Page 37 of Cold Curses

“It’s possible,” Hugo said. “Think about a house with really old wiring. You try to plug in a high-def gaming screen decades after the house was built, and there’s a pretty good chance something goes wrong.”

“Magically speaking,” Paige said, “this mama has really old wiring. That’s one of the things we’ve been trying to fix.”

It all sounded simple and logical. Until you remembered we were talking about a Victorian-era magical antidemon system.

“It was a miracle the machine worked at all after all this time,” Aunt Mallory said, and grinned at Hugo. “He’s the miracle.”

Hugo smiled. Yes, his baby was broken, but for the first time in a long time, he could discuss it with others who were as invested in its success as he was.

“Is it worth saving?” Theo wondered, and all heads turned to him. “Not the machine,” he clarified, “but the system.”

Aunt Mallory and Paige shared a look that said they’d had similar conversations. “It’s what we have now,” Aunt Mallory said. “No need to reinvent the wheel if we can get it working again.”

“I say, let’s try Petra’s spark,” Hugo said. “Sometimes you have to take a chance.”

“Good call,” Aunt Mallory said, and we followed Hugo to a boxy portion of the machine marked in the scratchy magical symbols that made it run.

“This is the transformer,” he said. “Aim here.”

“And everyone else step back,” Mom said. “Gears shouldn’t go flying, but…”

Theo and I took extra-large steps backward, nearly to the building’s exterior wall.

“This is either going to work or become a shrapnel bomb,” Theo said.

“It’s Chicago,” I said as Petra and the sorcerers talked specifics. “There are so manyothercreative ways it could go badly: spin us all into another dimension, bring interdimensional monsters here—”

“You can stop,” Theo said with the faintest of smiles.

When the sorcerers and Hugo moved back, we braced ourselves.

“Ready,” Aunt Mallory said, placing a jar of green stuff near the machine. Grass with demon residue, I presumed. “Set,” she said, and Petra leaned forward, produced a spark in her hand. “Go!”

The air contracted, and a thin streak of brilliant blue flowed from Petra’s hand to the machine. For a moment, there were only the smells of warm grease and oil, and then the gears began to turn. I expected a groan of metal against metal, but Hugo and his family had maintained the machine meticulously. The machine’s component parts moved together effortlessly, speed increasing as energy was transferred from one part of the system to another.

Then the ceiling doors began to move, angling upward to make room for the light’s beam. That beam was nearly invisible at first, but as the machine’s symbols began to glow, light was gathered and condensed into a single beam. Magic peppered the air as machine and beam—a functioning ward—prepared to strike at demons.

But then the column of light flickered, faded. The flywheel slowed, and the gears stopped moving. The machine had already exhausted the energy Petra had fed it.

“First time I’ve seen it running in a while,” Hugo said, voice thick with emotion. “I didn’t think it would affect me so much.”

“It’s your life’s work,” Petra said with a smile, pulling on her gloves again. “Of course it would.”

Paige and Aunt Mallory were still silent. They both stared at the machine, hands on hips and frowns pulling their mouths.

“It runs,” Aunt Mallory said.

“It runs,” Paige agreed. “But why did it stop?”

“Something missing.”

“Mmm-hmm. Connection?”

“Maybe.”

They made considering noises.

“They get like this sometimes,” Mom said affectionately. “Sorcerer shoptalk.”