Single Witch's Survival Guide Read Online Free

emotions like anger. Instead, his entire body vibrated with focus . He watched David and me and Spot as well, clearly evaluating the threat all three of us represented. I caught the barest flicker of energy he spared for his witch, for Raven. He was attuned to her, angled toward her just enough that he could assess the full extent of her injury.
    And Raven milked the attention for all it was worth. She rolled her hips with the ease of a bellydancer, tossing her wild hair over her shoulder. I could measure the precise instant she remembered that her wrist was supposed to be injured because she slipped the contested phone into her cleavage and folded her fingers around her purported bruise.
    Emma caught the motion as well. The blond woman’s face tightened in frustration. Disappointment, too. But mostly, I read resignation across her features, heard it in the exasperated gasp she barely swallowed.
    This was clearly not the first time Raven’s games had precipitated chaos. Raven’s performance was forcing her warder to escalate his role; even now, the man was shifting his balance. David had no choice but to react, to brace himself for a true fight.
    But I could bring the curtain down. Now. Without injury to anyone involved.
    Carefully, precisely, I took a step back, toward the front door of the house. My motion brought my right heel to rest on a marble slab embedded in the porch, the centerstone for our home. As my foot made contact, a shimmer of energy rippled up my spine. I was tied into the power I had invested in the marble every time I entered the house, every time I brushed my fingers against the doorjamb and muttered a quick spell of protection. The astral energy spread beneath me like a moonlit pond.
    Raven’s warder was moving now, using his sword to sweep clear the space in front of him. David glided forward to grab the only available shield—an impossibly flimsy rattan table. Spot’s hindquarters tightened; he was ready to launch at the invader whenever he was given the command.
    Raven added sound to her own performance, keening as if her arm were broken. Her wails only grew louder when Emma barked out orders for her sister to step back, to show her wrist, to calm down. Raven’s warder shifted his weight, moving from a defensive posture to one of attack.
    The marble shimmered beneath me, humming with its reservoir of magical potential. I brushed my fingertips against my forehead and offered up the power of my mind. I touched my throat to commit the power of my speech. I settled my hand against my chest for a single instant to summon the power of my heart. The magical sequence awoke energy deep inside me, and I drew a steadying breath against the sudden, yawning core of astral force.
    My surge of power provoked an automatic response in Raven. She raised both arms high above her head, apparently forgetting that her wrist was supposed to be horribly injured. Potential surged within her, and shimmering waves crashed against my own magic. Without thinking, I drained the reservoir of the marble centerstone, absorbing its prodigious strength into my own. Acting to preserve my home, my life, I shouted the single word of a stasis spell: “ Hold !”
    One syllable, crackling with all the power at my command. One syllable, and there was a bolt of nothingness, a flash like a photographic negative of the world around us. One syllable, and we slipped outside the stream of the universe around us, shimmering and shivering and disappearing to the physical eye.
    Then reality jolted the world back into being.
    Everyone on the porch was frozen in place—the new witches and Raven’s warder and David and Spot, too. Everyone was locked into position but me.
    My ears rang. My throat was scraped raw on the single word I’d shouted. Every inch of my body felt compressed and pounded, but now was not the time to hesitate, not the time to think. I couldn’t give anyone else a chance to recover, to devise any counterspell. Instead, I