“I wish we had an idea of the numbers that might come at us,” I said, looking down at Edgar’s sloppy scrawl.
“Here.” Mr. Tom sat in the empty chair and fished a sheet of paper and a pen out of his interior jacket pocket. He pulled the orange piece to him. “Let me make this legible. Austin Steele thinks the secret is out about you in the magical world. That people will start to take a greater interest. I happen to agree.”
“This isn’t the time to increase the pressure, Mr. Tom.”
“My advice? End this coming battle hard and fast. Make a statement. Show both factions, if there are indeed two, that you will not be easy to cow, kidnap, or intimidate. If someone is coming for you, they’d better have their big-boy pants on, because you won’t play nice when threatened.”
“Make a statement, sure, sounds easy. Except I’m still brand new to magic, and I’m potentially up against a master and some other guy that isn’t afraid of a master. How am I supposed to stand out when I’m the underdog?”
Mr. Tom chuckled. “I doubt even Elliot Graves can so easily blow someone up. Trust me, miss, you have more at your disposal than you think, including imagination.”EighteenBased on what Edgar had found, Ivy House could sense living things through a sort of heat signature, and it identified the nature of those creatures based on the type of energy they put out. Just like with scent, animals had a different energy than people, shifters had a different energy in their animal form, and so on.
Somehow, Elliot was wrapping his people up in spell bubbles, containing their heat signatures and their energy.
My job was to pull those bubbles away. Something I was still in the process of figuring out in the underground cavern. I stood in front of the pulsing crystals at the core of the house, working magic in a spinning motion that sent sparkles tumbling through the air (a pretty effect that had a practical purpose—it helped me figure out if the magic was rolling in the right direction). My aim was to grab hold of the bubble spell and essentially unwind it. Once the person was exposed, even for a moment (I was working on the assumption that they could reapply the spell at will, aiming for our worst-case scenario), Ivy House could quickly capitalize on their vulnerability.
“You need a way to dig into the spell,” Ivy House said in our special communication. She had some good ideas on how to rip away the spell. Apparently this type of spell had been attempted many times in the past, but those other attempts had always been flawed. This was the first time someone had locked it down. Elliot was clearly very good at his craft.
I had to be better.
“Otherwise your spell will just whoosh by. It won’t catch.”
I nodded, watching the sparkles tumble away before washing against the bare walls. I’d long since stripped the walls of the paper, my spells creating whirlwinds that the tape couldn’t stand up to.
“What if ripping away the spell isn’t the right way to play it?” I took up Mr. Tom’s handwritten page for the millionth time, looking over the verbiage I’d all but memorized. “What if I should be counteracting it instead?”
“You don’t know what to counteract.”
“Yes, exactly.” I shook my head. “Maybe I’m spending all this time, going without sleep, for a spell that won’t work.”
“You have the power to rip that spell off. If he’s using it on lesser-powered shifters, it can’t be a volatile spell. You should be able to use might.”
“I want to use brain, not brawn. I want to do this the right way.”
“We all want something.”
I glared at the crystals before stuffing the piece of paper into my pocket and leaving the room. Sure, it could very well work for most people, and the beauty of the spell we’d devised was that it would rip off other spells, too—ones that might be dangerous. But what if I came up against Elliot? He wouldn’t succumb to such a simple tactic.
My gut told me I needed a counter-spell. A reveal spell. Maybe not for this battle, maybe not even for the next, but until I could properly counteract Elliot’s masking spell, I’d always be vulnerable to it. For that, though, I’d need some idea of the composition of the spell he was using. Agnes hadn’t locked anything down.
“Oh, hello,” my mom said when I made my way into the kitchen for more coffee, “you’re up already.” She beamed at me as she laid some bacon into a hot pan.
“Yeah, what time is it?” I looked around. “And where is Mr. Tom?”
“It’s almost eight o’clock, and your caped crusader of a butler was scurrying about upstairs last I saw him, headed up to the third floor. He seemed a bit more animated today, and he hasn’t once tried to shoo me out of the kitchen. What’s up?”