Spirit (27 page)

I didn’t bother
to light a fire since there was no food to cook and because I was all alone.
Since I was planning on watching the looking glass again to glean information
about Jodi and Steven’s plans, I couldn’t watch the fire or for anything the
fire might attract. I shook my head. I didn’t need to think about things like
that; if I didn’t remain calm, I couldn’t focus on the looking glass. I closed
my eyes and cleared my mind, keeping the images of Jodi and Steven in the front
of my mind.

Jodi and Steven
were huddled in the tree house again. Jodi had a notebook open on her lap. The
yellow highlighter in her hand pointed at a passage in one of the open books.
There was a pen behind her ear, making her look like she was cramming for
finals, but instead of Chemistry and Calculus books, spell books on invocations
and magical properties surrounded her. Steven was in a corner under the larger
window, a laptop in his lap. Lucky for him my dad had run electricity up there
years ago at my request.

Jodi’s phone
buzzed on the floor beside her. After picking it up and viewing the message,
she looked at Steven and said, “Sherry says they’ll bring the consecrated water
and blessed dirt, but we need to bring the Air, Fire, and Spirit elements.”

Steven nodded,
reaching to make a note in the notebook beside him as he clicked through a
website. “What color candle?”

Jodi turned her
phone sideways to make the keyboard longer and typed out a quick text. Less
than a minute later, it buzzed again with their answer.

“Black,” she
said, “to symbolize the light emerging from the dark.”

“Oh, right,
duh,” he replied, rolling his eyes. He was right; he should have known that off
the top of his head. What surprised me more was Jodi’s lack of comment; pointing
out a slip up like that was almost a knee-jerk reaction for her.

“I’m gonna bring
a bird,” Jodi said as she set her phone on the floor by her knee again.

“A real live bird?”
Steven asked, finally picking his head up and tearing his eyes away from the
screen.

“Yep.” She
nodded, making another note in the book.

“Kinda creepy,”
Steven said, earning a smirk from Jodi. I understood her reasoning though. She
couldn’t depend on her breath being strong enough this time. Usually we would
just use a feather to symbolize a bird, but with their diminishing abilities,
she’d want something more concrete.

“Ugh,” Jodi said
after a few silent moments, throwing the highlighter at the far wall. “How the
hell did Shay do this crap all the time?”

“I know, right?”
Steven said, rubbing the back of his neck one-handed. I couldn’t help the smile
that curled on my lips. Because I was the one blessed with the affinity of
spell writing, Jodi and Steven had just slowly stopped doing it, and I knew
they had taken that for granted. Anyone could learn to write spells, but you
had to practice and keep up with it, like any skill.

“How did she
know which spells were legit and which ones were bullshit?” Jodi asked, rubbing
her right hand, working out a cramp from all her note taking.

“I don’t know.”
Steven slid the laptop off of his lap. “I don’t think she ever used anyone
else’s spells; I think she made them up from scratch.”

“But how?”

“Intuition?”
Steven shrugged. “Probably should’ve paid more attention.”

“Probably,” I
muttered. Steven was half-right. I tried not to use anyone else’s spells, but
in the early days, I did just as much studying as they were doing now, seeing
which elements were the common threads between authors, figuring out what were
essential items, incantations, and symbols for whatever type of spell we were
trying. Once I had that committed to memory, I could make up my own spells,
writing them to work with our strengths. It was a lot like writing good poetry,
not just poetry you thought was good, but poetry other people enjoyed too. It
wasn’t easy.

“Think it was
because she was an Empath?” Jodi asked. She was trying to make herself feel
better for not being able to do this as easily as they thought I did.

“Maybe,” Steven
said with a sigh. “But I think it was a lot of practice. Since you and I weren’t
very good at it, we always left it up to her to figure it all out. I mean,” he
said, “I think if we had worked with her to write spells, we wouldn’t be having
this problem right now.”

