Lucas pulled a face and opened his mouth to argue over it, but Hunter put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder as he stood. “We’ll give you some quiet,” he said, a little forcefully so that Lucas snapped his mouth shut.
We all stood up, gathering books.
Nathan glanced up at me. “Not you.”
I shared a somewhat surprised and confused look with the others, and slowly sat back down. Well. That was progress of a sort, I guessed.
As Lucas and Isaac went around the table, they each bent to kiss me, silently wishing me good luck with Nathan, I thought. Hunter was last. He hesitated at the corner of the table, jerking a little one way and another as if his body and mind were at odds, before finally he kissed the top of my head and hurried after the others.
Nathan’s head was down for all of it, but when they were gone it was clear he’d noticed. “So. Hunter finally came around.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye as I opened the next journal. It was old, the pages bound papyri, the letters faded Greek. The Testament of Kiratus the Athenian. “I’d ask if you were upset about it,” I said, “but I just assumed you couldn’t give a shit, given the way you’ve treated him.”
Nathan only snorted at that, the graphite tip of the compass scratching away as he laid the foundation for a summoning diagram.
No snarky comment? No disparaging remark? I put my finger on the page to mark the line I stopped at and looked at him. His expression was concentrated, and grim. “Seriously?”
He looked up briefly. “What?”
“After all that, after the things you’ve said to him, you’re pissed at him over this?” I could see it like it was written on his skin. Nathan was never speechless.
“You’re delusional,” he said. “And still distracting me.”
I rolled my eyes and peered at the paper. “It’s wrong already,” I pointed out. “You can’t harmonize those first two vectors in the space you have, you’ll have to sacrifice stability to do it and we can’t risk an unstable circle.”
He paused, looked it over, and sighed before he crumpled the paper up. “Well spotted.”
“Yeah, I’m real observant.” I put my hand on the paper that he pulled from the stack before he could start again. “If you’re upset that Hunter is moving on, don’t you think you should just tell him how you really feel? It’s obviously you feel something. I don’t even think you’re really fooling him. You’re definitely not fooling me.”
“To what end?” he asked, turning as he clasped his hands together, eyebrows raised. “Where exactly is the benefit of an emotional entanglement when the end of the world is looming near? Let’s say that I did have feelings, for him and for the others, even you, and let’s even imagine that all five of us can live in blissful harmony, shall we? What possible benefit could there be? Will our complex tangle of romantic feelings grant us the mysterious ability to avert the end-times, Amelia? Will the power of love save us all, as if this were some cheap Disney adventure, where all we need do is believe hard enough?”
I reached to take the compass from the table, and the protractor, and slid his paper over to me before I passed him the journal. “Let me have a crack at it,” I said quietly. He had a point.
I turned to the paper and started to trace the circle before I paused. You know what? He didn’t have a point. “Just… for the record,” I said, “the whole ‘power of love’ thing isn’t about some quasi-spiritual magic or something.”
“Pray,” he breathed, “enlighten me.”
“It’s about motivation,” I said. “And connection. And shared strength. I want to keep the boys safe as much as you do, Nathan, and I know that you do. So I work hard, and you know what? If I didn’t have them, I don’t know that I would push myself past my limits the same way. That’s the ‘power of love’ and yeah, it can save us. Not alone, obviously, but it helps. Maybe if you just admitted that you miss it, that you want that, that you need that connection with them, you’d find out that it gives you just the little bit of extra determination. And that little bit extra? That might make all the difference in the world. If I wasn’t trying to protect them, I don’t know that I could have given myself over to… whatever instinct it was that I leaned on to get you back. Without them, and without my love for them, I might have just done what Sinclaire wanted and not felt there was a reason to fight back. So… so that’s…”
Nathan was staring at me, hard, a deep furrow in his brow, his lips pinched in the way they were when he was working something out. Had I managed to say just the right thing? I reached out to put my hand on his. “They do miss you, Nathan. If you were to—”
“What?” He shook his head and pulled his hand away. “Stop talking. I think… give me that compass.”
I handed it over, and he snatched another piece of paper and hastily sketched out the first part of a circle. When he was done, he turned it and pushed it toward me. “What do you see?”
“Uh…” I picked it up. “The… vectors are wrong, I think. This is for something here in this world, but physical. Except… no, this set here, that’s for a person’s astral body. Except they intersect the physical at the wrong angle. And there’s no arrival point, you’d need a…”
I looked up at him, frowning. “You’d… need a hat. Like the rabbit. A receptacle. Nathan… what’s this supposed to mean?”
He took the paper back from me and laid it down. “The… timing of my lapses and the attacks has not escaped me. I believe it hasn’t escaped you, either.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair and shrugged. “I suspected. But that could be a shared resonance issue—you spent almost a year in the Abyss, that thing is from there, and it puts off a field effect; Mara’s seen it twice, and it probably happens every time it manifests. That could just be—”
“We’re connected,” he said softly. “I know it, now. First because of the way if affected my mind when it arrived at the ball, and then when you banished it. My migraine wasn’t from the backlash of the containment spell, Amelia. I can ground the released magic from a broken spell in my sleep. It was the banishing; it… felt like it was splitting my brain into two. I believe it’s the reason I lost my grip on the containment spell. The evidence is fairly clear.”
