For a Few Demons More(36)
“You okay?” Jenks asked, and I blinked, brushing my hair from my eyes and nodding.
“The line seems warm tonight,” I said, and Ceri’s face went empty.
“Warm?” she questioned, and I shrugged. Her eyes grew distant in thought for a moment, and then she gestured to the chalk-marked scrying mirror.
My eyes fixed on the chalk lines, and with no hesitation I reached for the pentagram.
The stick of yew touched the glass resting on my lap, and with a shudder my aura pooled out of me like icy water. I gasped at the sensation, my head jerking up, my eyes finding Ceri’s.
“Ceri!” Jenks shouted. “She’s losing it! The damn thing just left her!”
The elf caught her alarm fast, but not so fast I didn’t see it. “She’s fine,” she said, getting up and fumbling for the chalk on the table. “Rachel, you’re fine. Just sit tight. Don’t move.”
Frightened, I did exactly that, listening to my heart pound as she drew a circle inside her original one and invoked the more secure barrier immediately. My smut-damaged aura had colored my reflection, and I tried not to look at it. The click of the chalk hitting the table was loud, and Ceri sat across from me, her legs tucked under her and her back straight. “Continue,” she said, and I hesitated.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” I said, and she met my eyes, a hint of shame in them.
“You’re fine,” she said, looking away. “When I did this so I might screen Al’s calls, I wasn’t making such a deep connection. I erred in not making a secure circle. I’m sorry.”
It was hard for the proud elf to apologize, and, knowing that, I accepted it with no lingering feelings of “I told you so.” I didn’t know what in hell I was doing, so it wasn’t as if I could expect her to get it all right. But I was glad I had insisted on a circle. Very glad.
I turned my gaze back to the mirror, trying to keep my focus shallow so I wouldn’t look at my reflection. I felt dizzy without my aura, unreal, and my stomach was knotting. The scent of burnt amber rose to tickle my nose as I drew the lines of containment, and I squinted, seeing the faint haze of smoke on both sides of the glass where the yew was burning the mirror. “It’s supposed to do that, right?” I asked, and Ceri murmured something positive-sounding.
The red curtain of my loose hair blocked my view, but I heard her whisper something to Jenks, and the pixy flew to her. I shivered, feeling naked without my aura. I kept trying not to glance into the mirror as I scribed, the haze of my aura looking like a mist or glow around my dark shadow of a reflection. The once-cheerful pure gold color of my aura had been tainted with an overlaying black of demon smut. Actually, I thought as I finished the pentagram and started on the first of the symbols, the black gives it more depth, almost like an aged patina. Yeah, sure.
A rising of tingles cramped my hand as I finished the last symbol. Exhaling, I started on the inner circle, relying on the points of the pentagram to guide me. The haze of burning glass grew thicker, distorting my vision, but I knew the instant my starting point and ending point met.
My shoulders twisted when I felt a vibration chime through me, first in my extended aura in the mirror and then in me. The inner circle had been set, and it seemed to have been etched onto my aura by way of marking the glass.
Pulse quickening, I started on the second circle. This one, too, resonated upon completion, and I shivered when my aura started to leave the scrying mirror, pulling the entire figure into me and carrying the curse with it.
“Salt it, Rachel. Before it burns you,” Ceri said urgently, and the white drawstring bag of sea salt edged into my tunnel vision.
My fingers fumbled at the ties, and I finally closed my eyes to make better progress that way. I felt disconnected. My aura was coming back painfully slowly, seeming to crawl over my skin and soak in layer by layer, burning. I had a feeling that if I didn’t finish this before my aura came entirely back, it was really going to hurt.
The salt made a soft hush as it hit the glass, and I flinched at the feeling of unseen cold sand rasping against my skin. Not bothering to trace the patterns, I dumped it all, my heart pounding as the weight of it hitting the mirror seemed to make my chest heavy.
The bucket appeared at my feet and the wine at my knee—silently, unobtrusively. Hands shaking, I scrabbled for my big-ass symbolic knife, pricking my thumb and dropping three plops of red into the wine as Ceri’s voice hovered at the edge of my awareness and told me what to do: whispering, guiding, instructing me how to move my hands, how to finish this thing before I passed out from the sensations.