Free Book of Shadows by Cate Tiernan

looked like a panther. They made an interesting pair if they stood next to each other.
    “Happy esbat,” Robbie said, raising his glass.
    “Happy esbat,” Bree said. I knew from my reading that esbat was just another word for a gathering where magick was done.
    Matt was sitting on a low velvet settee, with Jenna curled on his lap. They were talking to Sharon Goodfine, who was sitting stiffly on the floor, her arms around her knees. Was she here just for Cal, or had Wicca spoken to her somehow? I had always thought of her as having it easy, with her orthodontist father smoothing her path through life. She was full figured and pretty and looked older than she was.
    “Here.” Cal handed Bree and me wineglasses of grape juice. I took a sip.
    A patchouli-scented breeze washed into the room, and Raven arrived, followed by Ethan. Tonight Raven looked like a hooker who specialized in S and M. A black leather dog collar circled her neck. It was connected by leather straps to a black leather corset. Her pants looked like someone had dipped her in a vat of shiny black spandex, and this was the dried result. She wouldn’t have stood out in New York City, but here in Widow’s Vale, I would have given money to see her walk into the grocery store. Did Cal find this attractive?
    Ethan looked like he always did: scruffy, with long, curly hair, and stoned. It hadn’t seemed odd to me that people would have stayed the first time we did a circle—lots of kids will try anything once. But it was interesting that everyone except Todd, Alessandra, and Suzanne had come back, and it made me look at them more closely, as if I were seeing all of them for the first time.
    This group had hung out a few times at school in a new, multiclique assemblage, but here we separated into our old patterns: Robbie and I together; Jenna, Matt, and Sharon together, with Bree going between me and them; Beth, Raven, and Ethan together by the drinks.
    “Good, I think everyone’s here,” Cal said. “Last week we celebrated Mabon and did a banishing circle. This week I thought we’d just have an informal circle and get to know each other better. So, let’s begin.”
    Cal picked up a piece of white chalk and drew a large circle that almost filled this end of the attic. Jenna and Matt got up and pushed the sofa out of the way.
    “This circle can be made out of anything,” Cal said conversationally as he drew. On the floor were the smudged and faded outlines of other circles. I noticed that although he was drawing freehand, the end result was almost perfectly round and symmetrical, as it had been in the woods when he had drawn a circle in the dirt with a stick. “It can be a piece of rope, a circle of objects, like shells or tarot cards, even flowers. It represents the boundary of our magick energy.”
    We all stepped inside the chalk circle. Cal drew the circle closed, as he had done last week. What would happen if one of us stepped outside it?
    Cal picked up a small brass bowl filled with something white. For a worried moment I thought it was cocaine or something, but he picked some up in his fingers and sprinkled it all around the circle.
    “With this salt, I purify our circle,” he said. I remembered he had sprinkled salt last time. Cal placed the bowl on the circle’s line. “Placing this bowl here, in the north position, signifies one of the four elements: earth. Earth is feminine and nourishing.”
    In the last several days I had gone online and done some research. I had found out that there were lots of different sects of Wicca, as there are different sects of almost every religion. I had focused on the one that Cal had said he was a part of and had found more than a thousand Web sites.
    Next Cal put an identical small brass bowl, filled with sand and a burning stick of incense, at the east side of the circle.
    “This incense symbolizes air, another of the four elements,” Cal said, focused but utterly relaxed. “Air is for the mind, the