“So you think…” I looked at the sketch again. “We use you. You’re the reference point, and the receptacle.”
He nodded slowly. “It will at least work to summon it. After that… well, we’ll need a means of sending it back.”
His eyes were hard, unemotional. Like he knew what the cost of that might be. He’d have to be in the circle to act as reference and receptacle, and we wouldn’t be able to risk getting him out of it for the second part. The image of Sinclaire’s face in his final moments flashed in my memory, and I shivered. But he knew the risk, and I wouldn’t insult him by questioning him. “Let me see the diagram,” I said softly, and he passed it to me. I looked it over and picked up the compass. “All right… let’s just see if we can come up with a stable version.”
It took another couple of hours. Incorporating a person, their astral connection to another creature, and drawing that creature through a non-spatial vector to avoid turning the person into inter-dimensional spaghetti proved difficult but not impossible. We took the final version to the study nook where the boys had settled down.
They all looked up as we came in. Nathan and I had agreed, however much it made my heart ache, not to tell them about the many, many risks involved. We focused on the positive, instead.
“We might have done it,” Nathan said. “A means of summoning and sending the creature back.”
The three of them—Lucas, Isaac, and Hunter—sat up straighter in their chairs and began to ask questions.
I put my hands up. “We can talk about the details after, if it works. Right now… we should try this as soon as possible. Before someone else is hurt.”
“Actually attempt it?” Isaac asked. “Are you certain it’s safe, then?”
Nathan�
�s expression was neutral. I did my best to look confident. “Definitely,” I assured them. “It’s… completely safe. This will work.”
I hoped that the power of love and belief really was some kind of magic. Because we were going to need it to pull this ritual off without killing Nathan, and possible the rest of us as well.
Amelia
“And you’re certain this is a viable solution?” Hayes asked when we took her to the workroom and presented our plan. “I understand there is some history of angering entities with failed summonings.”
“There is,” I admitted. Sinclaire and Nathan were at least in agreement about that.
“We don’t believe that will be an issue,” Nathan said. “The procedure is fairly straightforward.”
Headmistress Hayes turned to Percy. “Your thoughts?”
Professor Turner folded his arms, looking over the diagram. If he could tell which elements were intended to connect the circle to the Abyss, it didn’t show on his face. He was looking at the center of the circle. “Seems like sound spell work.”
Nathan politely coughed into his hand.
“All right,” Hayes said at length. “That’s Miss Cresswin casting, Professor Turner, Mister Turner, Mister Roth, Mister Webb and myself augmenting. You believe a fourth level containment field will be sufficient?”
“Given the scale of the magic inside the circle,” Nathan said, “it would be dangerous to go beyond that. With five magicians supporting it, fourth level should be enough. I used a fifth level containment at the dining hall, and the augmentation only hardened the lattice to the point that it became brittle. Fourth should allow for some flexibility.”
“I concur,” Hayes muttered. “All is in preparation, then? Has the circle been tested?”
“We wanted—” I started to explain, but Nathan cut me off.
“We’ve checked the calculations numerous times,” he assured her. “It will work.”
She eyed the two of us for a moment. “And you believe it to be safe?”
Nathan shrugged. “As safe as magic like this is going to be.”
Headmistress Hayes grimaced slightly but was forced to concede that with a nod. There was no such thing as a totally safe summoning and subsequent banishing of an Abyssal entity. “Then, we should begin.”
My hands were shaking slightly. Nathan turned to me as he took his shoes off. “Just as we discussed. You’re more than capable. You have only to follow it through.”
I nodded and tried to wet my dry lips. “I know.”
Even though we’d had our differences, and there were definitely a lot of them, I hated how much of a risk he was taking. Over the last few months, we’d gone from enemies to something more like frenemies. If I sent him back into the Abyss instead of just the creature, I’d never forgive myself.
He stuffed his socks into his shoes and, for good measure, knelt to roll up the hem of his slacks. Then, careful to avoid stepping on the chalked lines of the summoning circle, he picked his way to the middle of it. It was large, by necessity, filling almost the entire room. I’d considered performing the ritual in the dining hall instead, but Nathan pointed out that if the circle was too large, the convergence of forces would be proportionately more intense as well. A ten-foot circle was about as large and as small as we could safely go and still keep the elements within it distinct.
With some direction from me and Nathan, Percy, Hayes, and the boys arranged themselves around the circle at the points where the diagram was set up for them. Six was a good number, easy to harmonize and structurally sound. Nathan watched me, and when I had rehearsed the words and gestures in my mind enough that I was confident I could execute them correctly, I gave him a nod and raised my hands.
A second later, the five other magicians around the circle did the same and wove their fingers together as Hayes began the containment incantation and moved her hands at a reasonable pace through the gestures. One at a time, as her spell came to life around the perimeter, the others joined in. Each added magician thickened the shimmer around the edge of the circle into a haze, until Nathan and the circle itself were both washed out from the pale light.
