Page 42 of The Demon's Spell

“What’s my prize?” I asked, drawing her body close to me as we floated toward the ceiling.

Her gaze flickered toward my lips, and I leaned toward her. She closed the distance between us, and our spiritual lips connected. Kissing her was different on the astral plane. On the physical plane, every sensation existed only in your own body. When I kissed Nadine in spirit form, it was like I felt what she felt, too. The thrill and excitement pulsed through each of our spirits like we were one.

We floated downward, until we were a few inches off the ground again. We weren’t far from Nadine’s dorm, and we could hear the distant sound of Talia’s piano from inside her room.

“Do you think Talia can feel us?” I wondered. “If we play around with it, maybe we can learn what it feels like when someone’s astral traveling into your space.”

“We can try it, as long as she’s decent and she and Grant aren’t… you know.”

That was the last thing I wanted to walk in on. “Grant’s in class,” I said.

I floated over to the door, but my spirit slammed into something solid. “That’s weird. We walked through Professor Poppy’s classroom just fine.”

I pressed my hands to the door. Even though I was in spirit form, it felt solid.

“The dorm rooms are warded, aren’t they?” Nadine asked. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

Just to double check, Nadine reached for the door handle. To my surprise, her spirit curled around the handle like it was solid, and the door opened. Except what we found behind it wasn’t Nadine’s dorm. It was a small closet, so small the door could barely open all the way. Items hovered in mid-air, but none of it looked special. I didn’t understand, until I saw a piece of paper I recognized with words scribbled down in my handwriting.

“That’s a poem I wrote you,” I realized.

Nadine peered into the closet curiously. “This is my stash!”

I furrowed my brow. “I don’t get it. How are we accessing your stash like this?”

“Our stash is a pocket universe we create to hold our belongings. It makes sense that it exists on the astral plane,” Nadine said. She reached out and plucked the poem from the air. “It’s solid here.”

I took the piece of paper from her and turned it over in my hands. “I didn’t know this was possible. It makes you wonder…”

I reached for a key floating mid-air, but the second my hand passed through the doorway, my spirit was blasted backward. An intense pain shot through my entire form, and I smashed against the wards on the other side of the hall.

“Lucas!” Nadine cried.

I winced. It was a different kind of pain than I’d felt before, though. It was like my energy had been drained.

“That answers that question,” I said. “You can’t access each other’s stashes from the astral plane. They’re protected. Only you can open the door to your own stash.”

“That’s good, because otherwise people could steal things and lose them on the astral plane,” Nadine said. “I see why trying to access someone else’s stash can be dangerous. Professor Carlisle said that in Conjuring Basics. Do you want to find your stash?”

“Sure, we can see if mine’s here.”

Nadine closed her door, and we floated down the hall. I tried to open my dorm room, but my hand went right through the handle.

“Mine should be here, like yours,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not about where you live,” Nadine theorized. “My dorm room is my only real home right now, so it makes sense that this is where I would metaphorically keep my stuff. Yours could be anywhere.”

“I wonder why we aren’t taught how to access them on the astral plane,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not something everyone can do,” Nadine wondered. “If I have more powers as a priestess, maybe it’s something only talented witches and warlocks have ever accessed.”

“That’s possible—” I stopped dead when I saw a woman float across the hall. She went down the grand staircase, and I lost sight of her. “I thought I saw… Professor Ward.”

That couldn’t be right, because she’d died the night of the Burning. But I was on the astral plane, which meant it was entirely possible I’d just seen her ghost.

Nadine’s jaw dropped. “Lucas, we have to follow her! What if she learned something after she died? Ghosts see things and talk to each other, don’t they?”

Nadine grabbed my hand, and we flew down the hall and over the railing. We stopped beneath the grand staircase and looked down both hallways. My heart leapt when I saw her. The hall began to blur, and a sensation tingled throughout my body.