“Just give me what you have.” I held out my hand.

“The power to combat the assault is within you,” Ivy House whispered to me. “The clues are there. You can piece them together. You must.”

No pressure.

“I’ll get working on this spell.” I took the paper from Edgar.

“Well, then.” Mr. Tom pulled at his lapels. “I’ll make breakfast.”

The sense of urgency settled onto my shoulders like a great weight, something in me knowing that my time was running out. I took off for my room, jogging all the way there, and then spread the page onto the table and sat down to study it.

“I’m going to head into town,” Austin said, peeking his head in. “I don’t have any sort of organized pack yet, but I have people there who can help. I’m going to put them on alert, if that’s all right?”

He clearly felt the press of expectation, same as me.

“More the merrier,” I answered, “as long as you can handle them.”

He spared a moment to walk in behind me, laying his hands on my shoulders and kneading.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

I closed my eyes for a moment. “Yeah. Just feeling the pressure.”

“Have faith in yourself. You are an excellent problem solver. You can crack the code.”

I wrapped my hand around one of his wrists, needing the contact. He stopped kneading with that hand and took mine, entwining our fingers. We stayed that way for a moment as the night peered in through the windows, all silent. The calm before the storm.

“Okay,” Austin whispered, pulling his hand away. “I’m going to head out.”

“Yup. And I need to work miracles.”

“It’s not a miracle—it’s a challenge. You’ll rise to it.”

“Sometimes your supportiveness is just plain annoying,” I groused.

“I concur.” Mr. Tom came into the room with my coffee mug, steaming once again. “Much too supportive. Who needs someone to believe blindly in us? What a bore.”

I had a sneaking suspicion he was mocking me.

Austin slipped out of the room, leaving my line of sight, but I could feel him making his way to the side door—and then changing shape and darting into the trees in the side yard, hopefully slipping into the wood before anyone noticed. Speed was clearly on his mind, and he could move fastest in his polar bear form.

“I wish we had an idea of the numbers that might come at us,” I said, looking down at Edgar’s sloppy scrawl.

“Here.” Mr. Tom sat in the empty chair and fished a sheet of paper and a pen out of his interior jacket pocket. He pulled the orange piece to him. “Let me make this legible. Austin Steele thinks the secret is out about you in the magical world. That people will start to take a greater interest. I happen to agree.”

“This isn’t the time to increase the pressure, Mr. Tom.”

“My advice? End this coming battle hard and fast. Make a statement. Show both factions, if there are indeed two, that you will not be easy to cow, kidnap, or intimidate. If someone is coming for you, they’d better have their big-boy pants on, because you won’t play nice when threatened.”

“Make a statement, sure, sounds easy. Except I’m still brand new to magic, and I’m potentially up against a master and some other guy that isn’t afraid of a master. How am I supposed to stand out when I’m the underdog?”

Mr. Tom chuckled. “I doubt even Elliot Graves can so easily blow someone up. Trust me, miss, you have more at your disposal than you think, including imagination.”

Eighteen

Based on what Edgar had found, Ivy House could sense living things through a sort of heat signature, and it identified the nature of those creatures based on the type of energy they put out. Just like with scent, animals had a different energy than people, shifters had a different energy in their animal form, and so on.

Somehow, Elliot was wrapping his people up in spell bubbles, containing their heat signatures and their energy.

My job was to pull those bubbles away. Something I was still in the process of figuring out in the underground cavern. I stood in front of the pulsing crystals at the core of the house, working magic in a spinning motion that sent sparkles tumbling through the air (a pretty effect that had a practical purpose—it helped me figure out if the magic was rolling in the right direction). My aim was to grab hold of the bubble spell and essentially unwind it. Once the person was exposed, even for a moment (I was working on the assumption that they could reapply the spell at will, aiming for our worst-case scenario), Ivy House could quickly capitalize on their vulnerability.

“You need a way to dig into the spell,” Ivy House said in our special communication. She had some good ideas on how to rip away the spell. Apparently this type of spell had been attempted many times in the past, but those other attempts had always been flawed. This was the first time someone had locked it down. Elliot was clearly very good at his craft.

I had to be better.

“Otherwise your spell will just whoosh by. It won’t catch.”

