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I blush a bit as I oil my fingers and pull down the collar of my shirt.

My intuition tells me to anoint my heart and so I do, rubbing the oil into my skin over that organ that has both blessed and tortured me since the day I was born.

I pass the bottle to Leo and massage the excess oil into my hands.

It smells like summer in an herb garden. I can almost hear the buzzing of bees.

Leo pours a small amount of oil into his palm and coats his hands. Interesting. I thought he talked to plants to heal them. Does he use touch, too ?

Fortunately, we all know how to ground and center, so Avery doesn’t have to guide us through the process.

Once we’re ready, she starts the invocation, calling on our ancestors and asking them to visit with us.

I open my heart and my mind as far as I safely can and try to hold back questions and images, anything that could interfere with transmission.

There’s one relative I’d like to visit with, but I don’t plan to block anyone else who wants to contact me.

I’m sinking into darkness, my limbs warm and heavy.

It’s my skin that tingles first, responding to some sort of energy outside of me.

I concentrate on drawing it in, feeling it seep into my pores, bleeding into my muscles, and finally, coursing through my veins.

When it gets to my heart, I feel it, like a jolt.

My chest seems to swell until it bursts painlessly in a pulse of heat and light.

I’m nowhere and everywhere, searching as I float in a pool of warmth.

I’m open and receptive, waiting to see, hear, or sense someone reaching for me.

One after another, I feel a brush of fingers, a whisper against my ear, then a tight embrace.

A hand strokes my hair. There’s nothing but darkness, nothing but silence, as I move through this assembly line of sensations.

Of human-to-human contact. Emotions tear through me as I sink deeper into the blackness: fear, delight, pity, longing. But they fade as quickly as they come.

Strangely, the heat enveloping me refreshes me like iced tea on a hot summer day.

Bubbles and ripples caress my skin when I move my limbs.

I’m swimming and I’m not afraid. I push through the water, diving to the bottom, where it’s silent and tranquil.

Mud squishes between my toes and feathery fins tickle my shins. Sunlight warms me from above.

Other swimmers join me. I can’t see them, but I can feel them, feel how the water moves as they push through it. Joy blooms in my chest.

“Betts—”

I push off the silty bottom and break the surface, water sluicing down my face .

“Betts—”

The voice is familiar. A friend. No, a lover. I want to call back, but I don’t remember his name. I reach for him. For the hand that’s holding my face.

The water grows colder and heavier. I shiver as slimy creatures slither past. The powerful current tugs on my legs, threatening to upend me and carry me away.

I don’t want to swim anymore.

Get me out. Somebody get me out!

“Betts!” It’s a hiss.

I cling to him, nails digging into his arms. Pull me out! He grabs me by the shoulders and gives me a good shake. My eyes snap open and…

It’s him, I know it is. But he looks and feels different. So real, so tangible. Wait— “Leo?”

He exhales and relief erases the deep lines between his brows. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I breathe back.

“You okay?”

I nod, relaxing my hands and clinging to his beautiful eyes instead. They’re brighter than usual. Stunning. And glittering with flecks of gold.

“Look around,” orders a female voice. “Get oriented.”

Reluctantly, I obey. A quick scan of my surroundings reminds me where I am and who I’m with: Aaron, Leo, Avery. We’re in her living room, doing a ritual, an ancestor ritual.

“Where’d you go?” asks Aaron.

I shake my head as I murmur, “I don’t know.”

“Grounding first.” Avery opens the circle she cast with her wand. “Questions later.”

I lean back against the couch alongside Leo and nervously close my eyes again.

I’m reluctant to go back into a meditative state, but if I don’t ground, the excess energy is going to burst my veins.

I shoot as much of it as I can into the earth, but after several minutes, I’m still vibrating like a tuning fork.

Leo smiles at me and stretches an arm across my shoulders, inviting me to rest against him, calming me with his closeness. “You sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“You were down in there deep,” Avery tells me. “We were having a hard time pulling you out. My recommendation? No hedge riding or astral travel unless somebody’s with you.”

She’s talking gibberish again. “What?”

“A crystal’s not enough to keep you tethered to this plane. You need someone else to bring you back when you can’t do it yourself.”

I think of what she told us before we started the ritual: that our spirits could get lost or stolen.

Holy shit.

“I had my tourmaline.” I produce the black stone from the front pocket of my jeans.

“Not enough,” Avery declares with a shake of the head. “You’re powerful, witchling, but you’re as ignorant as a newborn baby.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means your natural ability far exceeds your knowledge. You’ve got a lot to learn if you want to use your power safely.”

