Single Witch's Survival Guide (The Jane Madison Academy Series) Read online

  David cast our circle that morning. I felt the familiar surge of his warder’s power every time we tested the boundary with flame. I could relax into that safety; I could draw from it. And there was a part of me that reveled in the knowledge that I was keeping David from his secret study. Every minute David spent protecting us was one I denied him from spending with the Court’s papers.

  That reality wasn’t lost on him. At the end of the day, David saw us witches back to the house. He handed Raven and Emma over to their attentive warders, and he checked on the welfare of all the familiars. Then, he excused himself from our supper, and he headed downstairs. Once again, I was asleep before he came to bed.

  In the morning, I realized I’d actually seen more of David when he lived in the barn. That didn’t matter, though. I couldn’t cut back on our course schedule now. The magicarium and the Mabon working had to come before everything else.

  Wednesday was the last of the elements: Earth. Barley and Corn. Amber. Garnet. Inguz. We witches eased our bodies between individual grains of dirt. With the mid-day sun beating down upon us, we buried ourselves up to our knees. It took all our concentration to shake ourselves free, siphoning off our carefully invested power so we released our bodies without destroying the rattling stalks in the nearby cornfield, without undermining the porch where Caleb once again kept anxious watch as Tony guarded us.

  And then we took four more days to repeat all those lessons—Air, Water, Fire, Earth. Practice, practice, practice, drumming our knowledge indelibly into our minds and hearts.

  The following Monday, we rested. Not because I discovered any sense of mercy. Not because the Academy’s need was any less urgent. Rather, because Emma came scratching against my bedroom door in the grey light before dawn. Her voice quavered like an old 78 record.

  “Raven needs to sleep.”

  “We’re all tired,” I said as I heard David roll over in bed behind me.

  “This is more than feeling manky! She was sleep-walking last night. She got to the front door twice before Tony stopped her!”

  That got my attention. “Where was she going?”

  “How do I know?” Emma was anguished. “She did this when we were children. Before we understood our powers. Before we learned to manage them.”

  I was still calculating my reply when Tony loomed out of the darkness. “Raven will not work today.”

  David smothered a curse as he pulled himself out of bed. He came to stand behind me, his bare chest against my back. He rested one hand on the doorframe, automatically staking a claim in the conversation.

  By then, Caleb had stumbled out of his bedroom. His Diamondbacks T-shirt was rumpled, as if he he’d slept in it for months. He scratched at his rough beard, and I was surprised to realize he’d stopped shaving at some point in the past week. He planted his feet and said, “Emma needs rest, too.”

  It had been two months since my students had arrived at the farmhouse. Two months since David had faced Tony at swordpoint, and I’d used the Word of Power to protect everyone. To control everyone. I’d learned from that experience and from the intervening time. I could yield on this relatively little thing and still maintain power over the magicarium. Perhaps we’d all be better off in the long run.

  “Fine,” I said. “But we’ll be back at it tomorrow morning.”

  I closed the door and leaned against it. I could hear a whispered conversation between Caleb and Emma before both bedroom doors closed. My students and their warders were going to catch up on desperately needed sleep, and that seemed like a brilliant plan to me.

  But David was pulling on his pants.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I was supposed to help your mother in Sedona tomorrow night. With the shifted schedule, you’ll need me here. I’ll go out there today.”

  “What does Clara have you doing?”

  He just looked at me. I already knew the answer: Ask Clara.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call her now.” I’d wake her up. And she’d be even less coherent about her magical plans than usual. So first I tried, “This can’t wait till after Mabon?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry.” He cupped my jaw with his hand, and I heard honest regret in his voice.

  “Come back to bed.” I closed my fingers around his wrist. “For just a while.”

  He broke my hold by moving his hand to the back of my neck. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t?” I asked as he stepped away. “Or won’t?” My heart pounded as I waited for his answer.

  “I need to go. I’ll be back before tomorrow morning.” He didn’t even try a perfunctory kiss.

