into their eyes, really hold their gazes.
“If you want to cancel the coven spell, I won’t hold it against you.
In fact, I’ll think you’re pretty damn intelligent. ”
The witches remained silent for a minute or two. From the looks on their faces, they were in deep contemplation. I wanted to ask what they were thinking about but didn’t. They’d tell me soon enough.
Margaux rose, her spine as tall as the stem of a corpse flower, and went to her side of the circle. She stood there, saying nothing, seemingly waiting.
Bronwyn followed after a long moment and went to stand by her side of the circle. When her toes edged the outside of the salt circle, both witches looked expectantly at me.
Margaux spoke first. “It’s time. The spell is at its strongest now and will remain so for another hour. Our bonding chant will take at least that long. Ground yourselves.”
“Agreed.” Bronwyn secured her long braids with a hair tie she wore around her wrist. “I’ll begin, if that works for everyone here.”
“You don’t have to do this. You’re choosing a side if you align yourself with me. You’ll have a target on your backs.”
“We know that,” Margaux said snippily. “We aren’t fools.”
“We’ve made our decision, Betty,” Bronwyn said. “It’s time to make yours.”
There’d been moments over the last few years where I’d felt alone in my magic. When an elemental witch was separated from the power that had helped form her at birth, it was agonizing. Not in an “I’ve just been shot” way, but in a “thousands of cuts from a very sharp blade all over my body” way.
There’d been days where it had hurt to walk, to move my head—to breathe.
In the months following Mom’s death, grief had pecked and prodded and gouged, stabbed into me until I’d lost so much of myself that I felt like a shadow, a spirit of a person.
I was half-alive, mostly dead, and deeply, seemingly irrevocably, hurt.
Had it not been for Ida—and, later, Fennel—I wouldn’t have held on long enough for the soil to heal my magic.
In this moment, with these witches, I felt similarly healed.
A tear trickled down my cheek. Another. I did nothing to stop them, nor did I try to explain them away. I simply slid off my stool, took my place on the salt circle, and grounded myself.
Margaux joined next, and as our chanting voices harmonized, I discovered something wondrous. There was astonishing strength in witches who bonded together by choice instead of by blood. There was unexpected love in being chosen rather than having had the choice made for you by an accident of birth.
We carved openings in the salt ring. Mine was the size of a handspan, theirs half that. As the leader, I was expected to absorb the most magic—and the responsibility that came with it.
Magic trickled through the opening, oozing like honey onto my hand. When I didn’t move away or push back, it must’ve taken that as permission, because it slammed into me, and if my body hadn’t been anchored to the ground, I’d have likely been blown through the glass garden room wall.
It hurt.
Stinging pain, like when blood first rushes in after you’ve accidentally slept on your arm all night. I set my jaw, gnashed my teeth, did my best to bear it.
It was over almost before it began, and yet it felt like a decade had dragged by while I was pinned there.
Fennel wandered in at some point, and Cecil poked his small purple hat out of the lavender.
I noticed them the way I did everything—the silent bloom of the daisies Cecil had planted last month, the bean sprouts in the dresser drawer breaking through the soil, the whisper of a slight breeze dancing across the dusty tile.
I felt it all. Everything. Everywhere.
It was beautiful and right and the worst pain ever.
I wanted to relive it immediately and also run so far away that it would never again find me.
I existed in dueling realities that both made perfect sense.
Rather than fleeing, I welcomed the beauty and terror, the weight of responsibility that bowed my spine and tried to bear me into the floor.
Tried.
As Ida had said, I was the most responsibility-driven person she’d ever known. Bottom line, there was no burden the spell could fabricate that would overpower me.
The intensity wound down, and when I opened my eyes, the three of us were seated cross-legged inside the broken salt circle, knees touching.
“I vow to honor you with my allegiance and my magic,” Bronwyn said.
“I vow to honor you with my allegiance and my magic,” Margaux said.
“I vow to protect and honor you with my allegiance, my power, and my heart.”
The promise poured from my lips like prophecy. There’d been no script, only raw emotion, a natural flow of words, and a sacred urge that arose from the birthplace of all magic.
