he Priestess Diaries timelines:

Celebrating the Tower Card
------------1 year later, The Sweetest Poison
---------------3 months later, The Return of the Archangel
---------------How to Set Up an Inter-Dimensional Portal
-----------------2 months later, A Wedding of Souls
-------------------2 months later, Salt and Fire
------------------------------------------------------------------------about 3.5 years later, Fire Burning in Water

The Archangel's Return, continued

This time, it’s Donna, who was my High Priestess when I belonged to the Dragon Hart Grand Coven, one of the best-known Wiccan teaching groups in the country. We have very important things to talk about, and I know that before I even reach for the phone. I resign myself to the fact that I’m not going to be getting much work done tonight on the computer, so I continue with my chores around the house as we talk so that I’ll be caught up on those and can redirect my time tomorrow to focus on the computer work.

 “Raven,” she says, calling me by my magickal name, “I had the weirdest thing happen today. I almost called you but I figured you’d be in a meeting at work.”

 “I want to hear all about it,” I tell her as I pull clean dishes from the dishwasher and put them away inside the cabinets. “I take it your intuition is on super-sensitive right now?”

 Donna snickers. “Well, yeah. Ever since the soul retrieval work I did at my Samhain ritual. My skin is crawling. Um, in a good way.”

I laugh and start loading the dishwasher. “Glad you clarified that! Have you noticed though? The way everything sorta ground to a halt in September, then something shifted around the Harvest Moon, and now things are gearing up again? Especially in the past week?”

 She agrees and then explains her most recent unusual experience in which she connected with something or some one or some energy. While driving. The details sound a little too familiar.

 “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I say when she’s done. “Exactly. Do you remember the Harmonic Concordance or Convergence or whatever it was two years ago this weekend? I was to conduct the manifesting part of the ritual that you and Barbara and Mariah and the other Elders did. I had just started working with a group that wanted me to teach them and I had trouble leaving the house because Quent was having one of his I-must- be-in-control-of-your-life hissy fits, remember?”

 Donna curses under her breath, calls Quent a jackass, and finally tells me to go on.

"So finally, I got to leave for the manifesting ritual in Mellie’s back yard and I had to leave the girls behind with Quent because he was accusing me of devil worship and stuff. And I was late leaving the house and the eclipse was already in full swing and it was a thirty-minute drive. At the exact time of the Concordance, I got this really strange feeling, like I was going to float up out of my body.”

“Precisely!” Donna exclaims.

 “Which was pretty cool—except that I was driving. I mean, it was this wild energy like I was going to leave my body. Walk through a portal or something. I was really afraid that I would astrally project and wreck the car.”

“Yes!”

 “So I was holding on tight to the steering wheel to keep from floating away, and I turned the air conditioner on my face to keep the physical sensations so strong that I’d stay grounded.” I don’t mention turning on a South Alabama country music station to jolt me out of my spiritual experience. “It was incredible, but I wish I’d experienced it with my feet on the ground and not speeding along at 65 mph.”

 I pen the puppy into the kitchen area using a childgate across the opening to block him in so he won’t steal my underwear while I’m doing laundry, then grab a watering can. Sonnet, my twelve-year-old, did a half-decent job with her plant-watering chore, but the wilted leaves on the hard-to-reach pots betray her lack of dedication to the task. My grandfather’s peace lily, the one I brought home from his funeral ten years ago, looks sad at the moment. Granddaddy hangs out in my house, guarding the entries and acting as a guide, so I don’t want to show any unintentional disrespect by letting his lily droop.

 Donna and I continue to talk about her experience, about what “Jackass” is likely plotting, about how the photo of Jess keeps turning every day toward the computer screen, about what’s going on at her work, about the mission we know we’re a part of but how we don’t yet know what we’re to do, about why Jesse hasn’t come back and whether our unborn descendants will ever incarnate.

 The puppy’s whining and whimpering gets so loud that I walk into another room to water plants and talk to Donna. I’ve never seen him this way. Well, yes, I have.

Once.

The night of the “intergalactic conference call” as Donna calls it. The night we had Rhiannon and me on the Ouija board, Sonnet channeling for the first time in her young life, Donna on the speakerphone from Texas or wherever it was she was living then, and nineteen entities in the room with us, including spirit guides, unborn children, three angels—Michael, Rafael, and Opiel—the higher selves of both Jesse and Dragon, my grandfather, Lady Anna, Ascended Master Lantos, a couple of Pleadians popping in and out, and an otherworldly group known at The Eden. All of them there with the purpose of deciding “what to do about Jesse.” Lady Anna had come to us just before the room filled up, a new guide with a new purpose and that purpose being to work with Jesse’s healing so he’d be better able to talk through his worries with me and so we’d work out our future and the mission we shared would solidify.

 The puppy had stood in his pen, yipping, whimpering, cocking his head from side to side and staring at something to my right. Or someone. At the same moment Sonnet saw the new guide and described her to me in silently mouthed adjectives, Donna, who was 1200 miles away, had gotten the visual on the lovely, golden-haired Anna and her earnest desire to help two would-be lovers become two real-life lovers and seal the fate of a sacred communion. But the puppy had been the first to see what to me was invisible.

 What’s he seeing now? I wonder as I stalk back into the kitchen area and peer over the child-gate at him. Only he doesn’t look at me. He looks past me.