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Sorry, sweetheart,I thought.I put a lot of work into this shop. It may be tucked away in Globe, Arizona, but it’s not some cut-rate discount store.
Apparently ignoring my thank-you, she added, “I also wanted to let you know that I’ll be hosting my own solstice ritual here. I’ve done some exploring around town, and the energies in Globe are perfect. I know you have a ceremony of your own planned, but I don’t want you to get too upset if I draw some of your celebrants to my ritual.”
I supposed I should have expected as much. It took a lot of effort to keep myself from glancing down at the notebook that held all my scribbled calculations about the ceremony I was planning at Chuck’s ranch. Best guess, I probably wouldn’t need to be too worried about capacity at the clearing down by the stream. With my luck, I’d have to start scrounging up people to attend.
“That’s fine,” I said, my tone as even as I could make it. The last thing I wanted was for her to get under my skin. “I didn’t want anything too large anyway. If a ritual gets too big, then it loses all the power of its intimacy.”
For just a second, her nostrils flared in annoyance. Good. It had been a subtle barb, but I’d still wanted it to draw a little blood.
“Small and intimate is probably best for a beginner witch,” she replied with a lift of her chin.
Of all the —
“Oh, I’m not a beginner,” I said sweetly. “I’m new to social media, but I’ve been practicing since I was nineteen years old.”
“So, for more than ten years?” she asked, and I had to resist the impulse to ask her the age on her driver’s license. I might have been a few days away from turning thirty, but I still got carded on a regular basis.
“Long enough,” I replied, almost preternaturally calm. I absolutely wouldnotlet her mean girl schtick get to me.
“Good,” Lilith said. “Because I’m always concerned when an inexperienced practitioner attempts a ritual that’s too advanced for her. Those things never turn out well.”
About all I could do was nod. Behind her, the Wednesday Addams lookalike had observed the whole exchange with absolutely no shift in her expression. The Snape impersonator, on the other hand, had just the faintest quirk to his mouth, one that told me he found the situation secretly amusing.
Great. I’m so glad I could be here to entertain you.
Before I could say anything else, Lilith added, “Oh, just so you know, I’ll be performing my ritual by the river, over on the San Ramon Apaches’ land. I reached out to the tribal elders to get permission earlier today, and they were so kind about it. I’m surprised you didn’t try to have your ceremony there — it really is the perfect spot.”
Having delivered that tidbit, she sent me an insincere smile and then turned, striding back toward the door with the smugly confident air of someone who’d just skewered their opponent in a fencing match. Her two companions followed, although Snape gave me just the slightest over-the-shoulder glance before he headed outside.
Was that pity in his expression?
Maybe. I wasn’t in the correct mental state to analyze his reactions. Instead, I was boiling inside.
How dare she?
Never mind that I didn’t have any more claim to San Ramon Apache land than I did the Holy Roman Empire. And all right, if I really stopped to analyze my feelings — something I’d trained myself to do ever since I started doing readings professionally, since you couldn’t really going around charging other people for spiritual advice unless you had your own house in order — I knew a big part of the anger that churned inside me right then was merely jealousy.
And that was ridiculous, because it wasn’t as though Lilith had announced she was performing a sex ritual with Calvin Standingbear on the banks of the San Ramon River. No, she’d done what I should have done, if I weren’t being such a coward about the whole thing. She’d merely reached out to the tribal elders for permission, and they’d given it…for whatever reason.
Still, I was angry, mostly because I knew she’d only showed up in Globe to steal my thunder. It was her way of marking her territory, of letting me know that some upstart from the wilds of Arizona wasn’t going to horn in on her Instagram action.
Fine. I’d never been a competitive person — my philosophy had always been “do as you will as long as it does no harm” — but something about that woman had gotten my hackles up. And Lilith Black might have had millions of followers on her side, but I had one thing she didn’t.
The people of Globe.
Yes, I was still new in town, but I owned a business here, had already done a lot for the community in terms of donations to various worthy causes. Some of my fellow townspeople might not have completely understood my witchiness, and yet I was still one of them now. I had to believe they’d be on my side.
Either way, this was war.
6
Dinner for Two
Obviously,I wasn’t going to let the world know that things weren’t entirely sunny in Globe, Arizona. I supposed that was one of the good things about social media — you could show only what you wanted people to see and hide the rest.
So I posted about the ticket situation, and let my followers know they’d be able to pick up their tickets at the shop on Monday. That didn’t leave a whole lot of time, since the solstice celebration would be on Tuesday evening, but Dan had told me Monday morning would be the soonest he’d have the printed tickets ready. The Instagram post got some reactions…although not nearly as many as I’d been expecting.
Had Lilith’s rival solstice ritual already siphoned off a bunch of my attendees?
