“You ever been to this Red Den?”
“Hell, I’ve never been to DC,” Grace answers. “But I needed to get out of Alexandria. Too much history . . . and too many memories.”
“That I understand.” I follow Grace’s gaze to Gunn’s minion, Dawson, as he jumps off the back of the truck and starts making the rounds, attempting to get everyone moving to the clearing.
“What Stock was saying about my family?” Grace says slowly. “It’s bullshit, but there’s a sliver of truth in the lie. My family’s gifted in natural forecasts, has always excelled in using magic to commune with nature. But I swear, the more we listened, the louder and scarier nature got. Magic melded our minds with superstitious, primal forces, forces that whispered what they wanted constantly, forces that started pushing us all into stranger, darker spells. I needed to get out, go somewhere new, forget all of that,” she adds, then looks at me suddenly. “Sometimes the only option is walking away and starting over, you understand?”
White-hot memories of Mama’s own strange, dark spells sear into my mind—Mama bent over the farm boy Skippy McGarrison, his bottom half crushed by one of his daddy’s stallions, the lanterns of her spell room casting him in a sick yellow glow, his howls, her steady hand carving out a graft of his skin as a sacrifice to save his life—
I shake my head to chase away the memories before Grace has a chance to catch them. I don’t know how to answer her—whether to say that I do understand in my own way, or that I could never leave my family, or whether I trust her enough to share my family’s own special magic. But before I can sort it out, Gunn calls out to the crowd, “Time to wrap it up!”
The sorcerers fall into silence. “Clearing’s not more than a stone’s throw from here,” Gunn adds. “Dawson will bring the materials we’ll need.” Then he gestures to the truck. “And grab something for later—it’s going to be a long day.”
We take some extra fruit and bread from the truck, follow the snake of sorcerers through the wild brush, and soon cross over a border of tall grass to reach a clearing. It’s huge, three times the size of the one behind our cabin back home, with a small bordering stream and a nice, clean patch of sun in the middle. On the far side of the clearing near the stream, there’s a structure of large, stacked stones piled waist-high, almost like an altar.
Dawson carries a crate of mismatched water bottles over to the side of the stone formation. Gunn takes a bottle and places it on the altar’s center, and then approaches a sorcerer who Grace didn’t point out to me in the warehouse. The sorcerer’s middle-aged, with hair slicked back, greased to right above his shoulders. The sorcerer just nods as Gunn whispers to him, doesn’t say a word.
I feel the crowd’s reaction around me, the whispers and side conversations being slowly killed by curiosity, jealousy—why’s this fella being singled out, what’s so special about him—we all shift uncomfortably and watch the sorcerer wrap his hands around the glass bottle and close his eyes. Like I’ve seen Uncle Jed do so many times before, this sorcerer begins to brew sorcerer’s shine, to cast a spell without any components, other than his own magic touch. Sure enough, the water inside the bottle starts hissing, steaming, and thrashes around until it’s transformed into something else: something sparkling, deep and red. Sorcerer’s shine.
The sorcerer releases the bottle, wipes his glistening brow with his sleeve, and wipes his palms on the side of his pants.
“Thank you, Billy,” Gunn says. “That will be all for now.” He looks up at the crowd. “The rest of you, come gather around the altar.”