on the table, a perfect five-pointed pentagram ghosted into existence, the lines more visible energy than anything else since there was no candle ash to give them substance.
“Okay . . . ,” Hodin said hesitantly, eyes intent. “But it’s still only five points.”
I bit my lip, then went for the cedar twig still holding half a dozen frost-dark leaves. “It just needs to be shifted a few degrees,” I said, reaching out.
“Rachel!” Hodin shouted as I breached the glyph. Jenks’s wings clattered in warning, but then his eyes widened as I gave the lines-not-there a nudge, and they shifted, the points setting at the freestanding lines like a roulette wheel clicking to a stop. Left behind was a ghostly image of the original placement. I had my ten-pointed star.
“Looks like a ten-pointed star to me,” Jenks said smugly as Hodin pushed forward.
“Seal it,” Hodin said, and I drew back, the bells on my sash jingling. “Name what you did, and register it in the collective so you can do it again!” he exclaimed. “Latin. Bind the motion with a naming. Do it, Rachel. I can’t. I’m not in the collective. This can’t be forgotten.”
“Oh!” I stared at what I’d done, only now realizing how rare it was. “Um.” Turning. I had turned it. What was the Latin word for turn? “Ah, Wee-keh Wehr-sah. Evulgo, Rachel Mariana Morgan,” I said, the last words imprinting it on the collective.
“Vice versa?” Hodin’s long face screwed up. “You jest. That’s hardly Latin anymore.”
“Which is why I stuck with the original pronunciation,” I said, embarrassed. “Ut omnes unum sint,” I said, and with a slight pull on my awareness, the ten-pointed glyph vanished to leave only the original pentagon. “Look, if you don’t like it, leave. I’m doing the best I can here.”
“Mmmm.” Hodin’s fingers twitched as if looking for chalk. He took a slow breath and exhaled, his eyes touching on my no-doze amulet, then dropping to the wilting vegetation on my gathering scarf, and finally on my fingers still holding the dirt from the garden now mixed with a smear of magnetic chalk. “I’m impressed,” he finally said, and Jenks nearly choked, inking a startled silver. “Will you show me your ideas, Rachel?”
My gaze flicked to Jenks, and seeing his shrug, I nodded. It was a request, and somehow that was more worrisome than a demand. A demanding demon I knew what to do with.
One who thought I was smart . . . That was a whole new game. And I smiled.
CHAPTER
21
Hodin was close. Actually, he was too close as he sat on the couch beside me, and I shifted my knee before he could touch it with his own. An unopened pentagon with ten radiating lines waited on the slate table, pristine in its unmagicked state. The faint scent of burnt amber pricked my nose, and I glanced at Hodin scribbling notes on Ray’s sketch pad with a half-busted pen Jenks had found in the floorboards. He’d changed into a spelling robe to minimize his aura contamination, this one gold at the top, radiating down to black with stars about the hem and Möbius strips on the ties. There were no bells, so I was the only one jingling.
It had been hours now, and he was getting frustrated.
“Shall we try it?” Hodin prompted as he set his notes down with a smack. “Modifying the All candle with a broom straw in place of traditional cotton should facilitate a smoother energy movement.” His tone was scholarly, nothing like Al’s bluster, and his expression was serious as he tried out another of my lame ideas. “Obscurum per obscuris,” he intoned, and I felt a dip in the line we were both connected to as he snapped his fingers. “Wee-keh Wehr-sah.”
Breath held, I stared at the chalk lines, willing something to happen. But nothing did. My All candle sat and burned with exactly the color one would expect from a birthday candle.
“Damn my dame,” Hodin muttered, slumping back into the cushions. His knee hit mine, and I stiffened. Noticing, he sat up and shifted down a few inches. “I thought your addition of a straw in place of a cotton wick would have changed something.”
“Try it again,” I said as I blew out the candle and removed it from the glyph.
“I did not draw it wrong,” he muttered. Snapping his fingers, he added, “Obscurum per obscuris. Wee-keh Wehr-sah.”
Again I felt a drop in the line, and with a soft hiss of undrawn chalk, the pentagon