I approached him, ignoring how he tensed when I moved to face him, when only a slender space of air remained between us. Rain began to tap on the windowpanes. The night felt heavy and swollen with the storm; the shadows gathered knee deep in the corners of the library.

“If you want to learn,” I murmured, “then it begins here.” I laid my hand over his heart. “It begins when you acknowledge and respect who you are—scars and mistakes and victories and accomplishments all accounted for.” I let my hand slip away, fingertip by fingertip, and watched his deep inhale, as if I had left a scorch mark behind. “Now. Summon her.”

I returned to the safety of my chair.

Phelan cleared off his desk. He set my drawing over the center of the wood, along with a silver bowl, a moonstone, a knife, a candlestick. He next selected a spell book, leafing its ancient, crinkled pages open to a spell of summoning.

I watched as he read it, once, twice, as he began to utter the rivers of incantations.

He placed my drawing in the silver bowl and cut his palm with the knife. His blood dripped into the basin three times, marring the parchment, mingling with my art. Next, he held the moonstone over the wavering candle flame, until the stone seemed to come alive, a vein of light pulsing within it. He opened his bloodied palm and the stone gently lowered itself into the bowl, as if gravity had thickened. The moonstone came to rest over his blood and over my drawing. Smoke rose, a dancing blue tendril. The air smelled like cloves, like the wind from the mountains.

It was beginning.

“Clementine,” I heard Phelan call. His voice echoed, resounded in my bones. “Clem, will you answer me? Will you meet with me?”

He was making no sound with his lips. The conversation was in our spirits—silence in our ears and yet thunder in our minds. His eyes were focused on the smoke as my drawing broke into flames, and my eyes were focused on him, the way the light washed over his face. His lambent eyes as he waited for me to materialize.

I prayed he would not look at me in that anguished moment when I felt the magic tug in my chest. I waged war against the overwhelming urge to rise and answer him.

Sweat beaded my brow, slipped down my back like a taunting fingertip.

“Clem,” Phelan called to me again, his voice sharp and beautiful as glass in my mind. Reflecting prisms of color in every direction.

I forced my answer down, down in the tangled vines of my lungs and the wild briars of my being. And yet the tug turned bright and painful. I discreetly braced my feet on the legs of the chair. I held to the armrests, my knuckles strained white.