Page 1122 of One More Kiss

But all I heard was fluttering pages, and I quickly opened both my eyes to see the room not explode. The pages slowed their flipping and landed on the spell I wanted. The exact picture I’d gleaned from my spell-induced influx of information stared back at me, Asa’s red eyes peeking out of the gold mirror.

The working wasn’t exactly complicated, but the ingredients were numerous. On top of that, the damn thing required an unhealthy-for-me amount of blood. In the small script at the very bottom of the page was an incantation under the heading “Inverto.” To reverse.

A half-hysterical little laugh spilled out of my mouth. Man, I was never so glad I hadn’t snoozed through Latin class. It was bad enough I’d have to draw a sacred geometry circle into a planked floor just right or I’d kill us all, but at least now I didn’t have to figure out what to say.

Under Jeff’s tutelage, I got to work, pulling ingredients from the apothecary cabinet and measuring out what I was supposed to use. Honestly, it was a little like baking a cake. Well, if baking a cake involved dead animal parts, releasing a ghoul out into the world, and a fair amount of math.

Okay, so it was nothing like baking, and that analogy was going to haunt me anytime I tried to make some cupcakes.

Drawing the “circle” was where I really had trouble. Mostly because it wasn’t just a circle. It was some complicated mess of circles and triangles that had to be pointed in the right direction at the perfect degree, or something wouldn’t work right. It was a lot of pressure for a woman who only got a B-plus in geometry.

Jeff’s growls and yowls at me were not helping, either. “You are a college-educated professional brainiac.”

“Leave her alone, Jeff,” Asa growled. “I don’t see you drawing the circle anytime soon.” Solid burn since Jeff didn’t have opposable thumbs at present.

“Librarian.” I let out a sigh, answering Jeff. It wasn’t like he was wrong, exactly, but the clarification was necessary.

“Whatever. Use your giant brain to solve the problem. You need—”

I rolled my eyes before clamping a hand over his face so his grumpy kitty mouth couldn’t send me into a tailspin. “I need you to shut up for five seconds and let me work.”

Use my giant brain, he says. Like I haven’t been trying.And then it came to me.

I snagged a pencil and some twine to make an improvised compass. After that, it was a one-two snap to finish the circle. Now all I had to do was put Asa in the center of it, bleed into a cauldron, toss in some herbs, and try not to fuck up the Latin.

Easy-peasy.

Swallowing hard, I hefted Asa’s mirror and arranged it in place. Before I could leave him, though, Asa spoke.

“Thank you for doing this, Jasper,” he said, his gruff rumble of a voice doing very interesting things to my middle. “I won’t forget it. Not ever.”

His chocolaty eyes practically burned their way into me. Asa and I didn’t know each other very well, but he’d been nothing but kind to me. It was a refreshing change from Mitchell, who put everyone down to try and lift himself up. Granted, I figured I’d be sure to be nice to the person who was getting me out of stasis, too, but this felt different.

Asa’s expression was the picture of intensity, but underneath it was a vulnerability and a need that had never—not once—been directed at me at any point in my life. I had a feeling if someone were to have looked at me like that at eighteen, Mitchell MacMillan wouldn’t have even been a footnote in my history.

“Don’t mention it,” I whispered, trying not to smile or giggle like a schoolgirl at him.

His lips pulled into a wide grin, his dimple popping once again.

Seriously. Could impregnate an entire city block with that thing.

Reluctantly, I left him, getting to work on yanking him back to the land of the living. A small part of me worried he was just flirting with me to get what he wanted. An even smaller section of my brain screamed that he wouldn’t help us once he was out of the mirror.

Swallowing down those fears, I started tossing ingredients into the cauldron. A dash of galangal root, a pinch of cloves, some vetiver, and a little black pepper. All ingredients for separation. The only thing missing was my blood. Mercy’s blood.

I practically gulped before screwing up my courage enough to slice into my forearm. Sure, my thumb was already healed, as was the gash to my palm, but this was different. I practically gagged as blood bloomed over the wound, dripping into the cauldron faster than I thought it could.

Shakily, I muttered the spell, trying to get the pronunciation right before saying it for real. I was not prepared for everything to happen at once. One moment I was muttering in Latin, trying to make sure my syntax was right. The next, all the sconces brightened to blinding levels before exploding for the second time in an hour.

The attic was bathed in darkness for a single second before Asa’s mirror began to lift off the ground. Brilliant blue light radiated from the glass, growing so bright it was as if the sun had decided to take up residence in my attic. Shielding my eyes, I almost missed it when the giant mirror began to spin in a tight circle as if it weighed nothing.

Then, just like the sconces had done before it, the mirror’s light grew even brighter before it, too, exploded in a maelstrom of glass. Fear clawed up my throat in that solitary moment, and then I heard the resounding thump of a pair of booted feet landing on the wooden floor.

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