Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows #1)(21)

Much of my job had entailed bringing in "gray spell" crafters—witches who took a perfectly good spell like a love charm and turned it to a bad use. But the serious black magic users were out there, and I'd brought them in, too: the ones specializing in the darker forms of entrapment, the people who could make you go missing—and for a few dollars more, spell your relatives into not remembering you even existed—the handful of Inderlanders driving Cincinnati's underground power struggles. Sometimes the best I had been able to do was to cover up the ugly reality so that humanity never knew how difficult it was to rein in the Inderlanders who thought of humans as free-range cattle. But never had I had anyone come at me like that before. I wasn't sure how to keep myself safe and my karma clean at the same time.
The last of my daylight hours had been spent in the garden. Messing about in the dirt with pixy children getting in the way is a great way to ground oneself, and I found I owed Jenks a very large thank-you—in more ways than one. It wasn't until I went inside with my spell-crafting materials and a sunburnt nose that I found out what their cheerful shouts and calls had been about. They hadn't been playing hide and seek; they were intercepting splat balls.
The small pyramid of splat balls neatly stacked by the back door had shocked the peas out of me. Each one held my death. I hadn't known. Not a freaking clue. Seeing them there ticked me off, making me angry instead of afraid. Next time the hunters found me, I vowed, I'd be ready.
After my whirlwind of spell crafting, my bag was full of my usual charms. The dowel of redwood from work had been a lifesaver. Any wood can store spells, but redwood lasts the longest. The amulets not in my bag hung from the cup hooks in the otherwise empty cupboard. They were all great spells, but I needed something stronger. Sighing, I opened the next book.
"Transmutation?" Ivy said, setting the forms aside and pulling her keyboard closer. "You're that good?"
I ran a thumbnail under a fingernail to get the dirt out from under it. "Necessity is the mother of courage," I mumbled. Not meeting her eyes, I scanned the index. I needed something small, preferably that could defend itself.
Ivy returned to her surfing with a loud crunch of celery. I had been watching her closely since sundown. She was the model roommate, clearly making an effort to keep her normal vampy reactions to a minimum. It probably helped that I had rewashed my clothes. The moment she started looking seductive, I was asking her to leave.
"Here's one," I said softly. "A cat. I need an ounce of rosemary, half a cup of mint, one teaspoon of milkweed extract gathered after the first frost… Well, that's out. I don't have any extract, and I'm not about to go to the store now."
Ivy seemed to swallow back a chuckle, and I flipped to the index. Not a bat; I didn't have an ash tree in the garden, and I'd probably need some of the inner bark. Besides, I wasn't going to spend the rest of the night learning to fly by echolocation. The same went for birds. Most of those listed didn't fly at night. A fish was just silly. But maybe…
"A mouse," I said, turning to the proper page and looking over the list of ingredients. Nothing was exotic. Almost everything I needed was already in the kitchen. There was a handwritten note at the bottom, and I squinted to read a faded, masculine-looking script: Can be safely adapted for any rodent. I glanced at the clock. This would do.
"A mouse?" Ivy said. "You're going to spell yourself into a mouse?"
I stood, went to the stainless steel island in the center of the kitchen, and propped the book up. "Sure. I've got everything but the mouse hair." My eyebrows rose. "Do you think I could have one of your owl's pellets? I need to strain the milk past some fur."Ivy tossed her wave of black hair over her shoulder, her thin eyebrows high. "Sure. I'll get you one." Shaking her head, she closed the site she was looking at and rose with a stretch tall enough to show her bare midriff. I blinked at the red jewel piercing her belly button, then looked away. "I need to let them out anyway," she said as she collapsed in on herself.
"Thanks." I turned back to my recipe, going over exactly what I needed and gathering it on the kitchen island. By the time Ivy padded down from the belfry, everything was measured and waiting. All that was left was the stirring.
"It's all yours," she said, setting a pellet on the counter and going to wash her hands.
"Thank you," I whispered. I took a fork and teased the felt mass apart, pulling three hairs from among the tiny bones. I made a face, reminding myself that it hadn't gone all the way through the owl, just been regurgitated.
