Page 35 of Justice & Liberty

I headed down into the basement, carrying the book with me. I had all the ingredients for the spell, though I was going to have to look into how to replenish things like “unicorn hair,” which did look like something that might sprout from a mythical beast’s head—iridescent and shiny, with the texture of very fine hairs. I hadn’t been a horse girl as a teen, but I was pretty sure horse hair wasn’t supposed to be that fine and soft.

The process was simple enough: gather ingredients, sit in circle, read spell—just like when I’d made the tea. Seemed almost impossible to mess up, in fact.

I measured everything I needed into a bowl as the spell said to do, then rolled the rug to one side, uncovering the pentacle on the floor. The bowl went in the middle of the circle, and then lit candles at the points, where there were already bits of wax clearly used to anchor previous candles.

I was careful as I went, measuring the ingredients to the gram with the scale, and putting the candles in precisely the right spots. Then I sat myself in the circle with the bowl and book in front of me, and started.

Unlike the one for the tea, this spell was in Latin, so I made good use of my college Latin skills to pronounce the words of the spell correctly. Thank goodness for Latin classes. I didn’t remember it all well enough to speak the language, soI didn’t know what half of it meant, but I remembered enough to get the pronunciation right.

As I read the last sentence, the bowl of ingredients seemed to spontaneously—and without heat—combust, filling the room with white smoke.

That was when I realized that nowhere had the spell required me to say whose disembodied spirit I was trying to summon. Sure, I’d had Mom fixed in my mind the whole time, but there hadn’t been a place to add her name or anything. I thought maybe the spell had been intended to summon a parent, since “custos” had been in the words, which I knew was Latin for...sort of, guardian. It was the root of the words custody or custodian. It was about caring for a person.

That would have been Mom, right?

Was the spell only for summoning the ghosts of dead parents? That seemed weird.

I coughed as I inhaled a mouthful of smoke, but...was it even smoke? It didn’t burn my lungs, just felt more heavy and wet, like I was walking through a fog bank. I waved a hand in front of myself, trying to dissipate it, then paused, wondering if that would screw up the spell.

Too late for that, I realized as the fog cleared in the next few seconds, leaving me questioning whether I’d imagined it all up entirely.

Except no, the smoke had definitely been there, and the bowl was now empty.

Also, apparently I’d already screwed up the whole spell entirely.

Because that was not my mother. That...was a transparent teenage boy. He was looking around, confused, and when his eyes finally found me, his brows shot up. “Who are you?”

“Who am I? Who are you? You were supposed to be my mother.”

He looked down at himself, as though expecting to have morphed into a middle-aged woman, then shook his head. “Obviously not.”

Obviously.

He was...well, it was weird. He looked a lot like most goth teenagers in my experience. Wearing baggy black jeans with a freaking wallet chain and a loose black Nirvana T-shirt, a lip ring in his bottom lip, his hair clearly dyed blue-black rather than naturally that color, since his eyebrows were some lighter shade—probably dishwater blond, but light enough that it was hard to tell. But something about the shaggy cut of his hair was odd. Like...well, unstylish, sort of. Old-fashioned?

I hesitated to call it that, since it wasn’t like he looked like an extra from Grease with a giant pompadour or something. On the other hand, that kind of thing had come back into style, hadn’t it?

I didn’t really know men’s hairstyles all that well.

Heck, I didn’t know women’s hairstyles. I just trimmed my split ends sometimes and that was it. So maybe I was wrong.

It was always popular to like Nirvana—it had been since before I was born.

I sighed, dragging my thoughts back to the actual situation. “I’m Jaycie. Who are you?”

He struck a defiant pose, hands on hips, and looked at me for a moment, before giving a sigh. That was weird. He was translucent. Transparent? What was the difference? Anyway, he definitely didn’t have lungs, and didn’t need to be sighing.

“Deez,” he finally said.

I lifted a brow and felt very much like my own mother in that moment. “Deez? Deez. Yeah, right. Don’t get me wrong,my name is fucking Justice Chesapeake Jones, I have all the sympathy for a weird name, but your name is not Deez Nuts.”

His expression went slightly disappointed, but then sly. “Okay, fine. It’s Dez.”

“Not Seymour Butts? Mike Hawk?”

He laughed at that and shook his head. “No, it’s really Dez. Desmond, but who the hell wants to be called that?”

“That’s...fair. It’s why people call me Jaycie. Not that Justice bothers me, but still, awkward.”

---