The first spell wasn’t the one he needed, and to get to the next one… he’d need to master the Teleport spell. After everything he’d done, he couldn’t even get to his father. Mastering teleportation would take days, maybe even a week, time he didn’t have, time his father didn’t have!

He could feel it all slipping away from him, and his anger faded, pushed out of the way by a deep, devastating despair, one that sank all the way to his core.

He’d lied to and betrayed his friends. Sierra might have just gotten caught by TDA agents because of him. And all Fort had gotten out of it was a teleportation spell, leaving his father still beyond reach.

Teleportation magic? he could hear his father saying. Why, you could go anywhere, see anything with that spell! That’s maybe the most amazing magic I’ve ever heard of!

Except it wasn’t, because it couldn’t do the one thing Fort needed it to do.

“Stop it,” he whispered to himself, digging his nails into his palms. This wasn’t helping, this wallowing. Yes, things were awful and terrible, but he still had the book, and more spells would come after he mastered Teleport. And he knew the right spell was in there somewhere, because Damian had used it to bring the monsters here in the first place.

It would mean at least a week of practice. But maybe the portal spell would be the second one. Or worst case, the third. He’d already waited two weeks just to get the book. He could survive three more.

More weeks while his father suffered who knew what—

Stop! he shouted in his mind. Focus. That doesn’t help. You need to master this spell as quickly as you can, not worry about what’s out of your control for now.

He quickly stood up and grabbed the book from where it lay on one of the counters, opening it back to the teleportation spell again. This time, he read the description, just in case there was anything he’d missed.

When an object must pass between nonadjacent spaces, yet still within the same reality/probability time line, a teleportation circle can be opened, connecting those two spaces.

Though true magicians know that space is a false equivalency, and everything lies within our own reach, to convince the cosmos of this, one must first bring to mind one’s destination location and merge it to your starting point.

Even through his roller coaster of feelings, Fort’s eyes started to glaze over at the text, completely unable to concentrate enough to figure out what it was trying to say. The Healing book’s language had been nice and simple; why couldn’t whoever had written the Summoning one spell things out in plain English? Or whatever magical language this actually was?