Charmfall (The Dark Elite 3)

“How so?” Daniel asked.

“We need a new perspective.” I walked over to the dry-erase board. “Can I erase this?”

“Not that it’s doing any good,” Scout said, so I took that as permission, swabbed it down with an eraser, and grabbed a marker.

“Let’s think about the magic like a story.”

“Like a story?” Paul asked. “How?”

“Um,” I said for a second, pausing as I tried to actually figure out what I might have meant. Thank goodness, an idea popped into my head. “Well, instead of thinking about how the parts go together, like a recipe, we’ll storyboard it, like we’re deciding which scenes to put in a movie.”

I drew a grid on the board, three squares across and two squares down, six squares in all. “Now we need to fill in the pictures.” In the last square, I drew a little caricature of Scout casting a spell.

“The happily-ever-after is that we get our magic back,” Paul said.

“Exactly. So, what has to happen in the square before that one for you to get your magic back?”

Scout leaned forward at the table, and that’s when I knew I had her attention. “Fayden’s magic has to be interrupted.”

“Like, um, a cog in the wheel?” I asked.

“Yes!”

In the next to last frame, I drew Fayden’s circle, then smudged away a little part at the top to show that it had been broken; then I looked back at the room.

“So maybe we don’t have to dissect the spell exactly, or know the exact combination of stuff they used to make it. Maybe all we need is to figure out a way to break the circle. And there has to be more than one way to do that, right? Like, um, could we throw something through the circle and break it?”

As an example, in the square before the circle was broken, I drew another, smaller circle with an arrow flying toward it. “Like that? The circle looked like it was just made of light. That should break pretty easily.”

“But it’s magic,” Scout said. “A physical object won’t interrupt that kind of magic. Otherwise every time a bit of dust hit the circle the thing would explode.”

“Okay,” I said, “then we need something magic to throw.” I drew little squiggly lines along my arrow.

“Is that supposed to be magic?” Daniel asked, but there was a smile on his face. I blushed a little, forgetting that my studio art teacher—at least when we actually had time for class—was standing in the room.

“Those are magical indication lines. It’s a very, you know, technical phenomenon,” I totally made up. But he chuckled, and I felt better that the mood was a little lighter. “If only we had some, you know, magic.”

Scout jumped off her chair and ran around one table to another, where she flipped through a book on the table. “Parker, Parker, Parker, I love you almost as much as I love strawberry soda. You might actually have something there.” She scanned the page, then ran over to the board and snatched up another marker. She popped off the lid and started scribbling.

“So we don’t actually have any magic, right? But we need magic to blow a hole in the circle and destroy the spell.”

She moved back one more square and drew another arrow. Then she drew a plus sign and something that looked like a beaker.

“What’s in the jar?” I asked.

She put the marker down, then looked back at everyone else in the room, who had gone completely silent. “A pre-spell,” she said, fanning out her hands for effect. “An almost-spell. A spell-to-be.” She looked back at me. “A spell that isn’t actually a spell until it hits the magical catalyst.”

“The circle,” I guessed.

“Exactly. We rig some kind of projectile, and since we can’t actually activate any magic right now, we equip it with a pre-spell. The circle is magic, so as soon as our projectile hits the circle, kapow. The spell activates and breaks apart the circle, and we all get our magic back.”

Dang. I guess drawing on the board had been a pretty good idea. I leaned toward Scout. “I get credit for this, right?”

“Totes,” she said, and wrapped me in a big hug. “You helped me get my mojo back.”

“Just get me a projectile with pre-spell,” I told her. “Then we’ll worry about mojo.”

And just like that, we went back to work. Which as far as I could tell, meant Jamie, Paul, and Jill mixed ingredients in a big glass bowl while Scout worked out the incantation to go along with the spell. See, there were three parts to every magic spell—intent, incantation, incarnation. She definitely had the intent, and the stuff being mixed together would form the incarnation. The incantation was the part you said aloud that made the spell take root—assuming Scout’s theory was right, and putting the spell into the circle would give it enough magic to make the spell work.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like Scout was feeling the rhymes today.

She stood at the dry-erase board with giant black earphones over her ears, bobbing along to the beat of some hip-hop song she’d downloaded. Every few seconds, she’d lift up her marker and start scribbling something out, and then she’d immediately erase it again.

She had magical writer’s block. So far, she’d rejected “Break this circle, so our magic we can encircle!” and “Break this circle, or you’re a big fat jerk-el.”

Those were truly awful, but to be fair, not much rhymed with “circle.”

Hip-hop didn’t help. Switching to country didn’t help. Musical soundtracks didn’t help. Nothing helped until we found a station for Scout that played ragey alternative stuff. Those people were angry. But it worked. Scout draped the earphones from a corner of the dry-erase board, and we bounced around to the music until Scout got in the mood. And when the rhyme finally came, I wrote it down while she called it out.

“It’s a circle of fear,” she sang. “A circle of control. You wanna wreak havoc? Then you have to pay the toll. You take our power. You try to take our souls. But in this case, honey, it’s you who’s gotta go. We’re breaking your circle; we’re tearing up your goal, and most of all we’re taking back the magic that you stole!”

The room went silent.

For five full minutes, Scout walked back and forth in front of the board, fingers on her chin, mulling it over, deciding whether it passed some unspoken incantation test.

And then, finally, she spoke.