5 Beewitched (6 page)

Part of me was still enthralled by the aspect of an actual witch ritual, but another part of me started getting a little anxious.

Uncertainty and doubt circled around me right along with the cinnamon incense they were burning next door. I shook it off. Or tried to. But this concern refused to go quietly into the compartment in my head where I’d stored “Worry About Hunter.”

I overheard Rosina and Lucinda exchange a few tense words, recognizing their voices from conversations earlier at the store. Their tones seemed dark and sinister as the night.

“This better work out,” Lucinda said, threateningly.

“I told you it would, now leave me alone.” I detected traces of doubt tinged with fear.

They moved off toward the house.

Soon after, Dy came outside and joined Greg while he added more wood to the pit from logs he brought from the back of his moving van. The guy had really come prepared.

Dy’s voice, even though low, carried my way. “I wish I hadn’t agreed to this,” my new neighbor said to him.

“All you have to do is get through this evening,” Greg replied. “Then she’ll leave you alone.”

“Rosina’s had enough of her, too.”

Greg gave Dy a reassuring hug before she went back inside.

My secret surveillance was starting to bother me. Should I be listening in like this? These little snippets of conversation were private, personal, none of my business. But there wasn’t anything wrong with a person sitting out in her own backyard, was there? Patti certainly would have agreed. Besides, I was intrigued by what I was overhearing, and it was entertaining to puzzle out interpretations of their meanings with so little information.

My imagination took off to the moon.

The “she” Dy had referred to had to be Lucinda. I’d just assumed that Dy was a willing part of the coven, but what if she wasn’t? And what had gone on between Rosina and Lucinda? Why the worry? What was the
it
that had to work “or else”?

Before I could ponder those questions further, Lucinda came back outside. At first I couldn’t tell what she had in her hand, but as she walked close to the flame that Greg had built up to a roaring blaze—OMG! She was carrying a scary-looking double-edged dagger!

That certainly got my undivided attention, and not in a good way. Little hairs stood at attention on the back of my neck, and not because of the dip in air temperature, either. My heart decided all on its own to pick up the pace.

It’s one thing to get a bunch of women together around a fire. It’s quite another to introduce a dagger that size.

I stopped to consider a serious question regarding these strange people. Were they good witches? Or bad ones? Clearly, Patti thought the latter (she didn’t seem to believe in the former), but I’d just assumed they were Wiccans: not exactly mainstream, but harmless. But what if they really thought they were Satan’s children and were into human sacrifice? And what if that somebody was Aurora? She was the newbie, filling in for a last-minute vacancy. Or so they’d said. What if they had been pretending, just so that they could lure in an innocent naïf like Aurora to shed her blood? My guilty imagination conjured up a sinister plot. Lucinda would be the one to do the deed. Or maybe that was Greg’s job. Looks can really be deceiving. Just because he was drop-dead handsome didn’t mean he was a good person.

If not for the chill of the October night, I would be sweating bullets.

Why was I imagining such terrible thoughts? This was Moraine, Wisconsin. Human sacrifices didn’t happen here. If someone around here wanted to get rid of a problem person, they ran that person over with a car or shot them while out on their daily walk. Guns are big in my area. Knives the size of this one aren’t common at all.

Unfortunately, I’d lost control of my reasoning process and bad stuff just kept popping in uninvited.

Then suddenly I went all calm—which, ironically, worried me even more. Had I been zapped with a spell after all? Had Patti been right? Probably not, or I wouldn’t feel so nervous. Did a person under a spell know it, though? Somehow I doubted it. What if . . . ?

Stop that
, I said to myself with as much firmness as I had in me.

Where the heck was my man when I really needed him? Come to think of it, he rarely was available when it mattered the most. Like when I discovered a wood tick buried in my leg. Where had he been then? Gone, that’s where. And this was way huger than a bloodsucking bug!

What about Patti? Why wasn’t she creeping through the darkness, watching for trouble, prepared to insert herself if something wicked raised its ugly head? On second thought, Patti tended to create more trouble than she stomped out. Plus, she was more scared of the witches than I was at the moment, so scratch the possibility of her actually making a heroic appearance.

I tried calling Hunter, as that brief but glorious moment of calm disappeared and my fear for Aurora returned as strong as ever, though I wasn’t too hopeful that he’d pick up. He usually silenced his phone when working a case, something we’d discussed numerous times without me getting my way.

He actually thought his cell phone was for his convenience, not mine, using it any old way it suited him. I’d been up to my neck in alligators a few times when the situation wouldn’t have happened in the first place if my guy had just answered his stupid phone.

The last remaining relaxed hairs on the back of my neck rose as I went over more options for an intervention to rescue Aurora from what I now considered a potentially dangerous situation.

It would’ve been nice if we had a decent police chief, one I could call with a serious emergency witch alert, a cop with a professional attitude who wouldn’t give me grief and disparage me for being a good citizen. One who could be counted on to make a few drive-bys, look-ins, and check that everything was copacetic. Chief Johnny Jay, current law enforcer and big bully from way back, was absolutely
not
that guy. Johnny Jay is one of this town’s few drawbacks, up there at the top of the list with Lori Spandle. Both are petty and vindictive. It’s as though they both drank the same bad water from a contaminated well when they were growing up.

I could just imagine our conversation:

“We need police protection over on Willow,” I’d say. “Right now, and hurry.”

“Fischer,” he’d reply, “ever hear the story of the boy who cried wolf?”

“But, but, evil witches might be sacrificing Aurora. I saw a knife.”

I could imagine him, kicking back, plopping his Dumbo-sized feet on his desk and smirking into the phone. “Uh-huh. Whatever, Fischer.”

