“What? What’d I say?”
Faye cleared her throat delicately. “We need a fire, but it isn’t the same kind of ritual.”
“Well, then, what is it? Do we all get naked and dance around trees and yodel to the moon this time? This is all new to me, guys. I don’t know wh—” It took that long for the slight smiles to register in my mind. The smiles that had started with “get naked.” “Uh,” I said, very loudly in the faintly grinning silence. “Uh. Guys?”
“It’s a ritual of body.” Faye’s eyes were very, very wide. So wide, in fact, that I suspected she was holding them that way deliberately, to keep herself from laughing. “It’s a, um…”
“Sexual ritual,” Marcia said dryly. Faye blushed. I backed up so fast I fell over.
“What? A what? Awhat?”
“Performed specifically by the Mother and the Father,” Marcia went on. I shot one horrified look at the Father—I couldn’t even remember his name—and was offended to see that he looked just as dismayed, if less surprised, as I felt. Then I remembered I didn’t care if he didn’t want to have sex with me, because, “I am not having sex with him!” Pause. “No offense.”
He waved his hand in an understanding gesture, his expression bordering on strangled. I scrambled to my feet and put my hands on my hips. “No way, no how, noway—”
“But you must,” Marcia protested.
I overrode her, my voice getting louder and louder as I repeated, “No way, nohow, no WAY—!” It wasn’t the most eloquent argument I’d ever made, but it was right up there in the running for most heartfelt.
Garth pulled into the parking lot before we went through another iteration. We all broke off to watch him park. He tumbled out of the car nearly before the ignition was off, taking a dozen long steps to me.
I had never actually been swept off my feet before. Garth, who didn’t have the height advantage, managed it. He lifted me off my feet and spun me around in such a tremendous hug that my back popped. I staggered when he put me down, and he grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me. I gaped while the coven members laughed and broke into applause. “The part of the Father will be played by Garth tonight,” someone said in a dry, amused tone. Garth picked me up and spun me around again.
“They say they’ve never seen anything like it.” His grip on my shoulders hurt, when he put me down the second time. He shook me, a little vibration that felt like it wanted to explode into enthusiastic violence. “It’s like all his healthy cells finally noticed the cancer and are all like, ‘What’s this bullshit going on?’ They’re tearing it apart, Joanne. He’s getting better!”
More applause erupted around us. The coven moved in like a swarm of bees, hugging and back-patting and cheering, getting close and making contact despite the sticky heat. I stood there staring at Garth, feeling a slow, crooked smile start to work its way across my face. “Seriously?” I asked beneath the coven’s happy babble. Garth nodded so hard I thought his head might pop off.
“You should see him, Joanne. You’ve got to come see him as soon as we’re done here tonight. You won’t recognize him.”
“I will,” I promised. “I will, as soon as—I amnot having sex with him!”
Garth’s jaw dropped in horrified astonishment, eyes going round. “NotColin,” I said impatiently. “—the Father.” Crap. I still couldn’t remember his name.
“Duane,” he offered.
“Duane! I amnot having sex with Duane!”
“Joanne, can’t we discuss this reasonably? It’s an act of sharing and—” Marcia honestly sounded like she expected to get her own way. I set my jaw and dug my heels into the ground.
“No. No, we can’t. I appreciate that there’s power in sex, okay? I even appreciate that we’re trying to save the world, here. And you know what? I can even appreciate that maybe Cassandra was willing to go through with this, but I’m guessing sheknew Duane here. How long’d she been with the coven?”
The corners of Marcia’s mouth pulled down. “Two years.”
“And Duane?”
“We only brought this coven together a year ago,” Duane said. “I used to work with an all-male coven. Still, you’re right. We’d discussed this ritual pretty thoroughly and had worked out our discomfort. Marcia, you know it’s not going to work with unwilling participants anyway. I’m not any more comfortable with this than Joanne is. No offense,” he said back to me, and I waved it off just like he had.
“Nothing else has the required power.” Marcia kept frowning. “Have we come this far to turn back now?”
“I amnot,” I said adamantly, “having sex with Duane. I’m sorry if I’m screwing up your ritual, but there are limits. We’re going to have to find another way.”
“There is another way.” Faye’s voice was deep and hollow. We all turned to stare at her, alarmed sounds erupting from everyone’s throats. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, glowing bright black in my frustrating vision. “He guides me.” She sounded like her tongue had fallen back into her throat, making her words thick and glottal. “We have to hurry.”
“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance or something?” I asked nervously. No one paid me any heed. Marcia and Garth stepped forward to take Faye’s elbow, leading her around a parking bumper and toward the woods. The rest of the coven flowed around them, hurrying forward until I was the only one left in the parking lot. At the last moment Duane turned back, expression curious. “Aren’t you coming?”
I flung my hands up. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. Wait up.” I jogged over asphalt and caught up with him, walking into the woods with everyone else.
It took absurdly little time for the fire to build up. It was as if the branches sucked the heat right out of the air and turned it into flame. Well, it was like that except the air certainly didn’t get any cooler, and the fire’s dry crackle didn’t seem to wipe any of the mugginess from the air. I felt like somebody’d wrapped my head in a wet wool blanket and put me down to roast.
Faye was still functioning with her eyes rolled back in her head, bright blackness tracking like she could see. I was the only one who seemed disturbed by it, which struck me as wrong. How did people get used to weirdness being an ordinary part of their everyday lives?
By accepting. I puffed out my cheeks until air squeaked through my lips, and sat down on a log to wait out the preparations.
Five of the coven members, including Garth, had finished drawing a tremendously large circle around the fire. Where trees intersected the circle, they’d stopped and spoken with the tree before doing what looked like drawing a thread through a needle, where the tree was the needle and the circle, the thread. It was extremely polite. I had the peculiar feeling I could feel the trees’ pleasure at being asked to take part in the ritual. I wondered if anybody’d asked the branches in the fire if they’d like to be burned. Probably.
They stood at five points. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they were the points of a pentagram. I worried my bottom lip, thought of heeding my teacher and accepting and honoring, and tried to see. Rather: to See.
I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t know if it was my own reluctance, or if it was that they practiced a different kind of magic, or if it was something else entirely. If I stared at the fire and unfocused my eyes, I could almost see the lines of power misting up like gray fog between the five points of the pentagram. They came up one at a time, from Garth to Roxie, behind my left shoulder, then to Sam the underwear model off in front of my right shoulder. Five lines, all of them nearly touching the fire, making it the pentagram’s heart. The five creators murmured a binding spell—I assumed it was a binding spell, and tried not to wonder where that particular bit of knowledge had swum up from—and then stepped away from their points in the circle, the pentagram completed.