concentration.”
“Var. If I am fighting, I do not always have time to cast.”
“Still, your magic is really powerful and faster than mine. But,” I added brightly, “mine will still be pretty fast once it’s ready, assuming I can make it right.”
He waited, with only the occasional impatient scoff, as I resumed building out the array. Though he’d memorized it in a few minutes, his reproduction of the spell was powerless. Anyone, mythic or human, could speak an artifact’s trigger incantation to activate it, but only Arcana mythics like me could create them. I was a conduit, and through the process of creating the array, my passive magic would infuse it.
It took me two hours of careful, intensive work to finish, every line and angle measured and remeasured. Then I spent another hour adding the runes in painstaking detail.
When I went to the cupboards, Zylas stirred out of his bored stupor. I collected bags of iron powder, salt crystals, copper calcinate, and black sulfur, as well as a jar of oil. Using the scales on the counter, I measured out exact amounts and added them to the small, circular nodes I’d drawn into the array.
Finally, I selected a thin rectangle of pure iron the size of a domino. With a small silver marker, I drew three runes down the front as shown in the text, and placed it in the node at the point of the open triangle—the spot where all the magic would be directed.
“There,” I declared proudly, standing over my work. “It’s ready.”
Zylas wandered to my side. He stared down at the array, dotted with piles of colored powder and three drops of oil.
He waited a beat. “Now what?”
“Now”—I consulted the book—“the array needs to charge for at least sixteen hours.”
“Charge?”
“Arcana is powered by the natural magical energies that flow across the earth. Spells like this absorb that energy, then expend it when they’re triggered.”
He scrunched his nose. “You spent hours making this, now you must wait even longer? So slow, drādah.”
I shrugged. “Making the spells is slow. Some of these”—I patted the book—“have to charge for months before the sorcerer can complete them.”
“What will you do while you wait?”
“Well …” I drew in a deep breath. “Zora thinks she found the vampires’ hideout—where the ones controlling all of this might be. She’s taking a team in tomorrow morning.”
His bored lassitude vanished as he focused his full attention on me.
“I’m not invited on their mission. And even if I were, I couldn’t search for answers with a bunch of witnesses. If we’re going to learn what’s really going on, and why the vampires are so interested in Uncle Jack, I think we need to go see this place for ourselves … before she and her team get there.”
Zylas glanced at the skylight, the dark glass reflecting the room and my Arcana array back at us. “Then we have until the sun returns.”
Which meant we needed to go now—when the vampires were at their strongest.
Chapter Sixteen
This vampire “lair” was several steps up from the last one. Not that the last one had qualified as a lair, really. I didn’t know what to call them. Hideouts? Dens? … Habitats?
I lurked in a shadowy doorway across the street from the building Zora had marked on her map. Tucked deeper in the shadows behind me was Zylas. His heat radiated into my back as he studied the building over the top of my head. Traffic zoomed past, headlights glaring in the misty rain.
We were in the heart of downtown. In fact, we weren’t far from the storm drain I’d escaped through last night.
Neither the tallest nor the nicest building on the block, the tower was anonymous among its neighbors. It could be full of offices or condos, and stood out from the rest only in that the front doors were blocked off by construction barricades and the second through fifth floors had plywood in place of windows.
“What do you think?” I whispered to Zylas.
“Too many hh’ainun here. They will see me.”
Though darkness had fallen, it was still early evening and the remnants of rush-hour traffic was whizzing by. Zylas, with his horns, tail, red eyes, and armor, was a tad noticeable.
“I’ll go around to the back,” I told him, “and let you know when it’s safe to come out again.”
Crimson light rushed over him and his power returned to the infernus. I hugged my arms to my chest—having lost my coat, I was wearing three sweaters instead—and ventured into the light rain.
A few