I reached into my pocket and took out the Aelvestone. If we are really connected, I whispered to the stone, show me! Monstrare leoht!

A blinding gold light blazed out of the stone. And then the doorbell rang.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I SLIPPED THE stone back in my pocket and fumbled my way to the door, my eyes still dazzled by the light. I opened the door, squinting against the light that formed a corona around the dark figure of a man. My heart beat harder and I thought of Liam in my last dream of him, his face dark against a blaze of Aelvesgold. He had come back to me!

But then the man stepped closer and his face came into focus. Not Liam. He was a good looking man, though, with fair hair that swooped up from a high brow and then fell over one eye like a wing. He wore a wrinkled linen suit with a worn leather satchel – the kind British schoolboys used in Goodbye Mr. Chips – strapped across his chest. He would have looked like a British schoolboy if his features hadn’t been so severe. He had a strong jaw, high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes that narrowed at me.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a sexy Scottish accent. “You look disappointed. Were you expecting someone else? Dean Book told me to come as soon as I arrived in town. You are Cailleach McFay?”

He pronounced my name correctly, so he’d probably heard it from someone who knew me. Still, I didn’t want to leap to any conclusions.

“Who are you?” I asked brusquely, still trying to get over my disappointment that he wasn’t Liam.

He took out a card from the inside of his linen jacket and handed it to me. Duncan Laird, DMA was engraved on the heavy cream cardstock.

“It doesn’t say Wizard,” I said.

He smiled, relieving the severe lines of his face and revealing very white teeth. “Oh, but it does,” he said. “If you look at it the right way. Focus your energy on it. You’ve got enough magic coursing through you right now to light up the Eastern Seaboard.”

I stared at the card harder, focusing the energy that was fizzing through my veins. A watermark appeared in the paper – a five-pointed star within a circle. A pentacle.

“Cool,” I said. “Does the reverse side have a picture of Jesus blessing the masses …” I flipped the card over while making my, admittedly, lame joke – really, I was just trying to give myself time to recover from my ridiculous idea that I’d summoned Liam to my door – but the smile vanished from my face when the card burst into flames.

“Uh oh,” Duncan Laird said. “It only does that when it senses an overload of magical power. The spell circle was right. You do have a most unusual energy signature. It’s going to take a lot of work to harness your power, but when we do …” He gave me a frankly appraising look that made me blush from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair, “… you’re going to be magnificent! But,” he added, “I can’t start your training on the front porch.”