42. Beltane

forty-two

Sprawling across a bend in the Mobile River, the ritual grounds were a mix of forested and cleared land bordered by the magick-disrupting running waters of Sisters Creek to the north and Cold Creek to the south. According to the map Milla studied, the Panhandle Coven had spared no expense on the entertainment, attractions, and exhibits.

Keeping with the theme, the grounds were laid out in a series of concentric rings meant to mimic Dante’s Inferno. The outermost ring, Limbo, consisted of the campgrounds, a thin warded barrier shielding the witches inside from the Staid world, and an area for basic conjurations and summons, which bubbled and popped in the air as they crossed the campground and approached the official entrance.

The more personal and intimate rituals encompassed Lust as the Second Ring, and to keep all the attendees sated and refreshed, the third ring was filled with food trucks, BBQ tents, pop-up bars, and beer gardens as representative of Gluttony. Artisan booths and coven tents comprised the Fourth Ring, Greed, and all witches in attendance had signed Forms of Consent to account for the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh rings.

The Eighth Ring, Fraud, housed the audiomantic tents for music and dancing, and the mound at the center of the grounds representing the Ninth Ring and Treachery featured the main stage and Elder Witch tent where Darkly and Milla were scheduled to demonstrate their Ways.

Their tiny coven plunged through the campgrounds, joined by Dies-well clutching a large black umbrella and carefully avoiding the sun. Excitement welled with each step. It had been years since Milla had attended a C.R.O.W.-sanctioned mass ritual, a Mabon held at Poverty Point in Louisiana. She had been little more than the quiet, black mini skirt and crop-top-clad witchling on Master Lightner’s arm, too afraid to be seen and all too happy to hide in Ezra’s shadow.

Now, witches stopped mid-sigil, hands held out before them and eyes wide with a mixture of fear and wonder as Lady Death and the Living Shade passed through the campground. Darkly lifted his chin, walking tall and proud, almost defiant, as the Shade on his arm writhed and whirled, happy to see and be seen. But the silence that followed in their wake worried Milla. She half expected to be tackled or hexed to the ground at any moment.

Sensing her discomfort, or perhaps feeling his own, Diego fell into step beside her. A silent show of support that did more to heal the rift between them than the clothing or the promise of later. So Milla took a chance.

“Hey.” She nudged him with her shoulder. In the periphery, she saw a witch at a nearby campground run into a tent pole in shock. A Death Witch touching a Stitch Witch, the horror!

“Hola,” Diego said quietly.

“I was wondering,” she said, pulling her phone out of the leather pouch attached to her belt. “Could you run me through the E.R.I.E. real quick?”

He arched an eyebrow at her and cocked his head. “?Por qué?”

“I'm just curious. If I wanted to filter out the social distortion … the noise from all the other Ways,” she explained, “and track a certain a specific Way to a location, like how they found me off of Darkly.” Milla wiggled her fingers at their surroundings. “Could I do that?”

“Which Way?”

“Chronomancy.”

He tripped over his own feet. It was subtle, and he recovered quickly, but that was obviously not what he expected her to say. “Why?”

“A hunch.”

“A hunch,” he asked, “or a ‘hunch.’” Diego pinched his fingers in the air.

“Both.” At his sharp look, Milla amended. “Later, I promise.”

Diego searched her face. “Is this about your visitor in the cells?”

“And at my arrest.” She nodded. “Also, could you show me how to pull up old reports? And filter them for a specific Way or witch?”

“Ya veo.” He nodded and pointed to her phone. “Sí, let me show you.”

The crackling charge of the barrier tingled along her arms long before she saw the sheen in the air. Like Lou’s ward, it flew up as a shimmering transparent wall into a barely discernible arc doming the festival. Darkly slid his fingers down Milla’s arm, interlocking their hands and giving a squeeze as they passed through the shimmer. Static danced down her arms and over her scalp, raising the fine hairs and setting little sparks dancing over their hands as they stepped into a world turned upside down.

Revelry, she had expected. Laughter and song and merriment, absolutely, but Milla was wholly unprepared for the riot of color and sound and the wild rush of magick accosting the senses from every discernible direction.

