Ceri sat cross-legged on the floor to make a small figure in jeans and a casual shirt under the shadow of the cross. A pot of tea sat beside her, steaming though my own mug was long cold. I had a feeling she was using magic to keep it warm, though I had yet to catch her at it. A delicate cup was cradled reverently in her thin hands—she had brought that from Keasley’s, too—and Ivy’s crucifix glimmered about her neck. The woman’s hands were never far from it. Her fair hair had been plaited by Jenks’s eldest daughter that morning, and she looked at peace with herself. I loved seeing her like this, knowing what she had endured.

There was a thump from the kitchen followed by the clatter of the oven door shutting. A frown crossed me, and I turned to Ceri as she prompted, “Are you ready to try again?”

Setting my sock-footed feet firmly on the floor, I nodded. Quick from practice, I reached out with my awareness and touched the line out back. My chi filled, taking no more or less than it ever did. The energy flowed through me much like a river flows through a pond. I had been able to do this since I was twelve and accidentally threw Trent into a tree at his father’s Make-A-Wish camp. What I had to do was pull some of that energy out of the pond and lift it to a cistern in my mind, so to speak. A person’s chi, whether human, Inderlander, or demon, could hold only so much. Familiars acted as extra chi that a magic user could draw on as his or her own.

Ceri waited until I gestured I was ready before she tapped the same line and fostered more into me. It was a trickle instead of Algaliarept’s deluge, but even so, my skin burned when my chi overflowed and the force rippled through me, seeking somewhere to puddle. Going back to the pond and river analogy, the banks had overflowed and the valley was flooding.

My thoughts were the only place it could settle, and by the time it found them, I had made the tiny three-dimensional circle in my imagination that Ceri had spent most of the afternoon teaching me how to craft. Shoulders easing, I felt the trickle find the small enclosure. Immediately the warm sensation on my skin vanished as the energy my chi couldn’t hold was drawn into it like mercury droplets. The bubble expanded, glowing with a red smear that took on the color of my and Al’s aura. Yuck.

“Say your trigger word,” Ceri prompted, and I winced. It was too late. My eyes met hers, and her thin lips twitched. “You forgot,” she accused, and I shrugged. Immediately she stopped forcing energy into me, and the excess ran out in a brief spark of heat back to the line. “Say it this time,” she said tightly. Ceri was nice, but she wasn’t a particularly patient teacher.