I waited until all five of them were chanting and casting in time with one another to start the summoning. These movements were simpler, focused on the hands and wrists, rather than the archaic full-body movements that would come later. We’d composed the spell in Latin so that I didn’t have to work so hard to memorize it, or to meld the words with the gestures and my own focused intention. It was short, focused, even elegant—Nathan really was brilliant as a magician.
Magic flowed from me, into the edge of the circle and along the connected elements, tracing out the pattern across dimensions, bending them to intersect with one another as invisible tendrils reached first into Nathan, and then across the connection between him and the shadow entity. I kept my mind clear and focused on the casting as I tracked the magic reaching out for purchase along every vector. It was like casting multiple fishing lines into as many possible lakes and rivers as we could plan for, hoping that our quarry was resting in one of them.
I’d begun to worry that we would have to recalculate those vectors and try again, when I felt the distant tug of something connecting on the far end.
All things resisted a summoning. Even Mister Rabbit hadn’t popped right over. Summoning was a bit like fishing in that way, too—once the connection was made, the entity in question had to be reeled in. There were other elements in the circle for that as well. I shifted my stance and moved smoothly into the next part of the ritual, calling the entity across the established connection. Inside the containment field, the lines of the circle took on a lambent blue-green glow that gradually shifted to violet, and finally to red before, at last, I felt the sudden give of the shadow entity losing its hold on wherever it was as it slipped across dimensions.
“It’s coming,” Nathan breathed. He swayed a little, and shook his head, blinking through some confusion as he muttered to himself. “When…? I thought you… Hunter, I’m not sure I… it’s too soon. Too soon…”
“What’s happening?” Hayes asked between rounds of the containment chant.
I caught her eye and shook my head, trying to urge her back to the containment spell without breaking my own concentration. There were no gaps in my spell for me to answer. She just had to trust me, and Nathan, and go along for the ride like the rest of us.
Just as I felt the last thrashing resistance of the shadow entity, a split in the air above Nathan opened up as if space itself were giving painful birth. The shadow spilled out of it and seemed to dig smoky tentacles into the world to keep from being dragged through. It knew. It had to know what we were doing. Perhaps only because Nathan knew, or because it was more intelligent than we really understood. Either way, it began to fight back, and it did so with a sudden fury that nearly made me stutter my spell.
When it became clear the thing couldn’t resist the pull of the circle, it surged out of the space between dimensions and slammed against the containment field and the circle’s edge. It struck out at all six of us and stalked the edge of the circle as I changed the spell from summoning to holding. The lines of the circle changed from red to bright white as the tone of the magic shifted.
It knew. The entity hovered a moment, and then sent tendrils at the diagram, attempting to scrape the chalk from the ground. At this point in the ritual, though, the magic itself held together with or without the guidelines of the diagram to control it. Furious, the shadow scrabbled over the ground, seeking out the edges of the circle with obvious desperation. Its form became less smoky, and began to solidify into something like a long, slender cephalopod with dozens of elongated thin tentacles that swayed in the air and over the ground like some black plant caught in a water current.
When the circle and the containment held, it changed tactics. It went after Nathan.
Inky tentacles snapped out around him and grasped his arms, his thighs, and throat. The slender ‘body’ of the
creature pressed close to him, and he pried at the arms, trying to dislodge them as his eyes went wild with panic. He gasped for air and tried to throw himself on the floor as if he might smash the shadow creature against the circle. It only flowed around him, though, until several tentacles pried at his mouth and attempted to get inside.
It was seeking refuge. If it got into him, the dynamics of a banishing changed entirely. We hadn’t planned for an exorcism. I finished the holding and started on the banishing. But it was already too late. I couldn’t possibly finish in time. Panic threw off the rhythm of my chant. The next line didn’t match the gestures. My heart raced, and fear trickled down my spine like ice water as I scrambled to get back into sync. Nathan’s eyes bulged wide, and he clawed at his throat.
I dropped the banishing meant to send the shadow back to the abyss. The circle’s light began to fade as I rolled into the banishing that had worked in the dining hall.
“Miss Cresswin!” Hayes snapped. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer her, there was no time. The Sumerian chant flowed over my tongue, between my lips, and into the circle as I stomped and clapped in time with them, throwing my body into the somatics until finally I shouted the last words and brought my hands together. Maybe because of the dissipating magic of the circle, or the effects of the containment spell, but when I shouted the final ‘barra!’ and clapped, the room shook, and the air inside the containment field took on a heat-haze as the shadow surged up and out of Nathan’s throat and dissolved into black mist, and then into nothing as it was forced back across the dimensional wall into whatever plane it hid itself in.
“Drop the field!” I shouted at the others.
Hayes continued to chant, but the boys, and then Percy, stopped. A second later, Hayes gave up as well. She was red faced as I dove into the circle by Nathan’s prone body. I lifted his head and felt for a pulse.
“What is the meaning of this?” Hayes demanded as she stormed toward us. “We had the creature in our grasp, we could have ended this, Miss Cresswin!”
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 21