“Yes, you say the spell and you bury it and then you are protected, but you need the urine of the person you are trying to protect, and that person is not cooperating.”
“Okay, moving on. What else did you bring?” I said.
Diana took a moment to glare at both of us.
“I expected this. We can do a short spell to try to control the situation and then another one to help clear your mind and focus on solving Tish’s murder.”
Alex started giggling. He had no tolerance for alcohol, and was not always on board with Diana’s magickal approach to life.
“Shut up, Ferguson,” Diana said.
Diana groped in her bag and pulled out a brown candle, a piece of paper, and a small bottle of oil. She wrote on the paper, and then turned to us.
“The current situation is that Sara and Tish have been killed. What should we ask for as an outcome?”
“That we figure out who did it?” I asked.
“Yeah, but we have to be really specific. Do we just want the person caught, or do you want to be the one who figures it out, or do you want the police to catch them?”
“Oh, come on. If that worked, I’d be burning brown candles every day asking to win the lottery,” Alex said.
Diana sighed. “You can’t ask for something like that. And you need to know the spell.”
“I don’t really care how the murderer is caught, as long as they pay for what they did,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll write that we want the murderer brought to justice.”
She wrote on the paper, slipped it under the candle, put a few drops of oil near the wick, and then began to talk quietly to it. Alex leaned forward to try to hear what she was saying, but other than the lilting cadence, we couldn’t make out the words. Diana lit the candle and said, “So mote it be.”
Alex leaned over and whispered to me. “What’s a mote?” He typically avoided Diana’s spell-casting if he could.
“It’s like saying ‘must’ or ‘may,’ but it’s very old.”
“That’s it then? Can we all have a drink now?” Alex asked.
“I think we should do one more thing—a banishing spell. I used it after my parents died, and it helped a lot.” Diana thrust her hand back into her bag.
“What do we do?” I sighed, resigned to a night of Wicca and whiskey.
Diana pulled a small velvet bag out of her tote and tipped it onto my palm. A black stone landed in my hand. She set a bowl on my bedside table and poured water into it, then stirred in some sea salt.
“Hold the stone in your right hand and close your eyes. Visualize your grief for Tish moving into the stone.” Diana’s voice was quiet and soothing. Even Alex was paying attention.
I held the stone and felt it begin to warm up in my hand. I imagined it taking on all the pain I felt today after Tish died and added all the sadness I had been carrying around for Sara and Jadyn. When I was done, the stone felt quite warm. She handed me a piece of paper and indicated that I should read it.
“Banishing stone, take my grief as your own. Banishing stone, set me free, so mote it be,” I read.
She pointed to the bowl and I dropped the stone into the water.
“Okay, stir it three times. Then we can take it outside and you have to throw it as far as you can away from the house.”
The stone was still warm when I took it out of the water, and I started to feel like maybe just the ritual of throwing my sorrow away would help. We trooped quietly through the house and out the back door. I threw it as hard as I had ever thrown anything. The stone arced high in the air and caught a glint of moonlight as it flew. I never heard it land.
20
The woods feel damp and close. My chest is tight and I gasp for breath but keep moving. The darkness makes the familiar woods threatening. Twigs and roots grab at my feet and legs. My hand flies up to block the branches as they slap past my face and shoulders. I am holding a leash and it is pulling me forward, but I know I will be too late.