A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

Your words have the power to take down a powerful man.” Margot paused, then smiled, radiant. “And, beyond that, your tarot reading predicted you’d be here.”

“What?” I asked.

“The Three of Cups, the sisterhood card. You only would have drawn that if you’d truly belonged.”

With a quick jolt of fear, I remembered the card I’d turned over before the Three of Cups, the card I’d hidden in my pocket and then buried in my drawer. The Ten of Swords. Betrayal. Clearly their “magic” didn’t extend to knowing that I’d lied about that. All during the reading, I’d assumed they were playing a mind game with me. But it had been so much more.

“No one had drawn it for so long, not as their future card,” Margot said.

“We’d been waiting years, and then, within a month, two of you did it,” Caroline said.

“Caroline thought it would be poetic justice to have Roy Pruitt’s daughter involved,” Margot said, and a flash of annoyance or regret passed over Caroline’s expression. “But you proved that you were the one who would be loyal, who was willing to do what needed to be done for the good of the Coven.”

“So we invite you in. Join us, Jillian,” Caroline said.

“Join us, Jillian,” the other women echoed, these women who took taxis and went to yuppie juice shops and who, now, were chanting my name, shrouded in mystery and darkness. And here I was, standing among them in my pajamas, not knowing where to put my arms.

“Are you ready?” Margot asked, holding out her hand.

Fuck no. I did not want to entangle myself in this. I’d come to find out what they’d done to Nicole Woo-Martin, not to get myself trapped in some mass delusion. Clearly things would only get more dangerous and unstable from here on out.

But . . . this was a story too. The elite of New York City, drawn into a cult of the occult, so drunk on their own power that they’d lost touch with reality. And they’d made other things happen, Margot had said with that mysterious smile. Did they believe they’d magicked Nicole out of office? If it was all connected, my God, the waves this reporting would make. I couldn’t get this far only to run away in fear.

“Are you ready?” Margot asked again, and it wasn’t a question.

I placed my hand in Margot’s. “I am,” I said.

The women let out a breath as one, a soft sighing noise.

“Then let’s start the ritual,” Margot said.

By now, the flames were crackling higher in the stone pit, hissing and spitting. Maybe I was still dreaming. Maybe they were still screwing with me. Caroline turned and walked to the altar, picking up a bundle of herbs and the silver-handled knife that lay there. She passed the herbs to Margot, who placed the bundle in her right palm.

Margot closed her palm into a fist and held it out over the fire. “Once we do this, you won’t be able to share the details of what you’ll go on to learn here with anyone outside the Coven,” she said. “Not a partner, not a best friend. We’ve all had to make that sacrifice. If you break the circle, there will be consequences.” Cool, so this was like a magical NDA, where instead of sending fancy lawyers after me, they’d send Satan? Thank God I didn’t believe in this. (I was more afraid of rich people’s lawyers than some demon from hell.)

Murmuring something soft, words that weren’t in any language I knew, Margot crumbled the leaves into the flames. I kept one eye on her but I trained my other eye, obviously, on the freaking knife. It was smaller than a butcher’s knife but larger than your average silverware, and I was getting the discomfiting sense that it would play a starring role in this ritual.

Caroline unsheathed the knife and held it delicately, revealing its smooth, sharp edge. “Your blood is mine, and mine is yours,” she said, and in one swift movement, dragged the blade down her left palm. Okay, they weren’t screwing with me. Shit.

The incision she made was about a couple of inches long, shallow. I winced as a line of red sprung up on her skin. Caroline turned her hand over the fire, letting the droplets of blood seep into the flames, which sizzled and smoked in response. “So mote it be,” she said, then straightened up, her smile more blissful than I’d ever seen it, her shoulders loosening as if she’d just taken a Valium. From her robe she pulled a jar of some kind of ointment and rubbed it over the cut. Margot took a strip of cloth from her pocket and tied it around Caroline’s palm. Then Caroline passed the knife to Margot, who dug it into her own palm and repeated the same words.

Again, the sizzle as the flames absorbed her blood, and then she passed the knife on down the circle to Iris, who took her turn and sent it down, getting ever closer to me, as the women who’d opened themselves bound up one another’s wounds.

Nope. Nuh-uh. I didn’t even like going to the pharmacy for a flu shot, so I wasn’t about to plunge an actual knife into my skin. Also, had these women been tested for STIs recently? I thought we all acknowledged nowadays that mixing blood with strangers wasn’t generally a great idea. I’d never shared a hairbrush at sleepovers back in the day because of lice, so clearly I was too neurotic to be a witch, and I should just gracefully bow out and let them carry on with their spell-casting and bloodletting without me—

Vy placed the knife in my palm, interrupting my thoughts. Its handle was heavier than I’d expected, with a raised pattern of vines and fruit on it. I stared at the vines, hesitating. “What are you waiting for?” Vy asked.

The flames, the smell of the herbs, the tang of the blood—all of it mixed in the air, a cloying, suffocating scent