The Mabon at Poverty Point had nothing on Beltane. Where the covens of Louisiana practiced structured rituals following a tight schedule, the Panhandle ritual was an onslaught on the senses. The closest she had ever come to this mad swirl of unrestrained Ways had been the large-scale skirmishes on Big Torch Key and exposition tournaments Morgen hosted. Even then, there had been a martial bite and organization to the explosion of ritual magick.

This was an intoxicating ecstasy all its own. Milla swayed at that first step, laughed at the second, and felt her Way kindle to life at the third, responding to the overabundance of visceral energy in the air.

Svítilna bursts of neon light strobed the trees in pinks, purples, and caustic blues, illuminating obnubilari cast illusions of fae and cryptid creatures. Milla spotted duendes with their bright white eyes and colorful caps darting among the trees, and a seven-foot-tall female figure in dark clothing swayed back and forth beside the path, silently screaming at the witches from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat. Overhead, hopping from branch to branch, were a bevy of long-armed creatures that Milla recognized as Floridian Skunk Apes. On the ground, loping after them, tongues lolling and ears pert with excitement, ran a pack of shifted rougarou, tumbling into one another with joyous yips and playful growls.

The edge of Limbo was marked by a creek illusioned by obnubilari to appear far wider than it was. Dies-well tipped his baseball hat to a witch stationed beside a small dock floating on the water. Cloaked as a ferryman, he traded minor spells with witches waiting to cross on a barge. For those not wanting trade for passage into the next ring, a wooden bridge had been conjured over the creek, the cost of crossing a simple secret.

Milla gripped Darkly’s arm, giving over to her excitement and all but dragging him up and over the bridge. She paused in the middle, feeling the secret bubble to the tip of her tongue, a heady compulsion intent on dragging the most inane truths from any witch that fell under its influence.

“I adore Taylor Swift,” she stated, grinning at Darkly’s unconstrained laughter.

“I had a poster of the Spice Girls on my wall as a boy,” he replied, waggling his eyebrows, “for five very bonny reasons.”

“Oh, my Goddess.”

Giggling, they stepped off the bridge and followed the path to the left. Occult circles marked the entrance into the First Ring, the volume of the various intents and incantations controlled by audiomantics stationed every dozen feet.

“Reminds me of Samhain at Ord Hill,” Darkly shouted over a ritual chant. “But less sinister.”

“Less sinister?” Milla glanced at twelve witches gathered beside the creek, each chanting in a guttural tongue and laying sticks in a perfect circle while a thirteenth cast her bones into the center. “They’re literally casting a drought.”

Darkly watched the coven, nodding when the grass at the center of their circle brittled and browned. “They’re Delta witches; what do you expect?”

“More.” Milla grinned wickedly at him and joined their circle. The intent washed over her, sharp and dry as a desert weed. Falling into step beside a Green Witch, Milla studied the cadence of her hands, marking the sigils and trying them on for size. As the ritual chant repeated, she joined in, appealing to the Goddess and the water in the skies, the earth. Their desire was to keep the waters at bay, their intent to ensure a strong growing season for the Delta crops, absent the floods brought on by a strong hurricane season, and their sacrifice was the moisture in their skin and their hair.

Gallon jugs of water sat outside the sphere of influence, ready for the exhausted witches once their ritual was cast.

Milla added her sigils to the next repetition, mimicking the witch beside her and bolstered by a friendly smile. Her brow furrowed as she eyed Milla, realization dawning as to who cast beside them. Then that smile bloomed into a manic grin as the magick caught, and the grass beneath their feet withered and died. Milla’s phone buzzed at her hip, and before the next round began, she fell out of the circle, caught by Darkly, and whisked away.

“Well cast.” He kissed her temple and guided her down the walk, a stone-faced Tobias walking right behind. “How are you after that?”

“Gonna need a drink to hide what I’m doing.”

“I think we can manage that.”

