the floating orb, her mind working back to the spellshape that had created it.
Glowing lines of power, beautifully tangled.
With the precision of a decade of practice, she called fire into her fingertips. And with the new eyes of the last twenty months, she began to tease apart the colors. Yellow - the workhorse stream of power. It took only a few seconds to work it into the oblong flow that served as the spell's backbone.
The thin orange flow came next, dancing more sharply. Breath in, breath out. The flow eased, winding itself sinuously around the spell's core.
This far, she'd come before - it was the next step that always faltered. Beth paused, checking the map. Aervyn's spellshape was cleaner and simpler than the ones she'd tried in the past. Just two more flows.
Unraveling delicately now, she teased apart red and violet, seeking the fickle, darting energies of the first. It snapped at her fingers, protesting. She tugged hard on the lines, demanding control. Too fast. Slow down.
The red snapped harder.
Let it change you. Liri's words seeped into the magic.
Slowly, Beth let the brakes go a fraction, and felt the zooming speed as red energy lit up her channels.
It was frantically fast - but it wasn't snapping anymore. If she could move fast enough, it would do as she asked. Fingers flying, Beth wove an undulating filament and threw it at her spellshape.
And gaped as it layered itself over the yellow and orange.
The shape was wrong. Not Aervyn's spell now, but Kenna's. Her magic had gone renegade.
No. It was morphing. Innovating. Evolving. Sweating now, Beth invoked the power of friendlier synonyms to stem the panic. She was one step away. One.
And the violet flow was her favorite.
Hands trembling, she folded the tiny energy stream that reminded her of fairy lights and slid it into the center of the spell.
And then ignited it and opened her eyes, laughing.
Delighting.
And stared in awe at the orb floating over her palm.
It was a tad lopsided. And the size of a basketball. And a fair bit hotter than a well-behaved fire globe was supposed to be.
None of which mattered in the slightest.
She'd done it. With Chicago concrete under her feet and an evening wrapped in love at her back - she'd done it.
Chapter 13
Jamie looked at the two women eating omelets at his breakfast bar and felt like the innocent bystander waiting for the sword fight to start.
Which wasn't making his own eggs go down all that well. He tried to figure out where to start. "So what is this brainstorm of Moira's, exactly?" His sister's text message had been far more thorough about her breakfast order than what was driving the early-morning visit.
Lauren finished chewing first. "She thinks we should put Beth in a circle."
He wasn't about to argue with a witch who wasn't even present. And feeling very foggy about why a circle was causing dark swirls in the air. "And what do the two of you think?"
"I think her reasoning makes sense." His sister-in-law fiddled with a stray onion trying to abandon the omelet ship. "But I'm not going to be on the front lines, so I think you guys have a veto on this one."
That sounded like a master negotiator trying to thread a very small needle. He looked at his sister and raised an eyebrow. "And you?"
"It might be the right thing to do." Nell sounded fairly conflicted on that point. "But purely from a training perspective, it's kinda nuts."
He couldn't disagree with that. They usually got trainees solid on a series of basic magics before they put them anywhere near a circle, and Beth had demonstrated exactly zero of them. "I hear you. But for a good cause, we roll with nuts pretty well."
The peanut gallery was very silent. Jamie tried to keep picking his way through the breakfast minefield. "Beth's not our typical trainee. And she's done circle work."
His sister's raised eyebrows said volumes.
Ooh, boy. He helped himself to more eggs - this conversation was clearly going to require fortification. "Fine. She's done circle work with a baby circle." Kenna's sneezes had more power than Beth's coven. "But her joins were solid, and she's not a floofy witch." That