Joy of Witchcraft (30 page)

I laughed as I stepped into the circumference of their working. Golden light gathered in my chest, rippling to flow down my arms and through my fingertips. Neko bolstered the effect, tossing strands to Perd and Seta, to Hani and Kopek, Nuri and Majom. The other familiars responded as they’d learned to do, as my magicarium had taught them. They fed energy to their witches, reflecting back my students’ innate power, charging it to become something new, something stronger.

Our magic sang as we wove our astral fabric above the cordon of Teresa’s warders. I heard each individual note, a clarion call from every witch, amplified by every familiar. The ringing cloth sailed high into the air, increasing in strength, magnifying in intensity.

I saw Teresa sense our threat, measure out the danger we presented. I read her lips as she broke off another command to the vortex. Instead, she ordered her sisters to gather closer to the centerstone. She clutched at Connie’s shoulder, the bones of her long fingers standing out white against the poor familiar’s shirt. I
felt
Teresa’s panicked draw on her magical lifeline, clutching at straws to boost her strength, even as she calculated the tremendous array against her.

With a mental nudge, my students and I lowered our weaving. Our cloth coruscated against the dome set by Teresa’s warders. I fed more power into our strands, forced them lower, closer, tighter.

Of course those paired warders outside Teresa’s glittering cordon did not stand idle. Individually, they poured their energy into their protective hemisphere. The iridescent surface bulged outward, issuing a series of noises like volcanoes splitting the earth. Empowered by their immediate success, the warders redoubled their efforts. The cordon pulsed again, stretching our weaving to the breaking point. Still more energy dripped into the dome, pulsing, pressing, ripping at our efforts.

We staggered.

As a group, we could not maintain our tension, could not continue the inexorable push down against the desperation of eight warders fighting to save the body and spirit of their witches.

Neko hissed beside me, the furious sound of a cat lashed into a corner. I gritted my teeth and tugged a little harder on the rope he offered me, on the strength that bound me to our joint working.

Slowly, painfully, we regained our collective footing. We pressed down on the others. We tightened our weaving, flaring our colored strands like the Northern Lights. Each of my witches renewed her bonds across the circle, reaching out for other familiars, relying on the community we’d built over the past six weeks.

We had a nucleus, a core of common power. But each of us remained independent, remained strong in separate ways. Alex lashed out with her angry urban energy, a wing of power as dark as midnight. Clara poured in her own crazy magic, a sage scented dreamcatcher that bolstered all our disparate strands. Bree and Emma, Raven and Gran, each maintained her own indomitable power.

I saw the look on Teresa’s terrified face, and I drained the last power from my capillaries. My own tentacles were woven throughout our working, golden strands that reinforced a flagging edge of our work, that pressed down on the iridescent cordon, that shored up another swaying span.

Teresa’s protection started to shudder. Spiderweb cracks opened and closed along the crest of her dome.

“No!” Ethan’s bellow rang out beneath our woven canopy, echoing from ground to sky. The one word was filled with anguish, strapped tight against bitter command. He was a warrior who led other men. He was a warder who protected his witch.

Shoving David to his knees, Ethan grabbed for the sword that had been leveled against all my powers. He plucked the steel from David’s fingers as easily as he might have taken cotton candy from a child. David was still bound, still enthralled. He could do nothing.

Ethan planted both swords—David’s and his own—against the edge of the cordon. He channeled his iron energy through the forged steel, pouring out his power in double time. The angry buzz we’d heard as Ethan bonded David’s weapon returned now, ten times louder, twenty.

The draw was too much to sustain. Ethan had to strip his focus from David. He loosened his grip on David’s throat, allowing him to speak, to bellow wordless rage. Ethan gathered up the energy he’d spent on David’s silence and fed it through the swords, bolstering the cordon still held by his men.

I leaned hard on Neko, crushing the mirrors of his reflective force. The splintering facets shone my power back at new angles. I harvested the dram of fresh power and stabilized our weaving.

Ethan peeled back more of his power from David, freeing my warder’s arms. David reached toward me, grasping, desperate. Ethan poured the gleaned energy into Teresa’s shimmering dome.

