“Power evolves as the people who use it evolve.”
Soul gave her an abbreviated nod and cleaned her left thumb with the alcohol pad. Pricked her thumb with the lancet. Thearcencielallowed three drops to fall into the tube. She dropped her paper waste into a grocery bag and the lancet into a small metal sharps container. Taryn reapplied the lavender top andmixed the blood with the clear stuff inside the tube, three complete movements of the tube: upside down, right-side up, upside down, right-side up, upside down, right-side up, in what looked like a ritual.
As she rotated the tube, she said, “This is our oath. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of the Old Ones. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of the working that breaksInfinitioandUnendlichfrom its attack on the Old One. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of Nell’s part in the ritual, despite the untruth of the lack of full disclosure. Do you so swear?”
“I so swear,” Soul said, her flesh brightening.
Taryn gathered up her equipment and the garbage, and carried the tray to T. Laine, who repeated the procedure. Then Taryn carried the equipment to her place in the circle, but still outside the mixed-element ring. She turned to her left and took three steps, clockwise, to the witch sitting there, where she repeated the process. And then to the next. And the next. As she moved, the breeze came up and the wood burning in the brazier smoked and blazed, getting into my eyes. I had to blink against the smoke and lean back and forth to keep it out of my face, but I succeeded in seeing every part of the ceremony. Each part of the collection process was done in threes, deliberately but not slowly. It took about twenty minutes, which I thought was fast, for every person in the clearing to donate three drops of blood to the small tube and swear the oath, including Taryn herself.
Lastly Taryn came to me and sat before me. Moving awkwardly, I cleaned my left thumb and squeezed the thumb pad with the fingers of my left hand. I stuck it with a sterile lancet. The pain shocked through me, unexpected, despite my knowing it was coming. Clumsily I added three drops to the tube. Taryn topped it and inverted the tube three times. Then she poured the contents of the tube into the small silver bowl. As she had promised, the blood hadn’t clotted, but there were minuscule clumps in it. Three drops from every person present.
Sitting with the brazier between us, Taryn said, “This is our oath. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of the Old Ones. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of the working that breaksInfinitioandUnendlichfrom its attack on the Old One. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of Nell’s part in the ritual, despite the untruth ofthe lack of full disclosure. Do you accept this oath and agree that you will never speak of your part in it?”
This meant that I couldn’t write or file a final report for PsyLED. That T. Laine couldn’t. That Soul couldn’t. The after-reports from this case would be interesting. “I so swear,” I said.
“You do understand that you will be given credit for theideaof the working only? And you accept the consequences, should there be such, from the lack of full disclosure to the authorities?”
“I do. I so swear.”
The breeze seemed to strengthen as I spoke the final words, and the smoke from the brazier whipped around me. More important, I felt Soulwood awaken, not so very far away, sleepy but aware. The wood reached to me, through the ground, through the earth, a long underground stream of power. It filled me. Restful and heated, deep and full. Like water filling a vase, higher and higher. It was getting hard to breathe. Or perhapsunnecessaryto breathe. I struggled to force breath after breath, holding on to whatever it was in me that was still human, that still needed air. And still the power filled me, making my palms itch and ache. I felt as if my skin would stretch and burst, and I gasped, mentally pushing the flow of Soulwood away. Back to its place.
The flow tapered off. Stopped. And Soulwood withdrew. Surprise flashed through me. I swallowed. My breath came more easily. That was an interesting reaction to blood vows. And important. BecauseBreakmight damage my wood. I had been afraid—
“Nell?” Taryn said.
I nodded that I was okay. Opened my eyes. Blinked against the smoke until I focused. Into the fire that burned at my knee, I poured out the blood from the silver bowl. Then, following the ritual as it had been explained to me, I upended the silver bowl and placed it into the center of the fire so the flames could lick and cook the last remnants clean. Taryn overturned the container of lancets into the flames. Then she opened a small bottle and I smelled alcohol, the drinking kind, not the sterilization kind, and she poured it into the plastic tube, swirled it to get all the blood free, and emptied it into the small tub that had held the lancets. She dumped the mixture into the fire. Flames leaped high and we both leaned away from the blaze. She dropped the tub and tube into the trash with the alcohol pads and trash paper.
