call.
“Where are you?” Bartholomew asked, his voice urgent. “Lachlan’s here, but the last time he performed this spell….”
Bartholomew didn’t have to elaborate. Lachlan was a woodworker by trade, and while it was true he could step in for Alex if he was needed, the trees and shrubs of the neighborhood tended to react rather strongly to his magic.
“Yeah,” Alex told him. “I don’t know if the tree in front of our house can get any bigger.”
“Jordan’s worried the roots might wreak havoc with the septic tanks and the plumbing,” Bartholomew agreed apologetically. “But he’ll step up if you’re not here.”
Because the alternative was to perform the spell with three people instead of five—and as powerful as Jordan and Bartholomew were, the chaos in the neighborhood was getting bad enough to overwhelm a three-person invocation, even if they were two of the people.
“Do I have five minutes?” Alex asked, pouring on the speed. They had to do the ritual exactly at sunset, and he figured at top speed, he was four and a half minutes out.
“You have eight.”
“I’ll take five and a half.” He hit the button on his ear to end the call and hauled ass.
FIVE minutes later he skidded into the cul-de-sac, dumped his bike near the sidewalk, and sprinted to the center of the street in front of the four houses, three of them practically identical.
The others had set up already, running multicolored threads from the front doors of each house to the duct-taped five-pointed star in the center of the street. They’d done this often enough that they actually had three stars—three, five, and seven pointed, although the seven-pointed star was only for symmetry—spelled out in duct tape. Even numbers were bad fortune.
As Alex ran for his place by the five-pointed star, Lachlan hauled his six-foot-three-inch body toward the driveway as quickly as possible, vaulting over the figure eight of squirrels marching single file as he did so.
The squirrels—which marched from sunrise to sunset, providing the humans executed the ritual so the little beasts could stop at night—created an infinity sign in their single-minded, almost-mechanical march. When they all fell asleep, the inhabitants of Sebastian Circle could see the track worn in the lawns and the driveways in front of the three identical houses.
They weren’t the only sign of the natural world gone amok, either.
As sunset approached and the possibility of the protection ritual not being performed loomed, a number of freakish things occurred. A jury of nine wild turkeys stood in front of Kate and Josh’s house, plumage spread impressively, wattled chins sunk on plump and stately feathered breasts. The starlings, which flocked this time of year as a rule, all turned upside down as they neared the neighborhood, and flew that way, defying the laws of birds and physics. Snakes—nonvenomous for the most part, and usually the smaller red racers and garden snakes—began to thrust tentative noses out of the lawns and grasses, a particular lot of them beginning to appear on the sidewalk of the vacant land across the street from the cul-de-sac. Experience had taught them that if the ritual wasn’t performed, the snakes would all head for the apple tree in front of Bartholomew and Alex’s house, turning the rather average bit of flora into a writhing herpetological nightmare by morning.
Ravens had begun to gather, perching on the roof and eaves of Alex and Bartholomew’s house, and, more forbiddingly, three owls had recently taken up a perch on the house in the center, Dante and Cully’s house, where the two roommates continued to wander the halls of their little suburban home completely out of sync with each other in time and space.
The familiars—a clowder of nine cats that Jordan had inherited from the witch who’d deserted her cottage—stood guard, in formation, on the yard of the cottage itself. In front of the curb sat their normal, pathetic little pile of dead things—usually one dead thing per day per cat. Small snakes, voles, mice, starlings, house sparrows, any number of small animals had been taken down and sacrificed for whatever cat reasons and left there to remind them all of mortality, apparently.
If anybody attempted to scoop up the offerings before the evening ceremony, the cats—an assorted mixture of felines from a great and powerful black-and-white female to a stompy, loud, cocky little neutered black tomcat—would hiss, spit, and attack.
They were a little terrifying, actually. And they weren’t the only ones who responded to the rituals. In fact if the rituals weren’t performed during