see the connecting links like colored vapor trails winding through the circle. Lois was greedy about it too, taking far more than she could actually use. When her eyes opened, the trails hung in the air for a moment before dissipating.
“You joined us after all. Please, take a seat.” Lois waved toward the opposite side of the circle and two women scooted in either direction to make room.
Raquel shifted, holding her arm at the elbow and looking around the bare basement for somewhere unobtrusive to sit. “I really just came to observe.”
“Nonsense, dear.” Lois gave her a tight smile. “You’re one of us now. Best to start as you mean to go on, my mother used to say.”
“Mine says wait until the deal is done.”
Lois’s eyes hardened. “As you wish. Come now, let’s try again.”
She waggled her fingers and the women who’d made room for Raquel moved back and joined hands, sealing the circle. Raquel upended an empty crate in the corner and sat down, propping her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. The group seemed good. There were some surprisingly powerful people here. The teenage boy to Lois’s left was the strongest of the lot. A little more power from him and the clan might not have had to go trolling for witches.
Some clans, she knew, didn’t like male witches. But it was an old prejudice, and there was no reason why they couldn’t do the job. There was also no reason why they were down here in this musty, old basement. She understood the need to close out potential distractions, but—
If Raquel stayed, if they kept her, she would make sure they at least got comfortable seating.
The circle powered up. Lois gathered all that energy in her greedy hands and hurled it in the direction of the portal. Raquel lifted her head from her hands. She couldn’t—holy shit, she wasn’t going to pour it all into the portal, was she?
Raquel rocketed to her feet, hands waving as she stepped forward. “Stop.”
Lois looked up, exasperated, and the energy snapped back, rebounding into the circle. It arced between the witches’ hands as they dropped the contact. The dark-haired woman to Lois’s right hissed in pain and shook her hands. The teenage boy, who’d gotten walloped, glared at Raquel openly.
“I didn’t think I’d need to tell you not to interrupt the circle,” Lois snapped.
“I block it from reaching the fault.” Lois’s brows rose and her mouth slid into a supremely smug little smile. Raquel had the uneasy feeling that she’d walked into a trap. “Your wards are only twenty years old. I helped to place them. Ours were placed over a century ago. If we don’t strengthen them regularly, they will fail. Which is, after all, the reason we need you.”
Ah. It had been a trap so that Lois could chastise her in front of the coven, prove to everyone that she was still the head witch. Raquel managed to not roll her eyes. She wasn’t here to play power games but fine, she could do that too. “The wards you’re refreshing—they’re stonebound?”
“Of course.”
That happened to be a specialty of hers, mostly because runes didn’t require one to have control over one’s own magic. They pulled directly from the ley lines and not from the person. Raquel could work rune magic like nobody’s business, all day, every day and twice on Tuesdays. She stood and brushed her hands on her pants. “You have warding stones here, I assume?”
“What for?”
“You don’t need to keep pouring your own energy into the wards. I’ll set up a secondary ring to power the first, drawing from the ley lines instead of the circle.”
“We’re an agricultural community. Drawing from the ley lines will weaken the land.”
“Not fast enough to do any damage so long as it’s only temporary. It’s winter now. If we remove them by January, it shouldn’t even affect the next harvest. And this way there’s no risk that any of your magic accidently aggravates the fault line. I’ve done this at home, I can have it up and running within a day or two.”
Raquel held her breath, waiting for Lois’s reaction. Would she cut off her nose to spite her face? If she did, there’d be no working with her anyway. Lois hesitated—or maybe she just had to work that hard to unclench her teeth—then gave a sharp nod. “Top of the stairs, turn right. There’s a closet halfway down the hall. They’re in the box at the bottom.”
The teenager scrambled to his feet. “I’ll show her.”
Raquel followed him toward the stairs but paused when Lois called her name. “I’ll want to check your work before we place them.”
Raquel schooled her features into a neutral expression. It wasn’t polite to gloat. “Of course.”
Reaching the top of the stairs, she closed the door behind her and leaned against it for a minute while the boy went to grab the box. He was smiling when he came back to set the crate on the workbench. “That was awesome. I’ve never seen anyone stand up to her like that before.”
Raquel shook her head. She really didn’t want to fight unless she had to. She was following the advice Kathy had given her—
“I didn’t say that to hurt her. I don’t like being bullied and I want to help.” The boy’s expression fell a bit so she said, “You’ve a good bit of power.”
He shrugged. “Not enough to do anything more than feed a circle.”
“That depends on what you do with it. This—” she grabbed the first stone out of the box and set it down on the scarred wood, “—doesn’t require much in the way of personal energy, but it’s incredibly powerful when used properly.”
She pulled the cap off the Sharpie with her teeth. He hopped onto the stool next to her and craned his neck to see what she was doing. “What if we do it wrong?”
“Then we destroy the town.”
He fell silent, meeting her gaze to see if she was serious. She was dead serious. When he saw that, his face paled a little and she continued, “It takes a lot of practice and you have to know what you’re doing. Lois was right to ask to check my work before we activate them. You always want at least one other person to double-check your work. Anybody can make mistakes, and mistakes can kill you.”
He was paying attention, all that young energy focused on the rune she drew on the first stone. She’d burn them later when she was satisfied that everything was right and activate them once they were positioned on site. That small magic she could do. It was the big stuff everyone had been expecting from her since she was a child, the kind of thing that would make her suitable as a clan witch, that eluded her. Julian looked at her, all wide eyes and held breath. “You know what you’re doing, right?”
She sure hoped so.
Christian was an astonishingly good-looking man. Generally, Raquel was more comfortable with the jeans- and-T-shirt crowd, but even she could appreciate how well he wore a suit. Turning around in the middle of the hallway before he caught sight of her, she almost crashed into Audrey.
“Maybe you were right about the heels.”
Audrey held up her hand, the sexy shoes dangling from her fingers. “Of course I was right. I bought the dress to go with the shoes.”
“What? That’s so crazy backward I don’t even know—”
Audrey pointed at the bench beside the hall closet. “Sit and I’ll get rid of those things.” She waggled her fingers at Raquel’s perfectly acceptable, versatile and comfortable shoes. “I don’t know why you thought they’d look okay with that. I can’t believe you didn’t pack a dress.”
