Chapter 28
The notebook materialized at Charlie’s side. She snatched it out of the air where it floated and waved it over her head victoriously.
“Another one!” she hollered at the porch, where Elias was seated in a rocking chair beside Bjorn and Vidar. “And it wasn’t even hard this time!”
The three of them burst into applause. Henry, who was sitting on Elias’s knee, sent sparkling silver colors of congratulations into Charlie’s mind.
Beaming, Charlie tossed the notebook onto the grass, where it joined a small army of various other items: a T-shirt, a piggy bank, a framed photograph, a book on Dorothy Dietrich, a French textbook, a bag of chips, a pair of swimming goggles, three sets of shoes, and, of course, two fuzzy green socks.
She was doing it. She was conjuring items from thin air, using the currents to transport them instantly from her bedroom to her side.
It hadn’t been easy—following coffee with Elias, there were many more hours of failures, grotesque curse words, and finally, two dozen almost-successes that landed in the treetops or on the opposite side of the clearing.
But then …
Then she did it.
She’d known that attempt was going to be a success even before the socks appeared.
Something about it had felt different right from the start—the currents more tangible, easier to grab; the location of the socks so clear in her mind; the folding of space as easy as bending a plastic straw.
She’d felt the socks come to her. Felt them rush to her side like an attentive servant.
Afterward, Charlie couldn’t stop conjuring.
She went for every object in her bedroom, starting small and working her way up to larger things, like her desk chair and the comforter on her bed.
“Aren’t you worried that your mom might be in your room right now?” Elias asked as she focused all her energy on the floor lamp next to her desk.
“No,” she said, keeping her eyes shut. “She only goes into our rooms on Tuesdays and Fridays. Those are laundry days.”
“What if she decided to change her schedule?”
Charlie inhaled as she felt the cool metal of the lamp materialize against her palm. “Then she’s in for one hell of a surprise.”
As soon as the lamp arrived—whole, none of its parts left behind—she sent it right back, just in case Elias was right and her mom walked in to find it missing. It was good practice anyway, sending things in both directions.
Once she’d worked her way through her bedroom, she expanded her radius, reaching for objects that were even farther away. She’d looked at the time and determined that Abigail was in French class.
She would’ve given anything to hear her friend scream when her textbook vanished right off her desk.
When three o’clock rolled around, Charlie knew that Lou would be taking out the bag of chips she always ate before swim practice. Charlie almost felt bad about snatching the chips right out of her hands.
She would have felt worse if she didn’t bring Lou those same chips almost every day.
Every time she conjured a new item, the Vikings cheered like they were watching a football game. They were completely engrossed, and neither seemed remotely bothered by Elias’s presence.
Charlie was shocked by how quickly they’d forgiven him for ruining their chances of getting into Valhalla—especially when Bjorn had previously been so angry that he’d wanted to fight an empty wall.
But Elias had shown up to the house every morning with two cases of beer and a plastic bag filled with bottles of mead, all of which the Vikings went through in a single day, an unthinkable amount of alcohol that didn’t even seem to make them drunk.
Or maybe they were just always a little bit drunk.
Whatever the case, Elias’s peace offerings worked. The Vikings were simple men, after all. Food, fighting, and booze—their holy trinity.
The good news: she’d finally gotten a handle on the first step toward learning to dredge.
The bad: it had taken until late afternoon to do so. She was expected home any minute.
They were out of time.
Elias jogged down from the porch to help her pick up the objects scattered on the grass.
She wanted to practice sending them all back to where they’d come from, but there was only time to do the biggest objects—the desk chair and comforter.
The rest she could only stuff into her backpack to return later.
“Should we meet after my mom goes to bed?” Charlie asked as she stuffed the notebook into her bag. “Get started on dredging?”