“This is our oath,” she said again. “That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of the Old Ones. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of the working that breaksInfinitioandUnendlichfrom its attack on the Old Ones. That we will not hint or suggest, speak, write, or sing of Nell’s part in the ritual, despite the untruth of the lack of full disclosure to those in authority over her. We so swear.”
I felt something heated, icy, arid as a desert, moving like a stream, coil through my body and into the ground. If I’d ever had doubts that witch magic would work on me, they were gone with that nearly electric sensation.
The witches and Soul and I all said the same words, “We do so swear.”
Taryn got up, gathering the trash, flipping the silver bowl over with a stick, and into the cooler coals at the side. The bowl had begun to glow a dull gray color, and the stink of burning silver was acrid on the air. Leaving the brazier burning, she took her place at cardinal north, tapped the circle, and said,“Aperire finis.”
Together, the eleven other witches said,“Aperire finis.”
I felt the circle close, and I closed my eyes again, feeling the power around me, but not reacting to it.
Taryn said,“Aperta pro fractura.”The witches repeated her words. The power grew.
From below us, in the river valley, came the echoes of explosions as transformers blew. The night grew darker, then brighter, as the entire electric grid guttered several times, and went down. Several heartbeats later, the part of the city that had backup on the secondary grid flickered on, the city of Knoxville like a patchwork quilt of light and dark. Sirens began to sound.
I had one job to do. Only one. I closed out the sound of the witches. And I put my palms onto the ground, flat to the earth. And I began to scan.
TheInfinitiowas circling, spinning, so fast that if I’d seen it only now, I would think it a ball of color and light, not the infinity symbol whirling like a dervish. It felt important, that I know what it was as it spun around the circle of the huge working. From the center of the working at LuseCo, the light blazed like a sun, a warm glow that seemed to have its own gravity. A power stolen from the ley lines just below it. From all around the circumference of the circle, lines dropped down upon theOld One, the consciousness buried in the earth. The lines of power spread across the sleeper tapped and drilled and bounced on the consciousness. Which... shivered in its sleep.
A slight waveform rolled across the surface of the Old One, the membrane created from the magic stolen from the ley lines. I remembered the Richter scale readings, too slight to register as earthquakes but too great to be missed by seismologists. This had to be the cause of the mini earthquakes that JoJo had been talking about, the microquakes of zero-point-two and -three. The Old One was beingannoyedawake. As a child, I had seen my father annoyed awake. I had seen my husband, John, annoyed awake by a dog wanting to go outside. Neither awakening had ended well, and I had a feeling that this awakening would end no better. In fact, far worse.
Around me, above me, as deep into the soil as the four-inch-deep circle, the power of the witch circle was growing.
***
The night was cold and I hadn’t brought a winter coat into the circle with me. Just prior to full-on night, I pulled the blanket out from under me, unfolded it, wrapped part of it around my shoulders and body, and pushed a portion back under my backside. I wasn’t warm, but I wasn’t quite as miserable. I looked over at T. Laine and Soul, who were on a flat-topped boulder, sitting on blankets or towels or foam pads of their own. Watching. I felt safer knowing that they were here, PsyLED guards. Rick had once said that no PsyLED agent ever went into anything alone. Had I doubted, this proved his truth.
The energies of the working whirled over us, behind us, around the witches, blue, green, lavender, yellow, red. It was like being stuck inside a spinning multicolored ball—a little nauseating. But the witches had completedaperire finisand were close to the final part ofaperta pro fractura. Which was a Latinwyrdworking for aBreakspell. That was the part where I came in. I had been waiting. And waiting. And just when I started shivering again, as badly as the Old One beneath me, Taryn whispered, “Nell. Now.”
I set my palms back onto the cold surface of the ground andreached. Sent my energies down and down and stopping, just above the surface of the Old One. The vibrations on its thinskin, the almost-not-there overlay of ley line energies, had grown bigger, higher, more profound. The sensation reverberated through the ground and up into me. My shivers altered, shifted, and slid into the rhythm, matching the vibration that attacked the ancient presence. My magics matched the tempo and cadence. Blended into it without making it stronger.
