Sorcery and the Single Girl (8 page)

A little more than eight weeks away.

Teresa Alison Sidney’s smile was slow, and I realized that she already knew what Haylee was going to say. She already knew the price for my entrance into the Coven. “Speak, Haylee. What have the sisters determined? How will Jane Madison prove her worthiness to join our ranks?”

Haylee’s answering smile was almost feral. Something about her next words made her vicious. “She will set the centerstone, Coven Mother. When the sisters gather beneath the moon of Samhain, Jane Madison will set the centerstone for our new safehold.”

I
stood in the dimly lit kitchen, juggling a plate of finger sandwiches and a glass of punch, contemplating whether I could manage to slip a petit four onto my plate without collapsing my entire carefully balanced little world. It wasn’t just the food that I worried about, of course. I was wondering about the witches who surrounded me.

Centerstone? Me? Just what the hell was I supposed to do to set a centerstone?

For the thousandth time, I glanced over my shoulder at the front room of the house, asking myself what the men were doing in there. Hadn’t they heard the end of the witches’ ritual? The loud crack of thunder, as Teresa Alison Sidney traced another pentagram in the air with her whole hand while she intoned, “So mote it be.”?

None of the other witches seemed concerned that their warders were absent. In fact, none of the other witches even acknowledged the familiars slinking around the edges of the table. I had already shot Neko half a dozen glances, silently remonstrating with him that he was not allowed to eat the entire platter of tiny crab cakes, that he could not fill his teacup with cream, that the cream puffs had to be eaten in their entirety—white, fluffy filling
and
pastry.

I was scowling at him again, trying to get him to back away from the artful skewers of grilled shrimp, when Haylee stepped up to my side.

“No hard feelings, right?” she asked, extending her perfectly manicured hand and flashing me a smile. Now that she was no longer encircling me with ritual power, I could see that she was as thin as a model. Her collarbones stuck out with a vehemence that I’d never seen in person, only on the glossy cover of
Vogue.
I took her fingers as she said, “Haylee James.”

“Jane Madison,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous. Every woman gathered around this midnight feast knew my name. I was the reason they had come. Me, and my new mission regarding their centerstone.

“I hope that you don’t think I was calling you out, trying to give you any sort of special grief.”

I had thought just that. I had thought that she enjoyed standing in the center of the circle of witches, that she’d taken pleasure in my flash of confusion, in my lack of understanding. I’d thought that I was transported back to the worst bits of elementary school, of high school, of college, and I had not appreciated the sensation that every other witch in the Coven knew what was going on while I was attempting to ad-lib from a very old, very outdated version of the play we had decided to stage.

“Of course not,” I said, and I managed to smile.

Haylee reached past me and took one of the petit fours, popping it into her mouth without worrying about balancing a plate and a glass, without worrying about anything at all. When she had swallowed the morsel, she leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially, “Teri always does such a nice job with these get-togethers. Half the time, I think that’s the only reason we let her be the Coven Mother.”

Teri.

Teresa Alison Sidney, to me. Terrifyingly powerful, all-knowing leader of the Washington Coven, to me.

Teri, to Haylee.

I was up against more than the most popular girl in school, here. I was up against the entire Old Girls’ Network.

Once again, I shot a glance toward the front room. Why hadn’t David warned me about this? Why hadn’t he told me who I’d be dealing with?

And then I thought, maybe he hadn’t known.

Well, that was absurd. He’d been affiliated with the Coven his entire life. Warding was the family business, he’d told me. He’d even been drummed out of the warders corps, on a temporary basis, for breaching the witches’ rules. He knew what was going on here. He had to.

If only I did.

Haylee flashed me a sympathetic smile. “It’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?”

I tried to match the quirk of her lips, pretended for just a moment that I had her devil-may-care flair. I shrugged and attempted an airy “Just a bit.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Really?” I realized how plaintive I sounded, and I hurried to cover my wistfulness. “It’s just that I don’t have any idea what’s coming next. I don’t know what people expect of me. What they want me to do.”

What was I saying? Why was I talking to this woman? Had she cast some spell to make me confide in her?

