Chapter 2 #2
An infantry line of plastic gnomes began marching through the gate and across the street toward us.
“Why is she attacking us?” Nick asked.
“Versus ignoring the two strange men lurking in the car across from her house, watching her?” I asked. “Or maybe she knows something about what Griffith is doing.”
I swore and dragged Nick with me behind the car.
Reaching up, I grabbed the scrabbling flamingo by its neck and dragged it over the hood of my car. With some effort, I held it down. Still, I couldn’t use my magic right away.
“Nick, can she see me?” I asked.
Nick’s eyes went wide, and he understood immediately.
It was one thing to do fae magic and call it witchcraft when the only people around were alchemists or people who didn’t practice at all.
It was an entirely different thing to do magic around a witch of her caliber who would know for certain that what I was doing wasn’t witchcraft.
Her witchcraft was phenomenal, and it used the sort of delicate spellwork my sister Laurel would’ve loved to see. Laurel was the head of her own coven, and loved seeing other witches at work.
I didn’t even know what kind of witch the woman was, although my money was on elementary witch. They’re not as flexible as a kitchen witch like Laurel, but they’re better at bringing things to life.
Either way, no matter what kind of witch she was, if she saw me doing magic, I was going to be in a lot of trouble.
“You’re good,” Nick said, his eyes coming back to me. He was drawing an alchemy circle without even looking at it, and his eyes dropped to the paper to begin the detail work.
The plastic bird under my fingers squirmed, snapping at me, but I focused on the concrete underneath it.
With a brush of magic, it woke. Concrete is malleable, its personality matching its use.
You can shape it into anything, but for the most part concrete settles.
It relaxes into its form and then hardens and stays that way forever.
“Hey,” I said to the concrete. “Wow, I can’t believe you haven’t hardened yet! Just my luck, since I need something that will hold this bird still. I knew I could count on you.”
There was a hesitation. This concrete had been poured decades ago and didn’t remember anything about being soft. I pushed more magic in.
“Yeah, and you didn’t even get any kids writing their initials in you.
Wow, you’re holding this bird so tight! You’re awesome.
” The concrete softened just enough to envelop the bird and then it was solid again.
The bird snapped and struggled, but it was buried in concrete and couldn’t touch me or Nick.
This was what I couldn’t let the witch see. Me talking concrete into softening was going to raise all sorts of red flags with her.
I began digging through my bag, although I had a sinking sensation that I was going to be doing magic with both hands tied. The leaves I’d usually grow into plants were too fae, the jar of sand the same. I didn’t have anything in my bag that I could disguise as witchcraft.
Nick had already drawn three alchemy circles. As he sketched, he kept looking up, quietly counting our plastic enemies.
“Twenty gnomes,” he murmured. “I count five more flamingos.”
There was a shriek like the sound of a horse being ridden by Death himself.
We’d forgotten the reindeer. It was floating above the street, and when it saw us, it dove. We were about to be impaled on tiny plastic horns.
Nick slammed one of his finished spells into the air in front of the car. It lit a brilliant green, creating a shield. The reindeer pulled up short at the sudden explosion of color and reared back, its hooves pawing at the air.
What would Laurel do?
For me, practicing witchcraft was like trying to drive a car Flinstones style. Sure, I could manage it for a short period of time, but I definitely missed a car that didn’t tear up my feet. Digging in my bag, I found a couple of pieces of chalk I kept just for this purpose.
The flamingo, half buried in concrete, was still struggling and snapped at me as I began drawing a circle around it. The woman’s magic linked her to the bird. She hadn’t let it go. This was going to be good.
Drawing a triangle around the flamingo, I was careful not to let it touch me, aware of its razor-sharp beak and the strength no plastic lawn ornament should have.
Nick threw down a couple more circles and pointed to where the gnomes had organized themselves into a long line and were attacking his shield with their pointed hats.
“They might get through. The points of their hats focus the force they’re using like a nail puncturing a tire,” Nick said, but he sounded calm, the immediate surprise having faded. This woman was good, but she wasn’t us.
I finished my circle and drew out a container of salt.
I used it in my fae magic for a hundred different purposes, but I could also use it in witchcraft.
Salt cleansed in kitchen witchcraft, and since I needed to send a bolt of my magic through the flamingo and back to the woman, I hoped it would confuse the witch about the actual source of my magic.
Sending magic back through her link to the flamingo would act like an extra powerful shock, something to get her off her game so we could physically restrain her before she animated anything else on the street. I had no desire to have a streetlamp reach down and attack me.
Touching the circle, I powered it up and poured a thin line of salt around it.
Hopefully the purification would confuse the witch enough that she wouldn’t recognize my fae magic for what it was.
With his eyebrows furrowed, Nick watched the assault on his shield.
They wouldn’t get through, Nick was too powerful, but he seemed to be trying to figure out how her magic was giving life to so many lawn ornaments at once.
When everything looked good on my end, I took a deep breath and drew from the magic inside my chest. I didn’t take too much; there was no sense in overwhelming the woman. Instead, I drew it out like a magician pulling a long line of scarves out of a pocket.
I fed the line of magic into the spell, which, if I’d done it right, was used to find a caster.
As far as I knew, no one had ever used it the way I was planning to, but that was how most things went when I did witchcraft.
If a kitchen witch was MacGyver, then I was the guy at home who saw MacGuyver turn a straw into a BB gun and tried it out himself.
Across the street, the woman shrieked, and in front of Nick’s shield, the line of aggressive garden gnomes fell over.