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

  Kopek flinched as the first bolt of lightning struck the ground. Emma reached out to him, comforting him, gentling him. Neko added to the wash of safety, confirming that the Fire was controlled, was ours to command.

  Outside our circle, Caleb raised a hand. I recognized the lines of concern on his face, his worry about those he had sworn to protect. Emma raised her own palm to match his across the circle, across the coruscating bands of magic light. The warder settled back on his heels, accepting his witch’s command, even as he tightened his grip on his sword.

  We moved to the west, to Water. This time, it took more of my energy to walk away. I needed to spare more of my strength to control the Fire, to tame the lightning that wanted to reach out across the half-sphere of our working. My fingertips tingled, and I recognized the danger of fatigue.

  I steeled myself and concentrated on building our bond with Water. Sodalite for confidence, for wisdom and the calming of inner conflicts. The stone was the color of deepest, clearest water, echoing its quadrant’s core. We added Solomon’s seal, with its simple oval leaves and bells of white flowers. The plant radiated wisdom, the following of hunches, the achievement of dreams. We anchored the corner with Ansuz, the slanted F that resonated with the power of the oldest gods rising from primordial seas. Ansuz whispered of wisdom and harmony and truth, and we drew upon its strength as we spoke our spell.

  “Powers of the West, of Water,

  Reach out to your questing daughters,

  Show us paths to joy, to pleasure,

  Fill us in unstinted measure.”

  I stumbled over the opening rhyme, and it took Raven and Emma’s combined voices to bring me back on track. For a heartbeat, I thought we had failed, that we had neglected something, overlooked some vital part of our ritual.

  But then I sensed the water hovering around us. It teased me, like a scent I could barely follow across a meadow, like the memory of a dream. There was no water in the ground, no water that flowed—that was the cost of four summers of drought. But water was layered in the air, in the humidity that pressed against our flesh.

  We needed more power to extract that water for our spell. I reached for Neko, silently demanding his assistance. He braced himself against my pull, digging in his physical heels, as if to avoid the crumbling edge of a cliff. I pushed again, demanding more, reaching past my own familiar to Hani, to Kopek. After an endless moment, an epoch outside of time and space, Raven and Emma bolstered my claim. Their familiars responded to my need, reflecting power toward me. I collected it all—the energy of the familiars and the strength of my students, my sisters in this working.

  Finally, we were able to pull Water into the ritual. It started like the finest of mists, the faintest haze. Encouraged by our success, I poured more of my core strength into our summoning. I repeated the last two lines of the spell like a child’s incantation against monsters that lived beneath her bed, and the mist turned to drizzle, to a fine, steady rain.

  And then it was time to drag myself to the last quadrant, to Earth. Each step felt like an epic journey. I realized I was clutching my students’ hands; Emma stood on my right and Raven on my left. We supported each other as we moved, lending strength that none of us could remember possessing.

  Moldavite was the last stone for our working, green and glistening. The mineral was extracted from the core of the earth, from the dying breath of a meteorite that had plunged into our world eons before. Its crystals represented our higher selves, the heights to which we could aspire from our earth-bound base.

  We added frankincense, that ancient gift, the essence of meditation and spiritual devotion. We anchored the corner with the Inguz rune, a stylized diamond, the archaic symbol of Earth.

  It was hard to remember the words of the spell, almost impossible to recall the specific order of the rhymes. Raven stammered as we started, and all three of us stopped, blinking with stupid exhaustion. Emma took the lead, then, starting our incantation, and we finally joined in like a ragtag band of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “Powers of the north, of Earth,

  Recognize our humble worth,

  Bring us patience, strength, and wealth

  That we might turn this lake to health.”

  I knew before we finished the words that we had not sparked the working. Earth was beneath us, of course. Our feet were anchored in the sand of the beach. Nothing we said, though, nothing we did, made anything come alive. Nothing turned the ordinary world to magic.

  Pushing down a whisper of despair, I started to recite the spell again. I reached out for the combined strength of our familiars, tugging on Hani and Kopek, bringing them into a tighter circle with Neko. But as I reached the last words, I knew we had failed.

  Raven and Emma understood the same. Raven was shivering; I could practically see her heart beating through the pale skin of her chest. Emma’s face was drawn; the circles beneath her eyes looked bruised.

  I looked through the dome, trying to measure what the Court members were making of our failure. Was there partial credit on this exam? The eight observers, though, were lost to me. I could not sense them directly.

  For the first time since arriving at the beach, I started to panic.

  Our careful balance over the elements we’d already summoned began to fray. A gust of wind swept toward us from our right, from the east, where we had confined the power of Air. The blow surprised me; I’d taken for granted our ability to maintain the control we’d already invested in our working.

  As if to mock my over-confidence, a bolt of lightning broke free from the south. Fire branched from the apex of our protective arch to the ground, flashing bright enough to blind us. The steady rain of the west surged with strength, pelting the ground beneath it, splashing us with energy that burned like acid.

  Each magical surge ate away at the little power we still maintained. The summoned elements danced to a symphony we no longer controlled. They were out of balance, spinning without harmony. We needed Earth to settle them, to bind them, but Earth was the one thing we no longer possessed the strength to summon.

