It was time for a serious love spell.
* * *
Afterward, I sat quietly on my deck, listening to the crickets and katydids and breathing in the night air. The slender moon was now completely overhead, and I basked in the soft glow while I came down from my psychic high. Spell casting could be a pretty intense experience. Even after sending the energy I raised back to the earth, I felt as if my cells were vibrating.
Not for the first time, I pondered what my friends and family would say if they could see me. What would they think if they knew I was a Wiccan?
Actually, I could imagine what they would think, which was why I couldn’t tell them. Not that I was ashamed or anything. In fact, I was quite comfortable with who I was. I was secure in my identity and confident in my spiritual path. This particular pursuit of mine was probably the one area of my life where I harbored no dissatisfaction or misgivings whatsoever.
That is, as long as no one found out.
My Irish Catholic grandmother would blame my father and his whole side, and my Italian Catholic grandmother would blame my mother and her side. At worst, they’d all think I was mixed up in a cult of devil-worshipping crazies, worse even than my aunt Josephine, who ran off and joined a hippie commune back in the day. At best, they’d worry for my immortal soul. Or, more likely, they’d fear this would damage my chances of marrying a nice young Christian man.
As for my friends, they might just think I was a bit flaky, even weirder than they already knew. My current friends, anyway, already called me a hippie chick—not even knowing about Aunt Josephine—given my dietary leanings and other earth-friendly tendencies. But my old friends, from high school and earlier, would likely be surprised to learn I’d never actually grown up. It was with them, all those years ago, that I had first learned about Wicca and the exciting world of Goddess worship.
That was back when witchcraft was über-trendy. We watched The Craft and Charmed and read books like Teen Witch. We wore lots of black, painted our fingernails black, drew tattoos on our hands and ankles with permanent marker.
I smiled as I recalled our secret “coven meetings.” We collected crystals and stones, wore pentagram jewelry, and read each other’s palms. There were spells, of course, incantations read from books to curse our enemies and attract our crushes. Then again, there was also a good amount of high-minded antiestablishment, feminist rebellion. In spite of my affection for Bewitched, we were not the daughters of housewife Samantha Stephens.
But before long, hot-blooded vampire romance edged out witchy girl power, and my friends pretty much lost interest. Not me. The Goddess had taken hold and wasn’t letting go. My teenage experiment had morphed into a real-life spiritual journey. And it was a spiritual path that suited me perfectly: there was no dogma, no fearmongering, no judgment. There were no authoritarian gatekeepers standing between me and the Divine—the Divine was already in me. And in the trees and the trails, the rivers and streams, the birds and the bees. It was a beautiful religion.
Unfortunately, Wicca was not exactly an accepted, let alone mainstream, religion.
Which was another reason I had to keep this part of me under wraps. If anyone at work were to find out—or anyone in the community—it could cost us clients. And that would cost me my job.
I started to feel chilly sitting on the deck, and my stomach began to growl, chastising me for the too-light dinner. I had just gotten up and gone into the kitchen to scrounge up a bedtime snack when my cell phone buzzed from the counter where I’d left it. I glanced at the caller ID and picked up at once.
“Hey, groovy chick!” I said brightly.
“Hey, chickie mama. What’s shaking?”
“Not a whole lot. You back?”
“Not till tomorrow, but save your evening. There’s a band we gotta see and men we gotta meet.”
I grinned. Evidently, my fun-loving friend Farrah was “off” again in her longtime on-again, off-again romance. That suited me fine. I had a spell to test out. And meeting men with Farrah was the best test method I could think of.
Somewhere out there was the answer to my prayer.
Bell, Book & Candlemas Page 25
