I know that the nitpickers will say this doesn't belong in the LW category, but the series started there, and there's infidelity here that's crucial to the tale. And I've put two chapters in other categories and they seem to have escaped notice.
If you haven't read the previous chapters, they are:
SARAH OF SALEM (Loving Wives)
SARAH OF SALEM: Sarah's Story (LW)
SARAH OF SALEM: The Tribunal, (LW)
SARAH OF SALEM: The Dark Valentine (Sci Fi & Fantasy)
SARAH OF SALEM: The Dark Son (Erotic Horror)
Now, what will probably be the final chapter, SARAH OF SALEM: Circe's Enchantments
Sarah looked around the table, taking pride in her large family. They rarely all got together these days, with her children having their own families or pursuing their own interests. The Litha banquet had always been special for her family, a celebration that foreshadowed the glut of birthdays her family had to commemorate in July. Those joyous parties were always tainted by the knowledge that conception of her July children and one grandchild had occurred at a forced Samhain orgy. The Summer Solstice ceremonies were strictly cheerful events.
She smiled as she looked down the table at her children. They'd had to move the event outside this year, with her children, grandchildren, and various of her children's in-laws and distant relatives, and not a few friends. Life was good.
She looked at her son, Blaise, smiling and laughing next to his wife, Deidre, while joking with his son, Talos. Deidre tended to the twins, Esme and Ursula. She felt the connection to the twins, a connection that had always been missing with Talos, her July grandchild. Talos, like her husband, was a mundane, a non-witch, although, unlike her husband, he hadn't been born that way. He had been an extremely talented warlock as a child, with strong telekinetic powers, even as an infant. He had been Sarah's problem child when she had cared for him in his childhood -- with her children and other grandchildren, she shared a psychic line, one that grew out of the connection she had always had, from childhood, with her husband, Will. She had always known instinctively where her children (and grandchildren) were, what they needed, and if they were in danger. That had been missing with Talos; Sarah had never before appreciated how difficult most mothers had it without her special link.
But Talos, whose mother had been abused at a Samhain orgy, had been seduced to the Dark One's power by his blood father, who had planned to sacrifice his son to the Horned One and thereby gain untold powers. That evil warlock had been stopped by her daughter, Anastasia, and destroyed. Annie had then erased the magic in Talos, recognizing that it had been corrupted by his father. Surprisingly, the moody and devious warlock Talos had become a very happy and joyful mundane. He never seemed to miss his powers, so grateful was he to be out of the Horned One's grasp.
The twins, Esme and Sula, were Blaise's natural children, and were still too young for it to be determined what strength their powers would attain. But to Sarah, watching them burble and giggle happily as their mother teased them, was magic enough.
Unlike their older half-brother Talos, Sarah could feel the family connection to the twins, but unlike the rest of the family, while they were linked to Will, Sarah's husband, he wasn't the focus of their connection. While Sarah and her children would turn towards Will whenever he was going to look at them, the twins seemed to have no such connection to their grandfather. Instead, Blaise seemed to be the focus of their attention. Will jokingly said he was glad; he finally had children he could play peekaboo and hide and seek with.
There was a twinge of sadness when Sarah shifted her gaze to her eldest daughter, Gwendolyn. As a pre-teen and teenager, Gwen had been a fashion butterfly, always dressed in style and bright colors. Now, her wardrobe consisted of blacks and dark browns, and her previous merry visage was now consistently somber. Her fiancé, who she had always referred to as her "One", had committed suicide after what the family called the Dark Samhain. In an effort to harm Sarah's family, the evil Griselda had heaped abuse on Gwen's innocent fiancé. In the end, he couldn't deal with the memories. Gwen had shut down for over a year, and had emerged as a sternly rigid witch who, as part of the new tribunal, came down heavily on any who dared even flirt with dark magic.
A loud giggle distracted Sarah. It was her youngest daughter, Anastasia. Unlike Blaise, Gwen, Tabitha and Circe, Annie didn't have Sarah's black hair and green eyes. Instead, she was a brunette with the palest blue eye, eyes and hair that reflected her parentage. She was Will's one true daughter, and ironically, the most powerful witch the world had seen in centuries. That was ironic, because Sarah's other children had been part of the previous tribunal's breeding program, intended to reinvigorate the Hexing Families' powers by breeding witches with warlocks, to counter the current thinking that mixing with mundanes like her husband Will had dissipated or diluted the Families' powers. Yet her mundane husband's natural child mastered all aspects of magic, including at least three of the Forgotten Arts. Annie had exhibited Levitation, Materialization, and Illusions (although the Illusions almost always took the form of dragons, her favorite thing in the world). Her younger brother Evie and Talos loved it when she babysat them, as they'd chase dragons around the house and yard.