Rai waited at a turn in the path, eyes darting from Milla to the witches behind them before she continued on. The rituals changed in tone as the path doubled back on itself for a few hundred feet before turning again, wandering deeper within the barrier wards. Lodgepole pines became maypoles, hedge walls sprung up on either side of the trail, and Green Witches manipulated flowers to burst and bloom on the vine.

To speed their progress, throughways were cut into the hedge walls every few turns. Tobias, Diego, and Rai disappeared into one, waving to Milla and Darkly as they headed off on their assignments.

The crowd grew thicker at the official entrance to the Second Ring. Housed in a meadow, Green Witches dropped ivy crowns on the heads of witches seeking entry into Lust, kissing them on their cheeks and murmuring “Blessed be” from berry-tinted lips. Darkly ducked his head, accepting a crown and a kiss before snatching an ivy crown for Milla from the Green Witch’s hands. The brunette smiled, sweeping her hand as she backed away and turned to crown the next coven passing through.

“Blessed be,” he murmured. Shadow bloomed in his palms, weaving in and among the ivy. He set it on her head, and Milla reached up, her fingertips just brushing his own crown to wither a strand of ivy, marking his festival regalia as he’d marked hers.

“Blessed be, Darkly.” She smiled at him, closing her eyes as he kissed her forehead and grabbed her hands.

Head spinning and feet light, she let herself be pulled into the Second Ring, where the more intimate rituals were performed, less than surprised when he stopped to watch a fertility rite.

“Fancy a go?” Darkly rumbled in her ear as he slipped behind her, hands firmly on her hips. She craned her neck to look up at him, somewhat disappointed when the copulating witches within the occult circle held his attention. Bright eyes tracked the balletic act, their moans a luscious, decadent song.

“I doubt this is what Lou had in mind when she said ‘be seen.’”

He replied by brushing hair away from her ear and nipping the lobe, eyes still trained on the act before them. Milla gasped as he worked his hand under her macramé vest, trailing knuckles up and down her spine while dusting kisses along her neck. She shivered, not unpleasantly, and pressed her hips against him. A trio of witches to their left dropped their voices and stared at the Dark Witch and the Death Witch. Milla met the eyes of a tanned Ink Witch, his Way apparent in the sigils painted on his skin, who openly scowled.

“Witches are watching.”

“Thought that was the point.” Darkly’s chest pressed against her back, his hands sliding from her hips to her waist. The low rumble of his voice rattled among her bones. “Do you want me to stop?”

The Ink Witch leaned over to the woman beside him, another Green Witch from the flowers wound in her hair and earthen tint at the tips of her fingers. He whispered something, and she made a gagging noise before cackling and turning away.

“No,” she angled her neck, silently asking him to continue. “But it’s your turn.” Darkly chuckled in her ear, his palm sliding higher up her stomach until the tips of his fingers brushed the bandeau top, tugging gently. Milla’s breath caught in a tight gasp. “You’re awful.”

“You love it.” He cupped her breast, his other hand splayed across her stomach. Her skin heated despite the blooming chill in his palm, and she bit off a moan as he teased her nipple and ground into her backside. Other couples began pairing off, giving over to the libidinous nature of the rite and feeding the ritual with their intent. Bodies twisted and twined within the occult circle while onlookers caressed and fondled their partners. A witch somewhere cried out with a low, guttural moan of pleasure and Darkly spun Milla to face him. His skin was a sea of goosebumps, and thick whorls of smoke drifted over his heavy-lidded eyes. “Enough?”

“Almost.” She ran her hands up his chest and under the tartan scarf, nails lightly tracing his skin. Darkly bit his lower lip, eyeing Milla hungrily as she danced fingers down his front and palmed his crotch, licking up the center of his chest. He groaned, muttering a curse under his breath as he clamped his hands at her waist. Winter cold wrapped around her, falling like water down her legs to disappear into the earth.

Milla flicked her tongue over his nipple, smiling when he spasmed against her. So she nipped the sensitive flesh.

“Ach, Goddess, too much.” He gripped her arms, hands warm once more, and pinned Milla against his chest, grinning wickedly down at her. “Keep going, and I’ll never last the day.”

“Poor baby.”