She’d been dancing around a lot as she fought, but now she made her way hurriedly back to where she’d put Jackie down, and stood next to him. “As soon as we see if this works!” she said. “Buy me a couple of minutes, okay? And then I’m going to need you guys to feed me power.”
Kit nodded, got Ronan’s and Dairine’s attention, and they formed a loose triangle with Nita at the center. Much as she would rather not have done so, she closed her eyes so she could better see the spell she was going to be building in her head.
She was furious, but right now that was a useful dividend, and Nita knew how to make that work for her: she let the feeling build. It’s not bad enough we have to deal with the Lone Power while we’re on active errantry, but it comes after us when we’re just having a little off time? This sucks. She scowled. This is not how I had my evening planned! A little candy, a little fun walking around and seeing everybody’s costumes and enjoying being dressed up ourselves. And then a little private time with Kit out in the quiet and the dark, just a little time during which the two of them were for a change not saving the world … Or blowing up zombies!
But instead, what do I get? I’m part of the evening’s entertainment! Nita could just imagine the Lone Power sitting somewhere comfy, in a big black armchair or something, with its feet up, sipping a nice warm pumpkin spice latte and watching all this unfold. And then probably recording it somehow and sticking it up on Evil-Minion YouTube to share with all Its little followers. She scowled harder, opening her eyes. Yeah, well, I’ve got your pumpkin latte right here, nuisance boy!
She grinned. Sun and water, she thought. But especially sun. Bobo, that complete dissociation matrix we were looking at a month or so ago? The one ‘too unpredictable and violent for everyday use?’
I do remember that coming up for study, yes…
Crack it out and restructure it for organic input.
Organic?
Get busy!
She picked up Jackie, looked him? her? whatever— in the eye. “How would you like to get out there,” she said, “and have a chance to be the pumpkin you only ever dreamed of being before? The best one. The biggest one. With all the sun you can remember inside you at one time—”
The feeling of utter longing and desire almost swept her away. If only!
“Tonight’s the night,” Nita said. “All you have to do is remember that sun. All of it. It’s all inside you… and it’s what’s inside that counts.” She grinned a slightly evil grin. “Can you do that?”
Can I!!
“Then get busy and start doing it right now.” Bobo?
Intention feed’s incoming, Bobo said. …It’s considerable.
It’d better be. Build the spell and give it to me compacted. I need a semiphysical conduit to plug it into Jackie here.
I have to warn you, the peridexis said, sounding concerned, if your adjunct’s intention flags, the conduit might short out and the spell might fail—
Better hope it doesn’t, then, Nita said, or Long Island’s gonna be hip deep in zombies by morning. Ready?
Delivering now.
The spell flashed into life before her, hanging in the air in a set of nested circles about a foot wide. Okay, Nita said, not quite what I had in mind for this. She reached out to start redrafting the spell, pulling parts of the spell diagram into other configurations. One big circle, three chord lines, a small external power-control circle at the tangent point. Three inclusions. Power envelope… radius of effect… expansion room for the intention statements… Once again she found herself being glad she’d spent so much time on spell construction these last couple of months: it was getting a lot easier to build spells on the fly when the Manual didn’t have exactly what you needed. But that module, yeah, that’ll work, plug that in here. And that one—
She concentrated hard on ignoring the chaos going on around her and looked the spell over carefully, checking the language of it and the way it was arranged. Every spell was about persuasion: this one was about helping Jackie remember all that sun, and more than that, the urge toward life that she’d picked up from it, the desire to get it right and be all you could even if that was just being a pumpkin. This is as good as it gets in the time we have, she thought at last. So let’s see what kind of result this produces. She signed the spell with her name in the Speech and tied it into closed-and-ready mode with the Wizard’s Knot: the whole long Speech-statement, from invocation to incitation, would read itself and execute when Nita pronounced the trigger word. “Kit! Two seconds to check me on this?”
He knocked down one more zombie while looking the diagram over. “Looks good, better get on with it—!”
And he was right, because the zombies were pressing in closer and closer all the time. “So here we go,” Nita said, plucking the bright-burning words and geometrical figures of the spell out of the air and crumpling them together into a little tight-packed ball. She got down beside Jackie, pulled his lid off, and popped the spell inside him, pushing it down against the orange flesh inside and feeling the spell’s short-range power conduit sink in and hook up. The light of the spell shone out through his eyes. How’s that? You feel okay?
Yes. And none of this would be working this way if you hadn’t scooped out my insides, would it? the pumpkin said.
Nita nodded, feeling a sudden rush of a weird mixture of satisfaction and excitement: a sense of absolutely being part of a plan, not just making one—a sense of things falling right into place, and of being exactly in the right place at the right time. Nita had heard other wizards call this serendipitous effect “the Big Sync”, and talk about how much fun it could be. Now she grinned, entirely seeing the point. “Okay,” she said. “Kit? Ready when you three are!”
Kit caught Ronan’s and Dairine’s eyes and started speaking under his breath in the Speech. Nita could feel him laying out the intangible power conduits that would feed the spell power through her. It’ll only take them a few seconds to get hooked up—
She turned her attention back to the tattered, rotted-looking shapes lurching toward them. “Willing followers of the Fallen,” she said, pulling up one of the shortest of the formal demon-management notifications, “be warned by me! We are on the business of the Powers that Be, and by Their power vested in us, unless you disperse forthwith to your own places, we will utterly undo and abolish you!”
The zombies paused—
And kept coming.
“Last warning, you guys!” Nita said, holding Jackie up. “I’ve got a pumpkin, and I’m not afraid to use it!”
There was another slight pause—and then a sound that if possible made Nita angrier than before: zombie laughter, the animating yangshi demons making fun of her. They kept on coming.
That’s it, Nita thought. Let’s rumble! To Jackie she said silently, Are you absolutely sure you’re up for this?
Up for this? I was grown for this!
Nita nodded. “Okay,” she said, and lifted Jackie high. “See you on the other side!”
And she took a large breath, said the last word of the spell she’d constructed, and dashed the pumpkin down hard on the ground.
It smashed. From inside it, an explosion of orange-golden light splashed out for yards around, then surged back and started to gather around the wet, smashed pieces. And a sound slowly began to build: like the earth shaking, like the sea crashing somewhere nearby—something growling.
A swirling shape started to mass up into the air between the wizards and the zombies. It was round, and orange, and it got bigger and oranger every minute. It was beach-ball sized, pop-tent sized, garage-sized. And it kept growing.
Nita stood there, fists clenched, feeding the spell power as Kit fed it through to her from himself and Dairine and Ronan. She staggered a little with the tension of managing such a big feed all by herself. Not too fast, or it’ll burn out early. Not too slow, or it’ll collapse. Keep it steady—