While we were driving through the canyon I realized I hadn’t floated my idea about creating an astral bottleneck past Maria, so it was hard to think of anything else until we were through and into Santa Clarita.

“Bueno,” Maria said on the third ring.

“Hey Maria, it’s Colm,” I grunted a bit as Bogo shifted in my lap and put a paw right into my junk. “Wanted to pick your brain on an idea I have.”

“Shoot,” she said, the word half cut off as a child screamed in the background.

“First, I was wondering if you could try divining me and seeing if you’re able to pick me up easily? We might be barking up the wrong tree and I want to narrow down options.”

“Oh, yes! I should have thought of that,” she said. “Having to watch the grandkids is making me sloppy. CARMEN!”

I winced at Maria’s sudden bellow. I waited for Maria to be done letting Carmen know she was going to be in the basement before continuing.

“Second, the problem is that the astral has a strong connection to me, right? If we’re right in our assumptions?” I asked.

“More like that you will have a strong connection to the astral, from the astrals point of view, which means you have a strong connection now because time doesn’t really exist there. It’s a weird, but important distinction.”

“What if I were to limit my connection to the astral?” I asked. “Not cut myself off, but create a bottleneck?”

“I—Hmm,” Maria grew silent as she thought. She began muttering to herself, and I heard a rhythmic clicking. Finally, she made a frustrated sound. “No idea.”

“I just don’t have enough data,” she continued. “My expertise is in divination, which is a huge, colossal pain in the ass. The potential benefits make it a worthy investment of effort, but a common trend amongst diviners is a narrow focus because of how much time and effort goes into refining your craft. A diviner that isn’t always working on better divination is a shitty diviner. I know what I know about the astral to make my divination models work and that’s pretty much where I stopped.

“I DO know that cutting yourself off from the astral for any length of time is a ticket to insanity,” she said, her voice full of warning. “Thankfully it’s tremendously difficult to do or it’d be a bigger problem amongst younger practitioners.”

I frowned. Incognito mode was difficult to learn, sure, but not more difficult than my fire spells. “I have a method to cut myself off from the astral,” I said. “It’s part of an anti-tracking spell, but I’m hoping to modify it to just limit my connection.”

“What? How?”

“How what? How am I going to modify the spell?”

“No, how does it cut you off from the astral?” She said, with a weird intensity.

I shared a glance with Alice. I began going over the theory of the spell, which wove several basic anti-tracking, scrying, and far-seeing methods together into one function then built it into a shell model of one's mind.

“Then you shape the spell into a kinda Faraday cage for your mind,” I said. “Which, when I first tried to implement it, I thought just to encase my head. That didn’t work and the spell broke down after a few seconds. You have to make it big and strong enough to cover all of your body, plus an inch or two outside of it.”

Maria was silent for a long time. With the window cracked, it was hard to hear what was happening on the other end of the line, but I think I could hear a pencil scratching.

“Where did you learn this?” Maria asked, her voice still laced with a weird intensity.

“A journal I got in an estate sale,” I said. “I don’t understand all the methodology with it as I had to translate it from Dutch, but it works very well.”

“It shouldn’t,” Maria said, the concern in her voice thick. “How did you calculate the astral border resonance?”

“It was similar to the calculations I did with my summoning circle,” I said. “I just modified them to apply to a parallel plane instead of a distant reality.”

Maria began muttering to herself. “When Alice said you had worked on that new summoning circle Gran showed her, I took it to mean you had tested or modified it.”

“A bit of it is my own design, but most of it I cobbled together from the writings of several other summoners,” I said. “Look, Maria, you’re worrying me.”

She barked out a laugh. “You’re worried! You just told me you invented a better mouse trap and can easily do something I’ve always been told is next to impossible.”

“I wouldn’t say the spell is easy,” I said. “Not terribly difficult, but not easy.”

“It should be impossible,” Maria said. “Look, when you guys stop for the night—if you don’t have other pressing concerns, give me a call and I’ll have Carmen set up a seeming so we can talk face-to-face. I need to see what this spell looks like in action.

“In the meantime, I’ll get to divining and I’ll call you back with how it went,” Maria said.

“Sure,” I said, a bit uneasy. “Thanks for your help.”

Maria muttered something in Spanish but didn’t reply as she ended the call.

“That was weird,” I said.

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“I think you just turned her whole magical career on its head,” Alice said.

I hummed a reply but kept silent. Something was bugging me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I rolled the conversation around in my head for a bit but couldn’t find what was dragging on my attention. What was that weird intensity she had gotten? Why was my attention fixed on it?

Attention.

I focused on what I didn’t want to put my attention on. I didn’t want to look behind me. Ignoring my instincts and I craned my neck behind me, past Ida, and out the rear window.

“That moving truck is really hauling ass,” I said.

A relatively new U-Haul was keeping pace with us. With Alice, who drove like she was on fire and the only way to put it out was setting a speed record. Like she was stress-testing Honda’s engineering.

Alice looked in the rearview, her eyes narrowed. “It’s warded against mental magic,” she said.

Ida cursed in French and grabbed the duffle bag from the floor and pulled out her MP5. I undid my seat belt and pulled my Webley from my waistband holster, while awkwardly moving Bogo out of the way. The not-dog sensed something was up and hopped between the front seats in the back, his back paws on the floor while his front paws were on the case of the Blood Stick, using it as leverage to see out the back window. He growled.

“Ope, that’s bad,” I said.

“What?” Ida asked. “Why?”

“I’ve only heard him growl once before,” I said as I gave the Webley a once over. “And that was when I was attacked by demons”

“Demons?” Ida asked with worry, her eyes nailed to the truck as she pulled spare magazines from the duffle bag.

