Ari stared at the collection with raised eyebrows. “I’m not going to ask you what those are for, but…that’s an odd assortment of goodies,” she said. “Are you sure about them?”
I nodded. “About as sure as I can get.” I glanced around. “Are we ready? The cats are in the guest room, and we’ve got cupcakes and rum.” Traditionally, cakes and wine were appropriate for a ritual, but whatever worked was fine, in my opinion. There was a difference between ritual theater, which was best reserved for large groups, and working magic, which could get down and dirty and often called for substitutions.
“Okay, let’s get this party started,” Ari said, dimming the lights.
I lit the candles and stood back, staring at the table.
It was beautiful in the flickering light, with a shimmering black and silver cloth over it, and the crystal ball that sat in the center. To either side of the quartz sphere stood a gold and silver candle, and a double-edged dagger rested in front of the crystal. It was Ari’s blade. I had my mother’s athame—her ritual dagger—but I really needed to buy one of my own. I had spent too much time among those who were squeamish about Otherkin, including those of us who had witchblood. I had buried my magic for too long. Now I was letting it out. Like a butterfly, I was coming out of my chrysalis, shaking the dew off my wings, ready to fly.
As Ari picked up the dagger and began to draw the circle, a slow flicker of joy began to spread through my heart. I was home, and I was learning what it meant to be me again.
My name is January Jaxson, and I’ll be forty-one years old tomorrow. I’m a witch by birth, born into one of the families known for witchblood. My great-grandfather, Brian Fletcher, and his wife Colleen moved over from England. Our family powers descended through her, and together, they helped to found Moonshadow Bay, a quirky town that welcomed Otherkin of all persuasions, be they shifter, vampire, witch, or something else. And those something elses could be both interesting and dangerous.
I had been married for eighteen years before I realized it had been one long lie from beginning to end. I walked away after torching my wedding dress and Ellison’s tux, and trashing his convertible. He was downright lucky I didn’t cast a spell to make his dick shrivel up for good. Even though I still wanted to see him go down, I had stopped at filling his convertible with water.
Now, a little over a month since I moved home, I have an unexpected new boyfriend who likes the fact that I’m not bone-thin, I’m back in Moonshadow Bay and out of Seattle, and I have a new job that is shaping up to be a crackerjack career. So yeah, forty-one promised to be far less scary than I had first feared.
We were a third of the way through the rum when we decided to officially start the circle. Oh, Ari had already cast it, but then we got distracted by the cupcakes and booze. I didn’t drink a lot, but Ari and I had pulled a few all-nighters back in the day, and my birthday seemed like the perfect excuse to let loose and just relax.
“So, how’s work going?” she asked, pouring another shot of rum for us. She held up her glass. “Here’s to you and your new life!”
“I’ll drink to that!” I clinked her glass with mine and we downed the shots, then took another bite of one of the pineapple cupcakes with coconut icing that she had picked up on the way over. Together, the combination was absolutely scrumptious. Piña colada cupcakes for the win!
I settled back against the sofa—we had opted to sit on the floor—and let out a long, contented sigh. “I like work, but I feel like I’m ready for another challenge. The past few weeks I’ve been researching Bigfoot sightings around the area. I have yet to meet Mr. B., but after talking to some of the people who have seen him, I think I’m a believer.”
“Of course he exists,” Ari said. “Shifters exist, and vampires, and we’re both witches. Why wouldn’t Bigfoot exist? But I’m not sure I want to meet one. The sasquatch are dangerous and unpredictable, from what I’ve heard.”
“You think?” I asked, taking another bite of my cupcake.
“Oh, I know so. I had a cousin who was chased through a graveyard by one. He almost ended up falling into an open grave awaiting a burial the next day. If he had tripped into it, he’d never have made it out alive. He wouldn’t have been able to escape.” She shifted, crossing her legs into the lotus position.
While I was limber, I had not yet mastered that asana. I had taken up yoga again, wanting to be a little more flexible now that Killian and I were doing the hot-and-heavy several times a week. He was an ardent lover, and I had no complaints. He seemed to be enjoying himself as much as I was, but I wanted to spice it up, and that meant stretching some muscles that hadn’t been used for a while.
“How did he finally manage to get away?” I asked, thinking I should interview Ari’s cousin.
“He ran out onto the freeway. He said he’d rather dodge cars than try to hide from Bigfoot. He was convinced he was on the dinner menu. A police car saw him. He told them what happened and they thought he was drunk and took him into the station. When they found out he wasn’t, and saw how scared he was, they sent a car out to investigate but by then, of course, the creature was gone.” Ari pressed a napkin to her lips and poured two more shots of rum. “All right, let’s get this down and then start your ritual!”
I laughingly clinked glasses again and slammed the rum back, not even wincing at the warm spice anymore. We were both drunk, and it wasn’t the best idea to work magic from an inebriated state, but I was in that headspace where bad ideas often made perfect sense. And I wanted to make sparklies happen.
“All right, how do we do this?” When I turned sixteen, my mother had held a wishcraft ritual for me, but that had been long ago and far away, and fairly tame compared to what I was planning for tonight.
“Lemme think,” Ari said, wincing. “Well, you make three wishes—like the genie in the bottle type of wishes—we seal the energy after each one, and then go back to cupcakes and rum.” She grinned. “I think the ritual’s mainly an excuse to eat and drink, but it seems like the perfect way to cement your focus for the coming year.”
“That’s true,” I said, musing on the thought that I was actually turning forty-one. “I don’t know what I was so nervous about, you know? Right now, I’m having a lot of fun, I’m actually glad to see my thirties behind me, and the coming years are going to be so much more comfortable now that I’m away from Ellison.”
“Okay, then let’s start…what’s your first wish? Hold up the object you found to represent it, then state it aloud while focusing on the energy.” She set down her shot glass and straightened.
I followed suit. Immediately, the old energy that used to rise between us flared up. We had not only been best friends, but there had always been a magical spark between Ari and me. The magic we had crafted together always worked, and we had always achieved so much more together than separate. Ari was my attueind and we had known it since the first day we played together as children. Our mothers had recognized it, too.
There was a theory among the witchblood families that every witch had an attueind—a magical partner—somewhere, kind of like the soulmates theory, except the attueind usually wasn’t a lover. But the attueind was someone with whom the magic worked better, faster, and stronger. Your attueind’s energy would mesh so well with your own that you formed a whole. This wasn’t to say that witches couldn’t be powerful on their own. Some of the most powerful witches in history had been solitary, but sometimes, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.