Page 51 of A Bond with the Dark

I admire the bracelet on my wrist. The place where it touches my skin seems to glow a little, and although I know it’s a trick of the moonlight, something dances up the back of my spine saying that I’m about to see more magick in myself than I ever thought possible.

It chills me.

I kiss him this time.

The whole night has affected me so strongly, the thought and detail he put into the gift for my mom and giving me the bracelet.

I’m swooning.

We spend the rest of the night talking and laughing and, quite simply, falling for each other. It’s around four in the morning when the birds begin to sing, that I realize the time and that I have to work in three hours.

As he kisses me goodbye on the porch, I want nothing more than to invite him in, get twisted up with him in the sheets, but I know I’m already going to hate life all day tomorrow.

He leaves me, and as he drives away, he also leaves me with the lingering sense that there’s something so incredibly special about him that I need to become more familiar with.

I cannot wait to see him again.

“All right baby,” I say to Gauge the next evening as I tuck the blankets up around his chin, “sleep good.” I kiss his forehead and close the book we’ve been reading, setting it on the nightstand by his bed.

“You too, Mama.”

“See you in the morning. Love you.”

“Love you,” he says, and I close the door behind me.

It has been a long sleepy day at work, but I still feel compelled to try something with this new bracelet.

I pull down one of my mom’s grimoires from my spell cabinet.

I’m unsure of what I want to do with the bracelet, but I can feel its power and want to add to it, add a piece of my own magick to it and see what it would do.

There’s a spell of gathering power, and what harm can come from that?

Collecting the ingredients it calls for, I move over to the altar and set them up one by one.

A few herbs, some stones, a candle or two, and my small cauldron that’s the size of a little bowl.

After lighting the candles, I sprinkle the herbs into the cauldron.

Whispering words of magick from the book, I close my eyes and recite them repeatedly.

There’s a rush of heat that encompasses me like a shower. I feel it start from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. Keeping my eyes closed, I can still see through my lids that the bracelet begins to glow, as if whatever power within it escapes and enters into me. It swims through my veins and gathers my own essence, and pools somewhere in the deepest, darkest parts of myself. The new power finds a lock within me, a cloak that has been draped over me, and like the feeling of something clicking into place, the lock snaps open and the cloak dissolves.

For a long time, I’m unsure how long, I recite the magick words, with my arms outstretched, willing the power to take over me. I feel it like one would feel a powerful drug taking over, pooling warm in my extremities, almost hot in the crook of my arms and backs of my knees. It pulsates throughout my entire body. Then I shift the energy and push it back into the bracelet, commanding it to take whatever part of myself that’s magick and enter this stone.

The stone lights up as brightly as the sun, and though my eyes are still closed, I feel the power, the heat. It’s the most powerful spell I’ve ever created.

As the stone dims and takes on its normal hue once more, I open my eyes and stare at it.

There’s something new and powerful lingering in me. I can feel the shift more than I know anything else at the moment.

I want to try something.

Arising from the ground and walking over to the cabinet, I gather petals from a dried rose that I put in there a long time ago.

Walking them back over to the altar, I set them neatly in front of me on the floor.

Concentrating as hard as I can, I hover my palm over the petals and will them to rise.

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