Lessons After Dark by Isabel Cooper

Author:Isabel Cooper [Cooper, Isabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, Fiction, General, Historical, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781402264412
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Honestly, Olivia wasn’t sure she was much more pleased than Gareth about what lay ahead. Curious about the forest, yes. She would eagerly have read a book on the topic or listened to any number of lectures. Attempting to work magic there herself was, at best, something of a mixed pleasure, particularly considering what had happened with Michael.

Nothing she’d heard had mentioned anyone getting hurt, but nobody had been poking at the place. And there had been those missing children.

Violet’s grandmother had probably made those up. If she hadn’t, they’d gone missing a long time ago. And missing wasn’t exactly the same as hurt…or killed.

Nonetheless, when Olivia spotted a clear patch just past the fork in the path, her emotions were decidedly mixed, and there was far more wariness in them than excitement. Not so for Charlotte, who stared with avid interest as Olivia stepped forward and began drawing her circle in the dirt.

Neither she nor Gareth spoke. Even the hedgehog seemed to have fallen silent, and it was too late in the year for many birds to sing. Olivia told herself the quiet wasn’t at all that unnerving and turned her attention to the task at hand.

The shape of the circle came first, a wide sweep with the wand. She didn’t get it as exact as she could have done indoors, another reason to be nervous, as if she needed more, but she thought it would serve. She was using the first part of a minor warding spell, the sort she’d used to protect herself from pickpockets in London, and those spells were generally rather gradual and undramatic.

She took a deep breath and drew another circle inside the first. Now a shiver ran down her spine. Power, or just nerves?

Olivia knelt inside the double circle. The plea came first, power for protection against those who would work by deceit and stealth. She reached out with the wand, drawing the first few symbols…

A rush of power streamed up her arm, as if she’d plunged to the shoulder into a warm bath. Olivia caught her breath, paused for a second, and then slowly kept writing.

As happened at such times, the world around her shifted. She could see the things of the earth: the trees, the ground, Gareth and Charlotte, the hedgehog, but she could see the power inside them too, and the true nature that lay under their physical forms. Usually, in the past, that sight had been only a faint translucence, a dim, many-colored fire inside everything.

Now the fire overwhelmed the forms. The trees were rays of steady light, green and brown mingling. Charlotte was a brighter apple green that shifted and flickered, the hedgehog in her lap aswirl with dark green and white and gold. And Gareth was a shimmering bronze. Olivia couldn’t even make out features, just vaguely shaped bits of light.

She realized, then, the world she saw was only one of many.

There were layers here, like an onion, or maybe like sheets of paper in a book.

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