Page 23 of Take You Home (Redwater Demons #3)
Magnanimously, Obie drops the subject. “If you insist. Can I please get a taco meal to go with chicken and?—hold on, let me check what my friend wants,” he says, pretending to look down at his cell phone.
“A taco meal with black beans,” Chester says. “Thanks.”
Obie dutifully repeats Chester’s order to Esteban, adding two churros for good measure. Within minutes, they’re walking away from the food truck with two bags of plunder, homing in on an abandoned table in the far corner of the Courtyard.
Obie makes sure no one is watching before holding Chester’s bag under the table. “Here. As long as you keep this on your lap so it’s touching you, no one will see you eating.”
“Oh?—?” The bag is lightly tugged from Obie’s hand and promptly vanishes into thin air. “Thanks, Obie.”
“No problem,” Obie says, digging around for a blank piece of paper and setting it on the table. “I’m going to request the spell from the Deep now. Be quiet for a few minutes.”
“You have to supply your own paper? The Deep doesn’t even give you that?”
“That’s not being quiet, Locke.”
“Touchy.”
Chester miraculously falls silent as Obie closes his eyes, mentally reviewing the spell one last time. He spent most of Chester’s shift today fully soundproofed and practicing the incantation, but it’s really not that complicated .
The only difficult part is tapping into the Deep itself, and even that is less “difficult” and more “delicate.” Obie lets out a slow breath, probing the veil between Earth and the Deep with his magic.
He’s tapped into magic reservoirs a few hundred times over his many millennia in this dimension, but for some reason, the Deep has always been his favorite. It feels almost… familiar, somehow.
Like home. “In the name of the Fourteen,” he whispers, biting back a grimace when the crinkling of Chester’s paper bag abruptly stops. “I call upon the power of the Deep…”
Obie flows through the incantation as quickly and quietly as he can, trying not to give Chester any opportunity to memorize his words.
Within seconds, he feels a faint thread of magic thrum through him?—the Deep responding to his spell.
Since it doesn’t kill him on the spot, Obie can assume that his request was honored, and when he opens his eyes, it’s to see the binding spell in question emblazoned in black ink on the piece of paper.
“Whoa,” Chester breathes, crowding in close next to Obie to look at it. “That’s really cool. Does the Deep have its own handwriting?”
Obie shakes his head, surprised by Chester’s perceptiveness. “It takes the handwriting of whoever casts the spell,” he says, wrinkling his nose down at the paper. “Although I’ll readily admit that it’s a lot neater than my usual handwriting.”
“Makes it easier to read, at least.” An edge creeps into Chester’s voice. “But this… looks identical to the Magic-Weaver’s spell. Didn’t you say it would be different?”
Obie fights back a wince. He was hoping that Chester messed up the spell itself?—the counterspell would’ve been much easier to create that way?—but considering Chester’s meticulous nature, it makes sense that the incantation was flawless.
“I said it might be different. This means you cast the spell itself correctly, but you messed up the pre-casting process. ”
Dejection winds through Chester’s voice. “Oh.”
A strange twinge of guilt shoots through Obie.
“That was the more likely option from the start,” he adds grudgingly.
“Pre-casting is notoriously difficult with anything beyond the basics. It’s actually a subset of twisted spellcasting, and that’s one of the most complicated magic disciplines out there. ”
Obie feels Chester start with surprise next to him. “Pre-casting is related to twisted spellcasting? But I thought that was just when you take two incantations and?—well, twist them together.”
“When you combine two or more spells so thoroughly that they can’t be separated through conventional methods,” Obie confirms. “Pre-casting is a simplified version of that. The pre-casting process might look like just adding a series of magical modifiers to the main spell, but it’s actually a convoluted tangle of extremely temperamental micro-spells?—although the Deep doesn’t recognize them as spells, so it unfortunately doesn’t keep a record we could request. That complexity is one of the biggest reasons why Ez and Roma didn’t use pre-casting during the rift-opening epidemic??—too much room for error. ”
“But…” Chester sounds perplexed. “But Sawyer and Naomi used to pre-cast offensive spells for me during Strike Team Kappa’s drills. They never had any problems.”
“Didn’t Bryant call them ‘baby’ offensive spells?”
Chester scoffs. “Yeah, but that’s just Bryant. They still hurt when I hit people with them.”
Obie rolls his eyes. “Effectiveness doesn’t equal complexity. If they were low-power, standard-activation offensive spells, then they wouldn’t have been too difficult to pre-cast.” He nods at the intricate incantation in front of them. “A spell like this, though, is a different story.”
“So how do we create the counterspell, then? ”
“Well?—?”
But Obie never gets the chance to tell Chester their next steps, because at that moment, a confused?—and much too familiar?—voice behind him says, “Obie?”
Heart dropping, Obie whirls around to see none other than Sawyer Solomon.