Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(39)
It was a rough-hewn sphere, shot through with cracks and what looked like streaks of moss and lichen, which made me wonder if Gareth had actually built it from raw elemental material or simply transported it from elsewhere, whisked it here from Hallows Hill or some other rocky outcropping in the vicinity. Telekinetic spells like this weren’t my forte—I wasn’t even sure which one he’d chosen to use—but Gareth was a pro at this kind of brute strength display. When I glanced over at him, his boyish face was completely relaxed and serene, as if he were meditating instead of levitating a several-ton boulder fifteen feet up in the air by arcane strength alone.
Lack of nuance aside, sometimes my brother’s magic could be kind of badass.
“Really?” I said, flicking him a doubtful glance. “You think smashing it with a rock is going to do the trick?”
“Won’t know until we try! Impact in three,” he announced, more out of habit than anything else. Normally we’d both summon shields for something like this, but such precautions weren’t necessary in the Cell.
As soon as the boulder began to drop, a glimmering sheath of webbed gold sprang up around both of us, encasing us each in a shield designed to deflect any amount of shrapnel or air displacement that might happen, anything that could hurt us.
Which was excellent, because upon impact with the coin, the boulder exploded.
It didn’t just crumble, or shatter, or fracture; as soon as it hit the ground, it pulverized itself completely. A burst of tiny shards like vicious arrows fired in every direction, fine needling projectiles that would have shredded both Gareth and me if the Cell hadn’t been shielding us. We both swiveled away out of pure instinct, flinging up our arms to guard our faces. I could hear the cacophony of bursts, pops, and sizzles as the shields incinerated each separate fragment, but every impulse in my mammalian brain shrieked at me to take cover, and I couldn’t bring myself to crack my eyes open and see what was happening.
By the time silence had settled back over the room, and Gareth and I turned back to where the boulder had fallen, there was nothing left of it. Not even dust.
Just the coin glittering maddeningly at us, shiny and undinged, light glinting off it in that taunting way.
“So, that was ballistic as shit,” Gareth remarked, with such uncharacteristic dryness that it startled a real, slightly shrill laugh out of me. “Like, yeah, it probably wasn’t going to work in the first place, but that was way out of bounds. What the hell is that coin made of, anyway? Adamantium? Unobtainium? Kryptonite? I don’t even get how something so small could have triggered that intense a disintegration.”
“Was that a real boulder from somewhere?” I asked, my own thoughts tumbling over each other. “Or did you build it?”
Sometimes magically conjured constructs—even if they were, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from their natural counterparts—were slightly more unstable than the real thing. Or considerably more so, depending on the strength and skill of the caster, but Gareth was such a top-tier elementalist that it shouldn’t have made this much of a difference in any case.
“Jacked it from an abandoned quarry a couple miles outside town,” he replied, shaking his head. “Don’t worry, no one was gonna miss it. So, not even construct weakness as a contributing factor, if that’s what you were thinking.”
“So the coin doesn’t respond to that kind of pressure,” I mused out loud. “What about a temperature change? Deep freeze? Most metals shatter if they get cold enough, right?”
Gareth nodded briskly, rubbing his palms together. “Yeah, but you have to drop really far below zero for a lot of the hardier ones to go from ductile to brittle. I can swing it, though, no problem, if that’s what you want to try.”
“Might as well give it a shot, since we’re here,” I said, hands on my hips. “Especially because it always feels so warm to the touch. So a cold snap may actually do the trick.”
With a nod, Gareth brought both hands in front of his sternum, palms together, then rotated them, until one faced up, the other down, elbows out at his sides.
“Try your best not to invite any ice wraiths to come party today, okay?” he tossed to me over his shoulder. “And for the record, that’s, like, only half a joke.”
“Fair enough. I don’t think that could happen in here, though. Too much warding in the floor and walls.”
Gareth took a long, deep breath, holding it as he rotated his hands through a series of precise, minute positions like compass needles quivering between the four cardinal points. When he exhaled, a sparkling purl of chill swirled on his breath, expanding and brightening, filling the room with white. I recognized this working; a Welsh frost spell, used to restore Wheel of the Year order by ushering in winter when it lagged so far behind it threatened to disrupt the natural balance.
Why anyone would ever want to go chasing winter was beyond me, but likely that was precisely why I hadn’t been born a Welsh village sage.
As ice crystals shimmered to life around us—like a host of tiny snowflakes, a flurry of floating crushed diamonds—the Cell’s shields snapped into place again, this time to keep our body heat safely sealed in. Unlike at Castle Camelot, I couldn’t feel the plummet in temperature; but I could see frost riming the walls, even the floor smoothing into milky glass as what little moisture the room contained turned to a brittle skin of ice. A pale fog swirled all around us, curtains of wavering white like gathered gauze.