Chapter Sixteen - Tammy

The first thing she showed me had been easy. It was like the sapphire in the hall of mirrors, when Scully first teleported me in. Move the mana up to the surface, but don’t let it out. With a little bit of guidance, I figured out how to move it around with a mix of muscle twitches and willpower. I could see the brighter spot of it through my skin, and it got itchy if I left it in one place for too long.

The second one was harder. It was the manipulatory aspect that I’d started working on. Pushing out a thread of my own mana and then bending it into various shapes – but without an actual spell. My headache threatened to come back as I tried. More than once, it burst into flame when I lost focus and ‘finished’ the spell.

I did not great, but at least ok, at that one. She gave me tips and tricks, and with her demonstrations, it got so much easier than last night.

The third one I completely failed. It was basically combining the first two to either other people’s or environmental mana. I couldn’t get the haze in the bottom of the pool – which was absolutely one hundred percent magical somehow, even setting aside how good it felt on my feet – to move no matter how hard I tried. It felt like bashing my head against a brick wall to try to ‘touch’ a ball of unformed power that Alyssa made that hovered in front of me.

Since neither of those worked, I turned to the bracelet. It was magic – obviously – and was at least supposed to be mine. So, I tried to poke it. Metaphysically.

That was a mistake.

The little bit of my own magic I reached out to it with vanished. A wave of cool tingling spread out from it, numbness following on its heels as it pulled in more and more of my mana. The entire arm was insensate by the time it stopped. The cursed piece of jewelry sat on my arm with a distinct sense of smugness to it. It felt more alive – or active, maybe – than it had been since the meeting, when Mordo’s god had fussed with it.

We took a break. Small talk, with Alyssa suggesting that I should bring a swimsuit next time. At her urging, I let the arm dangle down into the water, something about it driving the numbness away, slowly. Every time we looked away from it, the bracelet would change and jump around. Wings. Necklaces. Anklets.

The weirdest was when somehow it replaced my belly button piercing. My shirt had ridden up enough that it was obvious when it did, but I still felt weirdly self-conscious – for me that is – about the sphinx staring basically at my crotch from her spot across the sand. Every time it moved her nose would twitch and then her eyes would go to its new spot. The only place it didn’t touch was my left hand – the branded one.

“That thing looks like its happy.”

“Is…” I bit my tongue trying to catch the question. “It can’t be alive.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Oh no, no, not that. Faerie things can get weird like that fast, sure, but Mom would have mentioned if this was one of those. No – it’s more that it’s catching up on stuff it couldn’t do after what Mom said went down in Mordo’s. I’ve got no clue what exactly it is, but I’d kill for that kind of glamour.”

She paused for a second, brows scrunching up as she looked out the skylight.

“Legally speaking, that’s a joke. We can talk on how you can use it later – let’s just move on.”

Once I moved back into a comfortable spot, we moved onto the fourth exercise. She wiped the grin off her face. The change from a smiling mouth full of sharp teeth to a serious girl that was like a color-shifted, youthful clone of her mother was intense.

“All the rest is important, but this is Mom’s benchmark. Think of it as a gauge of familiarity, sorta. Most people with the gift can pull of the barebones stuff you have if you give them time and a hint – that doesn’t change with bigger spells. Give someone time and a manual and eventually they’ll manage anything that isn’t too complicated or quirky. Going past the basics, though, your reaction speed and ability to think on the fly start to matter. Fuck up making fire fingers, worst you need is some burn cream. Fuck up teleportation and you’re a chunky person-puree.”

She was kneeling right across from me, now. Her illusion had fallen away, leaving the crimson wings fully visible as she fanned them out. The serious face cracked as they rippled in a twitch. “This is a mix between a mnemonic and a reflex. Uh – think of it like hard-wiring yourself to do something. Like swearing when you stub your toe. Except in this case – it’s tying a spell you know by heart into a gesture, or a phrase. My advice – go for something flashy and over the top, you don’t want to be able to do it accidentally.”

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She held out a hand, palm up. There was no fur on the palm, just smooth, pink-tinged-rose, skin. She curled her left pinkie finger up, then straightened it in a jerky motion. The glow under her skin shifted, strands pulling together within her hand and twisting into shapes I couldn’t hope to follow. When they began to spin, there was a tiny tornado above her palm. The wind was a darker grey than the thundercloud that spread out above it, or the driving ‘rain’ it pulled into itself.

