black candle—they’re both sharp and sweet, and we had six of the drops and six pieces of onyx, so that worked well too.”
Alex nodded and let out a breath. “Good thinking, Barty,” he said, smiling when his friend ducked his head and blushed. “Now I’m trying to figure out….” He looked around at Jordan, Josh and Kate, and Bartholomew and Lachlan. “There’s six of us,” he said at last, helplessly. “That’s not a great number. Six is a really crappy number for a good spell outcome.”
Lachlan held his hands up, completely without ego. “I’m out.”
But Jordan shook his head. “Yeah, but that’s not… it needs to work with twelve. Five and twelve is no good, and seven and twelve is awful.”
“Three,” Alex said, but he shivered. “I mean, ideally, nine, but three works best with what we’ve got.”
The others nodded, and it was Josh who said the thing that had bothered Alex all along.
“Okay—so, I’ve been looking at the words of your spell, and you guys, I’m totally missing Dante here, because he was the one who did words, and we all suck at it. The spell itself looks sound. It’s white magic. But the black candle—we used one of those before, and it just didn’t seem to, uhm….”
He let the words trail off, but his tone—and his expression—indicated he had definite opinions.
And judging by the way everybody else nodded, Alex guessed they did too—but he’d been the one studying.
“Look, guys,” he said, “I know we’re all trained to think of black candles equaling super-strong magic—and we thought we would make our wishing spell real, which was why we used it, and yeah, it backfired. But I swear, I read witchcraft up to my eyeballs today, and that’s not always the case. Blood and a black candle—that’s bad. That’s evil magic, and that’s some powerful shit that I don’t want to mess with. But even though the wishing spell backfired, we need to remember—the black candle doesn’t have to be super-strong knock-’em-dead magic. We’re trying to appeal to pure magic. We’re appealing to the forces of magic itself—not any other element.” He looked around the kitchen and shrugged. “I mean, we pissed the magic off. The spell is written to sort of, you know, appease the magic. Tell it we’re sorry. Ask it for help to set things right. So I have the clock for time, and the herbs and soil for grounded space, and—” He glanced at his friends. “—who’s got the picture?”
“I do!” Jordan said, pulling a machine-printed snapshot of Dante and Cully on the coven’s last trip to the sea. They had their arms around each other, buddy style, and Alex couldn’t help thinking that—like every other picture where they posed “buddy style”—the photo was wrong. God, these two men belonged to each other if anybody did. With a sigh of misgiving, Alex took it from Jordan, who asked, “What were you planning to do with it?”
“I don’t want to burn it,” Alex said, and they all shuddered. Burned pictures could indicate bad things—and they were all still leery of that black candle.
“Maybe place it at twelve o’clock,” Bartholomew suggested. “We want them together, in time, in space. That’s our high noon.”
“Or midnight,” Josh muttered under his breath, and they all sent him glances that could have been either recriminating or begging.
“I’ll settle for midnight!” Alex told him in exasperation. “God, anything so I don’t have to tell them I lost their dog last night!”
“You didn’t lose her,” Jordan reminded him. “She just… ended up at your boss’s house. Did we figure out why that happened, by the way?”
“I have no idea,” Alex muttered.
“Oh, I have some,” Jordan said under his breath, and Alex sent him a sharp look.
“Want to share with the class?” Because Alex really was curious.
“Have you told everybody your actual heart’s desire?” Jordan asked, his face doing that Nordic god thing that indicated he was putting on the mantle of leadership that seemed to fit him so very well.
Alex’s entire body flushed. He knew it. He was a green-eyed ginger; he had no choice but to turn into a tomato when he was embarrassed.
“Sort of,” he said, remembering their night walking the dog. “You were there.”
Jordan nodded thoughtfully. “But there was more to it than that. I thought you might have come to terms with all the things you weren’t saying.”
“Have you?” he countered weakly. He respected Jordan’s reasoning—that he couldn’t articulate why the word was so powerful, so he didn’t want to