  I grabbed the phone before our bedroom door had closed. My first call went to Clara’s voice mail. I hung up, waited for the line to disconnect, and tried again. Voice mail. On the third try, she picked up.

  “What sort of ritual are you working out there?”

  “Jeanette,” she mumbled. “I was dreaming about you.”

  “Why do you need David to ward you?”

  “In my dream, you stood by the road with a sign. It said, ‘Will cast spells for cake.’ Are you that hungry, Jeanette?”

  “Jane,” I said, trying to correct her. “Wake up, Clara. I really need to know this. What are you working on with David?”

  “Cake…” She sounded like she was half-way back to dreamland. “In Rocher’s Dream Quests, cake means sharing your workload. You can’t do everything yourself, Jeanette.”

  I was trying to share my workload with my students. And my warder. I had a copy of Rocher’s Dream Quests somewhere in the basement. It was part of a set that included Animal Divination and Cloud Scrying. I put about as much stock in Rocher as I did in the Vortex.

  “Clara!” I put real steel into my voice, trying to force my mother to wake up. “Can’t your working wait until after Mabon?”

  “No, Jeanette. The cake will be stale by then.”

  “What are you talking about? Clara? Mother?”

  But I heard a doorbell ring in the background. “I have to go, Jeanette. Someone’s at the door. Sweet dreams.”

  And she hung up before I could tell her it was David at the door, that he’d used his warder’s magic to leave me and travel to her. I glared at the phone long after she was gone.

  After that frustrating phone call, it was impossible to get back to sleep. I finally gave in to the inevitable and stumbled down to the kitchen. Of course, the only thing that sounded good to me was cake. Preferably chocolate. With lots of extra frosting. I settled for almond meal biscuits, left over from Raven’s cleanse. No amount of butter could transform them into something edible.

  The next day, we were back in the academic saddle. David warded our working as if he’d never gone to Sedona. I shifted our arcane focus from the four elements to the specific building blocks of our ritual.

  As we had done for our disastrous Lughnasadh ceremony, each of us witches would commence our Major Working with lighting a candle. For Mabon, they would be traditional autumn colors—gold and brown, yellow and orange. I procured the beeswax candles from my extensive stash, and we spent four entire days working with them, learning to sense their power with our astral forces, without the least resort to mundane senses like vision and touch.

  Once again, this was more than a simple study of witchy tools. I urged my students to focus on the wholeness of candles in the magical process—how they interacted with our warders’ protective walls, how they drew from the elements, how they fed back heat and light and power, drying out nearby herbs, scorching crystals.

  Over and over, we lit the candles, separately and then together. We joined our powers, Raven and Emma, then Raven and me, then Emma and me. Finally, at the end of our fourth day, we found the perfect balance, all three of us witches braiding our power together, pouring it into a quartet of flames.

  Power spun between us like a web, joining us together, supporting us. I took strength from the violet of Raven’s astral force; I smoothed it with the silver power that
Emma poured into the working. I poured my own golden energy into the mix, and I basked in the accompanying leap of the candle flames.

  This was what I had imagined when I created the Academy. The unity, the harmony—everything I’d found lacking in the Washington Coven’s traditional workings. I saw wonder spread across my students’ faces.

  Tony and Caleb leaped forward the instant David let his warding circle die down. For the first time, though, since we’d begun to work in earnest, my students didn’t collapse against their warders. Rather, they stood tall and strong, proud of what they’d done. What we had done. Hani and Kopek basked in the warders’ praise. We all ate dinner together that night, nine of us, gathered around the dining room table.

  Alas, that was the last time we were gathered in relaxed household harmony.

  With one successful communal working under our belts, I doubled our training efforts. I was pushing my students harder than I ever had before. I was pushing myself harder than I ever had before. I had never come close to a sustained outpouring of energy like the one I now demanded.

  Every third day, David watched over us. Otherwise, I scarcely saw him. He was spending hours in the basement; his office light was on whenever I went downstairs to collect tools, to check books for half-remembered details about rare herbs, to compare the relative strengths of various crystals.