I nodded, watching the sparkles tumble away before washing against the bare walls. I’d long since stripped the walls of the paper, my spells creating whirlwinds that the tape couldn’t stand up to.

“What if ripping away the spell isn’t the right way to play it?” I took up Mr. Tom’s handwritten page for the millionth time, looking over the verbiage I’d all but memorized. “What if I should be counteracting it instead?”

“You don’t know what to counteract.”

“Yes, exactly.” I shook my head. “Maybe I’m spending all this time, going without sleep, for a spell that won’t work.”

“You have the power to rip that spell off. If he’s using it on lesser-powered shifters, it can’t be a volatile spell. You should be able to use might.”

“I want to use brain, not brawn. I want to do this the right way.”

“We all want something.”

I glared at the crystals before stuffing the piece of paper into my pocket and leaving the room. Sure, it could very well work for most people, and the beauty of the spell we’d devised was that it would rip off other spells, too—ones that might be dangerous. But what if I came up against Elliot? He wouldn’t succumb to such a simple tactic.

My gut told me I needed a counter-spell. A reveal spell. Maybe not for this battle, maybe not even for the next, but until I could properly counteract Elliot’s masking spell, I’d always be vulnerable to it. For that, though, I’d need some idea of the composition of the spell he was using. Agnes hadn’t locked anything down.

“Oh, hello,” my mom said when I made my way into the kitchen for more coffee, “you’re up already.” She beamed at me as she laid some bacon into a hot pan.

“Yeah, what time is it?” I looked around. “And where is Mr. Tom?”

“It’s almost eight o’clock, and your caped crusader of a butler was scurrying about upstairs last I saw him, headed up to the third floor. He seemed a bit more animated today, and he hasn’t once tried to shoo me out of the kitchen. What’s up?”

I thought about just telling her and Dad to go home. To pack up and get out of here. But I knew they wouldn’t go without a fight. Besides, the prowler had lurked from the front yard. If they were still out there somewhere, watching, I didn’t want to deliver them hostages. Even though my parents would be in the middle of a battle zone, at this point, the house was probably the safest place for them.

“It’s a pretty long story, but basically, we might have some trouble later on. When things heat up, we’ll need to move you to a safe place within the house.”

My mom’s movements slowed and a crease formed between her brows. “What do you mean, some trouble?”

There was no easy way to say it, so I just went for the direct approach. “Long story short, this house is magical, and in accepting to live here, I became magical, too. Now some people want to use me for my power, I guess. They are here to take what is mine, and we’ll be fighting them off. So we’ll need to get you to safety.”

My mom stared at me for a tense beat. Her flat expression lifted into a smile so broad that it scored her face. “Funny. You’re as bad as that butler of yours. Do you want some breakfast?”

I sagged. “Yes, please. Let me just check in with Mr. Tom.”

They’d need to be forced into safety, clearly, which was fine. Maybe we could just tell them we suspected a tornado or something. No, we didn’t get tornados here, but they’d probably believe that a whole lot faster than they’d believe in magic.

Nineteen

“Here you go, Jessie.” Ulric bent over my position at the kitchen table and handed me a small brown box covered in glued-on stones. He bit into a sandwich as he watched me ease it to the table without breaking off any of the decor.

“Why?” I asked, and I wasn’t sure if I was asking about the decor or why he was handing me the box.

“Edgar told me to give it to you. He checked in with Agnes earlier. They’ve been trying to re-create the potion. They managed to put together this elixir.”

Heart in my throat, feeling a surge of newfound energy, I flipped the metal clasp and pulled open the light wooden lid. I took out a little vial resting on a purple pillow, the liquid inside iridescent magenta. “They’re trying to re-create the potion? I thought she said she wouldn’t have enough power?”

“Yeah, they didn’t have enough to properly duplicate the spell, but this gives a low-level idea.”

A folded-up piece of paper rested next to the pillow. It had a list of ingredients, followed by instructions, like a recipe. I pulled up the pillow to find the plain brown wood beneath.

My mother bustled through with a pile of laundry just as I was lifting the vial to the light. For once Mr. Tom wasn’t chasing behind her, demanding she hand over the laundry and go sit down.