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Rebecca couldn’t sit still until Heather arrived, who, thankfully, was more prompt than usual. Rebecca ushered her quickly into the living room. God only knew where Valencia had gone.
“Um, okay, how long has she been like that?” Heather asked.
Rebecca looked down at Paula. Her eyes were open, but they showed only the whites, and her mouth was pulled in some horrifying recreation of a scream, even though no sound escaped her. Her whole body was trembling.
It had been a strange night.
Rebecca was a little shaken, to say the least.
“Half an hour?” Rebecca said. “She hasn’t really moved or anything.”
Heather looked between Paula and her, but her face gave nothing away.
“Where did Valencia go?”
“I’m here,” Valencia said, coming from the hallway. She was dressed in a dark purple dress that cinched at the waist, her lips smeared with dark red. Around her neck, dipping into her cleavage, was a chunk of rose quartz on a chain.. To feel more witchy, she had said earlier that night.
“I was just calling Joe—Father Brah.”
“Uh huh,” Heather said, in a way that Rebecca suspected meant something. “So, does someone want to run me through what exactly happened here?”
“It’s Valencia’s fault,” Rebecca said, then regretted it as soon as Valencia huffed behind her. Rebecca sighed. She was trying to get better at general culpability. “We all thought a seance would be fun. Or Valencia and I did, anyway, and Paula agreed after some gentle persuasion. Valencia ran it.”
She looked over her shoulder at Valencia, waiting for her to take over. After a few seconds of wrinkling her nose in anger, she spoke.
“I wanted to get in touch with my heritage—you know, my aunts were all brujas, so their blood has imbued me with magic.”
“How well did they teach you?” Heather asked.
Valencia grimaced. “They were always getting their hands dirty with things, and the rituals would take hours. I wasn’t going to sit around for that! But tonight, I thought—“
“You thought, without any training or advice from them, to follow some directions off the internet?” Heather guessed.
“Pretty much, yes,” Rebecca said, before Valencia could jump in to defend herself.
“Let’s see the website then,” Heather asked, holding out a hand. Valencia sighed. Even she must have realised the seriousness of the situation, because she willingly relinquished her phone. “Wow, I thought only my grandma and Rebecca used Facebook these days.”
Rebecca couldn’t object before Valencia started to defend herself.
“I’m usually more of an Instagram girl,” Valencia said, with a flick of her hair. “But someone replied to my Insta story to say this was a ritual that, like, actually worked. And it did!”
Rebecca looked back at Paula, who’s face was now contorted in anguish. She felt a hard stab of guilt for having talked her into it in the first place. It was meant to be stupid fun!
“I don’t know if I’d count this as worked,” Rebecca said.
Valencia scowled, but in that annoying way where she was still impossibly pretty while she did it.
“Are you going to stand there all day?”
All three of the women gathered around the circle jumped backwards. Paula’s eyes were back to normal and her face was twisted, sweat dripping down her forehead in the effort to stay lucid.
The voice that was coming out of her was both Paula’s, and not-Paula’s, some horrific, screeching sound from deep in her stomach that made her sound like two rocks in a garbage disposal mixed with Paula’s usual dulcet tones.
“I have a demon inside me, please hurry the fuck up!” she said.
Then, with an exhausted sigh, she slipped back, her eyes once more rolling back into her head.
Rebecca shuddered.
“Yikes,” said Heather. Then she turned to Valencia and Rebecca, her face set. “Paula’s right though. We should really hurry this up. We need to talk to someone who understand magic.”
Valencia started: “Well, I-“
But Heather cut her off, while Rebecca shot her a glance.
“No offence, Valencia, but I think we need real help. Why don’t we call one of the actual witches in your family?”
Valencia’s face crumpled.
“Oh, can we not? They’re just going to spend like, an hour lecturing me.”
“Fine. My aunt is, like, a witch or whatever. I’m going to call her.”
Rebecca blinked. Of course Heather had a witch in her family, and stated it like it was no big deal. And why did all her friends suddenly have magic families?! Where was hers? The most she had was a third cousin who swore blind that she got cursed once at a summer camp, but everyone knew Layla was a liar.
Two minutes later, though, they were crowded around Heather on the floor. Heather had her aunt up on a video call, and the camera was flipped so the aunt could see Paula.
The aunt, whose name was Xenia, because of course it was, sucked in air through her teeth.
“That’s a nasty case of possession right there,” Aunt Xenia said. “And the post you sent me, that’s the ritual you used?”
“Yes,” Heather said. Rebecca glanced towards Valencia, who at least had the decency to look doleful.
“It doesn’t seem like it should have done anything, let alone gotten your friend possessed. Whichever your friends did this, she was either extremely talented,” and at this, Valencia beamed, but then Aunt Xenia continued: “Or exceedingly bad at following even basic instructions, but whichever it is, I need you to talk me through it, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Heather flipped the camera around, and for a second, none of them said anything. Rebecca craned over to look at Valencia, giving her a ‘go on then’ kind of look, but Valencia was avoiding her eyes, like a puppy that knew it had misbehaved.
“Well, I wasn’t here to stop any of this nonsense, so…” Heather said.