  And he was traveling back and forth to Sedona. I caught whiffs of smudged sage from his clothes, along with the tang of juniper. He carried back desert dust on his shoes. I could smell the sharp scent of creosote on his pillow, even when he wasn’t there.

  I gave up trying to reach my mother. This was the woman who had ignored me for twenty-five years. I could hardly command her attention now. Better to stop trying, and to invest my limited energy in my Mabon working.

  So, my students and I took two days to explore Preparing the Earth, finding the most effective ways to channel the energy we raised. We wanted to make sure our power went to actual healing instead of dissipating into nothingness. We invested three full days on Protecting the Innocents, making sure no blameless bystanders—human or animal—suffered from a backlash of our working. I had trouble sleeping those nights, and my dreams were haunted by the cries of ospreys.

  We finally got to Rainmaking, to the delicate process of harvesting water from air, by way of all our witchy tools. For two straight days, we witches stood beneath an etheric arch, generating mist and drizzle and a steady, driving rain. Our fingers and toes were shriveled every time we took a break for sustenance.

  “All right,” I said, after we had built and dissipated a particularly vigorous thunderstorm. “Let’s take a quick break for dinner, then reconvene.”

  I waved my hand for Caleb to remove his protective warding, and his sword sliced through the circle he’d cast hours before. I ignored the taut lines on his face as he handed out towels.

  “Neko,” I said, as the others dragged themselves toward the porch, dry clothes, and the promise of supper. The autumn nights were already growing shorter. My familiar’s face was in shadow as the sun sank below the treeline. “I want to get started on incense as soon as everyone’s eaten. Could you make sure we have enough rosemary?”

  “No.”

  I was already concentrating on the other elements we needed—sandalwood and pine, dried oak leaves, and cinnamon. I blinked. “What?”

  “I said, no.”

  “You can’t say no. We’ve only got nine days left.”

  Before he could answer, there was the sound of tires crunching on gravel. I looked to the driveway and could just make out Rick Hanson’s F-150 behind the glare of headlights. Suddenly, I understood how Gran had felt when I begged her to let me have some elementary school girlfriend spend the night, with said friend standing right in the middle of our living room. I shook my head and started over to tell Rick it wasn’t a good night, that he had to leave.

  Neko put his hand on my arm. “Emma needs this. We all need a break.”

  Before I could argue, Rick called out a friendly greeting. Neko immediately waltzed over to the driveway and looped his arm through the fireman’s.

  “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes! Emma’s in the kitchen. Come right in.” Neko kept the burly man between us as he crossed the lawn. I barely resisted the urge to buffet him with an arcane slap. Traitor. Neko didn’t give a damn about Emma’s love life. He was only focused on his own, on getting Tony to a remotely private corner of the crowded house.

  I gritted my teeth and started to collect the discarded tools from our hard day’s labor. Crystals and runes and wands were strewn about the waterlogged grass. My legs felt unbearably heavy, as if I’d run a marathon, or somehow given in to Melissa’s pressure to spend an entire day doing yoga in some overheated studio.

  Melissa. I’d been a bad friend for the past couple of weeks. I’d listened to her wedding complaints on voicemail, responded to her texts when I could slip in a few spare seconds, but I owed her a trip into town, a long night of Mojito Therapy and maid of honor consultation.

  After Mabon. After the Madison Academy had completed its Major Working. After, after, after…

  I dragged myself up the porch steps. Spot whined from his place on the glider. Poor dog. I’d barely spent any time with him during the past month. I absently patted his head before I reached for the door. With the familiarity of frequent use, I turned the knob and leaned in at the same time, letting the weight of my body push my way inside.

  Except, I didn’t move.

  Plucked out of my fatigued haze, I looked down. No, I’d turned the knob all the way to the right. The door just wouldn’t budge. I pushed a little harder. Nothing. I swore and put my shoulder into it. Nada.

