The wind kicked up outside. Leaves scuttled across the lawn and pelted the side of the shed. Inside the garage, every noise was amplified, which did nothing to calm my jittery nerves. I did the inhale, exhale thing again.
It didn’t help. So I took a swig of beer instead.
“All right,” I said to the empty room. “Start with something easy.”
I dug around in the box of equipment and pulled out a glass dish and a hot plate. I took a step back and chewed on my lip.
I knew I didn’t begin to have the proper equipment to formulate a complex antipotion. Especially since getting it right would require my getting ahold of a sample of Gray Wolf and reading its energy to break down the components. Plus, many alchemical processes—even the down-and-dirty ones used on the street—took time.
My main goal that night was just to dip my toe back in those old, familiar waters to make sure I could handle it. The thought made my stomach quicken and my face flush. I licked my lips and tried to remind myself it was just this once—for Danny. If I failed no one had to know. In fact, even if I succeeded no one could know.
I had a bottle of vodka in the house and could probably scrounge up some herbs to make a basic Spagyric elixir, but distillation would take up to a week. And even then, after I’d filtered the solution through a pair of panty hose, it would have to sit an additional twenty-four hours before it was usable.
On the other hand, I found an old vial containing some sort of herbal extract. I opened the stopper and sniffed. The astringent scent of concentrated rosemary brought back memories of the cleansing bath salts I’d made for my mother one Christmas. Smiling at the memory, I decided I could manage a simple operation to make a “salt of salt” preparation of rosemary.
Salt of Salt requires a basic calcination procedure—basically, burning something down to white ash. I poured some of the thick, brown rosemary extract onto the dish. Next, I struck a match and touched it to the solution. The alcohol in the extract caught immediately, and soon the heat intensified the sharp pine scent inside the space. The mixture of infused alcohol and rosemary needles turned into a thick, black resin after a few moments. I took a small metal wand and stirred it, humming to myself as I worked.
As far as alchemical operations went, this was about as simple as they came. But, then, simple was exactly what I needed. The steps kept my hands busy and my mind quiet, and that alone was a blessing.
To speed things along, I lit the camp stove under the glass dish so it was burning from all sides. I sipped my beer as I kept one eye on the flames. If there had been a large quantity of extract, burning it down to ash might have taken hours or days even, but that night it took only about half an hour for the first round of heat to reduce the resin to a dark gray ash. I scraped the powder into my mortar and ground away at it for a few minutes with my pestle.
I repeated the heating and grinding two more times until the ashes were very light gray. Then the ashes went into a beaker with ten times its volume of water. Tap water worked just fine since I wasn’t cooking clean. If I had been, only sterilized and distilled water would do. After all that, it was simply a matter of letting it boil down until all the liquid evaporated. The white crystals that remained were the Salt of Salt.
I turned on my stool to look at the salt in the light. The white crystals gleamed dully in the poorly lit garage. I smiled at it and laughed at myself. It had been so long since I worked with magic that I guess I’d expected my first time back to feel … earth-shattering. Or at least dramatic. Instead, there had been a pleasing boredom to the process.
Despite what movies suggest, magic isn’t a flamboyant process. It’s not flying lasers from fingertips or flashes of lightning or wands waved and chants shouted. Instead, it’s a subtle art. Adepts don’t force magic on items, we coax and harness their inherent energies. The process I had gone through that night drew the elemental salt from the rosemary. Purified it with fire to reach its essential energy. Some believed fire elevated that energy, too. All that was left was for me to decide what other energies to mix it with to create the magic I needed.
But then I remembered that the kind of magic I needed was more complex than playing with simple herbs in a toolshed. I needed a lab and equipment and high-quality ingredients. One of those miracles I’d thought about earlier wouldn’t hurt, either.
Before I could get too worked up about that, though, I realized my back felt very warm. Too warm considering the night air was filled with early autumn’s chill. I turned and cursed. Flames licked up the sides of the camp stove and were dancing dangerously close to the wooden walls of the shed. I jumped up, looking around for something with which to put out the fire. Since I’d dissolved all the water, the only liquid on hand was the last half of my last beer. The fire hissed at me but didn’t surrender. Panic started to rise in my chest like heartburn. The edge of a cardboard box began to smolder. I whipped off my sweatshirt and started beating the box and the camp stove.
In the process of smothering the flames, my hand whacked the hot plate’s glowing red element. “Mother of fuck!” At that point, panic fled as rage roared in. With my right hand—the unburned one—I grabbed the cord of the stove and ripped it out of the wall.
I try not to stew in self-pity often, but it was all too much. Boxes went flying and tools clanked and shattered to the ground. I kicked the mortar for good measure, which added a nice big toe contusion to my burn and the puncture wounds in my neck from when Danny attacked me. I’m not sure when the kicking turned into crying, but before I knew it I was on the floor in the smoky shed bawling like a child. Through the haze of tears, I looked down to see the rosemary salt crystals lying scattered among broken glass.
Pressing the heels of my palms to my eye sockets, I tried some deep breathing to get my emotions under control. A pity party wouldn’t help Danny. I glanced down at the burn wound. An angry red blister slashed across my Ouroboros tattoo. I ran a finger along the snake design and remembered how proud I’d been the day I’d earned the right to get inked with the symbol of my coven. Within six months of that day, I’d walked away from magic completely.
Obviously, the fire had been a sign that I should have stayed away.
“I get it,” I said to the universe. “But as long as you’re sending signs, how about one to tell me what to do next?”
I waited for a good minute in the silence before I sighed, hauled myself off the ground, and cleaned up the mess. Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t run on a human schedule. That’s why it waited until the next morning to send its message.