Free Harvest of Changelings by Warren Rochelle Page A

bleeding, the warm air tingling his skin. He could still smell the cinnamon of the altar incense, the aroma of the cauldron, the body of the priestess. She stood in the middle of the glade, Aradia, the Goddess, and soon everything, every smell, every echoing touch, was gone: only the Goddess remained. He was Thomas, he was Herne, the Horned God, and he took her there in the tall grass, the earth, the moonlight and the starlight.
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    The first witch Thomas met was Donald, the roommate with whom Thomas shared a North Raleigh apartment. He had met Donald at the Central Carolina Bank, after reading a note on a bulletin board advertising for a roommate. Donald was from a small mountain hollow deep in the Smokies and he was different from anybody Thomas had ever met. Donald spoke differently, moved differently, and he even smelled differently. A faint touch of spice, of cinnamon, sometimes clove, lingered in any room in the apartment after Donald had been there.
    Thomas learned Donald was a witch the second day after he had moved in. He came home after work and walked into an aromatic spicy cloud. The odor led him back to Donald’s room where he found his roommate busily arranging things on a small table covered with a midnight-blue cloth. Incense burned on the dresser and the night table. Thomas stood behind Donald, watching as the other man took two white candles out of a leather bag and set one on either side of a curiously carved silver cup. Then he pulled out a silver disk inscribed with a five-pointed star and placed it before the cup.
    â€œWhat are you doing? What’s all this stuff?” Thomas asked as Donald next pulled out two knives from the bag, one black-handled, the other white-handled.
    â€œSetting up the altar,” Donald said, sounding surprised. He laid the two knives on the table and turned to face Thomas. “You really don’t know?”
    â€œAltar? Know what? Are you in some sort of weird cult?” Thomas asked and sat down on Donald’s bed.
    Donald pulled out of his bag a slender stick of light-colored
wood. “You really don’t know? I don’t believe it. When we first met, when we shook hands, I could feel you’d been around magic. The stuff is all over you; your aura is so charged with magic that you glow. You’re pulling my leg, right? This,” Donald said and waved his stick at the table, “is a Wiccan personal altar. This stick is a wand. I’m a Wiccan, a witch. Aren’t you?”
    Thomas shook his head. “The closest I’ve ever come to magic was Dungeons and Dragons in high school and college. And I quit playing because it was just a game; it wasn’t real. All this is the real stuff? Are you crazy or what?”
    Donald said nothing for a long moment. Then he tucked his dark hair behind his ears and took two small, silver bowls out of his bag. “You’ve been near magic for a very long time; you didn’t know it, but you have been near it. And I’m not crazy and this is real. I’ll prove it to you. My coven meets tonight. Come with me. Hey, you’ve got nothing to lose, right? And everybody’s naked,” Donald added, grinning.
    â€œEverybody?”
    â€œEverybody.”
    Thomas shrugged. What did he have to lose? Hanging out with naked women couldn’t be so bad, now, could it? And if this was real—well. Thomas had liked playing Dungeons and Dragons the most when he was the gamemaster, when he was the one telling the others what to do and when and where to do it. It had been the power Thomas had liked the most. But it wasn’t real; it was only a game. Thomas wanted real power, power he could touch, move, taste. He wanted to be filled with power. He wanted never again to be as powerless as he had been when he had lived with his mother. And as for the magic Thomas was supposed to have been near—what was Donald talking about? His aura glowed with magic? And why did all this make him