“Use my power for what?” The million-dollar question.

She shrugs. “There’s only one way to find out.”

I giggle. I might’ve had too much mead. “So I should just go shooting my power all around, hoping something happens? What am I, a superhero?”

“No, you’re a psychic.” She grins. “And a witch.”

Two things that, until recently, I didn’t believe actually existed. Now I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m both.

In typical Avery fashion, she abruptly changes the subject. “Shit, I’m wiped. Where’s the chocolate?”

Aaron mutters, “I can barely keep my eyes open.” He’s slumped in the armchair, head tilted back and glasses on his lap .

“Really?” I turn to Leo. “Are you tired, too?”

“Exhausted.”

“Huh,” I muse, giddy and agitated. “I’m not. I’m all revved up.” I hop to my feet and dig the candy out of my bag.

“Then no chocolate for you.” Avery makes room on the coffee table for the Ghirardelli bar and the M&M’s. While everyone reaches for the candy, Leo retrieves my half empty glass of mead from the end table. “Try this instead.”

While I drink and my friends perk up, we discuss what we each experienced during the meditation.

“I set out to contact my dad’s dad,” Aaron tells us.

“Because he’s where the musical genes come from.

But it wasn’t him who talked to me. It was my mom’s dad.

” He shrugs. “He died when I was three, so I don’t even remember him, but I know it was him talking to me.

He didn’t say anything about being psychic, but still, it was pretty cool. ”

Avery, who’s already contacted most of her family line, tells us she intentionally called on her Great-Great-Aunt Laura, her favorite spiritual guardian. “I suspect she’s the psychic in my bloodline because my grandmother used to say how strange she was.”

“Strange how?” I ask.

“She was agoraphobic.”

I nod. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that a psychic overwhelmed by constant messages would never want to leave her home. Especially in a day and age when any woman who behaved oddly was thrown into a sanitarium.

When Aaron asks what relative I contacted, I turn pink and confess, “I don’t think I did it right.”

“You did something,” Avery says. “Because you weren’t here.”

No, I definitely wasn’t here. Maybe I went too far back into the past. So far back, I was a single-celled organism swimming in the primordial soup.

“So what happened?” Leo gently urges, his deep voice vibrating against my back.

“It was weird. I was hoping I’d get to visit with my Grammy.

” My paternal grandmother, a gentle, sensitive soul who died when I was eight.

I show everyone the opal ring I wear on my left hand.

“This was hers.” It wasn’t her most valuable piece of jewelry, but it was her favorite.

When I was little, I liked to turn her hand this way and that so that the stone would catch the light and I could see all its different colors.

“But she didn’t show up. None of my ancestors did. ”

“Then where did you go?” Avery asks.

“I don’t know.” I explain how, at first, I seemed to be dining on a veritable smorgasbord of emotions as I sank through a group of people. “But the deeper I got, it all went away, and the next thing I knew I was swimming.”

Leo startles. “Swimming?”

“Yeah, I know. It’s weird. You know how much I hate the water.” I turn up my hands. “But that’s what I was doing, swimming and enjoying it. Really enjoying it. And doing it well.”

There’s a strange edge to Leo’s voice when he asks, “Where were you swimming? The ocean?”

“No. A river or a stream or something.”

He goes quiet.

“Strange.” Avery taps her chin. “It has to be related to an ancestor somehow.”

“How?” I snort. “Unless one of my ancestors is a fish.”

“Or an Olympic swimmer,” jokes Aaron.

“Definitely none of those in my bloodline.”

Avery groans and reaches for more candy. “Sheesh. How much chocolate is it gonna take to get my energy back?”

Aaron cracks off another square of the bar.

I tap Leo on the knee, eager to get the attention off me. “So, who did you talk to?”

He draws in a deep breath and stretches like he just woke up. “My grandfather. I talk to him all the time.”

So he’s done ancestor rituals before? It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

“Was he a healer?” I ask .

“He had his own sort of magic.”

“Is that his ring?” I gesture to Leo’s right hand.

“Oh. Uh, yeah.” He leans forward and takes off the silver band, inspecting it like he’s seeing it for the first time. “How did you know?”

I shrug. “Cause I have Grammy’s, I guess. And because yours looks antique.” Ancient, to be honest. But I’m not an expert in jewelry or historical artifacts.

Avery gets up to take a closer look. “I always thought it looked medieval.”

Leo chuckles. “It’s definitely not that old.”

