in places with no violent activity, unless someone slips at the hospital or something. Ditto the corpses.” I drummed the fingers of my good hand thoughtfully on the table beside Bob. “Do you think Little Chicago could handle that?”
He considered for a long moment before he said, in a cautious tone, “Maybe one of them. But this will be a very difficult, very long, and very dangerous spell for you, Harry. You’re good for your years, but you still don’t have the kind of fine control you’ll get as you age. It’s going to take all of your focus. And it will take a lot out of you—assuming you can manage it at all.”
I took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “Fine. We treat it as a fullblown ritual, then. Cleansing, meditation, incense, the works.”
“Even if you do everything right,” Bob said, “it might not work. And if Little Chicago turns out to be flawed, it would be very bad for you.”
I nodded slowly, staring at the model city.
There were eight million people in my town. And out of all of them, there were maybe two or three who could stand up to black magic, who had the kind of knowledge and power it took to stop a black wizard. Not only that, but odds were good that I was the only one who could actively find and counter someone before he got the murder-ball rolling. I was also, presumably, the only one who was forewarned.
Maybe it would be better to slow this down. Wait for developments my friends would report to me. Then I could get a better read on the threat, and how to deal with it. I mean, was it worth as much as my life to try this spell, when patience would get me information that was almost as good?
It might not be worth my life, but it would probably cost someone else’s. Black magic isn’t the kind of thing that leaves people whole behind it—and sometimes the victims it kills are the lucky ones. If I didn’t employ the model, I’d have to wait for the bad guys to make the first move.
So I had to do it.
I was tired of looking at corpses and victims.
“Pull together everything you know about this kind of spell, Bob,” I told him quietly. “I’m going to get some food and then we’ll lay out the ritual. I’ll start looking for fear come sundown.”
“Will do,” Bob said, and for once he was serious and didn’t sass me.
Yikes.
I started back up my ladder before I thought about it too much and changed my mind.
Chapter Seven
Ritual magic is not my favorite thing in the whole world. It doesn’t matter what I’m trying to accomplish; I still feel sort of silly when it comes time to bathe and then dress myself up in a white robe with a hood, lighting candles and incense, chanting, and mucking around with a small arsenal of candles, wands, rods, liquids, and other props used in ritual magic.
Self-conscious as I might be, though, the props and the process offered an overriding advantage when it came to working with heavy magic—they freed up my attention from the dozens of little details that I would normally be forced to imagine and keep firmly in mind. Most of the time I never gave the proper visualization a second thought. I’d been doing it for so long that it was practically second nature. That was fine for short-term work, where I had to hold my thoughts in perfect balance only for a few seconds, but for a longer spell I would need an exponentially greater amount of focus and concentration. It took someone with a lot more mental discipline than me to cast a spell through a half-hour ritual without help, and while there were probably experienced wizards who could manage it, few bothered to try it when the alternative was usually simpler, safer, and more likely to work.
I rounded up the props I would need for the ritual, with the elements first. A silver cup, which I would fill with wine, for water. A geode the size of my fist, its internal crystals vibrant shades of purple and green, for earth. Fire would be represented by a faerie-made candle, formed from unused beeswax, its wick braided from the hairs of a unicorn’s mane. Air would be anchored by a pair of hawk-wing feathers wrought from gold with impossibly fine detail and precision by a band of svartalves whose mortal contact