Evan, who was carrying a basket filled with candles, a batch of dried herbs, and a small camp stove for heating water, just nodded. “Good thinking. Glad to have you watching our backs.”
It was the first time Evan had shown open approval of Jane, and she ducked her head to hide a pleased smile. I decided they were going to play nice, letting me concentrate on the seeing spell Evan and I had settled on. The math of any spell was hard—altering physical laws by will and intent was a job fraught with danger and the likelihood of mistakes. A loss of concentration, a stray worry, and everything could fall apart—or blow up, which was rare, but a lot more scary.
First thing I did was to damp mop the foyer, concentrating on the area of floor directly in front of the parlor. Then, while the floor dried, I cleansed the house with a stick of burning dried sage. Once the house was cleansed I asked Jane, “Did you remember to bring your shirt?”
She lifted her brows and handed me a Ziploc bag with her filthy T-shirt from the day before. “You gonna tell me why you need my dirty laundry?”
“I’m going to shake the dust into a bowl and give it back.”
“Least you could do is wash it first,” she grumbled. At my expression she lifted a shoulder and added, “Just sayin’.”
I shook my head and drew a circle about five feet across on the wood floor with white chalk and set a cut-crystal bowl in the center. I filled it with bottled water and put the empty in my bag. Using a compass, Evan set new, white pillar candles inside the circle at the cardinal points, and draped a silver cross around each. Outside, it was getting dark, making it very hard to see in the foyer. No electricity would be used tonight. Jane sat on the bottom step, out of the way, her knees drawn up and her arms around her ankles, as Evan lit the candles. I stepped into the circle and closed it with the piece of chalk. Evan backed away toward Jane and set the candle at magnetic north, which was to my left side and back a bit, the parlor opening facing east.
This was to be my ritual tonight, because as an earth witch, my magics were closest to the green magics of the spell we were trying to get a good look at. Evan, an air witch, could only offer support. I gathered my white dress close and sat behind the bowl, cross-legged, the bowl of water between my knees. I opened the plastic bag and held Jane’s shirt over the bowl, shaking it gently, steadily. Dust from the parlor sprinkled onto the still surface of the water. I balled the shirt back up and sealed it into the bag, tucking it under my knee.
Satisfied, I nodded to Evan. From the bag he had carried, he lifted a silver bell with no clapper and the silver mallet that was used to ring it. He also brought out his father’s old, leather-bound Bible—the book Old Man Trueblood had been holding when he was accepted into the church and baptized, when he married, when each of his children were born, and when he died. I wasn’t much of a religious person—nowhere near as spiritual as Jane—but even I knew this book had power.
I took a deep breath and exhaled, repeating the clarifying exercise twice more to settle myself. Everything I did tonight would be in threes. I closed my eyes and nodded to Evan. As I opened my mouth he rang the bell, the clear, pure tone and my words overlapping each time I said the word bell. “Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle.” The three tones seemed to ring on, echoing through the empty house, and continued, three times more with the first word of the next three lines. “Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now.”
I opened my eyes, and without pausing went on into the next three lines, knowing that Evan had the cadence now and would keep up with me, ringing the bell with each first word, even though the method of lines was changing.
“Time of warding. Time of blood. Time of attack.
“Time of betrayal. Time of undead. Time of change.
“Time of vampire. Time of transference. Time of death.”