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While I barely avoided giving myself away, Persi drew the final quarter circle, so that all three sisters now sat within its borders. Then she stepped to the center, lifted her face and her arms to the sky and said, “With these elements together under spirit, I cast a circle of protection above, below, and within.”
Around them, a humming of insects began, and the circle Persi had dug into the ground with her spoon glowed momentarily white. Then it settled again, the humming faded to nothing, and the three women sat once again facing each other, not one of them seeming in the least surprised by anything that had happened since Persi had begun. I crouched in my hiding place waiting, sweat dripping down the back of my neck, my hands shaking, and my heart beating like it desired nothing more than to escape my body. I was both eager for what would come next, and terrified, not least because they had just cast a circle of protection and I was decidedly outside its borders.
Persi handed the spoon back to Rhi, who put it back in her bag and now pulled out a set of the windchimes I recognized from the porch, and a tall silver thermos. I watched in confusion as she hung the wind chimes from one of the branches over her head, and then opened the thermos. She placed three teacups in the grass, poured a bit of steaming liquid into each of them, and handed one to each of her sisters before taking up the third herself. Was this just some sort of bizarre picnic?
Rhi raised her cup. “To Asteria.”
“To Asteria,” the other two repeated, and together they drained their cups. Mom pulled a disgusted face.
“Goddess, I hate mugwort tea.”
“I put some honey in to help sweeten it,” Rhi said.
“It doesn’t help,” Mom retorted, handing the cup back to her.
“Want a chaser?” Persi offered, holding out her flask.
“Persi, we want a clear head, remember? Put that away,” Rhi scolded as she wrapped the teacups in fabric and placed them back in the bag. “All right. Close your eyes. Center yourselves. Open yourselves up to communication, to connection, to understanding.”
They sat in silent contemplation for maybe a minute, and then Rhi produced the stumps of three candles stuck into glass jelly jars. She lit them with a cigarette lighter from her pocket, placing one down in front of each of them. Then she reached into the bag one last time and pulled out the object I’d been curious about since I’d seen it yesterday: the object that had lain inside the box Lydian had brought, the one she said the sisters could use if they “needed answers.” It was still wrapped in the blue velvet covering, and I couldn’t help but lean forward, risking my balance to get a better look as Rhi carefully unwrapped it and pulled it out.
It was fairly flat and rectangular, about the size of a cookie sheet, but made of wood and stained and finished in a honey-colored hue that showed every whorl and knot in the wood. The edges were worn and rounded, too, as if by age and frequent use. Rhi placed it down in the grass between them, and by rising up onto my knees and craning my neck, I could just make out a collection of letters, numbers, and symbols painted onto the board in an ornate hand, black curling characters with lots of decorative flourishes. Then Rhi produced a large, triangular piece of green sea glass with a hole bored right through the middle and set it down on the board. All three sisters reached forward and placed a finger lightly on the glass, and suddenly I understood what was happening. The surprise and the relief hit me with such force that I came dangerously close to laughing out loud.
It was an antique version of a Ouija board—a spirit board, I’d heard them called. My mother and her sisters were about to do what every sugared-up eleven-year-old girl has tried at least once at a Halloween sleepover; they were going to try to speak to Asteria through a Ouija board. Despite everything I’d experienced in the garden so far, skepticism flooded my thoughts, calming me down from the heightened fear of watching them cast the circle. I’d played with a Ouija board maybe half a dozen times, usually because Poe had forced me into it. She was convinced that they worked, but all we’d ever managed to do was get mad at each other, because we were convinced the other was moving the planchette on purpose; or else overcome with a fit of giggles so strong that we abandoned it altogether to roll on the floor with streaming eyes instead. Not once, in all the times we’d tried it, had anything even remotely like ghostly communication come to pass; and so it was hard for me to feel anything but disappointment that this was the answer to the mystery of what the sisters were doing in the garden at three o’clock in the morning.
I also couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed in my mother. She was buying into this crap? My logical, strait-laced mom, who lived in scrubs and listened to science podcasts while she shopped at Target? I was shocked she hadn’t gotten up and stormed out of the garden already. I wondered if it was worth my staying and had half-resolved to sneak back up to my bed for some much-needed sleep when the sounds started.
