Trial by Fire (Covencraft Book 1) Read Free

years, Paris?” she said sarcastically. “You sound like you’re ancient when I know for a fact you’re only in your thirties.”
    “There’s more to age than years.”
    “Yes, there is,” she agreed. “And once you’ve reached one hundred you can start lecturing me on age. But until then, you would do well to listen to your elders, young boy.”
    He wanted to laugh. Only Hannah could still call him a young boy and make it sound loving and chiding at the same time.
    “Very well, Hannah.”
    “Go find us our lost witch, Paris. Bring her home.”
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    Paris examined the locator spells researched by Callie and he pulled out the bits and pieces he liked, crafting them into a new spell of his own.
    “Ugh, how do you do that?” Callie bemoaned, watching him as he jotted down the few lines he wanted from each spell.
    His lips quirked, “Magic.”
    “Har-dee-har,” she deadpanned, leaning over the table slightly, her long, fine blond hair slipping over her shoulder and swinging out in front of her. She tossed it back with an absent flick. “Seriously, I’d have to try each one, see how I could ply them, if they worked, and then spend the next four days trying to cobble something together that still wouldn't be half as effective.”
    “I think you’re a very fine spell-crafter,” he murmured, not looking up at her as he perused his notes. He absently made a move to stick the tip of his pen in his mouth but Callie deftly snatched it out of his hands.
    “That’s a gross habit and it’s been gross since we were six.”
    He plucked his pen back from her hands. “It’s my pen.”
    She appeared to consider something, perhaps a rude gesture, but she simply jerked her chin slightly at the spell he was tweaking. “How accurate do you think it will be?”
    Paris looked over his words and ingredients and weighed them in his mind. He’d always had excellent instincts when it came to magic. He knew some people thought that his mother, as Coven Leader before him, had perhaps given him some extra books or knowledge that she had - things the rest of the coven didn’t have access to.
    He supposed in some way they were right. He’d had his mother to watch as she crafted spells. He couldn’t think of anything else that would have taught him as well as watching her. She’d had a deft touch, a fine control. Looking through some of her spell-books and grimoires now, he was amazed at what she could do. There were spells in her books he didn’t think any other witch on earth could understand, let alone cast, including himself.
    He pushed those thoughts of his mother from his mind before he became too distracted. Knowing the spell-casting part of his kitchen nearly as well as hers, Callie helped him gather the ingredients he needed, setting them down on the counter next to his notes and then stepping back out of his space while he worked. She crossed over to his kitchen table and unfolded the oversized paper map she’d picked up from the travel agent, smoothing it down and weighting it with four paperweights Paris picked from his spell-chest. She placed one at each of the directional points then quietly took a place just outside the kitchen, off to the side, not wanting her energy to interfere with his.
    He rolled up his shirt sleeves and only glanced once more at his notes before setting to work. He didn’t so much measure the ingredients as intuit the amounts he wanted, allowing the scents to overlap as he breathed them in deep. The aroma of each spell was always unique but somehow still always smelled familiar and recognizable to him. When Paris was younger, he thought that it was his mother’s perfume. As a child, he would sit on the floor next to her feet, or if he was very quiet, she’d pop him up on the counter while she worked. It wasn’t until he started his spell-craft classes in middle school that he recognized his mother’s “perfume” as the ingredients she often worked with - sage,