Grabbing a fistful of salt, I turned to her. "I'm going to make a salt circle. Don't try to cross it, okay?" She stared, and I added, "It's a potentially dangerous spell. I don't want anything to get into the pot by accident. You can stay in the kitchen, just don't cross the circle."
Looking unsure, she nodded. "Okay."
I kind of liked seeing her off balance, and I made the circle bigger than usual, enclosing the entirety of the center island with all my paraphernalia. Ivy levered herself up to sit on a corner of the counter. Her eyes were wide with curiosity. If I was going to do this a lot, I might want to blow off the security deposit and etch a groove in the linoleum. What good is a security deposit if you're dead from a misaligned spell?
My heart beat fast. It had been a while since I'd closed a circle, and Ivy watching made me nervous. "All right, then…" I murmured. I took a slow breath, willing my mind to empty and my eyes to close. Slowly, my second sight wavered into focus.
I didn't do this often, as it was confusing as all get-out. A wind that wasn't from this side of reality lifted the lighter strands of my hair. My nose wrinkled at the smell of burnt amber. Immediately I felt like I was outside as the surrounding walls vanished to silvery hints. Ivy, even more transitory than the church, was gone. Only the landscape and plants remained, their outlines quavering with the same reddish glow that thickened the air. It was as if I stood in the same spot before mankind found it. My skin crawled when I realized the gravestones existed in both worlds, as white and solid looking as the moon would be if it were up.
Eyes still closed, I reached out with my second sight, searching for the nearest ley line. "Holy crap," I murmured in surprise, finding a reddish smear of power running right through the graveyard. "Did you know there's a ley line running through the cemetery?" 
"Yes," Ivy said softly, her voice coming from nowhere.
I stretched out my will and touched it. My nostrils flared as force surged into me, backwashing at my theoretical extremities until the power equalized. The university was built on a ley line so big that it could be drawn upon almost anywhere in Cincinnati. Most cities are built on at least one. Manhattan has three of considerable size. The largest ley line on the East Coast runs through a farm outside of Woodstock. Coincidence? I think not.
The ley line in my backyard was tiny, but it was so close and underused that it gave me more strength than the university's ever had. Though no real breeze touched me, my skin prickled from the wind blowing in the ever-after.
Tapping into a ley line was a rush, albeit a dangerous one. I didn't like it. Its power ran through me like water, seeming to leave an ever-growing residue. I couldn't keep my eyes closed any longer, and they flew open.
The surreal red vision of the ever-after was replaced by my humdrum kitchen. I stared at Ivy perched on the counter, seeing her with the earth's wisdom. Sometimes a person looks totally different. I was relieved to see Ivy looked the same. Her aura—her real aura, not her vamp aura—was streaked with sparkles. How very odd. She was looking for something.
"Why didn't you tell me there was a ley line so close?" I asked.
Ivy's eyes flicked over me. Shrugging, she crossed her legs and kicked off her shoes to land them under the table. "Would it have made any difference?"
No. It didn't make any difference. I shut my eyes to strengthen my fading second sight while I closed the circle. The heady flood of latent power made me uncomfortable. With my will, I moved the narrow band of salt from this dimension into the ever-after. It was replaced with an equal ring of ever-after reality.
The circle snapped shut with a skin-tingling jolt, and I jumped. "Gripes," I whispered. "Maybe I used too much salt." Most of the force I had pulled from the ever-after now flowed through my circle. What little remained eddying through me still made my skin crawl. The residue would continue to grow until I broke the circle and disconnected from the ley line.
I could feel the barrier of ever-after reality surrounding me as a faint pressure. Nothing could cross the quickly shifting bands of alternate realities. With my second sight, I could see the shimmering wave of smudged red rising up from the floor to arch to a close just over my head. The half sphere went the same distance beneath me. I would do a closer inspection later to be sure I wasn't bisecting any pipes or electrical lines, making the circle vulnerable to breakage should anything actively try to get through that way.
Ivy was watching me when I opened my eyes. I gave her a mirthless smile and turned away. Slowly my second sight diminished to nothing, overwhelmed by my usual vision. "Locked down tight," I said as her aura seemed to vanish. "Don't try to cross it. It'll hurt."