Single Witch's Survival Guide (20 page)

CHAPTER 12

IT SEEMED LIKE such a simple thing, my discovery at Melissa’s. And yet, it opened completely new horizons.

On Tuesday morning, I summoned the entire magicarium into the living room. It took us a couple of minutes to find seats for everyone—several chairs were filled with boxes from the familiars’ not-entirely-completed move.

Fortunately, Rick was on duty at the firehouse, so there was no need to excuse Emma’s boyfriend from our conversation. Mundane companions might accept the existence of magic in the world around them, but this conversation was going to get into the specifics of a new approach to witchcraft. It was going to be a challenge for everyone concerned, and I didn’t want outsiders muddying the waters.

Everyone stared at me expectantly. I’m sure they thought I was going to change the living arrangements yet again. Maybe I’d have the warders take over the house, and the rest of us could live out of the minivan… I forced myself back to the challenging topic at hand.

Swallowing hard, I said, “I realized something important yesterday, something I’d forgotten for far too long. It affects all of you, and I’m sorry I didn’t think it through before now.”

That got their attention—a magistrix apologizing. I hurried on. “I’ve been coming at this all wrong. I’ve been focusing on the individual elements of our working, pushing us to perfect each component part of our magic. Over and over again, I’ve invested our efforts in mastering the tiny details.”

Emma nodded and Raven shrugged. Of course I’d focused on perfection of form. That’s what witches
did
. I held up a hand to forestall their questioning.

“But you know I planned on something different for the Academy. I told you that, your first day here. We were going to find communal balance, work together with mingled powers as we relied on the reflective nature of our familiars. But we failed the first time we tried that, and then I changed our focus. We never found our new paradigm.”

This was it. Time to launch the Jane Madison Academy 2.0.

“Okay,” I said. “Starting today, we’re doing something completely different. We’re tearing down the old classification schemes—herb magic, separate from crystals, separate from runes. Instead, we’ll do them all at once, all combined.” Oops. From the blank looks on their faces, I’d lost them completely. Frustrated, I paced two steps away, then whirled back to face them. “We want to purify an altar cloth. What do we need?”

They stared at me like I was speaking in tongues. “No,” I said. “I’m really asking you. What do we need? Emma?”

She shook her head, obviously not understanding where I was going. She glanced at Caleb, then at Kopek, but both men offered confused shrugs.

“Don’t think about it!” I said. “You walk into the basement, and you collect the supplies for the ritual. What do you grab? Emma!”

I shouted her name, jolting her out of her hesitation. “A silver bowl!”

“Raven, what else?”

“Rainwater collected under a full moon.”

“Exactly. And what else?”

Emma answered. “A branch of rosemary, to sprinkle the water.”

“Or?”

“Sage,” Raven said. “And a source of fire.”

“Exactly!” I almost clapped my hands, but I realized they might think I was mocking them, treating them as if they were preschoolers. And that was not my intent, not at all.

“It’s all about classifying the information,” I urged. “Instead of thinking about rituals as individual bits, as solitary elements where we succeed or fail on our absolute understanding of each tiny piece of magic, we’re going to focus on the whole. How does the silver reflect the power of the rosemary? What happens when the fire kindles the sage? When the droplets of water turn to steam, what effect does that have on the bowl, on the rosemary, on the sage? It’s all connected. It’s all a system. We’re all parts of the whole.”

Raven shook her head. “But every witch has an innate bond to a single practice. We’re best at herbs
or
spells
or
crystals. Emma and I work well together because I can manage herblore, and she can balance the elements.”

“You
have
worked well together,” I agreed. “But you’ve never grown beyond your basic skills. You haven’t moved past the magic you could work when you were children.” I rounded on Emma. “You know what I’m talking about. You felt it when we cleaned the kitchen.”

She nodded slowly. “But washing up was such a wee thing. I could grasp it all at once. The energy it would take to hold onto everything at the same time, in a Major Working…” She trailed off.

