Ellsbeth #2
Maybe the simplest answer was the truest one: He had always wanted the two of them to be no-commitment, just sex and work.
He had told her explicitly he didn’t want them to be in a relationship.
She had promised him she wouldn’t fall in love.
She had been the one to convince him to be with her in the first place, by making that promise.
It was no wonder he was distant and pulling away.
She had lured him in and then broken her word.
Any text she sent to him now would be further reinforcing that she was needy, that she was desperate, that she loved him when she’d said all she wanted was for the two of them to get into bed.
She could suppress these feelings, she thought, as she walked past the red-brick administration building, too impatient to stay on the proper walking path and letting her footsteps fall heavy in the snow-covered grass instead.
She could box them up neatly and put them away.
She could turn Rawlins into an anecdote, a life story to make her more interesting and glamorous at book clubs in her thirties—the professor she had once had kinky sex with, a narrative that made her more worldly and him vaguely pathetic in equal measure.
In the story she would tell about it later, love had never been a consideration.
Ellsbeth distracted herself by making a plan to infiltrate Banestooth.
Obscuration wouldn’t work, but it also wouldn’t be necessary.
Not every problem required complicated and illegal arcane mechanicals; she had been so impressed with pulling it off in the first place, her instinct had been like using a power drill when a tiny screwdriver would do.
What she needed was fairly straightforward: an invisibility ritual, and probably a ward in case they had any protective magic on the house.
Invisibility spells were easy, the type of thing professors did on the first day of undergraduate lectures in order to impress impressionable eighteen-year-olds.
Making the invisibility last longer than thirty seconds was slightly trickier, but not impossible, as was creating a ritual strong enough so that the invisibility would still be reflected in photos and video recordings.
Even as Ellsbeth built the invisibility ritual and a plan to infiltrate Banestooth in her mind, she couldn’t quiet the nagging part of her brain that still wanted to find an excuse to talk to Rawlins.
Maybe she would try to figure out a way to size up obscuration after all.
Something clever and impressive she could email; after all, he was still her adviser.
If she had an academic inquiry tangentially related to her thesis, there was no reason she shouldn’t be able to reach out.
A small part of her burned with pride at the thought that she could send him a completed ritual and force him to reckon with what she was able to accomplish without him involved.
She picked up everything she needed from the mini-mart near her apartment.
She already had a small store of arcane elementals, but for the invisibility, she needed sodium borate and glucose.
She picked up a small, leaking box of borax from the narrow aisle containing laundry detergents, and grabbed a large bag of stale gummy bears on the way to the cashier.
“Big night?” the cashier asked, not looking up.
“Mmmm,” Ellsbeth replied.
The invisibility ritual was prepared within twenty minutes on her kitchen floor—melting the gummy bears into the final formula would increase its strength, strong enough to defy even a motion detector, and a tablespoon of borax would extend the ritual’s duration.
She calculated that she would have about a full hour—any longer and the invisibility itself would be unstable, cycling in and out of focus. Easy.
But Rawlins still hadn’t texted, and so Ellsbeth began working on her idea for a new obscuration ritual alone.
Technically, a mass obscuration ritual was useless; she already knew that the second the group woke up, if they spoke to one another, it would be immediately obvious there was magic used.
But it was still an impressive feat of mechanicals, and Ellsbeth spent the next hour writing and rewriting a formula just to prove to herself she could do it.
Her moment of brilliance came when she realized that the ritual didn’t need to be transmitted by touch or through the air: It could be initiated with a trigger word.
She and Rawlins had already figured out how to do it.
From that point, the work was fairly straightforward.
She eyed the mostly full box of borax and realized she could contain the ritual within a salt circle.
That way, if something went wrong, she could say the trigger word and obscurate everyone who had been in the house when she laid the salt out.
Mass obscuration wouldn’t offer a safe lasting effect, but it would probably be enough to get her out of Banestooth if she needed an escape route.
She still had the printed blueprint of the house from the library; she used it to make the calculations for the radius of the circle.
When she finished, she typed up the entire ritual to send to Rawlins, but when she glanced back down at her phone and saw that he still hadn’t texted her, she deleted the email.
It was a pathetic and obvious bid for affection, a dog begging for a treat.
She would do this on her own. She didn’t need anything from him.