and still holding the warmth of it, he leaned across the table and drew a second one for me to use. I watched intently, losing the how of it even before he finished. Frustrated, I gripped my chalk, hoping that Al knew the skill.
“Add a small inner circle to create the five caves where you will place the candles,” Hodin said as he drew a perfect circle at the center of the pentagon, delineating five new individual spaces at the center of the glyph. “If done correctly, the candles will move to the points of the exploded pentacle,” he added, explaining nothing. “Draw your circle,” he barked, and Bis and I jumped.
I sent the chalk hissing around to make a circle inside the pentagon, my eyes flicking to the nearby basket. Unless the candles were in one of those little bags, there weren’t any.
“Now burn your blood to ash. Do you know how to do that?” Hodin asked.
“Yep.” I strengthened my hold on the line, and after I estimated how much I’d need to evaporate five cc’s of liquid, I bubbled the crucible in a tiny circle, exhaling as I whispered, “Celero fervefacio.” With a pleasing burst of flame, my blood turned to ash.
“Nice control,” Hodin grudgingly admitted as he peered across the table.
“I burn things a lot,” I said, and Bis snorted his agreement.
“Blood carries the representation of the soul’s energy, which is why banshees and vampires ingest it,” Hodin said, and I nodded. I knew this already, but that he bothered to tell me meant that he wasn’t entirely stingy with knowledge. “We make the required candles so as to infuse them with the ash. The beeswax is an inert carrier, the dried moonwort is to open the flames, and the fat garnered from pumpkin seeds will extend the flame’s life.”
“To prevent any auratic contamination as you would get from fat from even an unborn pig,” I said, and Hodin hesitated in his motion to untie his three bags as if surprised. “What should the bees be feeding on? Anything special? It smells like chicory.”
“It is.” Hodin gave me a cautious look. “You will also need milkweed sap.”
I inched closer, knees touching the table, when Hodin opened the last bundle to expose a length of green milkweed, totally out of season. “As a binder and dispersal all in one,” I said, familiar with sympathetic magic.
“Yes.”
Hodin’s last word had been wary, and I met his eyes. “My mother is one of the premier spell modifiers in the U.S. I picked up a few things.”
“Perhaps you’re up to this after all,” he said, a faint respect in his voice. “Mix a pinkie-nail amount of the moonwort, pumpkin oil, and milkweed sap with the ash within in the crucible. With the addition of the beeswax, it will solidify into a matrix suitable to make several candles.”
He pushed everything at me along with a little wooden spoon, and I cautiously picked it up. Wood? He uses wood? No one uses wood. “Everything is measured with the same spoon?” I said. “Right in the same crucible as the blood? Wow. What do you use to stir it?”
Hodin looked at me as if I was stupid. “The spoon?” he said, and Bis stifled a giggle.
I winced. Not ceramic? This guy is really old-school. “Okay, but if you’re using wood, what kind is it? I’d think hickory would be best, seeing as it helps unlock things.”
Hodin shifted to make the bells on his sash tinkle, his thoughts unknown.
“Or maybe it doesn’t matter,” I muttered as I used the spoon Hodin had given me, dumping everything in the crucible with my ashed blood and mashing it all up with the beeswax. I really wanted to weigh the chunk out first, but didn’t dare, and when I cut the milkweed and just squeezed several drops in at Hodin’s encouragement, I cringed. This was unconscionably inexact. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be my fault.
“The wick is cotton,” Hodin said, clearly recognizing my unease and apparently taking offense. “Harvested under a full moon and spun by hand before sunrise. Once your substrate is evenly mixed, roll it into a length to apply the wick.”
“Virgin cotton. Got it. Thank you,” I said. “Don’t you normally make candles by repeated dipping?” I asked, feeling weird as I rolled the wax into a long snake as if it was Play-Doh.
“Yes,” he said, sounding embarrassed this time. “But for a single use such as this, applying the substrate to the wick is