We all gather under the lamp’s light where we can better see the ring’s etchings.

“They look like some sort of runes,” Avery says, snatching it from Leo’s palm. “But they aren’t Elder-Futhark.”

Aaron screws up his face. “Elder-frufru?”

He and I snicker like fifth graders.

“Elder-Futhark, you Philistines. Norse runes.” She tilts the ring into the light and squints. “They look more like Ogham.”

“They do,” Leo agrees. “But they’re symbols, not letters.” He takes the band back from Avery and points with a pinky finger to the first of its three markings. We lean in for a better view, nearly bonking heads. “This one is a Hawthorn branch.”

The family name.

“How many generations have passed it down?” Aaron asks.

“I don’t know.”

I lean in a little closer, practically cheek to cheek with Aaron. Granted, I can’t see the etchings very well, but they look like a bunch of scritch-scratch to me.

Leo continues, “This middle one is antlers.”

“For protection?” asks Avery.

Leo nods absently as he spins the ring a bit to feature the last symbol in full. “And this is a spear. It’s an Irish heritage thing. ”

I take a long look at him. “You have Irish blood?” He’s too dark, if you ask me. Although there is that little hint of red in his hair.

“From somebody way back in my line.”

Avery swipes the ring again. “Is it the Spear of Lugh?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm.” She squints at the marks, then arches a brow at Leo. I wonder if she’s tempted to use her psychometry.

“Lugh the Celtic god?” I ask.

Leo’s eyes cut to me. “You know about the Celtic gods?”

“Only a little.” And mostly from fantasy novels.

I wait patiently while Avery and Aaron each take a turn studying the ring. When it’s finally passed to me, I sit on the couch close to Leo and take my time looking it over. I can sort of see the objects in the markings, or at least a suggestion of them. It’s primitive, almost, in style and design.

I peer at Leo. “What’s it made of?”

“Pure silver.”

I don’t know a darned thing about metals, but this is one tough ring. Not just because it’s survived generations, but because of the way it feels. Powerful. Like it contains some sort of ancient magic.

Softly, Leo asks me, “What are you doing there?”

“What? I…here.” I thrust the ring back at him.

But he doesn’t take it. “You were sensing it.”

“Not on purpose.” I feel like I violated him. “It just kinda happened.” Thankfully, Avery and Aaron are discussing ancient alphabets and are unaware of my embarrassment.

Leo traps my hand in his, enclosing the ring in my palm. “What are you picking up?”

As I explain what the ring feels like, his eyes widen in wonder. So, apparently I can not only read trees and herbs and crystals, but inanimate objects, too? Surely not. I must be sensing Leo’s grandfather, or imposing the symbols’ meanings on the energy I’m picking up.

I give it back to Leo. “Has Avery had a crack at it?”

“No. Not yet.” He slides it back on his finger.

Across from us, the psychic in question lazily twists in the desk chair as she rolls her eyes at Aaron and shoves her hand into the bag of M&M’s. When she yawns, I grin and say to Leo, “I’m not sure she has the energy to right now.”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it?”

All four of us are slouched and limp. It seems I’m finally coming down from my little high.

The torn purple Ghirardelli wrapper sits on the coffee table amongst the extinguished candles and small glasses of mead.

Since the beginning of our ritual, the energy in the room has gone from electric to ‘walking dead.’ I force myself to sit upright as Leo does the same, groaning like an old man.

His sleepy brown eyes meet mine and slowly he smiles.

“Tired?” he asks.

I nod.

“Come on. I’ll take you home.” He helps me to my feet.

“Hold up,” Avery says, stretching before standing up. “I have something for you.”

A snore erupts from the overstuffed chair and Aaron jerks awake. With the light reflecting off his glasses, none of us noticed he was asleep. “Y’all leaving?”

“Yeah,” I giggle.

“Don’t get up.” Leo pats his shoulder and follows me to the door.

Once we have our jackets on, Avery gives us each a baggie with a black candle and herbs. “For your homework,” she reminds us, with the caveat that I don’t do the ritual alone.

Outside in the stairwell, the cold slices right through me and snow coats the steps.

It’s going to be a bracing walk home. At the top of the stairs, I turn toward campus, but Leo takes me gently by the elbow and nudges me the opposite way.

He fumbles with his keys, making the lights of a nearby car blink.

“I bought it off Robin,” he says.

“Oh.” Briefly, I wonder why Robin didn’t need it, but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth? If it has a heater and can get us to Newberry faster, I see no reason to ask questions.