Page 20 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

“This is plenty. We can get the hulls off here, I guess.”

He shook his head. “Better not. You’ll want to wear gloves, or you’ll get horrible stains on your hands. Trust me.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“The manor where I spent my childhood had black walnut trees. I used to use the hulls to make my own ink.”

“Oh, the manor, huh?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “You didn’t have servants to do that sort of stuff for you?”

Gabriel looked down at the walnuts he’d gathered. “I liked doing it myself,” he said. Something told me that if he was capable of blushing, his cheeks would be dusted with pink.

“Lucky for me, I guess,” I said. “Otherwise I’d wind up with subpar nuts and stained hands.”

“We can’t have that,” Gabriel said seriously.

I snorted and grabbed one of the enchanted cloth bags I kept in my jacket pocket for evidence. “Here,” I said. “Drop those in here before you stretch out your sweater.”

We kept following the path Mrs. Pumpernickel had sketched out for us, but now, Gabriel had the map in one hand, and a bag of walnuts in the other. Luckily, our next stop was pretty hard to miss if you knew what to look for. The mouth of the cave was a large, triangular gash in a rock face, surrounded by plush, vibrant moss.

“Let me lead the way,” Gabriel said. “My night vision is far better than yours.”

“Not gonna be an issue,” I said. “Follow me.”

I led him into the cave. It narrowed into a tight corridor, then opened abruptly into a large, cavernous space. Gabriel gasped when he saw it.

The roof of the cave was covered with pale blue lights, illuminating trailing threads that looked as though they were strung with diamonds. It was as if the Milky Way had decided to take a break from the night sky to paint itself across the cavern.

“They’re beautiful,” Gabriel murmured. He was staring up at it with an expression of open, childish delight, and the blue light made him look ethereal. He reached out to touch one of the gleaming threads that hung down, but I put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“You really don’t want to touch that,” I said. “It’s pretty, but it’s bug vomit.”

“Good to know,” he said distantly. “They’re glow worms, aren’t they? The lights, I mean. Are you going to have to kill them?”

“I’m not going to kill them,” I told him, a little surprised that he cared about the lives of bugs. “They won’t even notice I’m doing anything.”

I pulled out a small bottle, and murmured a few words, twisting my finger in a pattern around the opening. Pale wisps of blue light curled through the air and filled it up. The glass warmed very slightly, and I closed the lid tightly.

“We’ve got what we need,” I said. “And now we’ve got a ritual to do.”

My apartment’s kitchen was small, and with two people in it, it was a little cramped. Gabriel stood by the sink, using a meat tenderizer that had been in the back of a drawer when I moved in to get the hulls off the black walnuts. He was going about the task with absolute focus, and there was a softening at the corners of his eyes and mouth that I was pretty sure meant he was enjoying himself. I’d given him the only pair of rubber gloves I had—bright purple ones I used to wash dishes.

“Ah, the color of royalty. And they’ll bring out my eyes,” he’d said mildly when I’d handed them over. I was a little annoyed at how well he managed to make them look like a fashion statement.

The ritual was a fiddly process, closer to potion-making than I usually got, but I followed the steps carefully. I had my cauldron bubbling away on the stove and added the ingredients according to the book propped open on the counter. The cauldron was, if you wanted to be technical about it, a Dutch oven, but it was good to be able to multitask, and I did a lot of braising and stews in the cooler months.

“I think we’re ready,” I said. “Are the hulls good to go?”

Gabriel nodded while picking up one of the now-mushed green balls. It smelled earthy and weirdly medicinal, with just a hint of citrus. “I may have gone slightly overboard,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t sure how many you’d need.”

“According to the book, we need… Uh.” I sighed. This was why I hated working with older spell books. “‘Hulls of the wall-nut, such as may be used for the production to ink, weighing the same as nine wrens, which is known by some by the name of kinglet.’”

Gabriel stared down at the book, then up at me. “That seems… unhelpful.”

After I’d Googled how much wrens weighed and measured out ninety grams of walnut hulls on my kitchen scale, we were actually ready to start. I read out the chant from the book once, twice, three times, then added in the walnut hulls. The liquid in the pot turned a dark brown.

“Did it work?” Gabriel asked, his voice hushed.

“I don’t kn—” I started, then all the breath left my body in a rush as a torrent of magic cascaded into me. My vision went white, and I couldn’t feel my body. It was too small and insignificant to even be recognized by what I’d just tapped into. I was a tiny leaf being swept along by a raging torrent. I was everywhere and nowhere.

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