Free Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) by Joshua Bader Page B

concentrate on other details, like staying alive. For a summoning, I wanted something solid, permanent. Unfortunately, even temporary methods of marking a circle could be rough on rented hotel room carpet. I didn’t want to have to apologize to the cleaning staff as they vacuumed up a ring of salt or sand, so I picked up a seven- by-seven roll of vinyl flooring and a can of silver paint. While my circle dried, I went out to an early dinner. I really could get spoiled by this whole regular eating out thing. On the road, my idea of supper was four slices of bread and a couple lumps of peanut butter.
    The vinyl mat didn’t want to lie flat, so I drafted the room’s furniture into service. The bed wouldn’t budge, so I put the table upside down on the mattress, while my ritual area occupied its section of floor space, held in place by two chairs, a lamp, and the nightstand. I needed to be careful how I moved, but I thought I had left enough room to work with.
    Taking a deep breath, I tried to let my anxiety roll out of me with the exhale, then began. If this worked, the portable circle would be reusable, but the rest of the summoning markings would need to go. I used a set of black, red, blue, and green dry erase markers to trace my designs on to the mat. The outer circle would contain the entire spell, but a square, second circle, and a pair of intersecting triangles would help me trap the spirit, if anything actually showed up.
    I’ve used fairies to help with magic before, invoking certain names and rhymes to help fuel my spells. This approach seemed to work reasonably well. I’d seen them before too, as colored aura spheres of light just outside the focus of my vision. I believed in fairies, as much as anyone could…but I’d never met one. My assumption was that they operated on a different frequency of reality, a parallel dimension. Maybe they were here a long time ago, but they’d retreated from the world with the rise of man. It was a nice, safe theory that allowed me to believe without wondering why I’d never really interacted with one.
    Duchess inadvertently challenged that. If fae and humans could have kids, that meant they could have sex, right? That implied touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste: this dimension. I mean, intercourse is not a parallel dimension sort of activity, though I’ve heard women accuse men of treating it that way. So if a fairy and a human had a child together, even if it was generations ago, that meant that the fae could materialize in this world, if they wanted to. If I was going to be a personal wizard for one of the world’s most powerful men, with fae court emissary in the job description, I wanted to be able to say I had actually met a fairy face to face. If I was really lucky, I could find one that knew a little about wendigoes, too.
    The lines in place, I set a candle at the point of each triangle. I picked up the page I had torn loose from the encyclopedia, and set it down dead in the center. It had taken me a bit to select what kind of fairy I wanted to meet. I needed a spirit guide with insider knowledge of wendigoes, but a fae with that level of power was best saved for after I had a little practice. The pookas had been helpful in past luck and illusion workings, but I was not sure I wanted a conversation with one. Much of their mystical power was based on a mythic reputation for trickery, hyperactivity, and creativity. Trolls and elemental sprites seemed like a bad idea in a confined space that didn’t belong to me. The sidhe were amazingly beautiful, but equally fearsome in their power. Calling out the heavyweight champs of the fey realm for my first bout would not be smart, even by amateur wizard standards of stupid.
    The picture I settled on was a group portrait of thirteen furry creatures with bigger hands than heads, using wrenches, hammers, and a crowbar on the rear axle of a wooden carriage. Gremlins were notorious mischief spirits, but were pretty low in the fairy