12

JUST OUT OF REACH

Dru spent the rest of the afternoon researching, cross-referencing, and building a little handheld wraith-finder that she was pretty sure had zero chance of working. For one thing, Tristram didn’t exactly provide detailed step-by-step instructions. He sketched out his invention only in the broadest strokes.

At some point in the intervening centuries, someone with horrible handwriting had doodled a spiral in the margin, and beneath that appended a list of various herbs and spell components. Which was great, except for one tiny detail: they didn’t bother to note the proportions. So she had no idea how much of each ingredient to use.

Dru was forced to improvise as best she could, based on other contemporary sources and her own personal experience. It was like trying to re-create a graduate-level chemistry experiment using a stranger’s grocery list and an IKEA booklet.

In other words, it didn’t go so well.

After stinging her fingertips in acid, sneezing on ground-up herbs, and nearly singeing her hair off in a startling burst of flame, she was about ready to scream. Until she finally figured out what the crudely hand-drawn spiral meant.

It was supposed to represent a chambered nautilus shell. That was shorthand for the Fibonacci sequence, which was still a pretty revolutionary mathematical concept at the time Tristram wrote his book.

Every number in a Fibonacci sequence was the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on.

So what she needed to do was ignore the first ingredient, then mix together one part each of the second and third ingredients, two parts of the next one, three parts of the one after that, and so on. Once she finally figured that out, it made sense. But it would’ve been so much nicer to know that up front.

Cursing the dyed-in-the-wool paranoia that made sorcerers the worst communicators in the world, she started over from the beginning and remeasured the proportions of ingredients according to the Fibonacci sequence. This time, she was able to avoid any bodily injury as she assembled Tristram’s wraith finding device. Or at least a crude reproduction of it.

When finished, it looked like a tiny bird’s nest made of crumpled raw copper, half-full of a tarry licorice-smelling substance that glued the cat’s eye crystal in place. The whole thing fit awkwardly in the palm of her hand. It didn’t win any points for aesthetics. But it was done.

“Ta da!” she sang proudly when Rane walked up. “It’s like a tiny piece of postmodern sculpture, don’t you think?”

Rane frowned and poked it with one chipped fingernail. “How do you turn this thing on?”

“It is on.”

Rane cocked her head. “Doesn’t look on. Shouldn’t it light up or something?”

“No. It’ll move in the presence of a wraith. The eye will turn toward it. So if it’s just sitting there doing nothing, it means we’re safe.”

“Or it’s broken.”

Dru sighed in frustration. “Well, we’ll just have to wait until nightfall to find out.”

Rane glanced at the fitness monitor strapped to her wrist. “Should be like, five minutes.”

“What? No, no, no!” Dru’s anxiety level shot through the roof as she realized she had spent hours more than she meant to, and the day was almost over. She rushed to the front of the shop and watched the descending sun slip down below the rooftops across the street. There was no time to go test Tristram’s device. Night was almost here.

She felt like her life was perched precipitously on some kind of cosmic scales, and they were tipping further and further out of balance no matter what she did.

Arms folded tightly across her chest, she stood at the front windows and chewed her nails, watching the white clouds above turn brass, then light afire in the copper sky. Ever so slowly, the encroaching night shaded them black against the deep blue twilight, as if the sky itself was silently burning out.

Some kind of primal instinct urged her to go outside, find a clear view of the sunset, and drink in every last minute of it, because it could be her last. But she resisted the urge. She had to stay here, inside the grid of crystals that protected the shop. The crystals silently hummed away in the background, their magic barely perceptible even to her, generating an invisible shield against magical intruders. If the wraith tried to cross the invisible border line, it would be in for a nasty surprise.

As long as the crystal grid held up, the wraith could do nothing but circle around the outside, frustrated, until it tried one of the doors or wandered into one of the additional circle traps they had painted around the outside of the shop.

Dru wanted to tell herself that nothing bad was going to happen tonight, but deep down she didn’t believe it. The wraith couldn’t have just disappeared, of that she was sure. Nothing was ever that easy.

Through her many years assisting the sorcerers that came into her shop looking for various enchanted ingredients to solve their magical problems, she had learned a few hard truths. One of them was that problems that went away on their own tended to come back on their own.

As she brooded by the front windows, Rane came up to stand next to her with arms folded, mirroring her pose. Together, they surveyed the street outside. Traffic was light. Only a few cars were parked nearby. Nobody waited at the bus stop, which was curiously missing its bench.