  Raven and Emma tried. I felt them slip back into their age-old bonds, the twinned power they had shared as infants. They plumbed the depths of their familiars, swept through to include Neko in one final, desperate bid. I tried to offer up my own strength, tried to give them the raw force they needed, but I was too weak, too bound up in the spells we had already cast.

  The storm began to slip away. Wind lashed the rain. Lightning sparked inside the tempest, tracing our limbs, framing our faces. I heard an osprey cry above the crash of thunder.

  I dropped to my knees, as if I could better reach the Earth in my defeat. Nothing. No connection. No bond.

  Raising my eyes up to the arch above us, I longed to tell my students I was sorry I had failed them. If only I could release the familiars who had given us so much. There had to be some way to assure the warders that this failure was not theirs; they had kept us safe beyond anyone’s expectation.

  My vision was gone. My sight was filled with lightning, washed away by rain. The scream of the wind kept me from blinking, stunned me past any ability to see. I curled in upon myself, folding into a protective ball.

  There was one bond left to me, though. One link to the world. I felt it, solid as iron. David. As I lay on the ground, silenced by despair, he stood before me like a door to safety. The amber pendant I had given him shone out like a newborn sun, illuminating the path I had to trod.

  I staggered to my feet, taking steps like a baby. I stumbled and caught myself against our etheric arch, against the boundary set by our warders. My hands were splayed across the field of energy, fingers stretched, palms flattened.

  David matched me on the other side. His hands touched mine, pulsing across the barrier. We were bound as warder and witch. Awareness pumped from him to me, augmented by the amber drop we both had worn.

  And that was when I felt it. A stir of energy. A whisper of witchy power.

/>   It was a scent that veiled my vision. A flavor that scratched my fingertips. An image that flickered through my nose with every breath I gasped.

  Energy. Pure, astral force.

  I flattened my palms against David’s, voicing my amazement with silent thought. We were far beyond the need for speech, past the puny limitations of letters and syllables and words. I imagined my query, and there it was, around us, within us. I lived the question of how I could harness this strange warder’s magic, how I could transform it into something wild and witchy and wonderful.

  And through the transparency, through the invisibility that was the core of David’s strength, I understood the answer.

  He was not offering me warder’s power. He could not do that, no matter how he wanted to save me. He was channeling from another source. He was delivering magic from other witches.

  From Clara.

  Now that I understood, I could taste my mother’s familiar strain of magic. I thought a question toward David, and he cast an answer back to me. This was why he had traveled to Arizona. Clara had primed him, building this channel so she and her sisters could pour power into our working. He was my warder, and he was Clara’s warder, and he could bridge the gap between our workings. Clara’s energy surrounded me, cradled me, sparking against the amber drop.

  A bolt of lightning flared, blinding with pure electric fire, and I was back inside our circle. My russet gown whipped around me, shredding in the wind, in the brutal wall of rain. My vision restored, I could see Raven once again, her vulnerable flesh striped red with welts from the storm. Emma hunched on the ground, her burgundy gown pooling around her like blood.

  These were my students. These were the women who had trusted me, who had sworn to join me in a test greater than any of us had imagined. I had worked with them, studied with them, lived with them.

  I reached out to them with new tenderness. I gathered them close as if we had all shared a womb. I spread my strength above them, sheltering them, feeding them, nurturing them.

  And then, I pulled down the full force that Clara offered through David. I inhaled magic, filling my lungs, suffusing my bloodstream. I poured my mother’s offering into my limbs, letting it vibrate down my thighs, through my calves, into my feet. I collected the loaned strength that my mother gave so freely, and I called Earth into our working. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, I stabilized our spell, and then I balanced all the energies—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

  Raven roused first. She understood what I was doing, even if she could scarcely glimpse the source of my new power. She anchored herself and drew on her oldest mastery, on the herbs we had worked into our ritual. She collected the magic of angelica and lovage, of Solomon’s seal and frankincense. She magnified them inside the stony chasms of her magic, echoing them in the fractal channels of her ability.

  Her determination brought Emma into our loop. As Raven and I tamed the storm, Emma plumbed the fathomless lake of her own powers. She excavated those depths, brought up reserves she’d never dreamed of harvesting.

  Stable now, balanced, we manipulated Air and Fire. We managed Earth and Water. We moved our life-giving storm over the lake, and we fed the damaged world around us, weaving a new tapestry to replace the one that had been torn. We strengthened the fibers of animals, of plants, of the very earth that had been damaged. We healed the destruction of days, months, years of drought.

  Together, we measured when we had accomplished our goal. Together, we recognized the success of our working. Together, we tucked in the last wild tendrils of our healing storm, freeing the wind, loosing the rain, releasing the final wild charge of fire into the earth.

  Through David, I offered a grateful thought to my mother, to all her gathering in Sedona. I shivered as I finally broke that bond, shuddering down to the chambers of my heart. I joined hands with Raven and Emma. We let the candles flare one last time, then die away. We worked with our familiars and warders, dispersing the last stray energy of the dome that had sheltered our miracle.

  We stood together on the beach.