But even redirecting my attention to the chief and all his flaws didn’t stop my scary thoughts from pushing through, tapping on my brain for attention. So I tried to focus on the positive side. Those crescent cakes smelled heavenly, and I’d spotted several bottles of wine, which was always a big draw with me, and I was lonely without the company of my man. See? All perfectly legit reasons for what I was about to do, the one and only option still available to me (other than running and hiding, which I’d considered but reluctantly rejected as cowardly).

Instead of turning tail, I found myself trotting directly into the radiating heat of the burning fire, and asking the only man in the group if I could join the circle.

Four

I found out pretty quickly how much (or rather how
little) input a guy has in a coven’s decision-making process. Sure, I’m used to women ruling roosts, given all the matriarchs in my family—and of course my honeybees are girls and don’t have much use for their drones—but this group seemed overboard with female dominance and control.

“Sure, if it were up to me . . .” Greg said. But it turned out that he didn’t get a vote, and wouldn’t be staying for the ceremony like I’d thought, so his support wasn’t one bit useful. At least he wasn’t a crazed warlock; one less obstacle for me to worry about. His lack of magical influence was a huge relief to my sense of community given that he was originally from here and was Al’s son and all.

“No males allowed,” one of the witches said, overhearing us.

“It’s the girls’ thing,” Greg told me. “The inner sanctum and all that. I’d vote to let you stay if, uh, I had a vote.”

So I asked the next witch who came along, careful to avoid Lucinda (who was nowhere in sight, thank my lucky stars), hoping for a more positive response.

My request to participate created a lively discussion among the witches. It was a numbers thing. Thirteen and all that. What was the big deal? Twelve, fourteen, I couldn’t see the difference. Like, who was counting and who cared?

Aurora’s voice came from the background with a rather weakly stated vote in my favor. Since she owed me big-time for getting her this gig, I’d expected more of a positive response from her quarter, but I guess since she was only a fill-in, she didn’t much count, either.

Some of the women had big issues with my presence. Some didn’t.

A few were on the fence. Like Rosina, who had sort of bonded with me at the store when I’d admired her necklace. Right now the crystal in the center of it was sparkling from the reflection of the fire’s flames.

A huge cloud of earthy, exotic patchouli oil hung over us.

“She’s uninitiated,” one dark purple–caped witch said.

“A mundane!” one with pointy glasses added.

That certainly didn’t sound like a compliment.

“A muggle,” somebody else said with a snorty little laugh.

The sassy part of me wanted to say, “Just because I sweep with my broom instead of ride it isn’t a reason to discriminate against me,” but that wouldn’t have helped my case. Besides, I hadn’t seen a single broom yet to reference.

Eventually Dy came outside with Lucinda, who settled it once and for all. “Absolutely not!” said the ringleader. Hers was apparently the deciding vote, as head honcho, dictator, the high priestess, or whatever they called her, because everybody fell into line, clammed up, and went about their business like I no longer existed.

“You’ll have to leave,” Lucinda said to me, giving me a big frightening sneer in the yellow light from the flames. But when I blinked, the scary image had vanished, and she was turning away. “This male has to go, too. Dy, what is he still doing here? Out! Now!”

I slunk back to my yard, instantly missing the warmth of their fire, while Rosina walked Greg to the street and stood watching as he drove away. She lingered there as if in deep thought before returning to the backyard.

At least I’d had an opportunity to see everything up close. They’d constructed an altar with witchlike tools on it—an ornate pewter goblet that reminded me of a scene in an Indiana Jones movie, a black kettle (à la the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz
) and bowls of what was probably water, and a large saltshaker. Then there were bunches of candles, cinnamon incense, and Dy’s wand. The dagger had been placed right in the middle of everything like it was the most important piece of the ritual.

I shivered just thinking about that knife. And redialed Hunter.

He still wasn’t answering his cell phone.

I sat in the deep dark of my backyard, watching from afar as the women formed a circle and began to fill the space with their moving bodies. Voices rang out. I heard several references to the moon and to goddesses (which I liked a lot), and found myself really wishing I was in their midst. Lots of chanting and dancing ensued. I was shocked when I glanced at my watch and saw it was already midnight. Midnight? It seemed like the evening had just begun. Had I lost track of that much time? Or fallen asleep?

I checked my cell phone and realized I’d unintentionally silenced it. How could that have happened? Of course, it figured, Hunter had left a recent message—he’d been successful with his mission and still had a little paperwork to do but thought he’d check on me. I did my usual “Thank God he’s okay” thought, shot him a quick text to let him know I was okay, and swung my attention back in the direction of the ceremony.

Hunter was too far away to come to anybody’s rescue if things got “dicey” soon anyway. It was up to me to make sure Aurora stayed safe.

Magic was in the air, electric energy zipping back and forth in the nighttime. I felt it like a physical presence. The women seemed lost in the freedom of the ritual as flames from the fire flicked skyward.

I stood up, pulled my fleece tighter around my body, and edged closer, careful to stay in the shadows, trying to pick out which one was Aurora. I scanned for her familiar face, but with full capes flapping, the circle seemed filled with way more than thirteen witches. More like thirty.

Suddenly, everybody stopped moving as Lucinda approached the altar and picked up the knife. Gazing into the sky, she began waving the blade in what looked like a figure eight.

Then the witches formed a more perfect circle than their earlier undulating one and passed around the goblet. Then each of them ate a little crescent cake. I couldn’t help noticing that the double-edged dagger wasn’t on the altar where it had been a moment before. And it wasn’t visible in Lucinda’s hand, either. With all the loose clothing, it could be anywhere.