spoke before she threw it. “Don’t bother, dear. He’s decided it’s under his protection and he can be stubborn as a stone. We’ll let it be if that’ll soothe ye, Mr. Warlock?”
Her tone was mock serious and I realized the thing with the tree had been a test.
“So, my cheeky lad here has taken care of our dirt needs in short order and your fine spells have started to work. Now we have the makings of a grand game pitch. So next, we need players. We’ll also need people to keep an eye on things and catch any that feel the need to cheat. Are any of you, by chance, telepathic?”
Three people, including Ashley, raised their hands.
“Oh, that’s fine then. You’ll be our officials. Okay, now for some avatars, what me nephew used to call double D’s,” she continued.
Paige raised her hand and when my aunt nodded in her direction she asked, “ Why can’t we just use the Barbies, Miss O’Carroll?”
“The dollies?” Aunt Ash frowned. “Did ye no show them a proper avatar, lad?” she asked me. I nodded, thrilled that she hadn’t used the term warlock. All my life, I had felt she should call us male witches warlocks and now that she was calling me that, I couldn’t wait for her to stop.
“He did, Miss O’Carroll, but only Michelle is an Earth witch. We don’t really see how we would play the game with fire, water, and air,” Erika said.
“The whole point of the game is to learn to improvise and use your given abilities with control and style. Do you not see any other ways to use your affinities?”
“Declan showed me I could use a water ball or ice ball, but the Barbies are so much more… people like,” Britta said.
“Oh, is that it,” Aunt Ash said. “ Ye’d rather be using a comfortable shape than be winning, is it?”
“No, ma’am. We want to win, but how does a ball of ice or water become the winner?” Ryanne asked.
“I see. Let’s do it this way. Tonight, we’ll have those of you with the ability to move a dolly do just that. You’ll all work together and your job will be to hunt down young Mr. Warlock here and whatever avatar he can put together in the next ten minutes. Then after, we’ll see how ye feel,” she said. “Declan, go around the backside and do yer thing. In ten minutes, we’re coming for ye. And only use what’s lying around or in your pockets. Oh, an would ye clean up that mess ye made coming in?”
I looked back at where she was pointing, seeing the trail of dirt and rock that had dribbled off the dirt lizard. A wave of my hand swept it toward me, starting at the overhead door and piling up at the back end of the course. I headed to it, thinking about what I could construct. I was finally warmed up, so I reached up and brushed back the hood of my sweatshirt, one of the bronze witch bracelets banging my forehead. I had left them on, kind of a visual reminder to Delwood and Jenks.
Now I looked at them as I squatted down next to the dirt and rock debris pile that was my supply source. Each bracelet consisted of two arcs of bronze, hinged together at one point, with a simple catch at the other point. When they were working, the catch was impossible for the wearer to open, the result of the spells embedded in the bronze. Now they simply popped open and I had two hinged pieces of bronze about an inch and a half wide.
I pulled my knife from my pocket it. It’s a SAK—I mean, it’s a Swiss Army Knife. Blade enthusiasts use the acronym SAK, but I had sworn off using it years ago. As I’m a diehard computer and gadget type, the inherent utility of a Swiss Army knife or a Leatherman type multi-tool deeply appeals to my inner geek. But when I was fourteen, I had spent the better part of ten minutes lecturing a cute girl at a science fair about my SAK. My SAK could do this and my SAK could do that. She disappeared as fast as she could and my friend Rory had quoted some of my sentences back to me so I could hear how it sounded. “Dude, the only thing worse was if you had a multi-tool; then you’d have been going on about how your