“You’re probably
right,” Jodi said, but her tone let me know she wished he wasn’t right. We’d
all had enough of realizing what horrible mistakes we had made over the years.
“And there’s nothing in her grimoire!”

“Not like what
we’re looking for anyway; nothing that’ll make her manifest here,” Steven said.

“Of course not,”
Jodi said through clenched teeth.

“Whatever,”
Steven said, reaching for the laptop again, “let’s just try to focus. Shay
always said to figure out what the common thread is for the similar spells and
rituals and then work from there.”

“That is probably
why Shay did so much angel magic,” Jodi said as she crawled to retrieve her
thrown highlighter.

“What?”

“Shay and the
angel magic.” Jodi fell back into her original position, highlighter in hand.
“Think about it, how much angel magic have we done over the last couple of
years? A lot, right?”

“Yeah.” Steven nodded,
looking off into the distance as if he were watching a replay of our latest
castings.

“I bet she was
coming into the whole angel thing long before any of us realized, and that’s
why she used angel magic so much,” Jodi explained.

“Okay, but so
what?”

“I bet that’s
why her spells were coming so easy to her,” she said.

“Her spells
always came easy,” Steven said with a shake of his head.

“Not like lately.”
Jodi shook her head back at him. “Lately things were huge like special effects
in movies.”

“Fine, but what
is your point?”

“My point is,”
she took a breath, “Shay played to her strengths. That’s what we’re forgetting.
So, Shay tapped into angel magic for her angelic powers. We need to focus on
elemental magic for our strengths.”

“We don’t have
much elemental magic anymore,” Steven said, dropping his eyes.

“But we still
have some.” Jodi shifted to her knees and turned toward Steven, reaching out to
grip his arm. I saw the light sparkle in her eyes. She was really on to
something. “I was able to call those birds to me, remember?”

“Yeah,” Steven
said slowly.

“Look,” Jodi
said, stopping him abruptly. “The first few angel spells Shay did were kinda
small. I mean, remember how long it took her to get us to meet our guardian
angels?” Steven glanced away again. I knew he was remembering that night on the
beach so many years ago as we invited our guardian angels to join us. My throat
swelled, and I had to force a swallow past the lump forming there as I
remembered the tears in their eyes when we came out of the meditation.

“True,” Steven
said after a moment.

“Okay, but then
suddenly things just started happening faster and faster. Shay could send her
spirit out of her body, angels always answered our calls; hell a whole host of
angels pulled us out of the water and saved us from those nymphs.” Jodi’s voice
rose like the chatter of chipmunks as she spoke, her excitement getting the
better of her.

“But that was
because Shay finally got her wings,” Steven said.

“Yes!” Jodi all
but yelled, startling Steven. “Because she’d been working angel magic more and
more! Shayna finally woke up, you know? She woke up and she found her true self,
but the amount of angel magic accelerated that.”

“All right,”
Steven said, holding up a hand. “You don’t have to convince me. If you think we
need to focus on elemental magic because that’s the key, that we have to just
pick our strength and focus on it, then that’s fine.”

“Not pick our
strength,” Jodi said, “recognize it. Shay’s always been an angel, but she was
earthbound, so she didn’t know it. I think that’s why she had empathetic
abilities, and that’s probably why she had Earth elemental powers. She took
eighteen years to recognize her true powers; let’s not make the same mistake.”

“What do you
mean?”

“I mean, let’s
put these angel books aside. They’re just weighing us down because we aren’t
angels,” Jodi said, shoving a couple of books away for emphasis. “We are elementals;
we need to work with that.”

“But we’re
summoning Shay, who is an angel, so shouldn’t we use angel magic?” Steven
asked.

“I don’t think
so.” Jodi shook her head. “Our powers, our magics are going to make this work
or not, so we need to use spells that speak to us, not her.”