“It
will
require energy. But we’ll structure a system for that. A new balance. Throughout the working, we’ll each give where we have strength. Then we can take where we have need.”

I could tell they wanted to believe me. They wanted to understand. They wanted the time they had spent at the magicarium to mean something.

I held out my hands to them, pushing the last drop of my enthusiasm into my explanation. “We’ll all be working together, so we can share all the tricky parts. We’ll help each other past the truly tough sections. Three witches. Three familiars. Three warders watching over us. We’ll have more than enough power to do it all.”

David cut through my excitement with a chainsaw. “It’s too dangerous.”

I whirled to face him. I had expected resistance from my students—I was asking them to rethink the essential way they used their powers. I wasn’t surprised by the skepticism on Kopek’s face either, or Hani’s. My proposal would require them to find new methods to bolster our powers.

But David? Splashing cold water on my proposal when I’d barely finished presenting it? Belatedly, I realized I should have brought him into the loop before I shared this plan with everyone. But I hadn’t, and now I had to live with the consequences. What was it I told Melissa yesterday?
I had to sell the idea.
And that sale began with letting him express his objections.

“Why is it too dangerous?” I asked.

“You’ll raise too much energy before you have enough control to manage it.”

“You’ve seen me do it before! This is exactly how I work with Clara and Gran.”

He shook his head. “Your students have more raw ability than your mother and grandmother. Your method multiplies forces, creates greater energy than any of its component parts. Until you learn how to manage that, it will be Lughnasadh, all over again. In a worst-case scenario—”

“What about a best case?” I couldn’t keep from cutting him off.

He shrugged. “I’m a warder. I don’t spend time on best cases.”

I
knew
he was a warder. We’d both made that abundantly clear, ever since the Fourth of July. But I wouldn’t get anywhere by losing my temper. I needed allies.

“Caleb? Tony? What do you think?”

I’d purposely addressed the guys in that order. Caleb was sitting opposite Emma, taking his cues from her. I’d only known the man for a month and a half, but I’d learned that he built things. He crafted solutions—whether that meant picking up a hammer or adjusting to a witch with a new man in her life. He was my best bet for structuring a resolution that would work for everyone.

We all looked at the tall, blond warder expectantly. He leaned forward on his chair and dangled his hands between his knees. “I guess I see it this way. It’s the bottom of the ninth, and we’re down by two runs. The bases are loaded. Two outs; the count is three and two. You bring in your best pinch hitter, and he swings for the fences. Everyone goes wild. But if the ball doesn’t get out of the park, you’ve got to have a coach you can trust at third base. If he makes a mistake, waves home the guy from first, and the runner gets tagged at the plate, you’re into extra innings. You might lose it all. But if he holds up the runner, your game is tied, and you’re still batting.”

I stared at him. He might have been speaking Urdu, for all I understood. But if I asked him to explain, was I going to get another extended metaphor about table saws and nail guns and ball peen hammers? Or could it be worse than that? Did Caleb have other hobbies I didn’t even know about?

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t quite follow that.”

Tony cut in aggressively. “He’s saying it’s a dangerous situation, and you have to manage the risk. Will you trust your warders if we say you’ve gone too far? Will you break off a working if your warder says to?”

I heard the old belligerent Tony in the questions—the man who had challenged David at swordpoint, the fighter who had punched a car in mindless anger. But the aggressive Tony was the same man who had waded into battle to protect his witch from an unknown enemy with unknown skills on unknown territory. He could be hot-tempered and short-sighted, but he was also fiercely devoted to Raven.

Caleb nodded, accepting Tony’s translation. “If you let us have the final say on what is and isn’t safe, then I’m in.”

Tony shrugged. “Me too.”

I could see David wasn’t happy. He was the only one of the three warders who had witnessed communal magic of any real complexity. He understood the multiplier effect; he had watched Gran and Clara and me become more than the sum of our parts.

But he also knew how much this mattered to me. If I couldn’t pursue a new method of teaching, the magicarium would never complete a Major Working by Samhain. David’s veto would effectively terminate the Madison Academy.

