Free The Conjuring Glass by Brian Knight Page A

words or incantations. Penny didn’t think these were spells, only crude manifestations of will. Potions and fancy words would come later, if at all, she guessed.
    Why guess when we can check ?
    “Zoe, come here,” Penny said, taking a seat on a boulder by the dead fire pit and picking up the book again. It had closed itself while they practiced, and Penny didn’t need to try the cover to know it wouldn’t open.
    Zoe, who had been using the wand like a leaf blower, sending the cover of dead and rotting leaves off the ground of the hollow and under the curtain of low ‐ hanging willow limbs, turned to Penny. When her concentration broke, the wind blowing from the wand tip died.
    “What?” she asked, trotting to Penny’s side.
    “Let’s see if there’s anything new.”
    Zoe brightened at the suggestion, and tapped the Phoenix coin inlaid in the leather cover. The book’s cover sprang open, and Penny thumbed the first few pages over to the first blank page.
    Zoe tapped it without hesitation, and her grin widened. She pressed the wand into Penny’s waiting hand and Penny tapped the page.
    Print spread across the page, not the weird pictures and runes, but neat and crisp handwritten English. She tapped the next page, and more text appeared across the top of the page. Beneath the text several illustrations appeared. They looked to Penny like pictures in an instruction manual. She flipped the page and tapped the next.
    “Nothing on this one,” she said, a little disappointed, and passed the wand back to Zoe so she could read the second new page.
    Zoe tapped it with the wand tip and read, taking several long moments to digest it. Her anticipatory grin wilted, became a frown. Finally, she groaned and handed the book back to Penny.
    Penny scanned the first new page, skimming over what appeared to be a few more spells, and an illustration of a cup like the one they found with the book. Finding nothing there to frown about, she moved to the second page.
    She read it three times, very slowly, before looking up from the page with a sinking feeling of disappointment.
    “Magic circle,” she said. “We have to make a magic circle before it’ll show us more.”
    Scanning back to the illustration of the cup, rereading the instructions below it, she saw that the book told them how to make the magic circle. It sounded easy, and everything they needed was here, except for one thing.
    The one thing they needed to move forward in their learning, neither girl knew how to find.
    The book said there must be at least three to start the magic circle, and they were only two.
    They needed to find someone like them, someone who had a talent for magic.
    They needed another friend.
    Questions.
    The girls had a hundred of them.
    Penny and Zoe sat across from each other on the ground next to the dead fire pit, a reluctant Ronan resting on his haunches between them.
    He turned his face from one to the other, then back again, and they fired questions without pause, determined to get them all out.
    “This feels like an ambush,” he’d said, and he had been right.
    “How long have you been here?” Penny asked.
    “How long have The Phoenix Girls been here?” Zoe fired her question a second later, before Ronan had a chance to even consider Penny’s.
    “Why doesn’t everyone know about this place?” Penny asked, crossing her arms and leaning closer to Ronan with an inquisitorial eyebrow arched.
    For the past few days Penny and Zoe had spent every possible minute at Aurora Hollow, and whenever Ronan came out to watch them practice, the questions began. At first they were hesitant, almost shy. But the more Ronan didn’t answer, the bolder they became, until finally Ronan emerged from the solitude of his cave one morning to find them simply standing on the other side of the creek, waiting for him. The wand and book were still locked in their chest.
    “Why are we the only ones who can see you?” Zoe asked.
    “Enough questions,” Ronan