Annie hadn't exhibited Mind Control, although Sarah had, with her husband Will, consistently, and others on rare occasions. She'd almost lost her Will when he realized her power and her manipulation of him in her efforts to protect him from the evil tribunal. Now, she only used her ability with Will to relieve him of pain, or once, to relieve his fatigue when they were driving across country one night.
Tabitha came bounding out of the kitchen carrying a turkey on a tray. As she placed it triumphantly on the table, Sarah reflected how Tabitha always was bounding or bouncing. Unlike her siblings, who were uniformly lean like their parents, Tabby had gained weight with her pregnancies and now was a solid matronly figure, but full of energy and love. Her four children (and probably the one she was currently incubating) were, like their mother and uncle and aunts, linked to Will. Tabitha relished her motherhood role, as exhibited by her annual childbirth, and used her witching to weave wards and spells to aid her offspring in their growth.
Sarah's youngest son, Erebus Valentine, was unique in the family. Like his half-sister, Anastasia, he was Will's natural son, conceived to be an offering to the Horned One when Will was bewitched by the evil Griselda, Evie's natural mother. He was Sarah's only child with whom she had no natural ties, only those of love. She had bonded with her son as soon as she held him, partly because it was Evie who had returned her Will to her, and partly because she was linked to him by the family connection, the connection which no one really understood. It was a connection that was so much more than the normal connections that witches sometime (although rarely) shared in their families. Will and Sarah's family connection was there when they were children, seemingly before they'd met, and it spanned bloodlines and generations. Gwendolyn spent years researching their link, but apparently it was unique in history, as there was no documentation that could explain it. Sarah didn't care; she believed it was just the power of love, the power that had saved her family again and again.
Sarah saw that Evie had thrown a Brussel sprout at his nephew Talos and was now innocently picking at the turkey slices on his plate, while Talos searched to see where the sprout had come from. Poor Talos -- a mundane in a family of impish witches. Sarah didn't have the heart to chastise Evie for his prank.
That left Circe, her soon-to-be-wed daughter, the last of her "Samhain children". Circe was a competent witch at potions and spells, but a disaster with telekinesis, divination, psychometry, and Curses. Especially Curses.
When Circe had tried to emulate the practice curse that her mother had used when learning curses, that of inflicting a pimple on the popular mean girl of her class before every dance or picture day, the poor girl's curse had rebounded and strengthen, until poor Circe's had a horrible case of acne that afflicted her most of her sophomore year of high school, and all the spells, potions, lotions that her mother and sisters would whip up didn't have the slightest effect. It was ten whole months before poor Circe's skin cleared up.
No, out of all her children, Circe, named for one of the world's most powerful witches, was the least talented of her children. Still, the girl was happy and wholesome, and working at a mundane job in town. Witchcraft would never provide a paying gig for the girl.
Her fiancé, Bellamy Castle, was attending his first Lawson-Goode family gathering, and was the subject of a lot of good-natured ribbing. Blaise and Tabby were teasing him about getting instructions from Ikea, so he'd know that tab "A" was supposed to go in Slot "B", not Slot "C"! As Bellamy reddened, Sarah saw that Evie had picked up another sprout, but was aiming it at Bellamy. Using telekinesis, Sarah plucked another Brussel sprout from his plate and directed it into his open mouth, causing him to choke in surprise. As he looked around the table and saw his mother raising her eyebrows at him, he nodded at her and returned the sprouts to his plate.
Reaching over and grasping Will's hand, Sarah pulled her husband to her for a kiss. Yes, they had a wonderful, loving family, and it was growing larger and better, every day.
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A week later, all was not well. Bellamy had had his bachelor party, and word came back to Circe that it had included a stripper who was "friendly" with the groom and all his groomsmen. The best man's wife Hecuba had found lipstick marks on her husband's shorts, and using a truth spell, had learned of the gangbang. As the husband was screaming in the background from her nutcracker spell (it only felt like his nuts were being crushed -- as angry as she was, the wife still loved her husband. But it never pays to piss off a witch), the wife had immediately called her friend Circe with the horrible news.
First crushed and in tears, Circe soon became calm with a ferocious anger, and anger that found her that night in the local pickup bar, dressed in her sexiest dress and "fuck-me" heels. She'd switched off her phone -- she'd already received two calls from Bellamy that she had refused to pick up or listen to his voice mail.
She'd come to the bar, where warlocks were known to frequent, and sure enough, there were some. Putting all her anger into it, she cast a powerful compelling spell on one named Tim (who probably would have gone willingly, but Circe want to skip the foreplay) and soon ended up in a hotel room with him. She was highly disappointed to find that he was below average in size, down there, just barely over four inches, if Circe was generous in her estimation. "You'd think," she mused, "that there'd be some spell or potion that would cure that problem!" While she ground through a miserable coupling, she dreamed about her soon-to-be-ex-fiance's nine inches. "Bellamy fills me up," she thought. Soon, as Tim tried to pound away, it became a mantra, "Bellamy fills me up, Bellamy fills me up, Bellamy..."
