By the time we finished eating, the sun had set.
Rafe stood and gathered the remains of our meal. He shoved everything into the plastic bag the food had come it and then tossed it into the air. Before the bag could fall, he triggered his fire tat and incinerated the bag and its contents. A few handfuls of ashes floated off on the light breeze. It was a regular trick of his to avoid leaving anything behind that might contain our DNA. He’d told me a few of the spells that used someone’s DNA and not many of them were pleasant. Could you actually make someone’s heart explode just by the use of the right spell while holding a lock of someone’s hair? It sounded so far-fetched compared to most of Rafe’s spells. I could understand how Rafe used magic to direct energy at things he could see and control the wind and lightning and all that sort of stuff but to make someone’s heart explode at a distance. That was, well, it was like magic, wasn’t it?
I gazed at the sky. We were still in twilight, and only a few stars were out. “So, do you think I’m ready to give it a shot?”
Rafe turned to me with a fretful expression on his face. He wore that expression a lot, usually after I asked a question. I wouldn’t say that it troubled me when he did, but it was a little frustrating. “That’s up to you. If you have any doubts, then you should wait. This is too important a spell to flub.”
I considered, giving it a full minute of thought so that he’d know I had taken his apprehension seriously and then I perked up. “I’m ready. I can do this.”
His concern vanished and was replaced with a wide smile. “Good, I thought you were, but I needed to make sure you were confident about casting it. Bring your ride over to the circle. We’ll need the object your familiar will possess in the circle with us.
I’d left my Harley by the road at the edge of the clearing. I still remembered how we’d been attacked last week during our training and I didn’t want my ride being in the line of fire if some other nasty showed up. I’d only had it a few days, but I already considered it mine and didn’t want anything untoward happening to it.
I practically ran back to my bike. It cranked smoothly, and I motored back to where Rafe waited in the circle that we’d cleared of small pebbles and sticks, just to make the ground a little more comfortable. Killing the engine, I leaned the bike on its kickstand and then had to catch it as it began to sink in the soft dirt.
“Hold it still just one second,” Rafe said. He bent beside me, and a moment later blue light erupted from his right hand and struck the ground beneath my kickstand. The light held for a few seconds and then went out. Rafe stood. “Try it now.”
Hesitantly, I lowered the kickstand back to the ground and wasn’t surprised to see the steel did not sink into the ground. “What did you do?”
“I froze the earth beneath it for a couple of feet. It shouldn’t thaw out before we’re finished.”
“Cool,” I said.
He sat down in his usual cross-legged manner, and I sat across from him. We clasped hands, and in a score of seconds, we meshed. Rafe released my hands and cast his little bottle of salt into the air. He spoke a spell, and the salt fell around us in a circle about twenty feet in diameter. As soon as the salt was down, Rafe spoke another spell to activate the circle. He apparently didn’t have his senses tat active because I couldn’t see any sign of the circle’s energy field.
Rafe set his grimoire between our knees and opened it to the spell for summoning a familiar. I looked down at the words and pattern that stretched out across two pages.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Rafe said.
I glanced up at him and then took a deep breath and let it out. “No time like the present.”
He nodded, and I could feel his reassurance through our meshing.
The words and pattern had to be done simultaneously to activate this spell. Some spells required you to make the pattern first, some the words first, others, like the tattoos Wanderers used, only had the pattern.
I concentrated on the pattern, making sure it was clear in my mind. Raising my right hand, I extended my index finger, focused energy, and began to trace the spell’s pattern in the air between us. As the glowing lines of the spell formed at the tip of my finger, I spoke the words.
The words didn’t make much sense in English, and I didn’t know what language they were originally created in. Some of Rafe’s spells were in English and easy to follow, but this one was syllables that meant nothing to me, but it did in some forgotten language. As I spoke the spell and traced out the pattern, I felt power massing. There was almost a hum of energy growing inside the circle. The hairs on my arms were tingling, and in a few minutes, I realized the hair on my head was standing up. Without pausing in my incantation, I glanced toward Rafe and saw that his hair was also standing on end.
This was new to me; none of the other spells had charged the air around me. The spell took a few minutes to recite, but it had to be done three times in succession in order to take effect. Sweat was beading up on my forehead by the time I finished the first repetition. I immediately started the second and found that I was having a harder time holding my concentration.
I felt Rafe’s concentration augmenting my own, and the difficulty lessened. By the time the second repetition was complete, sweat was rolling into my
