“Out,” I replied instantly, the word tumbling from my mouth without hesitation.
“Then yer best get on with it then,” he stated, nodding down at the book. My eyes widened before finding his.
“Look, okay, so I get why you think I would be able to do something with… erm… that… but I am sorry to disappoint here but I am not a witch.”
At that, he scoffed.
“I would beg to differ, girly,” he said, dragging a hand down his body to indicate himself, giving it a little wiggle for good measure.
“But I have no idea how I did that?!” I reminded him on a hiss.
“Okay, okay, so baby steps, I get it… right, here’s what we are gonna do. You just need to listen to me,” he said, his tone sharpening before continuing,
“Where do you want to go?”
“You’re saying you, not yer anymore… did you know that?” I asked randomly, focusing on that pointless fact and trying to stall the inevitable disappointment that if he was relying on me to get us out of here, then we were both fucked.
“Youmust be rubbing off in me.”
“You mean rubbing offonme,” I corrected.
“Look, I will rub it all wherever you want it, just concentrate,” he groaned, making me wrinkle my nose and say,
“Eww.”
“Tell me, where do you wanna be?”
The answer came so fast it startled me.
“Home.”
“Good, now keep that thought in your head. Pinpoint a place in your home, think of an object, the color of the walls, the smell… bring in the little things, bring them into focus and then hold them in your mind.”
I nodded, doing as he asked before saying,
“Okay, so now what?”
“Now put your hands on the page.”
I hesitated, my stomach knotting painfully as I stared at the strange markings.
“Bo…”
“Now, Eliza. Do it!”
I swallowed hard and lowered my hands, my palms hovering for a second before finally pressing down onto the page. The paper was warm beneath my skin, far warmer than it should have been. As though something beneath it were alive and waiting.
“Concentrate,” Bo urged, his voice tight with urgency.
“Don’t think about how. Just think about where,” he said, and since he popped up in my life earlier this morning, I hadn’t once heard him sound this serious. Not even when he was trying to convince me not to come here. But now, it felt different, like he was really trying to help me. Help us get home with whatever power he thought I had.
So, I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart hammering violently as I tried to picture my apartment. The couch. The kitchen. The stupid dish I’d left in the sink that morning because I’d been too nervous about work to bother washing it.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered, my voice shaking despite my attempt at sarcasm.
“You really think it’s going to be this easy?”
The moment the words left my mouth, the air shifted. The symbols beneath my hands shuddered, and I gasped as they lifted cleanly from the page, peeling away as though they were made of solid smoke. Light bloomed from them, sharp and blinding. Symbols that were now casting fractured shadows across the walls as they began to spin faster and faster in the air between us. The markings rearranged themselves mid-motion, blurring into something dizzying and incomprehensible.