Elias shook his head, loading a pair of shoes into the extra plastic bag he’d brought out from the house. “You need rest. It’s more important that you get a good night’s sleep and show up to OET strong and well rested, in case he follows us there.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m not stopping here. I’ve barely gotten a handle on levitation and conjuring. I need to keep practicing. If I can’t learn to dredge before we leave for OET, I at least need to be as good at the two types of magic I can do as possible.”
“What about your mom? She won’t be happy if you don’t show up for dinner.”
“I’ll have dinner, then pretend to go to bed, and at midnight, you can pick me up for more training.”
Elias shook his head. “Damn, Charlotte.” A smile curled the corner of his mouth. “Abigail isn’t the only terrifying one in this town.”
She scoffed. Then, remembering something, she straightened. “Hey. You never told me. What was your hypothesis? About why standing on the rock would make it easier to access my magic?”
“Oh, that?” He grinned. “I had none. But I knew that, with a little boost of confidence…” He winked. “You’d be able to do it all on your own.”
At midnight on the dot, Charlie slipped out her bedroom window, Henry clinging to her collar.
She crawled down the shingles and came to sit with her legs dangling over the gutter.
It was a fifteen-foot drop to the bushes below.
She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and summoning a few currents of magic, and pushed herself off the roof.
Thankfully, the currents carried her gently downward. She lost her grip on the magic just before she landed, abruptly dropping the final few feet. Still, nothing was broken or sprained, so she counted it as a win.
As promised, Elias was waiting at the end of the block, the convertible rumbling quietly in the still night.
Charlie ran up to the passenger side, placed her hands on the windowsill, and leapt over the side.
Henry squawked as they soared through the air, his little body bouncing twice when she landed on the seat.
Elias smirked sideways at her before shifting the car into drive. “Show-off.”
She couldn’t help but smile at having her own insult used against her.
When they arrived at the old house, Charlie was surprised to find Bjorn and Vidar in their usual rocking chairs, despite the late hour.
“What are you two doing up?” she called as she and Elias crossed the lawn.
“Don’t sleep,” Vidar called back, pointing at his chest. “Dead, remember?”
“Oh.” Charlie hadn’t considered that.
“Normally we’d be watching our show, but we can’t get that blasted TV to work,” said Bjorn. “Damn interweb needs to be fixed, and I don’t know the first thing about Wi-Fis.”
“Clearly,” Elias muttered under his breath, and Charlie held back a laugh.
Luckily, it only took a few warm-ups before Charlie felt like she was back at the skill level she’d left off at earlier that evening. Unluckily, that skill level was far below where she wanted to be before they got on those school buses the next morning.
But she had six uninterrupted hours to get there.
She worked all night. Elias drilled her like a boot camp instructor, allowing only the occasional two-minute break to pee or chug from the energy drink he’d bought her.
When she offered him a sip, he refused. Yet another perk of being a mare, apparently; he could sleep when he wanted to, but he never really got tired.
They started with conjuring. She went through the same list of small items that she knew were scattered about her room, bringing them to her side and snatching them out of the air.
Then, they moved onto aiming. Elias would place a stone in the grass, and Charlie had to summon a specific item, materializing it right on the target he’d created. Aiming the currents was more difficult than she expected, and it took almost an hour before she could pull it off with any consistency.
Next, he ran her through a series of levitation exercises, challenging her to pick up two items at once, then three, then four. She was fairly certain there would be a permanent divot in her lower lip from how hard she bit down on it in concentration.
But the hardest part—what they spent the majority of the night drilling—was combining the two. Performing both magics at once.
“In truly dangerous situations, like fighting off Rattatosk, you won’t have time to dither about, doing one spell and then another,” Elias said, walking in a circle around the area where Charlie was training.
“You have to multitask. To grab multiple currents at once and bend them all to your differing needs.”
“You make it sound so easy,” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.
“It’s not meant to be easy.” He raised one eyebrow. “You have the power of a god, Charlotte.”
The power of a god.
It didn’t matter how many times she heard those words; they always made her skin pebble with goose bumps.
She exhaled. “Let’s just get started.”