I countered again, reaching through Neko to the other familiars. I used stalwart Perd to excavate the depths of Gran’s powers, scraping the last tendrils of her magic and adding them to our web. I clutched at Nuri, relying on my familiarity with the woman to deplete Bree. Majom was next, the mischievous little boy who’d joined our group so early. I carved out every bit of energy Alex could spare, leaving her barely enough to breathe, to swallow.

A sharp crack echoed between Teresa’s cordon and my own. Her dome was breaking.

Ethan grunted in response. Sweat streaked his face, ruining the starched collar of his spotless cotton shirt. He pulled back the last of his power from David, yanking the final bonds free with a force that sent my warder staggering like a newborn colt. Ethan dumped his collection into his shimmering dome, shoving the last of his energy into the protection of his witch.

Everything rested in perfect balance. Our carefully woven net pressed against Teresa’s cordon. Ethan’s boost held our working at bay.

We had nothing left to give. Every witch in my community had poured out her utmost. Each familiar was channeling untold heights of power, weaving it, transmitting, keeping the entire impossible net charged. We were stretched to the outer limits of our capacity. Beyond.

Ethan drained his bond from David’s sword. Iron caltrops leaped from the blade, falling against the iridescent dome. With each jagged spike, the structure swelled, pushing back against our net, becoming an opalescent shield that obscured the witches inside.

They were winning. We had offered up everything we had, every trick, every spell. We had nothing left to give. Teresa Alison Sidney and her eight compatriots were safe beneath their dome, secure to continue their working, to siphon off every last item in the Osgood collection.

Every last item, including Neko. He was part of the Osgood collection. When Teresa had stolen everything in Blanton House, she would come for my familiar. She would come for my friend.

My witches’ power was stretched to the breaking point. Our familiars were drained.

But there was other magic in the world.

There were warders. Warders who bore their own magic. Warders who worked by their own rules, folding space, raising cordons, binding and releasing weapons.

How many times had I skated past David’s astral strength, confident that it was offered to my benefit, for my protection, never caring more for what it did? How many times had I accepted a mysteriously found parking space, a full pantry to ground me after workings, a charm against rain or wind or cold?

David had been my first teacher, my only teacher. I had learned the shape of his powers by instinct, absorbing them at the same time I learned about my own.

Now he crouched beside me where Ethan had tossed him, head lowered to one knee as he reeled from the other warder’s final blow. His lungs worked like bellows. He moaned, long and low, despair drawing out a single note into a dirge.

I settled my hand on his shoulder, fingertips reaching for the pulse in his neck. “
Trust me,
” I thought, pushing the words deep, past his fury with Ethan, past his hurt, his exhaustion, his shame.

I pulled back a little of my power from the web I held with my students. Teresa’s dome responded by bulging out, by expanding to capture another yard of earth.

Emma panicked; I felt her concentration shatter, and the cool silver of her powers began to leak out of our web. Everyone else did their best to dam the flow, and I took advantage of the shift to pull back another skein of gold.

In my mind, I shaped my magic into a vessel, a stemmed cup that shimmered in reflected light. Still counting out David’s racing pulse, I extended my powers, pushing past our warder-witch bond.

At first, he resisted. His reflexes were trained to clamp down, to shut me out, to cut off any intruder. I shifted my hand on his shoulder, though, moving my palm to rest against the vulnerable side of his neck.

He fought back for a moment, warrior’s body and mind refusing to yield. But then he relaxed beside me, issuing a conscious instruction to his clenched jaw, to his fisted fingers. I flashed a single burst of gratitude, and then I pushed deeper, past the dissipating walls of his conscious decisions, beyond the actions that made him the man I loved.

There. At the heart of his awareness. At the core of his being. The sphere was the size of my fist, the size of a human heart. It was steel grey and covered in spikes.

