Avoiding Alpha (Alpha Girl #2)

I glanced down at the papers. They were photocopies of the spell book. When I looked up at him sharply, he said, “Just for now. We can destroy them after if you want. But we each needed to know what the steps are.”

That was reasonable. “Fine.”

“Okay, so we’re here.” He pointed at the sheet. “The next step is to break that one up,” he pointed to the brownish-yellow stuff on the cookie sheet. “When it’s in smaller pieces, you can use the mortar and pestle to grind it.” He pointed to the large black stone on the table. “It’s a pain, but you have more control over the powder with it, and if we use a blender, the friction causes heat which would mess the whole thing up. Once that’s done, we add the blood and minced feather.”

“Gross.” I took the cookie sheet to the next table over and started pounding at the sheet of solid potion. Whatever it was, the stuff was as hard as granite. A few more whacks and a jagged crack formed. After that, a couple more whacks and it shattered into manageable chunks. I read through the steps in the spell. It needed to be as fine as powdered sugar.

This was going to take a while.

Working in circular motion to break the pieces faster, I separated out sections in the mortar and did a little at a time. It was boring as hell, but we had to get this right.

By the time the consistency was powdered sugar-like, I was sweating. I found a knife in the supply closet, and started mincing the feathers. The spell said that they had to be finely diced, but not grain-like. I got to chopping. I rocked the knife back and forth on the table and found the motion to be surprisingly soothing. When the little bits seemed small enough, I added them in.

The book said it needed three stirs, counter-clockwise.

That done, I moved onto the next step. The blood.

I stared at the jar. I didn’t like it. Not one bit.

I carefully unscrewed the lid and looked down at the paper again. “Christ. We need an eighth of a cup of this stuff?”

Chris paused from the green thing that he was breaking up to check his copy. “Yup. You got something to measure it?”

“Yeah.” I took a breath and focused on happy thoughts, even if the blood made me a little queasy. I carefully measured it—not wanting to spill any on myself—and poured it into a glass pyrex, stirring to mix the elements together until it formed a thick paste, and then stopped stirring. Over-stirring would nullify the mixture. “This looks really foul.”

“Good thing you don’t have to eat it,” Chris said.

I made a gagging sound and the guys cracked up.

“Cool. I’ll take care of the last step on this one. I think this other step needs you to give it some of your juju.”

Sounded awesome. I didn’t want to be around this sludge more than I had to be.

Adrian brought over two beakers. One had little green pieces that looked like bits of dried leaves. The other was the diced up stuff that had been on the other cookie sheet—it was now tiny little bits of black and white that looked like pencil shavings. “Mix these two with the ashes.” He handed me another beaker. “Put it in here, teaspoon by teaspoon. First, a spoonful of the green stuff. Then, a teaspoon of ash. After that, white and black shavings. Then, shavings, ash, green. Green, ash, shavings. Got it?”

Maybe not, but I had it on my copies. “We’re at this part?” I pointed to the step.

Adrian nodded. “Exactly.”

“Got it.” I started the process, measuring everything out. Each time I measured and mixed, I tried to think of a happy memory with Meredith. Her teaching me moves in Martial Arts. Laughing at night before bed. Having a Buffy marathon in her room.

The beaker was nearly full when Dastien arrived. He wore his usual dark jeans, but his T-shirt made me laugh. It had a large Above and Beyond Group Therapy logo across the front. I’d gotten it for him last week. “Cool shirt,” I said.

He caught a nose pin that Chris threw his way. “This cute chick got it for me.” He winked at me, and plugged his nose. There was nothing sexy about a guy wearing a clothes pin, but the way he walked, so confidently, without making a sound, he almost made it work. Almost, but not quite.

I turned to see what the other guys were doing. Adrian was shaving a block of what looked like white soap with a peeler into the nasty blood mixture. It looked like curls of Parmesan cheese floating in upchuck.

Chris was slowly pouring a blue gelatinous mess into a vial through a glass funnel. It was barely moving. Sloping down the funnel little bit by little bit.

“Do you want help pouring that? I could mush it—”