  The eight Watchers seemed stunned. There was a stillness about them, a silence of communion.

  We could have waited for them to bestir themselves. Perhaps we should have waited. But Raven and Emma and I were still attuned to each other, still locked in the perfect balance of our communal magic. As one, we turned on our heels and strode to the end of the dock. We summoned our familiars to move beside us, and we gathered our warders to watch at our backs.

  As we gazed out over the perfect lake, a shadow swept across the water. My heart recognized the osprey before my mind did. In the darkness, I could not tell if we watched a male or a female, but I could see the massive bird swoop down to the water. As it rose, I could make out its talons, closed around the silver curve of a fish. And I heard the raptor’s cry of greeting as it settled in its new nest, high atop an oak tree on the western shore of the lake.

  CHAPTER 19

  AFTER THAT, THINGS blurred.

  The court members conferred among themselves, and the gravelly bass voice eventually made an announcement: “By order of Hecate’s Court, this Major Working of the Jane Madison Academy is complete and acceptable to all those who judged. From this day forward, the Academy shall enjoy all rights and privileges of a Class Two magicarium in the Eastern Empire.”

  And just like that, they were gone—disappeared in a golden cloud and a shimmer of magic. I might not have been able to follow their astral departure if I were at the height of my powers. Now, weary and weepy with our success, I did not make any effort to figure out the magic of their transport.

  Instead, I yielded to David’s increasingly insistent pressure. I led everyone back to the kitchen for yet another shared meal.

  While we witches shed our waterlogged garments in favor of sweatshirts and pajama bottoms, Neko took over in the kitchen. He moved with authority, as if he’d been born to the job (which, as a familiar, he had been). In short order, he had Caleb firing up the grill. Tony was tasked with providing beverages. Hani and Kopek were pressed into service as porters, ferrying the entire contents of the pantry and the refrigerator to the dining room table.

  Emma and Raven watched, looking as dazed as I felt. I’d taken care to congratulate them as we walked back from the lake, but now words seemed superfluous. They leaned their heads close together, and Raven whispered something that made her sister laugh.

  I smiled and headed toward my bedroom, but David intercepted me at the stairs. “You need to eat.”

  I tried to edge past him. “I need to phone Clara.”

  “She can wait.”

  “I need to thank her!”

  “She’ll be grounding herself. Feeding her own witches. You can talk to her tomorrow.”

  Clara must be as exhausted as I was. She had poured her strength across the miles. It wasn’t fair she should be left to recover alone. She should have a warder to protect her, to stabilize her. “Go,” I said. “Make sure she’s all right.”

  “She’s fine,” David said. “There were two dozen women there, pooling their strength. They were warded by others.”

  How? I started to ask. Why? When?

  But there would be plenty of time for questions in the morning. For now, I let my warder take me back to the table. I took the plate he settled in my hand. I ate what he fed me. I was vaguely aware that Tony was serving Raven in a similar fashion, that Caleb was looking out for Emma.

  At last, I stood beside David on the porch, watching as my magicarium dispersed into the night. Glancing toward the garage, I saw Rick Hanson’s pick-up sitting on the driveway. Caleb shook hands with the fireman who was waiting for Emma in the shadows on the porch, and then the warder made his way toward the barn. Emma and Rick settled on the glider, his arm around her waist, her head resting on his shoulder.

  Hani and Kopek shuffled toward the greenhouse. Tony escorted Raven to the garage. He opened the door to the apartment, and made as if he would lead her up the stairs, but she to
ssed her head and turned him about, sending him back into the night. As Raven shut the door, Neko edged up from the shadows and slipped his hand into Tony’s. The men disappeared into the shadows, heading in the general direction of the renovated barn.

  I could scarcely keep my eyes open. David closed and locked the front door, and he guided me up the stairs. His hands were gentle as he helped me out of my clothes. He slipped out of his own silently, seemingly without effort. His chest was warm against my back, and I sighed and settled close against him. “I love you,” I whispered as he wrapped his arm around my belly.

  “I love you, too,” he murmured, and his kiss was soft against the tender hollow behind my ear.

  * * *

  He was gone in the morning.

  The sun was high. A quick glance at the clock confirmed it was nearly noon. I struggled out of bed and shimmied into shorts and a T-shirt.

  In a working nearly as great as the ritual we’d completed at the lake, the kitchen was somehow clean. Three fresh-baked blueberry muffins sat on a plate. I treated myself to one, spread thick with butter, then decided that a responsible witch kept her energy up. The second was even better than the first, and the third was best of all.

  I collected the phone from the counter and went outside to sit on the porch glider.

  Clara first. One ring. Two. A clatter and a breathless hello.

  “Clara,” I said.

  “Jeanette!”

  I grimaced at the name but remembered my priorities. “I want to thank you—”

  “I can’t hear you!” She was shouting, loud enough to wake the dead.

  “Where are you?” I hollered back, feeling slightly ridiculous.

  “By the waterfall, in Oak Canyon! We’re restoring our energy by charging our auras!”

  Charging auras. My mother and her crazy New Age dreams. She obviously was none the worse for wear after our shared ritual. I shouted back, “Good luck! And thanks!”