Page 74 of The Spellreader and the Phoenix

“You don’t have to do that,” Alex argued.

“It’s going to be at least forty minutes until the pizza is here,” Rory pointed out. “You definitely want to eat something before then.”

Max nodded encouragingly, so Alex shrugged. “Yeah, that would be great. Thank you.”

Rory popped upstairs, Nōwē keeping him company—i.e. hoping for food. It had been a bit of a traumatic day, so despite the fact that Rory had fed her already, he gave her an extra quarter of a can.

“Don’t tell your dad,” Rory whispered.

She shot him a look that didn’t even require words to translate. She was no fool.

And really, Max would see the partially emptied can in the fridge anyway.

Rory made three PB&J sandwiches, grabbed two apples from the crisper, and poured a glass of water. Then he thought better of it, wrapped the sandwiches in a tea towel and put them and the apples in a bag, grabbed the entire pitcher of water and two more glasses, and carried it all back downstairs.

Nōwē chose to return with him, since the hope of the best drama was still downstairs. She also had a strange fascination with olives from pizza, and while Max didn’t let her eat a lot of human food, there was the occasional treat that sneaked its way into her mouth.

Max and Alex had pulled up chairs at the D&D table, and Rory laid his bounty out. Alex looked surprised at all the food Rory had brought, but Rory just poured them all glasses of water and watched Alex immediately start eating.

Managing to talk in between bites, Alex looked at Rory. “Max said shifters didn’t have to shift. Is that right?”

Rory tilted his head back and forth. “It’s a little more complicated than that. We’re definitely not like werewolves—which are fictional. We’re not tied to the moon and an arbitrary cycle or anything like that. You’re not about to find yourself feeling compelled to shift.”

Alex looked immediately relieved.

Rory continued. “I might not be the right person to ask about this—which is why we can definitely find you other shifter resources—because I’ve always felt very strongly like both bird and human. The idea of not changing between the two of them is almost unthinkable to me. Not because I’m compelled to be either but because I can’t imagine picking between them.”

Alex nodded slowly as they stared at Rory. “I guess that makes sense. The bear still feels totally foreign to me. Like, it doesn’t feel like something that’s me. So there’s no impulse at all to change into it.”

They drank another glass of water and took a huge bite out of another sandwich.

“Absolutely,” Rory answered. “I think some of that is probably the shock talking. From what I’ve seen of you, you’re a pretty curious person, and I can’t imagine you not wanting to investigate more and find out if a bear can hold a paintbrush after all.”

Alex laughed, but there was a speculative gleam in their eye. “You’re… not wrong.”

Rory grinned. “I’ve been shifting for years, so it feels second nature to me. You may discover over time that you grow more comfortable with it, and you may not. I’m lucky in that it’s easy for me to blend in. It would be much harder for you.”

“Right,” Alex agreed, nodding again. “You’re small, and you’re a species that’s native to the area. If you were in Africa or South America or somewhere they don’t have cardinals, you’d stick out more—although you’re little, so people might not notice.”

“It’s much easier to blend in when you’re an animal people expect to see,” Rory side-stepped, since if he were in another country, he’d simply shift into a bird that was native to that area. But since no normal shifter could do that, Rory couldn’t advertise it. He eyed Max. “Have we talked about the Great World Spell yet?”

Max shook his head even as Alex said, “The what?”

Rory inclined his head at Max. “You’re the spell expert.”

Smiling faintly, Max said, “Definitely not an expert when it comes to this particular spell. My inability to be subtle notwithstanding, witches and shifters are actually able to hide as well as we do because of something called the Great World Spell. It’s a massive spell that was cast centuries ago, and it helps normal people not notice witches and shifters. It’s really important that we do everything we can to hide ourselves, but when there’s an emergency or something goes wrong or people are just way less subtle than they think they are, the Great World Spell is there. It’s not quite a spell to keep people from noticing things, and it’s not quite a forgetting spell, but sort of an amalgam of the two? With some reasonable doubt thrown in? It helps make normal people discount what they saw if it was something unusual. They might forget it, not even register it to begin with, or tell themselves that they must not have seen what they thought they saw.”

Alex grimaced. “So it’s magic constantly messing with our minds?”

Max and Rory exchanged glances.

Grimacing, Max conceded, “Well… sort of? Like I said, we really do try to fly under the radar whenever possible. If something goes wrong, though, and our existence is threatened, then the Spell smooths things over.” Max blew out a breath. “It’s especially important these days that witches and shifters are careful around exposures. The population of the earth has never been higher, and technology has never been more advanced. So now there’s people and phones and cameras and going viral… The spell has a lot more to contend with than it did when it was made, and it’s struggling.”

“Can’t you just… make a new spell?” Alex asked. “You’ve got those… spellmakers, don’t you?”

“Spellsmiths,” Max corrected. “And yeah, we have them. But no one knows how to make a spell that complex anymore. There were a few attempts made about a decade ago, and they failed utterly. The Great World Spell is not one to respond to a simple ‘undo spell.’ So even if we did figure out how to craft a new spell, we don’t know how we’d replace the old.”

Alex frowned. “Huh. That’s not great. I mean, unless we totally mess up the world and plunge back into the Dark Ages, we’re not about to have less technology any time soon.”