"Get the hell out of my house, sorcerer."

He gathered his papers. "I understand you've had a difficult day. While we must go over this list soon, it's not necessary to do so immediately. My advice would be to rest. If you'll allow me to listen to your telephone messages, I can return calls from the media, after which we can review this list-"

I grabbed the paper from his hands and ripped it in two.

"If that makes you feel better, by all means, go ahead." he said. "I have copies. I'll leave you a new one. Please add any concerns that may have escaped my-"

"I am not going through any list. You are not my lawyer. Want to know when I'd hire a sorcerer to represent me? Ten minutes after being hit by a transport and declared a vegetable. Until then, scram."

"Scram?" His eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch.

"Leave. Go. Get lost. Beat it. Take your pick. Just take it with you."

He nodded and returned to his writing.

"Listen," I said. "Maybe I'm not making myself clear-"

"You are." He finished his note, then put the papers into his satchel and laid a card on the table. "In the event that you reconsider-or experience an unfortunate collision with a large trucking conveyance-I can be reached at my cell number."

I waited until he was gone, then cast fresh lock spells at all the doors and vowed never again to answer the bell. At least not for a few days.

After Cortez left, Savannah decided to watch TV, so I slipped downstairs for some spell-casting. After what happened last night I could hardly let my neighbors catch me sneaking into the woods to cast spells. The forest is my preferred location for spell practice. Not only does nature provide peace and solitude, but something about the very primordiality of it seems to provide an energy of its own. From the earliest times, shamans and spell-casters have trekked into the forest or the desert or the tundra to reconnect with their powers. We need to. I can't explain it any better than that.

My mother taught me to spell-cast out-of-doors. Yet, as strongly as she believed in it, she was never able to impose that belief on the Coven. For several generations now the Coven has taught its children to practice indoors, preferably in a locked room with no windows. By forcing neophytes into locked rooms, it seems to me that they reinforce the idea that we are doing something wrong, something shameful.

That idea is also reinforced in neophytes by the way the Coven handles their first menses ceremony. First menses marks the passage into true witchhood, when a witch comes into her full powers. A witch's abilities increase automatically, but she must also undergo a ceremony on the eighth day, which fully releases her powers. Skip the ceremony and you forever forfeit that extra power. The Coven's stance on this was that if a mother wished her daughter to go through the ceremony, she had to find the ingredients, study the rituals, and perform them herself. Understandably, few did. My mother had performed it for me, though, and when the time came, I would do the same for Savannah.

I headed down to the basement. It's a large, unfinished single room that stretches the length of the bungalow. The far corner, under Savannah's bedroom, was the spot she'd staked out for her art studio. So far, I'd only thrown down an area rug for it, but eventually I planned to finish it into a separate room for her.

I won't say I understand Savannah's art. Her dark-themed paintings and cartoons tend toward the macabre. When her choice of theme began to worry me last fall, I talked to Jeremy Danvers, the werewolf Pack Alpha, who's the only artist I know. He looked at her work and told me not to worry about it. In that, I trust his judgment, and I appreciate the encouragement and help he's been giving Savannah.

This past year has probably been a nightmare for Savannah, and she's been so strong about it that sometimes that very strength worries me. Perhaps here, on canvases covered with angry splotches of crimson and black, she finds an outlet for her pain and, if so, then I must not interfere, however strong the temptation.

When I spell-cast in the basement, I do it in the laundry area, right near the bottom of the steps. So, I settled myself on the floor, then laid the grimoire before me and leafed through the yellowed pages. I had two such spell-books, ancient and ripe with the stink of age, a smell that was somehow simultaneously repulsive and inviting. These did not contain Coven-sanctioned spells. Yet they were Coven property.

That might seem like the Coven was asking for trouble, having these books around where any rebellious young witch could get hold of them. But the Coven wasn't worried about that. Why? Because, according to them, the spells didn't work. And, I fear, after three years of tinkering with them, that they were mostly right.

Of the sixty-six spells contained in these tomes, I'd managed to successfully cast only four, including a fireball spell. Admittedly, with my fire phobia, I'd been nervous about the fireball spell, but that very fear made it all the more alluring, and made me all the more proud of myself when I'd mastered it. That bolstered my determination to learn the rest, convinced me that all I needed to do was find the right technique.

Yet, in the ensuing two years, only one other spell had showed any sign that it might work. Sometimes I wondered if the Coven was right, that these were false grimoires, passed down only as historical oddities. Still, I could not put the books aside. There was so much magic in here, magic of true power-elemental spells, conjuring spells, spells whose meaning I couldn't even decipher. This was what witch magic should be, what I wanted it to be..

I worked on the wind spell Savannah had seen mentioned in my practice journal. That was the spell that had shown signs it might eventually work. It was actually a spell to "wind" a person. That is, to deprive someone of oxygen. A lethal spell, yes, but my experience in the compound last year had taught me that I needed at least one lethal spell in my repertoire, a spell of last resort. Now, with Leah in town, I needed this spell more than ever, but the added determination didn't help. I still couldn't cast it.

After thirty minutes, I gave up. Knowing Savannah was alone upstairs, even if she was protected by security spells, played havoc with my concentration.

Savannah was watching television in the living room. I paused in the doorway, wondering what she could have found to watch on a Saturday afternoon. At first, I thought it was a soap opera. The woman filling the screen certainly looked like a soap opera actress-a sultry redhead in her late thirties who'd been outfitted in glasses and an upswept hairdo in a laughable attempt to make her look scholarly.

When the camera pulled back, I saw that she was walking through an audience with a mike clipped to her blouse, and revised my assessment. An infomercial. No one smiled that much unless they were selling something. From the way she was working the crowd, it almost looked like a religious revival. I caught a few sentences and realized she was selling a different kind of spiritual reassurance.

"I'm getting an older male," the woman said. "Like a father figure, but not your father. An uncle, maybe a family friend."

"Oh, please," I said. "How can you watch this crap?"

"It's not crap," Savannah said. "This is Jaime Vegas. She's the best."

"It's a con, Savannah. A trick."

"No, it's not. She can really talk to the dead. There's this other guy who does it, but Jaime's way better."

A commercial came on. Savannah picked up the remote and fast-forwarded.

"You have it on tape?" I said.

"Sure. Jaime doesn't have her own TV show. She says she prefers traveling around, meeting people, but The Keni Bales Show has her on every month and I tape it."