Thunderbird Falls

coughed, and one of the young men leaped up and got me a cup of water. Faye hovered at my side, patting my back in concern as I drank. It still took a few long moments before I was able to croak, “Mother. Maiden. Crone.” The older woman’s mouth twisted wryly as I said the third word.

“You’re a coven.”

If I expected this to come across as an earth-shattering revelation, I was badly disappointed. Everyone exchanged glances again, and Faye laughed, a bright musical sound in the gloomy hall. “Well, yes. What did you think?”

My voice rose and cracked. “I thought you were going to give me any information you might have about your friend Cassie’s death. That’s what we discussed this morning.”

Faye went from laughter to kicked puppy dog, her brown eyes mournful. “And I told you I didn’t think we’d be able to help you very much, but you promised to come anyway. I told you,” she said, eager again, “we need you. You must be the Mother. I dreamed you and you were there, and you have power, and we don’t have anybody else for the part. There are already eleven of us, and you’re the twelfth. Youmust be the Mother.”

“I thought a full coven had thirteen.” I let the words come as a barrier to thought, but it didn’t work.

Two children.From my womb untimely rip’d. I closed my eyes. They’d come early, but twins often do. Neither was strong as they lay together, fragile and tiny. The girl’s last breath seemed to strengthen her brother.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard Faye explaining thathe, whoeverhe was, was the thirteenth. He led and completed the coven, and there were twelve of us, so I must be the Mother.

Adoption papers signed and the boy—Aidan, though I expected his adoptive parents would change his name—taken away. I knew who his new parents were; the Eastern Cherokee Nation simply wasn’t that big. But I was only fifteen, and I never saw him again. I stared into my water glass, shivering and unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.

“She’s the Mother,” the Crone said. I felt the older woman’s hand brush my hair. “Leave her alone. She’ll be all right. Come.” She urged me to my feet. “Come and rest a while.”

“Faye doesn’t mean to be insensitive,” she said a moment later, when I was safely tucked into a nook in the wall, invisible from the rest of the coven. “She’s just very young. I’m Marcia. I know there were a lot of names to remember.”

“There were. Thanks.” I glanced up at her, trying to get a feel for her.

She was reasonably tall and attractive, threads of gray through brown hair and wrinkles settling in around her eyes. She could stand to lose fifteen or twenty pounds, but carried the weight comfortably, letting it round her cheeks where age had begun to take the flesh away. There was a sense of strength, of connectedness, about her. “Are you a witch?”

She smiled, thin and only a little amused. “Are you?”

“I don’t think so.” I had no idea, really. I just assumed Coyote would’ve called me a witch if that’s what he’d woken up in me. “If I’m not a witch, I can’t do you any good, can I?”

Marcia’s smile grew, spreading through her voice. “You might be able to. Witchcraft is spellcrafting. We use one kind of spell to call up power that Gaia, the goddess Earth, lends us, and another kind to focus that power and create with it. Spells and witchcraft can be learned.”

“What kind of spells? I don’t think I do spells.” I knew I could borrow power from people and objects if my own wasn’t enough, and drumming was a sort of ritual to get myself into the mindset, but Marcia sounded like she was talking about something else entirely.

“The basic tenement of witchcraft isdo what thou wilt, an’ it harm none,” Marcia said. “We try to use spells to create, to heal, and to nurture.”

I could get with the healing. I knew something about that. “Create and heal and nurture what?”

Marcia smiled, almost impishly. “The world.”

A startled laugh burst from my throat. “That’s a tall order, Marcia.” My laughter faded as I remembered that six months ago I’d thought it was a tall orderI might be up to accomplishing. If not the world, Seattle, at least. “You think you can do that?” I asked, more subdued.

“We do. Beginning with this heat wave. It’s not natural, no more than the long winter was. Maybe you’ve sensed that, too.”

A chill that had nothing to with the air-conditioning settled over me and sank into my stomach, making the power centered there flutter and dip. “Yeah,” I said in a low voice. “I’ve gotten that idea. You think your spellcrafting can help fix it?” I was beginning to think I lived in a world in which there were no coincidences. The universe appeared to be lining up the support I needed to deal with the heat wave. Unless I wanted to turn my back on it all, the spirit horse was probably right and I’d better accept what was being offered.

Nobody said anything aboutliking it, though. The bitchy little thought hung around the edges of my mind and I gritted my teeth against it. At some point I was going to have to come to terms with all this, and whining incessantly wasn’t going to win me any friends. More to the point, it was starting to annoyme, and I had to live with me all the time. I preferred it when I got along with myself.

“It can,” Marcia said with utmost confidence, but then she faltered. “It could have,” she corrected, “but we do desperately need a Mother figure, Joanne. Cassandra took that role, but now…”

I remembered the picture of the little girl in Cassie’s wallet, and nodded, then looked up, a sick feeling gurgling in my gut. “When did Faye dream about me?”

Marcia’s eyebrows drew down. “She only told us about the dream this evening, before you arrived. Why?”

My shoulders relaxed. “Nothing. Just an ugly thought.”

It must have shown in my face, because Marcia’s eyes widened with surprise I thought genuine. Her pupils dilated, color gone from her cheeks, and she shook her head, the action verging on violence. “We would have succeeded with Cassie in place, Joanne. No one would do something like this in order to replace her with you. It couldn’t be hidden from the coven. Our power would be forever tainted, and anything we tried would go terribly wrong, or fail entirely.”

I got to my feet, shaking my head. “I hope you’re right.”

“Join us in tonight’s ceremony,” Marcia suggested, voice caught somewhere between rigidity and hope. “It’ll prove our innocence to you.”

I sighed and nodded. “Yeah. All right. I’m still going to have to talk to everyone about whether Cassandra had any enemies, even if you’re all pure as the driven snow.” Telling Morrison I’d eliminated people as possible murderers via psychic investigation was not going to go over well.

“The police have already done that,” Marcia said.

“Oh.” I wanted to sayI am the police, but I was only here on Morrison’s forbearance, and the elephant we’d been ignoring was the fact that psychically was exactly how I was most useful in this investigation. That made me feel a little bit better, so I lifted my chin, put on a stiff upper lip, and went to participate in my very first witchcraft session.

I was marked with red wine, a circle written on my shoulder by Faye’s determined finger. The wine symbolized a woman’s first blood and the blood of childbirth, they told me, and the circle represented the full moon, the sign of the Mother. Marcia wrote a crescent moon, waxing, onto Faye’s shoulder, and reluctantly, I completed the ritual by writing a crescent moon waning onto Marcia’s.

We stepped together in the center of a circle of coven members, standing back to back and shoulder to shoulder. My right shoulder, inscribed with the full moon, pressed against Marcia’s left, Faye’s right shoulder with her crescent moon against my left shoulder. Marcia took one more small step backward, pressing her right shoulder against Faye’s left, and power, like an electric current, slammed through me.

We made a tiny triangle with our backs to one another, a small empty space between us. In that space, light shot up, crashing into the ceiling like it would burst through and illuminate the world. I heard Marcia and Faye’s indrawn breath, sharp as my own, and from the coven came whispers of awe.

I tingled. From my toes to the top of my head, I tingled, light coursing through me until I thought it would pour out my fingers and eyes. My hair felt as if it was standing on end, waving in the air of its own accord. I