Page 22 of Spirit Storm

The scowl on Wylder’s face is too funny. “Didn’t you end up in New Mexico the last time you tried to channel the energy in the stones to portal?”

Asher rolls his eyes. “Dude, that was so last week.”

Yeah, it was literally last week.

He waves away Wylder’s negativity and pushes on. “Now that my girls are in Arcana, I’ve got this. Tanner says it’s because they act as an anchor. Here, I’ll show you.”

Wylder studies Asher’s extended hand as if it might infect him with something unpleasant.

I step forward and take it, then offer Wylder my other hand. “Come on, Howe. Where’s your adventurous spirit? Even if we don’t stick the landing, we’ll be together and we’ll have an adventure.”

“That’s the spirit, P.” Asher stands a little straighter and offers his free hand. “Come on, handsome. Your mother wouldn’t have named you Wylder if she didn’t want you to be a little ‘wilder’.”

I chuckle. “Yeah, it’s literally your name.”

Wylder pegs me with a look. “Et tu, Brute?”

I laugh harder. “Come on, hotness. Have a little faith.”

With all the reluctance of a cat being carried toward a bathtub, Wylder accepts both our hands. “Please focus.”

Asher isn’t the least bit affected by Wylder’s pessimism… and good for him. Having been on a few portaling adventures already with my bestie, I know better what to expect.

When Laurel first took me to Arcana, she used a fairy portal, and it felt like being sucked into the swirl of a magical vortex. It was like being on that centrifugal force carnival ride that sucks you backward against the walls, as pressure builds in your ears.

Portaling with Asher isn’t like that. It’s more like the snap of fingers and the world falls away, only to clap back together a moment later in a new location.

One moment we're standing in my backyard, the next, we reappear on the grassy lawn of the Arcana Academy.

The main building stands at the far end of the grounds, with endless stone arches and rows of narrow windows catching the afternoon light.

And, far off to the right, by the edge of a forest walkway, in a place I was fairly certain there had previously been nothing, stood a stone mansion.

The building itself looked like a miniature castle. From what we could see of the rampart, the stone walls must be two feet thick. There was a heavy timber frame over the door, and iron fittings on the hinges and windows that were dark with age.

A massive chimney rose at one end in a blunt square tower, and out of it radiated a warmth we could feel from a hundred feet away.

It looked as if it had been there for a hundred years, but we knew better. Mica had only just arrived and anchored it.

"That is not what it looked like last time,” Asher says.

"It was a ghost town blacksmith shop when we found it." Wylder crosses his arms and studies the structure. "And from our research, it’s appeared as an Icelandic farmhouse, a cave, a mine, and a half-dozen other things. It adapts."

"Like a magical cuttlefish," Asher says.

Wylder considers that and nods. "Structurally, yes."

Asher turns to me with the particular energy of a kid whose brain has just handed him an idea he is very proud of. "Do you think one of my new powers will be shape-shifting? I’m imagining myself as a master of transfiguration. One minute I’m a bird, the next, I’m a building."

"A building?" I repeat.

"What? Buildings are useful."

"But do you want to be a building?”

"I want options, Poppy."

Wylder blinks at us in the way that says he just doesn’t get us. That’s fine. Nobody really ever has. Still, he brushes a hand over his mouth and erases his amusement. "The Goddess Mother grants powers based on her own reasoning. No one really knows what criteria she uses."