“Obviously, this isn’t practical. It’s a practice tool for me, easy to visualize but complex enough to let me catch if I’m slipping. Imagine if, instead, it was a blade of wind strong enough to cut through steel. Or a jet of water that could drill through rock. Now, fair warning, I can’t do either of those. Yet. Still, that’s the point. Mom trains her students to protect themselves, and raising a barrier or putting down a broken summon with one motion is something that keeps us alive when we make mistakes.”

She repeated the motion, twice, from scratch, letting me watch.

“You don’t have compatible affinities for this – Fire is your best bet. Go for something simple to start with, like a ball above your palm. Do it the hard way first and watch how it forms. Try to memorize that shape, then aim to do it again. It’s early days yet for you, but remember: don’t go for a common trigger. It gets instinctive and the Council will bitch at you if it goes off in public. Lord Blackleaf had to wipe memories way back when a Belmont kid scratched his nose wrong and set his girlfriend’s hair on fire.”

My headache was picking up again. Focusing in on the individual mana strands against the dark glow that came from my skin was a bit of a strain. For Teresa, though? It was worth it – everything was worth it.

I failed, twice. The mana shifted, but then it lurched back and the flames flared out along my fingertips like normal. The third time it flared out lower, a jet at the base of each finger that startled me as the fire fell down instead of shooting up and started to burn. Each time, the shape the fiery strands of mana took as they welled up changed, just a little.

The fourth try had the same burn. I pushed through it, and the jets slowly nudged themselves lower, stabilizing into a wisp cradled in a cage of my fingers. Maybe half the size it should have been – unignited strands of mana were leaking out and fading away – but there. Thick strands branched out into finer ones, twisting in and out of view as the magic writhed in a knot that seemed deliberately hard to watch. It was shifting the entire way, before stabilizing into a pulsing tangle.

It was still pouring out of five different spots. I knew there was no way that was efficient – but optimizing that didn’t matter. With a deep breath, I flicked the flame away and tried to hold the process in my mind. Then, I flicked my wrist out like a magician flourishing a bouquet of hidden flowers.

Nothing. My hand sat there, empty and disappointing.

Everything here was too vibrant and colorful. Alyssa was combing through the feathers on one of her wings, just watching in silence. Too many distractions. I remade the thing, flicking my wrist as the strands of mana moved to try driving home the connection. Then, I screwed my eyes shut. It was just me and the imagined lines of magic, moving the way I’d seen. Nothing else was there – no sand, no sun, no sphinx.

This time, I could feel the heat as I flicked my wrist. It was under the skin, though, and not quite a sting like it should have been. But it was there, and growing hotter…

“No!” Two sharp pinpricks of pain shot through my knee. A hand slapped into my palm and my focus shattered as I tipped backwards in a cloud of sand. Alyssa’s shout rang out, “You can’t force it like that!”

There was a knot of twisted orange and red light breaking up under my skin as she pulled back. Parts of it dripped down onto the sand, but a string of the mana connected back to the sphinx as the rest sank back into the depths of my flesh. Two ruby-red drops of blood were welling out of my knee, crimson clinging to her talons. At the sight, a pulse of heat ran up from the ring that the Faerie thing was currently masquerading as.

“Ow.”

I pushed it down as her eyes flicked between me and the ring. I trusted her to have a reason. I had to. I just hope that the hurt and the implied question was enough to get my meaning across and not trigger her.

“Sorry, sorry. You were a sneeze away from losing fingers there. It was like you didn’t even hear me so…” She shrugged and gestured to the glittering specks of mana clumped on the sand. “That’s a mana blockage. Like a magic blood clot – you shoved too much mana into a single spot, without an outlet or a way to reabsorb. It clumped up and the weird stuff started. Weird stuff, for the record, tends to default to ‘explosive’.”

There’d been a pressure building in my head with each failure. The weight I’d sort of shrugged off my shoulders by optimism earlier, fading with each time I failed. Now, it came to a head.

“I guess I screwed this up too.”

“No! You’ve got to be kidding. Seriously! It’s only been a few hours and you actually managed a partial mnemonic. That’s like – a week’s worth of proper lessons. Sure, it failed and you aren’t the kind of rank amateur that’s usually getting them, but that’s fucking impressive! Like, girl, you’re an Aufrey. You have to know what that means!”

“No. No, I really don’t.”

She stared at me, a look I didn’t quite understand on her face. Not pity, but something adjacent and sad.

“C’mon. I know you can do this – let’s try again from the top.”