“Not like, from Hell,” I said. “A lot of the people I’ve studied just use it as a catch-all term for monsters not from our reality.”

“How are we going to do this?” Alice asked, almost interrupting me. “I can try to outrun them but I’m not sure I can squeeze much more out of your car.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure how they’re getting a U-haul truck to keep up with you… Let them get a little closer,” I said with a smirk. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to try.”

“Are we sure they’re hostile?” Ida asked.

Bogo snarled.

“Pretty sure,” I said, my smirk falling into a frown. “But yeah, I don’t wanna shoot first just in case it’s some practitioners and their own not-dog out for a trip and have someone at the wheel as crazy as Alice.”

“So?” Alice prompted. “What do we do?”

“Speed up a bit,” I said. “Make it look like we’re gonna try to outrace them down the five. But the two-ten is coming up—at the last second, make the change and see if they follow.”

Alice nodded. “Got it.”

I closed the window that had been cracked and Bogo gave me an irritated look. “Sorry, man,” I said. “I just want to reduce drag for this next part. Hondas aren’t meant for speed. Well, this one wasn’t.”

The speedometer crept up as Alice wove through the limited traffic. The main reason she couldn’t open up the throttle was that, while traffic was pretty good, the roads were far from free. She was having to move from lane to lane to dodge the slower, oblivious drivers. While that allowed us to somewhat keep the truck from closing, it was still able to keep pace. Which, was kind of impressive for a big moving truck.

I saw the sign for 210 East.

“Hold onto something!” Alice said and cranked the wheel at the last second, cutting through three lanes and just missing hitting the divider. She corrected the turn with a slight screech of tires.

The truck began the turn at the same time we did, keeping pace—no, gaining steadily.

“Merde,” Ida muttered.

We went through the connection and merged onto the 210, where Alice could really put her foot down. The 210 has a lot less traffic than the 5 on a normal day, and today was no exception. The speedometer climbed above one-ten, then one-twenty…

The truck kept up. Kept gaining.

The Honda started to make a really worrying noise if Alice tried to push it over a hundred and twenty-five, so she had to back off. Not to self: Take an automotive class so I can figure out how to supercharge my car with magic. Until then…

“Seems like they’re here for us,” I said, breaking the tense silence.

“Oui,” Ida said.

“Hit the brakes, Alice,” I said, bracing against the dashboard. “Don’t make them hit us, but get us close enough that I can fuck with them.”

“Brace yourselves,” Alice said. Bogo dropped down and laid as flat as he could on the floor, while Ida and I held onto whatever was in reach.

Alice pumped the brakes, the speedometer plummeting. Just when I thought the truck was going to rear-end us she cranked the wheel to the left and the truck shot past us on the right.

I reached out with my magic and, as I expected, found the cab and the bed of the truck to have defensive wards placed on them. That’s fine. It would be easier to do what I’m trying to do with access to the cab but I’ll adjust.

So, the spell that forms the basis for my telekinesis is a fairly straightforward utility spell, meant to move big heavy things by shoving or dragging. By mastering it with Circe’s method, not only did I broaden its application but also stretched and focused its power. The reason I could draw in the dirt with it was that I could take some of that hundreds of pounds of force—originally meant to be spread over a surface area of several feet—and narrow it down to a point, making an effective chisel or sharp point.

I don’t know enough about car engines to enchant one, but I do know enough about cars to know that the steering system is reliant on a few bars not moving away from each other. I think one of them is literally called the “steering rod.”

The long and short of it is; they warded the cab, they warded the engine, they even warded the tires. But they didn’t ward under the engine, where a gear met a certain rod.

Now, a couple of hundred pounds of force may be able to break or bend one of those rods out of shape, but I doubted it. Maybe on a smaller car, but moving trucks deal with a lot of force, a lot of extra weight, not to mention the fact that they were just bigger. Nope, instead I just created a very small, very dense cube of force, poured all of my will into it, and slammed it into that gear when the driver tried to course correct when we dipped behind him.

I growled in the back of my throat in concentration as the two pieces of metal tried to crush my magic but I held on, gritting my teeth. When I felt the pressure mount, and then slip, I slammed everything into the spell and made it burst out. I felt something shift, and maybe heard a metallic “clang!” but I probably imagined that part.

The truck started drifting to the right.

“Oh my God,” I said, panting. I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. “That was way harder than I thought it’d be.”

“What’d you do?” Alice asked. She was moving us into the left lane and regaining the speed she had lost. The truck was wisely slowing down now that they had lost steering.

“They had warded the shit outta the truck, but missed a spot,” I said. “I took out the steering mechanism.”

“Neat—“ Alice began.

“They are doing something!” Ida nearly shouted.

I had taken my eyes off the truck for what felt like less than a second, and in that second the truck had undergone some changes. Dark red… skin? I guess? Began to creep from the seams of the trucks body and cover the chassis. I could just make out what looked like ligaments reach from the wheel wells to behind the front wheels. Immediately after, the truck began to correct course and resume chasing us. The top of the cab bulged, a head forming from a mass of dark red skin. An eye appeared on the mass, the rest of the surface area taken up by a giant mouth.

The truck had effectively turned into a weird fleshy monster.

“That shit’s not normal, right?” I asked. “That’s not something you or your family see all the time, right?”

Alice was barely watching the road, her eye wide as she looked into the rear-view mirror. “N-no,” she said. “That’s a new one for me.”

I nodded and rolled down my window. “Whelp, they turned their truck into a weird demon thing,” I said, leaning out and aiming my Webley awkwardly back at the truck. I couldn’t get the angle with it with my right hand so I swapped to my left. “I say we have a strong argument for self-defense.”

I pulled the trigger.