Page 28 of Demon's Bluff
“Oh! Cool,” I said, unabashedly delighted as I glanced at Al.Nested and self-erasing.
Al leaned forward to eye the settling soot. “Newt’s connection is now gone and the stone is open. Seeing as the outer pentagram is not sealed with glyphs and the innermost is nulled, you may enter the middle pentagram and use the copper stylus to apply your blood to the stone, thus creating an additional point of connection to you.”
“One side okay?” I asked, seeing the logic behind it. I pricked my pinky this time, using my homemade brush to apply three drops of blood to the stone.
“One side is sufficient.” He tapped the Srandford bowl to make the wine ripple. “Douse it. Saffron filaments and all.”
The wine would probably carry my blood into the stone. It was going to make a mess, though. Wincing, I poured the quarter cup of wine onto the blood-painted, ash-smeared stone.
“Good,” Al said, a hint of pride showing when the wine flooded the middle pentagram, the outermost…and then stopped at the chalk lines. It had defined the outermost pentagram while washing away the second. “Now apply the runes of permanence.”
I knew them, obviously, and I quickly put them at the points, whispering their names and feeling the strength of the ley line grow as a stronger link was forged between me and the stone.
“All that is left is reciting the three phrases used to make the charm work,” Al said, and then quietly pushed a strip of paper to me.
I smiled when I took it up, quickly reading and recognizing the Latin as the same inscribed on the stone. But the thrill that spilled through me was because he had trusted that I was going to do this right, so much so that he had written down the words ahead of time.
“A priori,”I said, hoping my pronunciation was right. It meant “from the former,” and a quiver went through me when I saw the glyphs engraved upon the stone begin to glow.“A posteriori,”I added, and the glyphs brightened. “From the latter”—easy enough.
“Omnia mutantur,”I said, nodding. It meant “everything changes,” and I remembered it from another transference curse I had used before.
The writings on the stone burst into a horrific brightness, and my pulse quickened when a pinging sensation seemed to arch into me, quickly fading.
Al reached for the stone, rubbing the last of the ash from it before handing it to me. “It’s yours,” he said. “And yours alone.” He hesitated, then added in a lighthearted voice, “Well done. A glamour can be seen through by anyone with a sharp enough intuition, but to break it entirely, usefinis. Because it’s linked to both you and the collective, you can glamour more than one thing at a time. I would be cautious in that regard. I’ve always found less is more.”
I couldn’t stop my grin. The stone was warm in my hand, and I wanted to try it out.
“Go on.” Al waved a hand at me as if shooing chickens. “Tap a line, look at the object you want to lift the image of through the stone, and recite the first incantation.”
What to copy…I spun a slow circle, raising the stone to my eye when I saw myWitch Monthlymagazine.“A priori,”I said, and a quiver of line energy rippled through me.
Al dropped the vampire sex guide onto the table with an attention-getting smack. “Gaze upon what you want to disguise and recite the second.”
Beaming, I peered through the hole at it.“A posteriori,”I said, then lowered the rock. It hadn’t changed.
“And invoke it by speaking the third phrase through the hole, thereby carrying the spell to it?” Al suggested, and I felt myself warm.
Of course.“Omnia mutantur,”I whispered through the hole. My breath streamed through the stone, pulling a haze of energy straight from the ley lines to settle over the book and soak in.
Slowly my smile faded. “It didn’t work,” I said, disappointed, but Al chuckled and swept Cormel’s dating guide up, riffling through it in interest.
“It did,” he said, lingering over an illustration as he turned the book on its side. “Since you cast it, you can’t see the changes unless you look through the stone.”
Curious, I brought the stone to my eye, excitement tingling to my toes as Al was suddenly holding a magazine. “So it’s kind of a spell checker, too,” I said, and the demon snorted.
“It’s a transposition charm. You see things that are transposed. Magicked things appear as they truly are, and things the stone has glamoured appear as everyone else sees them. Don’t ask me how it knows. It’s like a thermos.” He let the book drop with a thud that a magazine never would have been able to manage. Expression pleased, he grabbed the open bottle of wine and started for the kitchen. “I suggest you put it on a lanyard, but don’t run anything through the hole. You’ll ruin the spell.”
“Thanks, Al,” I said, getting a half-assed wave as he continued on, shoulders hunched.
Tickled, I opened my fist and ran a finger over the warm stone. I’d loop some wire around it and put it on a length of chain. “Hey, Al?” I called after him. “Do you think someone might have disguised the Atlantean mirror with a glamour?”
Al drew to a halt in the hall, his silhouette ominous as he half turned to me. “No. You can’t transpose things that reflect. I’m sorry, Rachel. You have until June, and then it’s Alcatraz, the coven, or me.”
And as he spun to go out to his wagon in my graveyard, I began to wonder why I was working so hard to stay here.
Chapter
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