Shift

TWO.1

Blaze stood alone on a darkened street of Manhattan, eyeing the blue plywood wall in front of him.

The trace spell had only taken a few moments and had told him that the girl lived in a New Jersey suburb. Even now, he could feel a pull on his gut whenever he took a step towards the west.

The transport spell, however, was a little more problematic. Unlike the trace spell, which he had written on a small piece of paper, a transport spell required a large rune diagram written out on the floor. There was a casting room in his apartment, but Blaze had been worried that his father would come home early and catch him in the act. There were also several public casting places spread throughout New York in buildings that doubled as nail salons and art galleries, but he hadn't trusted those either; even in a city as large as New York, it always felt that every potestas knew each other.

So Blaze had waited until the sun had set and had found a stretch of sidewalk boarded up with plywood walls: Construction site by day, his makeshift casting place by night.

Blaze made sure no one was looking and grabbed the silver padlock that sealed the entrance to the construction site. He scrawled a symbol on the metal with chalk, and then whispered, "Aknah," intending the lock to click open. Instead, with a flash of yellow light, the entire padlock disintegrated between his palms.

He cursed, rubbing the metal filings off his hands. My power is really out of control today, he thought, slipping behind the makeshift door.

Beyond the plywood walls, the façade of the building appeared to be under construction—the facing was torn off and the ground was littered with loose nails, bits of plaster, and sawdust. When Blaze saw a security camera perched on the building's front, he knew he should safely disable it with a proper spell. Instead, he wrote another Aknah. Unlike the bolt, the camera did not disintegrate, though he heard an electric crackle accompanied by the smell of burning plastic.

Blaze took a few minutes to clear the sidewalk of debris, and then he started writing out the intensely detailed rune circle with a piece of white chalk. The fading light made it difficult to see the diagram in his father's book, so when he finally finished writing in all the tiny symbols, he began to triple-check his work. This was his first attempt at casting a transport spell; he wanted to make sure he did it right. By the time he was done, the sky had blackened to the color of ink.

Blaze stepped inside the circular chalk drawing, making sure he didn't smudge any of the ancient symbols with his shoes. Transport spells were dangerous if they weren't done properly. Unbidden, the memory of an article he had read once slipped into his head. It had been about a man who had mixed up two symbols in his rune and had been trapped between the boundaries of time and space for almost 30 years. The thought was not appealing.

But I have to do this, Blaze thought grimly, flipping a page to reach the incantation. He stared at the words for a moment, took a deep breath, and cleared his throat. Then he started reading.

He was always surprised by the way the ancient words rolled off his tongue when he read an incantation; his voice seemed to have more layers, reverberating with a vibrato that did not exist with his normal speaking voice. And then the true magic began. From over his spell book, Blaze watched as the world around him dimmed, the silver nails and blue plywood walls fading away as their color fueled the spell.

A moment later, the chalk runes on the ground began to glow. It was faint at first, almost sickly, and much less intense than Blaze had expected. He emphasized his words, adding more fuel to the fire by letting his power trickle into his voice. A fatigue crept into his skin, the drain of the spell pulling on his energy, but slowly the light intensified until he was surrounded by a flaring aura of white light.