The interview had been broadcast several times already, and one national newspaper had run an article about it, including a half-page photo capturing Roy looking spectral and spooky, me beside him, my eyes glowing pale green and my hand locked with the ghost’s as I channeled energy into him so he would appear on camera. But despite al the press the interview had garnered, I had the feeling that the construct attack and the tear into the Aetheric would eclipse Roy’s story.
Lusa appeared on the screen as I flipped to Channel 6.
She was back in the studio, but a digital y imposed box beside her head rol ed footage of the smal hole in reality surrounded by crime tape. My picture popped up on the screen, and I groaned.
“What did you do this time?” Roy asked, staring at the screen.
“Hopeful y nothing that wil start another media circus.”
Once upon a time I’d actual y liked Witch Watch—that was before I started appearing on the show semiregularly. I’d better find out what’s being said.
I bumped the volume up and listened to Lusa’s report as I sketched a plan for the spel I intended to cast.
sketched a plan for the spel I intended to cast.
“—are stil debating jurisdiction over the tear, but the Organization for Magical y Inclined Humans has official y confirmed that what we’re seeing is pure Aetheric energy slipping out of the hole. Rumor has it that bil ionaire Maximil ian Bel , founder of the controversial spel crafting school for norms, Spel s for the Rest of Us, made an offer for the property and has attempted to buy access to the tear. The possible implications and dangers of raw magic slipping into reality are actively being debated al over the nation, so for now, the tear is being contained within a circle and the area is off limits to civilians. In other news—”
I muted the TV again. Al things considered, if whatever she’d said about me had been short enough that I didn’t catch it before hitting the volume, it probably wasn’t devastating. At least, I hope not.
“I’m going to cast my circle,” I told Roy as I gathered a quarter-sized wooden disk and a carving knife and headed for the smal circle cut into the floor in the corner of the room.
The ghost shrugged, not looking up from the cereal bowl he was attempting to shove from one side of the kitchen counter to the other. When I’d first met Roy, he hadn’t been able to interact with anything on the living side of the chasm between his plane and mine. He’d received a serious power boost a month ago when I’d been overflowing with energy I couldn’t control and I’d siphoned a load of it into him. Ever since, he’d become a champion poltergeist: knocking things over, pushing buttons, and even managing to hold a pen long enough to write his name in uneven, crooked letters.
“Don’t break that bowl,” I said, and then settled down inside my circle. If I was going to have any shot at casting a spel that would alert me to glamour, I’d need to be focused
—and not on the ghost haunting my apartment.
Closing my eyes, I concentrated on the raw magic stored in the obsidian ring I wore. I channeled it into the dormant in the obsidian ring I wore. I channeled it into the dormant circle, and the magical barrier sprang to life, pulsing with blue energy. Circle cast, I cleared my mind and let my consciousness sink deep inside until I reached the trancelike state I’d been taught to strive for while in academy.
I hit that place of perfect nothingness, perfect peace.
Then the world exploded in a rainbow of colors.
Aetheric energy twisted around me in writhing swirls of light, but there was no land of the dead mixed in, no mortal realm. I’d reached the Aetheric plane the way a witch was meant to: my psyche, and only my psyche, projected into the magical plane. I could stil feel my body sitting inside my circle, but it was a distant sensation—more a minor irritation, like a buzzing fly, than a solid connection.
In the Aetheric plane I wasn’t restrained by the rules of a body. I could float. I could fly. I laughed with the freedom of it, the sound turning to bright blue notes. Magic swirled around me, and I was a part of that magic. I felt invulnerable, limitless. And that was the dangerous part.
It would be so easy to forget I needed the tether to my body. To forget that I wasn’t just magic and energy like everything else in the Aetheric plane. To forget that I had a limit. So after I danced along a stream of vibrant green magic, years of training forced me to pul back and recenter myself.
I adjusted my perspective and did something that was possible only in the Aetheric plane: I moved outside myself and examined my projected self from the outside. The deep fissures where a soul-sucking spel had damaged my very being stil cut through my astral body, but the wounds were clear, showing no signs of taint or dark magic. They also showed no sign of healing.