Free Familiarity Breeds Witchcraft by Nora Lee

mind and focused her magic.
    As a direct descendant of Emilia Ash, carrying traces of her blood and power, she might have more success restoring the structure than the rest of the coven. Of course, she forgot to consider the fact that her sister, also a blood Ash, had participated in the previous failed rituals.  
    She pressed her palms flat against the warm earth as she leaned back, supporting her stretched-out form with the strength of her arms as she drew power from the ground below her. Sunlight caused her to see red on the backs of her closed lids.
    Though she was a techno-witch, she only needed to draw on her most basic magic skills to see the lines of power flowing throughout Secret Hallow.
    It was a beautiful thing, the magic of the village. A spiderweb that linked herself with the coven, the Samhain Grove, the Elder Tree, and the world outside. It sparkled in her mind like cascading fireflies.
    “Let’s see what we can do,” Gemma murmured to herself.
    She tapped into her specialty: summoning and generating technology.
    Power radiated out from her toward the ruins. In her mind she saw the progress of the myriad decaying wires dangling within the crumbling wall remnants as they twisted and stretched, reforming into complete pieces before reconnecting to the various junction boxes, switches, and outlets. Any magical practitioner needed to maintain the delicate balance between spells and their specialized powers; since Gemma had an affinity for all things wired she did better with this part of the reconstruction than she would with the restoration of the foundation, walls, and roof.  
    She hummed under her breath to help her workings. Since she hadn’t set up any formal circles or supplies, she needed all the help she could get. A theory nagged at the back of her mind that the coven’s previous failure may have been due to their too-fussy castings, so she tried hard not to become too rigid with her own working. While the group had been having fun during breaks, they hadn’t seemed to enjoy the actual spell work, so any progress they’d made may have been too brittle to stand firm. She hoped channeling joy into her own spells might produce a different outcome.
    Gemma felt tendrils throughout the Academy coming together, almost as though she were touching every part of the building with her bare hands, supporting wires with little effort on her part.
    She sensed definite progress and felt if she could just get in just a little deeper…a little bit further…she’d reach a point where the entire place returned to the glory of its’ heyday without a hitch.
    She felt the exact instant things started to break down.  
    As she approached the peak of her spell work, she sensed holes in the building where wiring and other vitals pieces hadn’t reconnected, the gaps so large they prevented the building from attaining structural integrity. She never should have attempted such a big job on her own. Of course, she didn’t come to that realization until the structure once more began to collapse.
    Her extremities trembled with exertion as she tried to push beyond her impending failure.
    The few walls she’d reconstructed fell in with a whooshing sound and a cloud of dust.
    With a sigh, she refocused on her own body, the remnants of magic returning to her. She felt alone with the loss of connection to the powers of the outside world.
    To her regret, she hadn’t done any better than the rest of the coven.
    “Shame,” she said aloud as she got up, dusting off her hands and knees. She shook the dust out of her skirts and straightened her hair. A fine sheen of sweat covered her from head to toe from her exertions. When she got home, she’d need to shower and do a load of laundry, something she hadn’t done in a few days. She’d been too caught up in the idea of rebuilding the school to think about her personal hygiene.
    She pulled out her phone and turned up the brightness so she could see the screen out in the