As if to confirm that dark thought, Haylee raised a perfectly manicured finger to the base of her throat. I realized that she wore an ornament there, a delicate amulet that rested on a silver chain so slight that I could barely make it out in the dim light. I could not keep myself from stepping closer, from staring at the device.

A torch. The same torch that I had seen on David’s key chain. “What is that?” I asked, before I could stop myself.

“This?” Haylee touched the jewelry again, and her voice conveyed a shrug, almost as if she were saying,
This old thing?
When I nodded, she said, “My Torch. The symbol that I’ve dedicated myself to Hecate.” She looked around the room. “We all wear them. Teri presents them to us, when we’re accepted into the Coven.”

Teri
again.

“Oh.”

Well, that response made me sound absolutely brilliant. Like I was a shrewd judge of witchcraft. Or jewelry.

I must be even more tired than I’d thought. As soon as those words crossed my mind, a yawn began to grow at the back of my throat. I thought that I could hide it, that I could swallow it away, but I could tell from Haylee’s arched eyebrows that I wasn’t quite successful.

“I know,” she said in a voice that wasn’t quite sympathetic. “It’s all strange when you’re new to the Coven. Your mother certainly wasn’t able to keep up with us.”

“Clara?” My voice cracked with incredulity. When had Clara come to the Coven? When had she met the witches? And, far more importantly, why hadn’t she said anything to me? “What happened with Clara?”

“Let’s just say that she wasn’t given any major assignment, shall we? No centerstones in
her
future. Poor thing’ll be lucky if she learns how to read jade runes.”

“She’s actually quite skilled at jade runes!”

Why was I defending Clara? Well, it was one thing for
me
to challenge her, to say that she was a lousy witch and a worse mother. But I wasn’t about to let a perfect stranger get in on the game.

“Really.” I could tell that Haylee didn’t believe me. “Well, I suppose we might have been mistaken. Some women are just so nervous when they come before the Coven. It didn’t help that your mother was so worried about your grandmother. I don’t think that either of them had stayed up past midnight in a long time.”

Either of them. So Gran was in on the silent conspiracy as well. Anger rose up in my chest, competing incongruously with another yawn.

Apparently oblivious to my distress, Haylee went on, “I suppose it’s
possible
that we all drew the wrong conclusion. We might have been thrown by neither of them having a familiar.”

Well, of course, neither one had a familiar. Neither one had known she was a witch until I’d spilled the beans last year. And it wasn’t as if Gran or Clara could have marched into Macy’s to snatch up a magical helpmeet or two.

Familiars, I knew from my reading in the past year, were only created with the expense of a great deal of magical energy. When a particularly gifted witch died, she could encapsulate her power in an animal, feeding her spectral energy into its body, storing the raw stuff of magic for other witches to draw upon. Not every witch had a familiar—the valuable resources were generally allocated only to the powerful within any given Coven. So it wasn’t at all surprising that Gran and Clara had no familiars.

As if on cue, Neko chose that moment to abandon his stalking of the food table. He materialized at my side like a ghost, licking his lips. I wondered how many treats he had stolen while I’d been talking to Haylee. Avoiding my dagger glance, Neko cocked his head to one side and scratched at his ear. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d begun to whistle a tuneless little song—anything to make himself seem more innocent.

Apparently unaware of the tension sparking between Haylee and me, he asked, “Do you think that Teresa Alison Sidney will bring out any more of the salmon canapés?”

Haylee sniffed, and I immediately realized that she did not routinely speak to other witches’ magical assistants. “Teri is not in the habit of providing extras for familiars.” Again, I felt that strange instinct to defend someone close to me, to explain away Neko’s hunger. “Especially now that people are heading home,” Haylee added before I could speak.

I looked around, surprised to realize that there
were
fewer people in the room. The door to the men’s club at the front of the house now stood open. While I couldn’t see inside from my current angle, I could just make out the shadow of a familiar ducking inside and then, less than a minute later, re-emerge with a tall, sleek man.

