She pushed her shoulders back and strode inside after Zina. The house was musty with signs of disuse everywhere. The old staircase was rickety with missing boards. Cobwebs littered the corners. Dust covered the creaky hardwood floor. The Red Masks had been using the abandoned house to store weapons, so it hadn’t been entirely abandoned, but it looked worse than the last time she’d been in here.
“Help me with this,” Zina said.
She dropped her bag onto the ground, and Kerrigan helped her extract a few dozen candles from inside. Zina directed her to put them in a circle large enough for them both to sit in. Even before she was finished, Kerrigan could feel the house come alive.
She closed her eyes as she felt the brush of little fingers on her hair. She shuddered.
“Leave her be,” Zina commanded. “She’s here with me.”
“You know the spirits?”
“Know them? No. No one can really know the spirits that still inhabit this land, but I can feel them, and they’ve come to respect my presence. They’re not used to you. They’re inquisitive. The circle will keep them at bay.”
Kerrigan gulped and hurriedly put the rest of the candles in the circle. Zina settled into a seated cross-legged position and gestured for Kerrigan to sit, facing her, which she did.
“Now, light the candles,” Zina said.
Kerrigan didn’t even have to snap her fingers anymore, and flames burst from all of the candles at once. Her fire training had really taken off. She’d never had this level of control.
“Dimmer,” Zina said. Kerrigan put her hand down, and all the candles burned low so only their faces were illuminated in the space. “Better.”
Zina put her hands on her knees, palms up, and closed her eyes. Kerrigan mirrored the position and waited for something to happen. When nothing did, she opened her eyes and looked around the haunted house.
“Not a fan of meditating?” Zina asked.
“I don’t dislike it. It’s hard to forget where I’m at though.”
“That seems reasonable.” Her eyes opened to stare at Kerrigan. “Today, we’re going to work on guiding you into the spirit plane. Helly said that you’ve done it before with Gelryn, but it came with risks. I want you to very easily be able to flow between the two.”
“Okay.”
“But it’s not easy, even for me, and I’ve been doing it for nearly a thousand years,” Zina informed her. “The spirit is the realm of the dragons. The bond should link you deeper into the spiritual world, but because we each have spirit magic of our own, we can cross without them. Though that bond is a useful tether. We can reach for it and pull ourselves back out.”
Kerrigan flushed in the dying light. Even here, that stupid bond was ruining everything. “I understand.”
“You don’t understand anything,” Zina chided. “You just wait. The reason that I wanted to do this on the Night of the Dead is because crossing the spiritual plane is easiest at those times when we’re closest to that liminal space. The summer and winter solstice, the Night of the Dead, midnight of the full moon, for instance. Witching hour is a good place to begin practicing on your own.
“First, take my hands.”
Kerrigan scooted closer and reached for Zina’s hands. They were cold to the touch, and Kerrigan realized that she could see her breath fog up in the house. It wasn’t even that cold outside. Perhaps Zina had been doing something other than meditating.
“Now, close your eyes and reach down past your other magic to the center of yourself. Grasp on to the seam of your spirit magic, and I’m going to guide you into the spiritual plane once you have ahold of it.”
Kerrigan did as instructed. She found her spirit magic much quicker than when she’d had to find it for her air-magic test. It came to her almost giddy with excitement. That must have been the liminal space. It never hit this easily.
“I have it,” she told her.
Then, Zina had connected them, and the world disappeared all around them. They shot out of their bodies and up into the spiritual plane. They were still within Black House. In fact, she felt almost trapped within the bounds.
“You won’t be able to leave. That is another reason for choosing this space. It already contains so many spirits that its purpose has shifted to containment, and I didn’t want us to get too far away,” Zina told her.
Kerrigan looked down at her body, just a wisp of what she had been down below. “I can’t believe I did it.”
“I did it,” Zina corrected her. “But we will get you there. The important point is that you should feel safe in these confines. The last time you did this with Gelryn, you were out of control, and I want a safe learning environment. Now, we’re going to push back down into our bodies and let you try.”