Blood Witch_ Book Three - Cate Tiernan [17]
“What happened?” Mary K. whispered. “Are you okay?”
That was when the thought came to me: What if I was the one who had made Father Hotchkiss stumble? I almost gasped, with my hand over my mouth. What if, in the middle of all my Wicca thoughts, a force had decreed that my taking communion was not a good idea? Quickly I stood, my eyes large. Mary K. headed back to our pew and our parents, and I followed her.
No, I thought. It was just a coincidence. It didn’t mean anything.
But inside me a witchy voice said sweetly: There are no coincidences. And everything means something.
So what did it mean, exactly? That I should stop taking communion? That I should stop coming to church altogether? I glanced at my mother, who smiled at me with no awareness of the confusion that was raging inside me. I was thankful for that.
I couldn’t imagine cutting church out of my life completely. Catholicism was part of the glue that held our family together; it was a part of me. But maybe I should hold off on taking communion for a while, at least until I figured out what it all meant. I could still come to church. I could still participate. Couldn’t I?
I sighed as I sat back down beside Mary K. She looked at me but didn’t say anything.
With every door that Wicca opened, I thought, another door seemed to shut. Somehow I had to find balance.
After lunch at the Widow’s Diner we stopped at the grocery store. I bought a litter box and a scoop, a box of cat litter, and a bag of kitten food. Mom and Dad pitched in for a couple of cat toys, and Mary K. bought some kitty treats.
I was really touched, and I hugged them all, right in the pet aisle.
Of course, when we got home, we found that Dagda had peed on my down comforter. He had also eaten part of Mom’s maidenhair fern and barfed it up on the carpet. Then he had apparently worked himself into a frenzy sharpening his tiny but amazingly effective claws on the armrest of my dad’s favorite chair.
Now he was asleep on a pillow, curled up like a fuzzy little snail.
“God, he’s so cute,” I said, shaking my head.
7
Symbols
On Monday, Mary K. and I were late for school. I had stayed up late reading Maeve’s BOS, and Mary K. had stayed up late having a heartfelt, tortured talk with Bakker—and so we both overslept. We signed ourselves in at the office and got our tardy slips: the New York Public School System’s version of the Scarlet Letter.
The halls were empty as we split up for our lockers and headed toward our respective homerooms. My mind swam with what I had been reading. Maeve had loved the herbal side of Wicca. Her BOS was filled with several long passages about magickal uses for plants—and how they’re affected by time of year, amount of recent rainfall, position of stars, and phases of the moon. I wondered if I was a descendant of the Brightendale clan, the clan that farmed the earth for healing powers.
In homeroom I slithered into my desk chair. Out of habit I glanced at Bree, but she ignored me, and I felt irritated that it still caused me grief. Forget her, I thought. I’d once read somewhere that it takes about half as long to recover from a deep relationship as the relationship lasted. So in Bree’s case, I would still be upset about her a good six years from now. Great.
I thought about Dagda and how Bree would adore him: she’d loved her cat Smokey and had been devastated when he died, two days after her fourteenth birthday. I’d helped her bury him in her backyard.
“Hey. Slept late?” my friend Tamara Pritchett called softly from the next desk. It seemed as if I barely saw her anymore, now that Wicca was taking up so much of my time.
I nodded and started organizing my books and notebooks for my morning classes.
“Well, you missed the big news,” Tamara went on. I looked up. “Ben and Janice are officially going out. Boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Really? Oh, cool,” I said. I glanced across the room at the lovebirds in question. They were sitting next to each other, talking quietly, smiling at each