The Death of Jane Lawrence(95)

Impossible. Impossible.

And yet, there it was. She could find no flaw in the logic.

Far too soon she felt the sharp edge the cocaine had given her begin to ebb. She tried to wait it out, doing small geometric proofs on paper to produce new ideas and test her awareness, but her vision blurred. Her head drooped. She dropped her pen on more than one occasion.

The second injection was easier than the first, though she had to use a different spot along her vein; the original hurt too much to try. When it was done, Jane wrote Augustine in ink beside the pinprick hole, the better to keep him always in the forefront of her mind, keep herself fixed upon her purpose and her goal. Her mind was apt to wander now, and her field of study was too deep. The lack of sleep would only make it worse.

She returned to the library, alert once more. Her mind full to bursting with mathematical contortions, Jane took up her pen and returned to the previous night’s testing.

She soon ran out of floor space in the library, drawing out circles and testing variations. She began drawing her circles down the hallways. She inscribed one on the wall, carving through the wallpaper when the pen blurred and skipped. Her back pressed against the plaster behind her, she visualized the circle growing out and away from her, a tube that stretched to the opposite wall. It took and held steady, but felt no different from the other circles she had built.

More tests: she measured them carefully so that when she stretched out all her limbs, her fingertips and toes touched the inside of the line exactly—and then again so that she was curled up tight, and again where the diameter of the circle was three times the length of herself. She varied her method of visualizing the wall, digging moats instead, or wrapping herself in sheets of metal. She walked the inner perimeter and sat stock-still in the exact center. She lit candles and burned herbs and screamed and threw her notebook across the second-floor hallway.

Nothing she did produced any difference, inside her or around her. But she held on to hope. The circles—perhaps they were static. But there had been other figures in the ring inscribed in her vision, in the floor of the crypt beneath Lindridge Hall. What of those?

Dusk came. She laid a three-fold circle in concentric rings and raised the walls, and they came in a heady rush. Something new, something different! She could have danced if she hadn’t been so exhausted. She used the remaining moss and loam as sparingly as she could, fearing some dulling potency, but the flow of power within her was familiar, strong. Stronger than before.

Progress. She was making progress.

She stepped away from her work only to eat the ritual meal, pulling the sea grass from the icebox. It tangled around her fingers. She swallowed down each bite even though every motion of her throat produced pain.

The Doctrine of Seven had given only half-formed reasons for the ritual’s structure, but it was working; of that much Jane was certain. The changing of the egg each dawn was proof enough of that. But as she chewed, she wondered if all the details were exactly right. After all, the concepts she’d read in Augustine’s texts had seemed haphazard, cobbled together from a thousand disparate threads. Perhaps the rules were not actual rules, not in any immutable sense. The ritual, after all, only guided the magician’s force of will. Perhaps there were acceptable deviations. Some were obvious, and she had already taken advantage of them; there were no specified portions of the ritual meals, or the bog moss, or the grave dirt, and she had adjusted to use less and less of each. And she had crafted her own sigil, when she could not make sense of the moth-eaten, senseless instructions provided her. Could she push at others? Accelerate the timeline, so that Augustine would not be trapped for quite so long without food, without water, without warmth?

By midnight, she was back in the kitchen, counting out the remaining eggs. She had more than enough to finish out the rest of the mornings.

She could afford to experiment.

Intention and knowledge were everything. She had to be careful. She had to keep in mind, at all times, the truest depiction of what she was doing, why, and how it would happen. So Jane held Augustine (healthy and whole and waiting for her, with that light in his eyes when he wanted to kiss her, with that sureness in his hands when he saved his patients) foremost in her mind as she gathered her supplies.

His study, more than any other room, provided specific details and vibrant memories upon which to anchor herself. Her warning, too, was writ large across the shelves. It was the perfect place to work. The rug she’d pulled aside when she cowered from Orren was still heaped against the couch. Her first faint lines of chalk still stood out against the wood. She redrew her circle and knelt there, inhaling the scent of him, the resonance. She lit the candle and placed one hand over where she had scrawled his name upon her arm. She remembered his hands holding hers beneath the surgery faucet as she spoke the dawn invocations. She pictured him standing just outside the study door, flushed from kissing her, as she cracked the egg.

When the shell gave way, it revealed a half-formed chick, eyes bulbous and skin fuzzy with the beginnings of feathers. The yolk was smaller than before, and spidered full over with red.

“Yes, yes!” she cried, falling back onto her heels and clasping her hands over her mouth. Another component moved into place. She could work the rituals in sequence without caring for the time of day, and she could get to him soon. Soon! She looked to the clock that sat upon the desk. It had been less than five hours since she worked the dusk ritual. In another five, she would put the moss into her mouth again, and sequentially reduce the time between until either they ceased to progress, or she completed the sequence. At most, it would take forty hours.