Not On My Patch: a Young Wizards Hallowe'en Story by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

out to start redrafting the spell, pulling parts of the spell diagram into other configurations. One big circle, three chord lines, a small external power-control circle at the tangent point. Three inclusions. Power envelope… radius of effect… expansion room for the intention statements… Once again she found herself being glad she’d spent so much time on spell construction these last couple of months: it was getting a lot easier to build spells on the fly when the Manual didn’t have exactly what you needed. But that module, yeah, that’ll work, plug that in here. And that one—
    She concentrated hard on ignoring the chaos going on around her and looked the spell over carefully, checking the language of it and the way it was arranged. Every spell was about persuasion: this one was about helping Jackie remember all that sun, and more than that, the urge toward life that she’d picked up from it, the desire to get it right and be all you could even if that was just being a pumpkin. This is as good as it gets in the time we have, she thought at last. So let’s see what kind of result this produces. She signed the spell with her name in the Speech and tied it into closed-and-ready mode with the Wizard’s Knot: the whole long Speech-statement, from invocation to incitation, would read itself and execute when Nita pronounced the trigger word. “Kit! Two seconds to check me on this?”
    He knocked down one more zombie while looking the diagram over. “Looks good, better get on with it—!”
    And he was right, because the zombies were pressing in closer and closer all the time. “So here we go,” Nita said, plucking the bright-burning words and geometrical figures of the spell out of the air and crumpling them together into a little tight-packed ball. She got down beside Jackie, pulled his lid off, and popped the spell inside him, pushing it down against the orange flesh inside and feeling the spell’s short-range power conduit sink in and hook up. The light of the spell shone out through his eyes. How’s that? You feel okay?
    Yes. And none of this would be working this way if you hadn’t scooped out my insides, would it? the pumpkin said.
    Nita nodded, feeling a sudden rush of a weird mixture of satisfaction and excitement: a sense of absolutely being part of a plan, not just making one—a sense of things falling right into place, and of being exactly in the right place at the right time. Nita had heard other wizards call this serendipitous effect “the Big Sync”, and talk about how much fun it could be. Now she grinned, entirely seeing the point. “Okay,” she said. “Kit? Ready when you three are!”
    Kit caught Ronan’s and Dairine’s eyes and started speaking under his breath in the Speech. Nita could feel him laying out the intangible power conduits that would feed the spell power through her. It’ll only take them a few seconds to get hooked up—
    She turned her attention back to the tattered, rotted-looking shapes lurching toward them. “Willing followers of the Fallen,” she said, pulling up one of the shortest of the formal demon-management notifications, “be warned by me! We are on the business of the Powers that Be, and by Their power vested in us, unless you disperse forthwith to your own places, we will utterly undo and abolish you!”
    The zombies paused—
    And kept coming.
    “Last warning, you guys!” Nita said, holding Jackie up. “I’ve got a pumpkin, and I’m not afraid to use it!”
    There was another slight pause—and then a sound that if possible made Nita angrier than before: zombie laughter, the animating yangshi demons making fun of her. They kept on coming.
    That’s it, Nita thought. Let’s rumble! To Jackie she said silently, Are you absolutely sure you’re up for this?
    Up for this? I was grown for this!
    Nita nodded. “Okay,” she said, and lifted Jackie high. “See you on the other side!”
    And she took a large breath, said the last word of the spell