“Where’s Opal?” Dru said.

“Went with Ruiz to get more paint.”

“Yeah, but that was hours ago. What have they been doing all this time?” Dru checked her phone. There was a text from Opal saying that they were on their way back. And then another one saying that they were really leaving now. And then, apparently, they had a flat tire.

Dru shook her head. “What about Greyson?”

“Just went out back to send Hellbringer on patrol again.” Rane made a dinosaur-ish sound of frustration and drummed the heels of her hands on a bookshelf. “I hate all this standing around. When do you think the party is going to start?”

“Hopefully never.” Dru pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Tonight could go one of three ways. One, the wraith could come back, and hopefully now we’re prepared to beat it this time. Two, it could bring reinforcements, either in the form of additional wraiths, or the evil sorcerers who created it. That’s the worst-case scenario. Or three, nothing might happen at all, and we’ll just end up sitting here all night, bored out of our skulls.”

“That’s the worst-case scenario.”

“But the good news is, I do have popcorn.” Dru raised one finger when Rane made a face. “And I promise I won’t burn it this time.”

“Whatever. I’m going to go see if the G-man has spotted anything out back.” Rane walked away. “By the way, why can’t you just make popcorn in the microwave like everyone else?”

“The Bunsen burner is more fun! It’s like popcorn, plus science!”

* * *

On the rooftop across the street, Salem slouched on the grimy bench he had borrowed from the bus stop and drummed his long fingers on the still-warm brick wall. Throughout the day, he had watched Dru’s endless preparations with teeth-grinding annoyance. The lengthy stakeout gave him a dizzying amount of time to think the situation over. Eventually, he decided that when he got right down to the essence of it, he was there to observe, not interfere. Like a scientist studying monkeys.

He wasn’t all that concerned with what ultimately happened to Dru. She tended to bring her troubles on herself, having the consistently obnoxious habit of jumping into the deep end of the pool, no matter how many times he warned her away from it. So ultimately, when she got in too far over her head, that was on her.

Salem’s only concern, besides getting the apocalypse scroll back, was minimizing the collateral damage, specifically surrounding Rane. To the casual observer, she might seem invincible. After all, she could turn into solid metal or rock at a moment’s notice. Dangers that would utterly annihilate most people usually left her without a scratch.

Usually. But not always. He knew Rane well enough to gauge her overconfidence and try to compensate for it when needed.

Together, they made a nearly unstoppable team. By combining her brute strength with his ethereal magic, they had defeated more opponents than he could count. But sooner or later, the two of them were bound to come up against a vastly superior foe.

Worse, he was the only person who recognized that fact.

So, he kept watch, waiting for the inevitable moment when things tilted from ordinary strangeness all the way down to sheer madness. Which could happen at any time. Even left to her own devices, Rane never took long to start causing mass destruction. Teaming her up with the omnipresent crystal shopkeeper Dru was a surefire recipe for mayhem on a colossal scale.

Hence, the rooftop perch, which he did on a fairly regular basis. And so far no one else had caught on, which was a mind-boggling oversight in and of itself.

He sniffed. Amateurs.

He would never admit it, but he still wasn’t quite back in top fighting form. Accordingly, he’d been banking his strength all day long. None of his usual magical flourishes. Nothing wasteful. No idle toying with the unsuspecting passersby on the street below. Much as he was tempted.

Instead, he just rested, and occasionally napped. He even choked down a handful of Rane’s protein bars and energy gels, which wasn’t actually food at all. How she could nourish her long, lean, endlessly fascinating body on this sticky mush was a mystery to him.

As the sun sank down into the mountains west of the city, and the angular blue shadows crept across the street and climbed the buildings, Salem tried not to think about Rane. But he couldn’t stop.

It had only been a day since their last tiff. But already, he was feeling her absence as acutely as the ache in his injured ribs. He missed the raw, physical power she plowed into everything she did. He missed being the focus of that power. From the hot rooftop across the street, he caught only occasional sight of her, mostly her muscular legs, through the front windows of the Crystal Connection. Each glimpse was like a soothing sip of cold water that only left him thirsting for more.

He sighed. With her, nothing could ever be easy. Being this close to her, and still so far away, was torture. For reasons that constantly eluded him, she derived some kind of perverse pleasure from making everything difficult. He didn’t know how he could win her back this time, but he swore he would.

Nothing—and no one—would stand in his way.