  I folded my fingers into a fist and pounded with the meat of my hand. My gesture was met with an explosion of laughter on the other side, and the door finally burst open.

  Emma’s cheeks were as bright as an Empire apple. Rick was roaring, apparently oblivious to her embarrassment. He seemed rather proud, in fact, of her bee-stung lips. Emma clutched her blouse closed, and I realized she and her boyfriend had managed to cruise past first base in the short time since he’d entered the house.

  “Get a room!” Hani shouted to the happy couple from the living room.

  “Close the door,” Kopek added in a mournful voice. “You’ll let in all the mosquitoes.”

  I muttered a retort as I pushed my way into the foyer. Of course we’d let in all the mosquitoes. And every last one would find me. That’s what mosquitoes were born to do.

  Amid a chorus of good-natured teasing, Emma and Rick disappeared upstairs. Hani crowed toward the kitchen, “Hope you don’t need anything from your room, Raven! You’re stuck with us rejects in here!”

  A quick glance confirmed that Neko and Tony were nowhere in sight. They must have commandeered the familiars’ dormitory, forcing everyone else into the confines of the dining room. Maybe that’s why I felt like I was caught in a frat house on a Saturday night.

  As if to make that point, Caleb leaned forward and cranked up the volume on the television set. I wondered if his warder services included a guarantee that no one would ever overhear his witch in a compromising situation. According to the 200-decibel bellowing that echoed through the living room, some Diamondback had just made the third out in the bottom of the first inning, leaving the bases loaded.

  As the T.V. roared to commercial, Caleb swore and snatched up a beer, one of those fancy Czech things that had caused so much grief when the warders moved in. The bottle had a complicated swing-top clasp, and by the time he managed to release the wire brace an arc of beer was splashed across David’s antique coffee table.

  Caleb hollered for Raven to bring him a rag. She shouted back, then sauntered into the room with a sponge. She was filming as she walked, clearly working on some artsy angle for the picture.

  With no magic at play, I could hardly censure her for the camera. Instead, I plowed through the wall of sound toward the kitchen. A glass
of ice water, that’s what I needed. And maybe an apple. A handful of walnuts.

  I fixed a small plate and carried my supper upstairs. But I could still hear the baseball game; it echoed through the floorboards. Alas, that noise wasn’t actually enough to drown out the sounds from the bedroom next door. Emma’s headboard was hitting the wall with frightening regularity. From the accompanying exclamations, my student definitely did not believe in the Victorian admonition to “lie back and think of England.”

  I snarled and picked up my plate and glass. There was one place in this house where I could steal a single, silent moment to eat my long-overdue meal. One place no one else would dare to venture. I stomped down the steps and through the living room. I threw myself down the basement stairs, moving fast enough that I could be sure not to confront Neko and Tony. I tumbled into David’s office.

  And I came up short.

  Because David wasn’t in Sedona that night.

  His back was to the door as I charged in. He was standing in front of the gigantic map, the one dotted with precise pushpin markers of covens and magicaria.

  But now, the map was scattered with photographs as well. Images of Norville Pitt were sprayed across the surface—Pitt with women in golden robes, with men in formal attire. Pitt with gatherings of witches and warders. Pitt with a collection of carved wooden creatures, familiars who had not yet been awakened.

  Court documents hung behind some of the photos—ribbons and grommets gleaming in the harsh overhead light. String stretched between the compositions—red and blue and green and yellow, linking image to image, paper to paper. Across it all was jagged writing, a disjointed scrawl. Some of the letters had been scratched into the map, over and over and over again. Words were slashed through, underlined with ink that had run down the wall.

  I was looking at the obsessive creation of a serial killer from every bad movie and television show that had ever been aired.

  And my warder completed the image. David’s hair stood on end. He had one shirtsleeve rolled up, but the other was ragged and torn. His hands trembled as he tried to shove a pushpin through a massive stack of papers. Even from the doorway, I could hear him muttering, a terrifying word salad about Pitt and money and witches and time.