“We just didn’t have some of the ingredients. Like, where is anyone going to find half of these crystals? Or a vial of sweat? I naturally don’t sweat, so that would have been impossible. So I made some substitutions! I can be really good at making things work.”
“What were these substitutions, then?” Aunt Xenia asked.
Valencia hesitated, before she rattled them off. Rebecca’s eyes widened. She knew Valencia had fudged it a little, but it sounded like there had been nothing she hadn’t substituted. And while some of them made sense (a red candle for a black one), some were a lot less advisable (purple dish soap was not the same thing as actual sprigs of lavender!).
Maybe Paula and she should have checked on Valencia’s work before agreeing to this stupid seance anyway. It was just meant to be some dumb fun! A girl’s night where they got a little scary! And Valencia was good at all that mindfulness, crystal shit, so it made sense to Rebecca that she would be good at this too.
By the time they reached the end of Valencia’s vast list, Aunt Xenia had taken off her glasses and was squeezing the bridge of her nose.
“That was certainly, uh, a creative use of components,” she said at last.
“She means you fucked up,” Heather helpfully translated.
“I was trying to be polite,” Aunt Xenia said. “But my niece is correct. Somehow, in all those substitutions, you managed to rig up a half-decent summoning circle, except without any vessel to hold the evil spirit. And, without that key component, it had to cling to the first suitable vessel it could find—in this case, your friend’s body.”
A small hush passed between Rebecca and Valencia. Hearing it stated like that made the whole situation a lot more real.
“Is there a way to, like, fix it?” Heather asked.
Aunt Xenia thought about this for a moment.
“I think so, yes. You’ll need a few things, that should be easy enough to find. Rose quartz, tea tree oil—“
“I have witch hazel, will that work?”
Simultaneously, Rebecca and Heather quickly said, “No more substitutions!”
Well, Heather said it, Rebecca cried it. She had had quite enough of Valencia’s substitutions for one night.
Quietly, Valencia said, “It even has witch in the name.”
“I have some tree tea oil, I use it for zits,” Rebecca supplied. She knew her breakouts had upsides.
“What else, auntie?” Heather asked.
Aunt Xenia rattled off a few more items, and the women scattered out across the apartment, hunting them down. They reconvened a few minutes later, successful.
As instructed by Aunt Xenia on the phone propped up against a cushion, they spread a salt in a circle, all four of them enclosed within. Valencia took off her rose quartz necklace and placed it on the floor in front of her. Then, she placed a dime in front of Heather, and finally, a bowl of water in front of Rebecca herself.
They mixed tea tree, lemon verbena that Heather had torn out of a teabag and more salt in a little bowl, and then anointed themselves, followed by Paula.
“Now place the candle in front of your friend—yes, that’s right dear, right there. Then you’ll want to clasp hands, all four of you—excellent. Now chant with me!”
Aunt Xenia started it up, and slowly, but surely, Rebecca began to join in, followed by Heather, and then Paula.
Together, they whisper-chanted: “By Earth and Air, by Fire and Water, so shall you hear my call: release your hold, you have been banished from this circle.”
They chanted this, over and over, eyes closed. Rebecca held on tightly to Valencia’s hand, who was squeezing her back just as hard, and Heather’s cool palm. Their voices grew, louder and louder.
When Rebecca flicked an eye open, she saw that the flame on the candle in front of Paula was dancing wildly, as if a strong wind was blowing, and that even the electric lights above them seemed to flicker. Paula’s body was shaking violently, so violently that Rebecca closed her eyes tight again, just in case.
“One last time,” Aunt Xenia called over their chant. “With me, now: be gone!”
She cried it loudly, and Rebecca did her best to match not just the volume, but how much of a belly-deep bellow it was.
Valencia and Heather did the same.
When she opened her eyes again, Paula was slumped back, breathing heavily. But her eyes were open, and she looked herself again.
Rebecca launched forward, almost knocking into the still-lit candle, eager to enclose her friend in a hug.
“Jesus, I thought I was going to be stuck like that all night” Paula said. Her voice was so thick with exhaustion, Rebecca couldn’t tell how annoyed Paula actually was. Although if she had to guess, from “0” to “my friends talked me into a seance in which my body got possessed by a demon and then took ages to get me out”, Rebecca thought she was probably on the upper end of the scale.
“Good to have you back,” Heather said, before slinking back to her phone to thank her aunt and call off.
Rebecca squeezed Paula, couldn’t stop touching her, watching her face to see if her eyes would roll back again, checking everything was okay, until Paula waved her off.
“I just got back in control of my body, let me move it!” she said. Rebecca relented.
“What was it like?” Valencia asked. “Was it really scary, having something inside you?”
Paula gave Valencia a well-deserved withering look.
“Thanks for calling me, this was much more exciting than my night was going,” Heather said. “But I should head back to the bar. Try not to get into more trouble until at least tomorrow, alright?”
“Oh, wait!” Valencia said. “I have this other ritual I wanted to try that needs four people and—“
“No!” Paula cried. “No way are you getting me involved in one of these again.”
Rebecca put a hand on Valencia’s arm gently.
“Maybe, uh, you should talk to your family a bit more before you try a new ritual?”
Valencia huffed. “Fine. But if I end up completely without any real magical powers, know that I’m blaming you.”