This was the heart of David’s power. This was the steely authority I’d recognized the first night he came to my doorstep, borne on the wings of a storm, drawn by my reckless use of magic. This was his warder’s energy, the steady stream of logic that he applied, sorting through threats, separating real from perceived. This was the masculine magic David had focused on Norville Pitt, on maps and pins and strings, as he fought to save me, fought to save Hecate’s Court, even when it didn’t want to be saved.

I clutched my astral goblet, and touched gold to steel. I collected a trickle of pure warder’s magic.

Discordant music jangled, an arpeggio played on the black keys of a piano, mysterious in its haunting familiarity. David poured off more of his power, filling my cup. I spun out the energy by reflex, twining gold and steel together into a single, solid thread.

Neko waited at the edge of my awareness. I passed the strand to him, bracing as he stumbled. He was startled by the weight, by the texture. Warder’s magic might be manipulated like witch’s magic, it might be gathered and spun and woven, but there was no disguising its masculine base, its solid, man-made core, so different from a witch’s natural force.

Neko recovered faster than I thought he could. He braced himself and cast the gilded steel to Hani.
Of course
, a distant part of my mind calculated.
He knows Hani best, knows him through Tony, through the time he’s spent with his lover.

Hani nodded as he caught the astral stream. He hefted it in one hand before tossing it all the way across the circle, to Seta. David’s steel began to seep into the net we’d already fashioned. It became a rib, a support for everything we’d already built. Seta handed off the energy to Nuri, and another brace was formed.

By then, Raven was reaching out for Tony. She rested his hand on her hip, the better to balance both of them. She tossed her hair and closed her eyes; I could only imagine the images she was receiving from Hani, the instructions Neko must be feeding all the familiars across their private, silent network.

Within a minute, Hani offered up a bronze bar accompanied by the a crash of thunder, both manifestations of the jagged energy I’d come to know as Tony’s. This time, he threw his finding to Majom, an easy under-handed pass. The boy laughed and lobbed it to Perd.

Caleb’s power entered the mix, a sleek pewter thread spun out with the crackle of a warming fire. Luke’s was next, the easy coil of well-worked leather bound up with the cry of a hunting eagle. Garth was last of all, an uneven onyx strand. It broke once, twice, three times before it held, along with an acid chord on an electric guitar.

But those mishaps didn’t matter. As we witches harvested our warders’ energy, we fed it into our mix, bolstering our own innate power. Our web tightened. Our net sank over Teresa’s dome, weighted down with warder’s magic.

The Coven Mother managed one last push, one desperate effort to cast us off. But we renewed our power ten-fold, siphoning off warder’s magic as if we’d worked with it for decades.

Leaving my right hand on David’s throat, I raised my left, commanding the attention of every one of my allies. I counted off—one, two, three. And then I clenched my fingers into a tight fist. In that same instant, we all hauled back on our powers, tightening our net around the dome.

With a thunderous
crack
, the cordon shattered, exposing nine startled witches, nine panicked familiars, and nine hopeless, helpless enemy warders.

For one lingering moment, I thought I’d been struck deaf.

Then, there was an explosion of sound. Teresa’s witches gathered close around her, tugging at their familiars as if they were trying to rescue wayward children. Nine warders, Ethan included, circled around, clutching their weapons.

But it was hard to be intimidated by men who were afraid to set their feet flat upon the ground.

The warders could sense the magic that had been used against them, the different strands of steel and bronze, of pewter and leather and onyx. Even if they could not work out what my witches had done, how we’d cast our spell, they knew they’d been bested by a terrifying opponent, by their own breed of magic turned against them in ways they’d never seen before.

My own students gathered beside me. I heard Gran muttering to Clara, insisting she was all right, that she didn’t need to sit down, that she was perfectly fit to stand on her own two feet. Bree took a quick inventory like a battlefield general, tallying up our injuries.

Emma stared at our assembled enemies, her face slack with disbelief. “Maria Hernandez,” she whispered, not bothering to fake an English accent. I followed her gaze to one of Teresa’s allies, a tall woman with angular cheekbones, with sweat-slicked black hair that fell straight down her back.

The name brought a scoff from Raven. Clara raised her voice across the safehold. “Why, Maria?”