Chapter 7 #2
“What’s wrong?” I ask. Fuck, have I already done something wrong or caused a problem? I haven’t even tried doing anything yet!
“Nothing,” David says. “This is, uh, just going more smoothly than I expected. I assume you can feel the magic?”
“Yes! Fuck me, it’s amazing. Is this what you guys feel all the time? It’s almost like being in water, only not.”
“That’s a weirdly good comparison,” Lily says, smiling encouragingly. “It’s surrounding us and touching us all the time, adjusting and reacting to movements, like water does, but unlike water, it doesn’t hamper movements.”
“If you two are done being philosophical,” Gideon interrupts, “can we get on with this?” He’s staring at his phone now, his thumbs tapping at the screen, and doesn’t even bother to look up as he speaks. Seriously? Has there ever been a bigger asshole in the history of assholes?
“Sure.” I load as much sarcasm as I can into the word, but he doesn’t seem to notice. How dare the top of his head be so attractive? Those horns… ungh. I shiver all over.
“Are you okay?” David asks immediately.
My face gets hot. Thank fuck he can’t tell what I’m thinking.
“Yeah. Sorry. It’s, uh, I’m just not used to feeling magic, I guess.
” I frown. That felt… wrong. “No, I mean… I’m not used to being aware of feeling magic.
Huh. It’s always been there, hasn’t it? I’ve always been able to feel it, I just didn’t realize. ”
David smiles and opens his mou—
“Are you still fucking talking?” Gideon demands, putting his phone in his pocket and turning his dark gaze on me.
“Gideon,” David and Lily chorus reprovingly. Andrew elbows him.
“Not cool.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Can we move on?”
I hate him. I finally, finally understand now what people mean when they talk about hate fucking, because I can’t stand the sight of him, want to stab him in the face, but would also fuck him again in a heartbeat.
Although, honestly, right this second, I’d fuck anyone. Being aware of magic has kicked my teenage-again horniness right up, and I’m so glad our office dress code is casual and my jeans and untucked shirt—and the dimness in the room—hide my hard-on.
“Let’s move on,” I say with gritted teeth. “David, what’s next?”
“You need to visualize a ball of light. Phil says I should make sure to tell you not a ball of fire or anything else that might be hot or dangerous. A cool, light-only ball.”
I snicker, because balls, and nod. “No fire. Got it.” I hadn’t really considered a fireball anyway, but yeah, I can see how some people might and that would be very bad.
“So visualize the ball, and then you need to use words to direct the energy to form the ball.”
Uh… “Like… what words? Do I just say, ‘Make a ball’? ‘Use words’ is not a very clear instruction, David.”
He grimaces. “It’s different for every person, apparently.
Spells aren’t universal, which might be why humans are so quick to give up when they try it.
Developing your own spells for everything is a lot of work.
Phil does say that it helps to use rhythm—so sing the words or rhyme them.
The more words you use, the more opportunity to build the magic, so ‘make a ball’ is probably not enough words, especially since you’re not used to doing this.
Remember, this isn’t like my sorcery, where I take natural-born ability from within and direct it.
You’re trying to harness and utilize the magic that makes up the universe. It’s going to feel different.”
I refrain from pointing out that I have no idea how his sorcery “feels” to begin with, so I wouldn’t know if it was different or not.
Instead, I take a deep breath. I can smell the sharpness of the antiseptic the cleaners used and underneath it, the remnants of someone’s lunch… tacos? Never mind. “Here goes.”
I close my eyes again and visualize a cool, white ball of light, focusing on it until the image is clear and crisp in my mind, then I imagine the magic I can feel all around me swirling together to create that ball, open my mouth, and sing, “La-la, di-da, ha-ha, ball of light we are; rah-rah, tee-tah, bah-bah, ball of light we are.”
I know even before I open my eyes that it didn’t work. I can feel the magic against my skin, ebbing and flowing, swirling, whisking about, but none of it reacted at all to my visualization or words.
I sigh and look at David. “What went wrong?”
A shout of laughter bursts out of Andrew, but before he can say anything, I point at him and declare, “No picking on my awesome skill as a singer/songwriter.”
“I don’t think it was the words, anyway,” David says. “I’ve seen humans perform spells before, and even with the ones that didn’t work, there was at least a stirring of the magic around them. This time, it… well….”
“It didn’t react at all,” I finish. “Yeah, I noticed.”
He hesitates.