“You may be on
to something,” Steven said. He pushed the laptop off of his lap and got to his
feet. He turned toward the open window, placing his hands on the sill. Closing
his eyes, he let the sunlight shine on his face and drank it in like a flower.
The faintest flush of heat colored his cheeks, making him look more like
himself than he had in days.

“Steven?” Jodi
whispered.

“Yes?” he
replied.

“So we’re
agreed?”

“Agreed,” Steven
said with a nod.

The image in the
looking glass began to fade. I imagined they moved to study elemental spells
for invocations and summonings, but I didn’t need to watch. I cradled the looking
glass in my lap, folding my hands over it. Balor was asleep near my feet. He
must have moved closer to me and I was so focused on Jodi and Steven that I
didn’t notice. Fearghus was dozing by the riverbed as usual. My stomach growled
painfully, almost cramping, but I was out of food. I thought about waking Balor
to get him to go hunting with me, but I really didn’t want to move just yet.
And really, the thought of killing an animal and cleaning it kind of stole my
appetite anyway.

I leaned my head
back against the tree trunk and closed my eyes. Jodi and Steven were finally
making progress and they actually had help. Any minute, they might rip me out
of this reality and bring me home. I wondered, when I got back, if I would
still an incorporeal ghost or if I would have my body back. A fluttering of
hope formed in my chest, but I pushed that thought away; there was no point in
getting my hopes up about that. As it was, they might not be strong enough to
pull me back at all, let alone give me a body.

I wished I knew
how far in the past these images were. Part of me believed they were real time,
but if I could be sure, then I could try to prepare myself. I opened my eyes
and tilted my head to look at Balor. I wondered if I kept my hands on him when
it happened, if I could drag him through with me. The thought of leaving him
behind made me sick. I shut my eyes against that thought and tried to relax.

When I opened my
eyes again, it was impossible to tell how long I’d been asleep. I hadn’t meant
to fall asleep, and the sound of a footfall somewhere behind me jarred me
awake. For a moment, I thought Jacob had finally caught up to me, but when I
didn’t hear another step, I knew it wasn’t him. He hadn’t managed to master the
art of walking quietly through the forest.

Balor rolled onto
his stomach, putting all four feet under him, ready to launch at any moment.
His blood red ears were straight up, and his eyes darted from side to side.
When he glanced at me, I nodded to him, letting him know I knew we weren’t
alone as well.

Slowly, I
reached behind me, gripped the handle of the crossbow, and pulled it from
behind my back without a sound. I set the looking glass on the ground in the
shadow of the tree, hoping it was well out of the way in case anything happened.

As silently as
possible, I pushed against the tree trunk to get to my feet. I felt better
having the trunk against my back so that whoever, or whatever, was there couldn’t
sneak up on me from behind. I adjusted my grip on the crossbow, switching hands
so that I could wipe the sweat from my palm before gripping it again and
holding it close to my chest. I held my breath, terrified the intruder could
hear my breathing, hear my heart pounding in my chest. Balor pressed himself as
close to the ground as possible, as if he could flatten his body and become
invisible, so that he could spring into action, taking whoever was there by
surprise.

I wished I still
had my ability to seek out a nearby entity to pinpoint their location, so I
could know if I ran right or left which way would save me or send me right into
their path. I tried to watch Balor for a clue, but his head was so close to the
ground, I couldn’t tell which way he was looking. He had gone unnaturally
still, so much so that I wondered if he’d managed to stop his heartbeat.

Closing my eyes,
I strained my ears to try to determine which direction the intruder was coming
from, but no matter how hard I listened, how quiet I was, I just couldn’t tell.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw the faintest twitch of Balor’s nose before
he sprung from the ground and was airborne.

I spun away from
the tree, my arms extended and the crossbow raised. Balor crashed into the
approaching person, slamming him into the ground and rolling with him in a blur
of white fur and snapping teeth. There was a surprised yell just before Balor
struck, but hitting the ground stole what breath the stranger had, silencing
him.