And then Norville Pitt would win.

I saw David reach the same conclusion, at nearly the same instant in time. His jaw tightened, and he raised his chin. “All right,” he said. “But only if you promise. If any warder says a working is too dangerous, will you stop immediately?”

“I will,” I said and waited for him to nod his acquiescence.

I looked at my witches. “Any questions?” When there weren’t any, I squared my shoulders. “All right. Let’s eat a light lunch, and then we’ll get to work. By the end of today, I want to complete a purification ritual.”

Chalk one up for the librarian team. I’d successfully sold an idea.

* * *

Alas, I’d always been an optimist.

By the end of Tuesday, we were nowhere near completing a purification ritual. With David taking first shift as warder (or babysitter or third base coach, whatever
that
really meant), we witches had gathered all our supplies and moved out to the stretch of sun-dried lawn between the house and the cornfield.

We’d discussed the various steps for the rite, defined how we were going to proceed. We’d attempted to balance the energies inherent in mugwort tea, in fresh-needled rosemary sprigs, in rainwater and silver and sage and spells.

And we’d failed miserably, spectacularly, each and every time we tried to work the rite.

There were simply too many things to keep in balance. There were the four literal elements—earth and air, fire and water. And there were the component tools—herbs and water and a silver bowl. And there were the words of a spell, along with its undefinable arcane power.

Mostly, though, there were the jagged edges of our personalities. If I tasked Raven with taking the lead, she could rapidly build a bridge to Emma’s strengths. But as soon as she brought me into the loop, that span twisted, torquing under my unfamiliar weight and collapsing into nothingness.

If Emma started, she could bond with me. But the instant she brought Raven into the meld, my balance was overwhelmed by the other woman, by the distraction of her overwhelming physical presence.

And if I started, we got absolutely nowhere. I was diverted by the flicker of power between the sisters. My attention snagged on Emma’s British facade, by the foreign rhythm of her speech. I lost my concentration when Raven ran her fingers through her hair, highlighting the violet stripe at her temple. There was always something that kept me on edge, something that kept our work from flowing.

Once, just once, I found the proper balance. It was late afternoon. Despite numerous applications of sunblock, we were all turning pink from the sun. We had consumed gallons of water to fight dehydration. We were sweaty and tired and ready to give up for the day.

But I took energy from Emma. I fed it to Raven. I felt the swirl of our collective forces growing, swelling, as if it were a new-birthed animal breathing on its own.

The potential astonished me. Even I had never expected to find so much pure energy available. I gasped in surprise, and the bond broke. The energy washed over us, as shifting and shapeless and impossible to grasp as water pouring from a broken balloon. I came back to full awareness of the mundane world, of David’s hovering form.

I was actually shaken by that last effort. Maybe we
were
attempting too much. Maybe I
was
stretching the definition of witchcraft too far.

I shoved my doubts as deep as I could, though. “Excellent,” I said, faking the confidence of a proper magistrix. “We’ll pick up from here tomorrow morning.”

My witches lost no time stepping away from our circle. They were both steady on their feet, but I could see fatigue in the slope of their shoulders. Kopek tagged along beside Emma as she made her way to the porch, to the farmhouse and its air-conditioned rooms. The familiar looked like a weary puppy who didn’t have anywhere else to go. Hani might have given Raven the same sort of support, but she shook her head irritably, telling him to take a break before she headed indoors alone. I suspected her fingers were itching for her phone. Maybe she wanted to play spare-time cinematographer without his intervention. In any case, Hani took offense and stalked off into the forest.

I looked at Neko. “Well? I’m sure you have plans, too.”

He actually blushed. “Tony and I had talked about going out tonight.”

“To a party?” I tried to picture Tony in a costume—
any
costume—and I came up totally empty.

Neko shook his head. “To dinner. We were thinking about trying the new steakhouse in Frederick.”

The new steakhouse. I couldn’t imagine that red meat had been Neko’s first choice. Maybe his relationship with the warder actually
was
something deeper than I’d believed.