“For as long as this coven exists, be it a year or an hour, I accept the responsibility of your safety and pledge to ensure you are kept safe from harm while in my care. If you are hurt, I will see that you are healed. If you are threatened, I will stand between you and your adversaries. If I fail, I will avenge you. This is not only my pledge, but also my honor.”
“As it is ours,” the witches said together.
We joined hands.
I shivered as the last dregs of power played over my skin. Bronwyn did, too. Margaux stiffened. She sat up so straight one might think she had a metal rod for a spine. The witch had the gravitas of a statesman. She wouldn’t allow herself to relax even if the goddesses themselves commanded it.
“It is done,” she announced. “Now we protect the park.”
Bronwyn quickly added, “I know your saguaros have it under control, but there’s no reason we can’t run a secondary spell outside theirs.”
“A failsafe?” I asked, warming to the idea.
“Think of it as a first line of defense,” Bronwyn said.
“The saguaros will do most of the heavy lifting, but anyone trying to break in will have to go through the other spell first. Then, we can bridge the two, so that they power each other and yet work independently if the other falls—a little like the coven spell we just did.” Fennel strolled up, and she stroked her fingers over his back.
“I have a grimoire that describes a spell similar to this one. I’m pretty sure I have it down, but I should check my memory against the grimoire. Just in case.”
Margaux gave her a quizzical look. “Why? You have an excellent memory.”
Bronwyn didn’t look like she believed her. “I’d just feel more comfortable going over it again.”
“If you insist.” Margaux set her gaze on me. “If it’s all right with you, Coven Mother—”
“Must you use that term?”
“—I suggest we feed the saguaros a little of our magic now and put up the veil spell tonight. That will give Bronwyn time to do her research, and your soil time to adjust to the coven’s magic.”
“Okay, but I’ll need to ask permission,” I said.
“Permission?” One of Margaux’s thin brows arched high on her forehead. “You’re an elemental witch. Is permission required?”
“The earth and I have a symbiotic relationship. If I started throwing my weight around without paying proper respect, I’d lose the soil’s trust.”
“Trust is important.” Bronwyn’s tone matched her smile—small, fleeting, distracted.
I left the witches in the garden room with Fennel and Cecil and went to sit in front of Red. The ring of flat, warm stones surrounding him had once been his grave. I was struck anew by how lucky I was to have him back.
He’d grown so much. Only a couple months ago, he’d been a foot tall.
Now he was close to my height, three or four inches over five feet.
He’d flowered twice and was already sprouting an arm, even though saguaros in the wild didn’t achieve that until they were at least fifteen feet tall—and that sometimes took a full century. Magic had its benefits.
“Red, I respectfully ask your permission to bring my coven’s magic into the park. It’s not forever, but we—well, I—have enemies who want to destroy the protection spell, and this is a way to lend even more magic to it.”
I explained the rest of the plan.
“None of this happens without your permission. When Mom turned the park’s protection over to you, she meant it. I filled in when you were … gone, but the spell is yours again.”
Moonlight glinted off Red’s spines as they rippled up one side of his thick body and down the other. Approval? I wasn’t sure. He was usually pretty overt when he felt strongly about something.
“You can say no. Also, if you say yes then change your mind at any point, we’ll stop. Signal me, the way you did earlier, when you warned me about the shifter intruders, and we’ll cancel the whole thing.”
A small peak formed in the soil between us. A smooth, gray stone pushed through the volcano-like opening.
I picked it up, turned it over in my palm.
The reverse side of the stone was covered in tiny black hearts.
I’d drawn them with a permanent marker one day while I was lying under Red, daydreaming about an upcoming school dance and a boy named Eduardo.
A week later, I found out Eduardo had asked another girl to the dance.
Red had been there when I’d cried over it.
I squeezed my fingers over the rock. “You kept it all this time.”
Red’s spines rippled again.
“Thank you for your trust,” I whispered, not because I wanted to be quiet, but because emotion had stolen my voice. “And everything else.”
I tucked the rock back into the mound of soil, and Red smoothed the dirt until it blended seamlessly with the ground.