Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [92]
When I hadn’t been able to manage a general summoning of even the most basic spirit, Douglas gave me a list of names. Apparently that old adage is true—names have power. Even with the list, I’d struck out. The spark of ignition was there, but I’d run clean out of gas. Great, now I was comparing myself to cars. If I ever saw Ashley again, I’d kick her.
“I suggest you try again,” Douglas said. His tone had cooled. Not reassuring. No, a definite threat lived in that tone. He held the crop loosely in his grip. If I screwed up again, ol’ Douglas might take a few steps up on the violence ladder. I licked my lips and tried again.
I eased my body into a cross-legged position. It hurt my back more than staying on my hands and knees, but my arms would get too tired the other way. My eyes closed as I took a deep breath.
The basement looked much different when I shut my eyes. When I relaxed and really looked, things floated up from the darkness. Brid shone to my right—twisting copper and emerald. The cage around her held the colors of Douglas. The wards on the bars burned beaconlike at the top. Douglas, with his nauseating swirls of grays, silvers, blacks, and ice blues, stood to my left.
But that wasn’t all. The room itself seemed filled with a shifting haze. I didn’t know what that was. I’d never seen it before. Was it supposed to look like that?
I concentrated on my hazy circle. My blue was a richer color than Douglas’s was. He’d drawn his own circle earlier after telling me that he still didn’t trust mine. I compared the two. Both blue, mine a dimmer electric, Douglas’s a vibrant ice color. The circles didn’t sit still completely. They held to the lines we’d drawn, anchored to the floor, but in the air they shifted and moved, just like our auras did. Mine looked weak. Douglas was right. His circle was better.
Okay, no more screwing around. I called up one of the names Douglas had given me into my mind. Not as easy as it sounds. I was tired from the earlier effort. And the bleeding. I could feel the tickle of southbound blood on my lower back. Ashley had said that I didn’t need blood to summon lesser spirits, but at this point I figured every little bit helped. Keeping my eyes closed, I reached around and swiped what I could off my back. Then I handprinted the floor in front of me with it. Kind of like finger painting in kindergarten, only gross.
I just hoped Ashley was right. With that thought sitting in my mind, a strange thing happened. It felt like something thin inside me snapped, bursting into a million pieces at once. I sucked in a breath, my spine going rigid with the force of it. This was what closing my first circle had felt like. Times a thousand. Every cell in my body took a shuddering gasp. The dam inside me had broken and all my power came rushing out. Years of unused, untouched potential, all at once. I’m not sure where it came from or why it had happened all of a sudden, but I had to let it go. I felt like I’d explode if I didn’t.
Brid gasped, and I heard a sudden commotion in front of me. My eyes popped open.
A giant hole gaped in midair, like someone had cut out a piece of the basement with a pair of scissors.
Ashley, still in Catholic-girl chic, stood in the portal, talking to one of the freakiest things I’d ever seen. And I’d seen a talking severed head and a zombie panda. He—I assume it was a he—stood a good three feet over Ashley, putting him somewhere in the seven-foot zone. He wore a simple linen skirt around his waist, and golden cuffs encircled two of the biggest biceps I’d seen outside of professional wrestling. Though heavily muscled, he wasn’t hulking. In fact, he looked more like a swimmer who lifted weights. A lot of weights. But his head was what gave me pause. He had the head of a jackal. From watching endless hours of Animal Planet with Frank, I’d learned that jackals