“What?” I ask. “You can tell me what I did wrong, David. I won’t learn otherwise. I can take it.” I can’t really, but I’ll pretend I can and then go home, curl up into a ball, and nurse my shattered ego later. It’s already pretty bruised because I can’t get the magic to respond.
“You didn’t actually do anything wrong,” he says.
“I’m a bit baffled, honestly. I expected it to take a lot longer for you to be able to sense the magic at all—based on all my reading and what I’ve been told, we should have spent this whole session working on that and not made a lot of progress.
It should have taken a few days of intense concentration before you even began to feel it.
So… you’re advanced there. You sensed it as easily as any of us.
But maybe that means it’s going to take a little longer for the rest.”
“You should try again,” Elinor suggests. “Now that it didn’t work once, there’s probably less pressure. And practice never hurt anyone, right?”
“Right. Okay.” Try again. Just like the first time I tried to ride a bike and fell off. I need to get back on and keep at it until it all comes together.
I ignore the little voice at the back of my head whispering that the bike at least moved a few feet before I fell off.
Closing my eyes again, I envision the ball of light and picture the magic that’s kissing my skin streaming toward it, building it up.
“Magic ribbons winding up, wind into a ball. Magic ribbons lighting up, light the ball for me.” I half chant, half sing this time, but it loses impetus toward the end, because there is absolutely no reaction from the magic.
At all.
I sigh and shrug as I open my eyes. “This is frustrating. I can feel it all around me, but it just goes on its merry way and ignores me. It’s like those stupid arcade machines—the candy bar is right fucking there, and you’ve got the tools to grab it, but somehow, you still can’t.”
“Interesting analogy.” Andrew sounds like he’s choking, and I know he’s trying not to laugh at my choice of spell words.
“Hey, it fits. Also, if you think you can make up a better spell on the spot, I’d like to hear it.”
He opens his smirking mouth, stops, then closes it, consternation crossing his face.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I sneer.
“You might just need to sit with the magic for a while,” David says, but he doesn’t sound at all sure. “I’ll give Phil a call tomorrow and see if he’s got some insights.”
“If you don’t mind,” Gideon interrupts, “I have a theory. It’s really off the wall and probably wrong, but…” He shrugs.
Ugh, I just want to ruffle his feathers. How dare he be all calm and cool when I’m frustrated and flustered?
“By all means, let’s hear it.” I sweep an arm in his direction. “The floor is yours.”
His smirk is just as irritating as Andrew’s. “The day after you got drunk and made an idiot of yourself, when you got up, your hair was sticking up just like it is now, and you said it was always like that in the morning.”
I wait, but he seems to be done. “That wasn’t a question.”
Elinor snorts. Gideon rolls his eyes. “Sorry. Does your hair really always stick up like that in the morning?”
“Is it relevant?” Are we really standing here talking about my hair?
Also, I’d really like to fix it now that I’m not playing with magic anymore.
I lift my hands to smooth it down, but it seems particularly stubborn right now, and I don’t want to fuss with it while everyone’s watching, so I drop my hands.
“Yeah, actually. So…?”
He’s so fucking sexy. Annoying. I mean he’s annoying, not sexy. Though he is sexy too. “Yes.” I sound like a petulant child, but there’s no way to fix that.
He nods. “And you can feel the energy flowing through your body now that you’re thinking about it?”
“Yes.” He seems to be waiting for me to say more, so I add, “It’s kind of tingly.”
David looks up sharply. “Tingly?”
“I don’t know how else to describe it,” I say helplessly, spreading my hands. “Is that not normal?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “It might just be a terminology thing, but nobody else I’ve spoken to ever described it as ‘tingly.’ They talk more about a glowing feeling or a warmth.”
“You’ve already said how the magic feels to you,” Gideon interrupts, dragging my attention back to him. “And we’ve seen that you can’t influence it at all—”
“Wait, you’ve seen ? You can see magic?” I’m instantly jealous. When this life is up and I transition to the spiritual plane, I’m going to make sure everyone knows that my next cycle on the physical plane will not be as a human.
“No, I mean that we could sense that the magic didn’t react to your attempts. ‘See’ was the wrong word. Sorry.”
Well, that’s a bit better. I still don’t want to be a human in my next physical life.
We kind of suck. “So what does that mean?” Does he have a point?
Is he going to reveal this theory before we all grow old and die, which will probably happen sooner for me than the rest of them.
Although… they are all considerably older than me.
My online research on Andrew puts him at least over eight hundred years old.