At first, it just seemed as though the wind had picked up, but after a moment or two I realized that I could feel nothing—no cooling breeze over my sweaty skin, no rustling of leaves in the foliage that surrounded me. The sound wasn’t air at all, but a whispering of voices that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once, enveloping the entire garden in a susurration that sent cold shivers skittering up my spine, and reignited the fear which had been nearly extinguished at the sight of the Ouija board. The temperature in the garden plummeted in an instant, and with a gathering horror, I realized I could see my terrified breath puffing out in front of me. I stared at my mother and her sisters, expecting to see some of my own panic mirrored back to me on their faces, but there was nothing of the kind. All three of them were sitting with their eyes closed, their hair whipping gently around their serene faces. My eyes fell to the board between them. The piece of sea glass was vibrating about six inches above the wood, as though the sisters’ fingers were the only things stopping it from shooting up into the canopy of the elder tree above.
My mother’s voice rang out, clear and powerful, “We call on the spirit of our mother, so recently departed. We call on her to give us the answers we seek, to the questions in our hearts. Speak to us, Asteria Artemis Vesper. Help us to understand the legacy you left behind, and how to move forward. Vesper witches who have gone before, watch over us in this moment of connection, and protect us from harm. We seek the light—shadow is not welcome here.”
The whispering rose and fell, almost like the tide I could no longer hear. I watched in terrified fascination as the sea glass floated around above the board. Rhi’s eyes were closed, and yet her hand, which held a pencil, was moving across a pad of paper that I hadn’t noticed lying in the grass by her knee. Could she possibly be writing down the message the spirit board was revealing when she wasn’t even looking at it?
Suddenly the whispering rose, and the sea glass shuddered violently beneath their fingers, causing all three sisters to open their eyes. My mother glanced around her, looking nervous for the first time. “Persi will this circle hold?” she hissed.
“Of course it will hold,” Persi snapped. “You watched me cast it. The elements were strong.”
“I can feel a presence trying to interfere. Can you feel that?” my mother asked.
“No, I think you’re just being a… hang on,” Persi cut herself off. She was silent a moment, and when she went on, her voice had a tremor in it. “Yes, I can feel it, too.”
I began to panic. Were they talking about me? Could they feel that there was another person in the garden, spying on them? I started to wonder if I should back my way slowly out of the garden and go back to bed. I tried to envision how I would do that without being seen, and realized it was likely impossible. They were on the alert now; I’d have to stay where I was, even if I was interfering.
“The circle will hold,” Persi said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself as much as the others, “but she won’t be able to come through if we aren’t concentrating.”
Rhi’s voice sounded out, a little sharp, but forceful, nonetheless. “Persi’s right. We have to focus our energies and trust to the circle to protect us.”
My mom looked like she wanted to argue, but swallowed her objections and closed her eyes again, doing her best to concentrate. The sea glass under their fingers steadied and began to swing around the board again. Rhi continued her documenting with the pencil.
This, I realized, might be my only chance to escape unnoticed. I put my hands down on the ground in front of me and began a kind of reverse crawl, placing each knee and hand carefully behind me, trying to avoid twigs or fallen leaves that might crackle under my weight and give me away. I’d only gone a few feet, though, when I stopped, heart in my throat.
Someone or something was behind me.
I didn’t know how I knew it, only that I had the undeniable feeling of being watched closely. A deep, vicious cold had concentrated in the air at my back, like I was crouching with my back to a deep freezer. My ears were filled with a strange humming buzz, as though a million insects were speaking with a single voice. Beneath my fingers, beetles and ants emerged from the earth. I stifled a cry and snatched my hands back from the ground as they skittered toward the sound, which grew louder and more insistent behind me.
Don’t turn around. Dear God, whatever you do, do NOT turn around,I told myself over and over again; and yet, the urge to do just that was growing stronger by the second.
The cold deepened, drew closer, until what I felt was no longer a blanket of cold, but a cold that moved. A cold that ventured closer, that poked and prodded, that reached out a long icy finger and ran it along the back of my neck. And all the while, the buzzing, humming, whispering voice grew louder. I could no longer see my mother and her sisters, obscured now on the far side of the shrub, but I could hear their strained whispers, and I knew things were not going as planned within their circle.
