Feral Magic: An Urban Fantasy Romance-Thriller

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  Lilly pursued me with a bowl of stew and Barnes brought out a jug of brandy he had been hiding for several years in a cabinet; I had to plead a change of clothes in order to hide the knife. When I stashed it away, I stared ruefully at it, then donned fresh clothes and went back into the commons area.

  Mordon lounged in a chair with a bowl full of broth and meat chunks and the other two were setting up Kill Dr. Lucky. Mordon and Barnes had never seen it before, but I had played it. It was Leif's favorite game.

  Someone somewhere along the line had modified the board to enact the scenes described on the card, which made trying to kill Dr. Lucky to be rather entertaining. Though Barnes was particularly skeptical, he was soon having the most fun and touching his drink the least. By the time Lilly killed Dr. Lucky with a candlestick (he tripped over it and rolled down the steps, coming to his death in the library), it was past midnight and each of us had taken a bit too much brandy.

  Sweet as it had been, the amount of time the game took up made me irritated. It meant I had that much less energy to figure out how to enchant Mordon's knife to make it look like a simple modification, but in reality be the entire spell he wanted to perform. It also meant that since my mind was fuzzy, time slipped by all the faster. I was more willing to take uncalculated risks, for better or for worse.

  The first thing I learned was that I had to transcribe the spell onto disenchanted parchment, but not in a way that anyone else would be able to see. I settled on an illusion, which worked better than I'd hoped. From there it got tricky: enchantments always were particularly finicky. After a crash course in enchanting and going through two practice items until my results were passable, I got to bed at two in the morning.