The warder had clearly been summoned by the black-clad witch’s servant. Confident and poised, the man crossed to Teresa Alison Sidney and bowed smoothly, raising her hand to his lips. She smiled tightly, expressing equal measures of satisfaction at the honor and world-weariness at the familiarity. The warder rose from his gesture and offered his arm to his witch, guiding her toward the door without a glance in my direction.

And suddenly, I knew that it was time for David to rescue me. It was time for him to make his obeisance before Teresa Alison Sidney, to say whatever needed to be said, to do whatever needed to be done. I was falling asleep on my feet, and the notion of waiting one more minute for my warder to appear was almost enough to bring me to tears. “Neko,” I said, but he had already sensed my command; he was moving toward the far doorway.

I turned back to Haylee. “Thank you for your…conversation.”

“I’m afraid that I’ve upset you. I didn’t mean anything negative about your mother or your grandmother. It’s just that they didn’t have the power we were led to expect. Nothing at all like
yours.
”

“No,” I lied, and then I realized that she might think that I was agreeing with her assessment of my relatives’ witchy abilities. My tongue seemed thick in my mouth as I hurried to clarify, “I’m not upset.”

“Good.” Haylee smiled and settled the fingers of one hand against the pulse point in my wrist, even as she once again touched the Torch that flickered against her throat. “Because I really do look forward to working with you. Maybe we could get together for coffee sometime. I do a lot of business with galleries in Georgetown—I’m an interior decorator.”

I smiled at the vague invitation. Haylee wasn’t actually so bad. She was reaching out to me. She was being sociable. She was welcoming me into the heart of the Coven,
assuming
that I would join the sisterhood, rather than betting against me. She was being a friend.

And if I had any doubt as to the goodwill behind her words, Haylee smiled winningly. “You know that you can ask me for help. With
anything.
”

“Thank you,” I said, and my response was made almost fervent by David’s appearance in the doorway. I was scarcely aware of his steps across the room; I could barely watch him say his farewells. All I knew was that he settled his hand on my arm. I found myself stammering goodbye to Haylee, babbling something to a calm, collected Teresa Alison Sidney. I cut off yet another yawn as I glared at Neko, forcing him to come and stand by my side.

And then, finally, David guided me out the front door of that strange and mysterious house.

The pentagram across the threshold had faded away. As we walked into the wall of humid, late-summer air, I could sense the power that had once been housed in the doorway. Its living, electric thrill was gone, though. The man with the sword had departed as well, and I could not say that I was sorry to miss his shadowy threat.

I was suddenly so tired I could barely move.

I was so tired I did not bother to reprimand Neko as he hissed at another familiar, a birdlike man who hovered by his own mistress’s car door, waiting for her to get settled before her warder turned his key in the ignition. I was so tired I didn’t notice Neko opening the back door of David’s car, ushering me onto the long, leather seat, making sure that my legs were inside before he closed the door and sat up front.

David was silent as he drove us home, retracing the tree-lined roads until we drove over the Key Bridge, working our way through Georgetown’s cobbled streets. He again applied some warder’s trick to find a parking space directly in front of the Peabridge. As David helped me to sit up, helped me to maneuver out the car door, onto the curb, onto the flagstone garden path, Neko skipped ahead.

My familiar opened our cottage door with his own key. He hovered in the living room, suddenly solicitous, but David shook his head. “I’ll help her,” he said. “Go to sleep.” Neko shrugged before heading down to his basement lair.

“I’m fine,” I said, but a yawn betrayed me, and I sounded like a cross child.

“It can be exhausting, entering a safehold for the first time.”

“You could have warned me.”

“No,” he said seriously. “I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to. You needed to meet the Coven on your own. Those are the ancient ways.”

He led me toward my moon-washed bedroom. I remembered the first time he had done this, the first night that I had ever stretched my powers beyond their natural strength. As if David had a cat’s night vision, he removed my fused glass necklace, eased my earrings from my lobes. He loosened my hair from its precarious chignon.

In the past ten months, he’d had occasion to put me to bed a dozen times. He never took advantage of the situation, never brushed against me in a way that conveyed anything more than strictly professional interest.

Not that I wanted him to. He was my warder, not my boyfriend.

But I couldn’t keep from leaning against him, couldn’t help but turn my face toward his as he helped me out of my dress.