The bowl was prepped, the rosemary pulped. Jenks had the fern sap and water from the lady’s mantle in two tiny ampoules I’d given him to fill. The mix of new and old was comfortable, and as a kid in the street shrieked “You aren’t being nice!” I cleared the rock between us to make a spelling area.
“Okay, moon is perfect. Time to spell,” I said, and Stef gave me a firelit smile. Exhaling, I reached out a stray thought and touched a ley line with my mind. Energy flowed in, making me part of the circuit that ran from our reality to the ever-after to keep the artificial reality intact. It eased my slight headache and tingled to my toes. It also made my hair staticky, and after I tucked a strand behind an ear again, I used my magnetic chalk to draw a spiral on the bumpy stone.
I went from the outside in, feeling the energy spill from me into the ancient glyph as I went. This one called for three turns, one for each property I was trying to instill into the artificial seed: youth from the rosemary and fern, strength from the plantain, and potency from the black cohosh flowers. The energy slowly built until I reached the end and it flowed unhindered into the earth. I had my reasons for not liking spiral magic. But it had its uses.
Sparks flew when Stef tossed a few more pieces of my broken past on the fire to light my present. I set the tiny plantain bowl at the center of the spiral, then emptied the ampoule of fern juice into it. The cohosh flowers I soaked with the dew from the lady’s mantle, then added them. All that was left was a drop of blood, but I paused when I realized I’d forgotten to bring out a finger stick.
Grimacing, I reached for my ceremonial knife, but Stef had seen me look at my finger, and she fumbled in her pocket.
“Finger stick?” she offered, and I smiled my thanks as I took the plastic-and-metal spike she was holding out. Many were the witches who had faked a case of diabetes before the Turn to get these babies through insurance, and where I normally wouldn’t dream of using a finger stick I hadn’t bought myself, it still had the hospital’s purity seal intact.
“Thanks,” I said as I snapped it open and pricked my Jupiter finger.
A single drop was all that I needed, and I felt a smile find me when the dusky scent of redwood rose and the witchy enzymes my blood carried kindled the charm. It was working.
“You’re, ah, going to put a Band-Aid on that, right?” she said when I wiped my finger on my jeans. “Antiseptic, now and then, keeps your fingers counting ten,” she sang to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and I stared. Maybe she’d worked in the kids’ wing.
“Sure,” I said, though I’d never used one since seventh grade. I hadn’t gotten sick much after being kicked out of Kalamack’s Make-A-Wish camp for dying children—unless you count the times it was from too much or too little magic.
“And a little rosemary to seal it,” I said as I used the crab-apple-wood stylus to move a blob of pulped rosemary to cap the bowl and make sort of a seed. Again I drew heavily on the ley line, feeling the energy flow through the spiral to collect in the “seed” before the excess spilled out and away. It simmered at the center of the spiral, and I held my breath, knowing this was different from anything I’d ever done before. The energy was there, and thanks to the fern water and black cohosh flowers, it would stay even after it was removed from the spiral and ley line.
Earth magic at its finest, I thought as I snapped the applewood stylus in two.
“That’s it?” Stef said, clearly not impressed.
“I haven’t said the magic words yet,” I said, and Jenks dropped from the darkening branches, his wings cherry red from the rising heat.
“It’s a seed,” he said as he hovered over it. “It won’t do anything until it’s quickened.”
“Isn’t that what she just did?” Stef asked, and I shook my head.
“Not exactly.” Using the broken stylus like chopsticks, I lifted the “seed” free from the spiral, my breath catching as the ley line lost its hold with a twang of sensation. The energy was still in there. I could feel it. “Jenks, I need a hole where you want this growing.”
“I’ll do it.” Stef sprang up as if to prove she wasn’t afraid to spell with demon Rachel Mariana Morgan.
Jenks’s wings clattered in annoyance, but he flew to the spot he’d probably picked out that afternoon. “Here,” he demanded, and the watching pixies chattered at his audacity in giving orders to a lunker. “Dig six to eight inches down.”
Stef used a busted one-by-one to dig a hole, and after Jenks inspected it and found it suitable, I set the “seed” in it. The tiny lily bulb went in atop it, and then Jenks shooed me away so he could cover it up.
“I don’t know, Rache,” he said as he worked. “That tiny thing needs at least one summer before it will bloom.”
“Then that’s what we’ll shoot for,” I said, thinking we was a word I hadn’t been expecting to use tonight. God, please don’t let this go wrong. I’d die of embarrassment if this flopped. Nervous, I strengthened my hold on the ley line. Magnetic chalk didn’t work in the dirt, so I used salt to draw a small circle around the planted seed. “All circles are really spheres,” I said, not knowing how much lore Stef had. “But most times the bottom half is under the floor, unseen. This way, all the magic will be contained, roots and all.”
“’Cause if this works,” Jenks added, “it’s going to be really stinky.”
“Got it.” Stef’s eyes flicked from the salt circle to the fire and back again.
I stooped to get the demon tome. Rhombus, I thought, to set my circle, and the ring of salt shifted to the ever-after, thereby creating a barrier that light, air, and not much else could get through. Circles carried a reflection of the maker’s aura, and I wasn’t surprised when Stef gave mine a hard scrutiny, visibly relaxing when she saw very little demon smut marring the clear gold. The slashes of red didn’t faze her at all, evidence of a medically troubled past. The accumulated smut, though, was gone, added to the smut from all the other demons to give the new ever-after mass.
And now the tricky part, I thought as I angled the book to the firelight to read the cramped demon script. The words would tap into the demon collective, where I would “buy” a curse already prepped. The demon who’d crafted it might not even still be alive, but his magic was, and I’d pay for it by accepting the smut, or “nature imbalance,” it caused. This one was going to be kind of hefty, seeing as I was trying to move the entire circle into the future and back, giving the grow/potency charm the chance to work its force over the span of a condensed year.
My eyes half lidded as I immersed my conscious into the demon collective and I was suddenly both here and there, existing in a space between space. Whispers of conversation rose up through my mind, echoes of half-heard deals and gossip. Overlying it were the usual feelings of mistrust, anger, and bad temper that the demons wore about themselves like a cloak to hide their deeper self-pity. The demon collective was a lot like a restaurant where you could chat quietly among yourselves if you didn’t mind the ever-present threat of being overheard.