idea. Oh well. That was his issue, not mine. The world had to move on, and my corner of the world was going to be what I needed, not what he did.
But Gideon didn’t have that problem. Maybe the people who had initially tied him to his own time had died, but now there was me. I was a connection to the world of the living, wasn’t I?
And he’d spent the last few weeks trying to tell me that the convergence was real, and it could do anything. So why couldn’t it do the impossible?
The theory on bringing the dead back to life was laid out in The Spark as an impossible theoretical, along with all the reasons it couldn’t be done. The main among those reasons, that the book laid out on hopeful terms, was that the kind of magic that made up those relationships hadn’t been discovered yet. They had run tests with social mages, dead mages, and even a rare death mage, but had no results. For a moment, reading the conclusion, my heart sank, hope flagging.
But the convergence wasn’t like those things, was it?
“None of this applies to us, does it?” I asked Fluke, who didn’t bother moving, or even opening his eyes, just let me scratch his head as I read. “These limitations on how far a power can be manipulated, they’re not for arcane magic.” I looked at Fluke. “Arcanists?”
He cracked his eyes and gave a tiny vulpine shrug.
I’d always complained about the technical term for social mages: “socialists.” Ugh. The puns and jokes in books and movies were endless and irritating. But the linguistic convention worked better with arcane magic.
It would be a ritual. If I wanted to have even a remote chance of pulling it off, I’d need to go the whole nine yards. I glanced at the athame, and when I looked back, Fluke was staring at me.
“Asshole.”
He blinked.
“Fine, come on. Ritual magic means a shower first. Got to clean off all that negative energy.” I frowned and glanced at the kitchen. Would it be worse to drink coffee, or to still be shaking off the remnants of the sleeping pill I’d taken? One drug or two, I guessed coffee wasn’t a great idea. I just had to stay awake, and I wasn’t in too much danger of falling asleep.
Hell, it would be downright impossible.
I’d decided to break all the rules of magic and throw caution to the wind. Who could sleep with that hanging over their head?
Fluke hopped up and preceded me into the bathroom. My familiar did love a nice warm shower, and I didn’t blame him one bit.
We showered, and then I dug out some clean clothes. It was just sweats and socks, the most comfortable things I owned, so that discomfort wouldn’t distract from the magic.
The best space in the house for ritual magic was the living room, so I shoved the coffee table out of the way and piled my father’s books back onto it haphazardly.
I didn’t have a proper ritual magic kit like my mother had, no bundles of sage or consecrated candles or whatever, but I also didn’t have money and time for all that.
What I had was my dirty old athame, which I washed off, of course. A pair of scented candles from a home store. Mmm, bay breeze, whatever that was. Wait, wasn’t it a fruity drink? Whatever. I hunted down one of the boxes of my mother’s carnival glass collection in the garage, searching in particular for a wide blue bowl, then filling it with tap water. What? I wasn’t an Evian guy any more than Fluke.
I considered the box of Dad on the mantel for a minute, but figured if it worked, Gideon wouldn’t want the old man to have any part in it, so I grabbed a bowl of salt from the kitchen. Both ashes and salt were effective representations of the earth. Any mineral would probably work, it just needed to be as close to its pure state as possible, so the salt might be a better choice anyway. I wasn’t sure if iodized table salt was bad, but hell, I was using scented candles. It would be hard to get sillier unless I had grabbed the seasoned salt.
Though . . . that was mostly plain old salt with, like, garlic and paprika, all of which were grown from or even in the earth, so maybe not the silliest thing ever.