Witch - By Fiona Horne Page 0,37

surprised at her lack of appreciation and looked back to the paper, and to my shock it did just look like a mess! But then as I gazed at it longer, the roses, birds and spider tendrils again formed from the blackness.

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ I muttered, and suddenly I realised what I needed to write for the cool spell.

‘What did you say, Vania?’ My mother was looking at me questioningly, and I smiled.

‘Well, everyone said Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles was a just mess, too.’

‘Good, well when you make two million dollars for selling a mess, you can take care of your father and me,’ she joked.

‘Deal,’ I said, and she smiled before starting to walk out of the room. ‘Can I shut the door?’ I asked quietly.

‘Well, how about you leave it open just a crack?’ Her voice was gentle.

I nodded, and she pulled the door to as she left. I sat listening to her footsteps retreating down the wooden hall.

The waning moon floated over the horizon, its diminishing light set in a pearly pink sky. The coven was standing on top of a cliff within a circle of seven white candles. I’d found out that the number seven was aligned with personal empowerment and that a circle of seven white candles would create a space to contain the power we raised so we could direct it to the goal of our spell. On the insides of our left wrists were our star arrows, dark-purple stains that we had painstakingly painted on each other with the black walnut dye Dean had made. We’d used the traditional Chumash technique, dipping a thin stick with a flattened tip, rather than a brush, into the bowl of sticky dye. Bryce had offered to paint mine on, and when his strong hand had taken my wrist my feelings of attraction for him had as usual, overflowed. Dilated pupils, palpitating heart, wobbly knees . . . but thankfully it had been twilight and I was sitting down. And for once he hadn’t looked me straight in the eye – he’d just stared at the symbol as he made it appear on my wrist. I realised we were becoming increasingly platonic. If he had ever had feelings for me, they were certainly squashed after the whole Matt mess. But this was no time for regrets, only for magic. And the land we stood on resonated with an ancient timeless pull, grounding our feet and anchoring our intention as we raised our arms to the sky.

‘All space is here, all time is now!’ I called out loud, before the waves crashing below at the foot of the cliffs swallowed my voice.

The twins spoke next.

‘We live in the shadows behind the light. When we close our eyes, we can See.’

Next we dropped to our knees and pressed our hands to the ground, closing our eyes as the twins’ meditation washed over us. It was a meditation their mother had showed them. She did it before she performed her tea-leaf readings, to help her see things. The twins had spent a good twenty minutes explaining how to do it, but all we had to really do was close our eyes and focus. I watched the starry dance of light across the back of my eyelids. Science called this phenomenon ‘phosphene’, made by random firings of the nerves in our visual system, but right now, to us meditating coven members, it was a celestial ballet of light starring sparks born of Fonteyn and Baryshnikov, each twirling magically alone and together – affirming that we were all our own energy, yet in the centre of all things, and that anything was possible.

Eventually that weird buzzing sound of our energies started up, like it had the first night we were at the Purple Raven, and the energy behind our eyes seeped out and started whisking around outside us like folds of fairy floss, wrapping us up together in a sticky cocoon. We all opened our eyes in unison.

‘It’s time,’ Dean said. We all had stalks of lavender at our feet that were bound with strands of our hair. Dean had discovered that lavender was a powerful magical herb for purification, healing and protection. He’d said that the smoke from it would stop any negative energy from getting mixed up in our magic. The hair was because it was important to contribute something personal, to tie our intention to the spell. Now we picked them up and threw