Rise of the Night Witch

Interlude 3 (Nathan)

No human could see in this quiet alleyway at night. Nathan was glad that faint moonlight shining through thick storm clouds was all he needed. How funny. He could see at night, but not wide or sharp enough to eliminate his need for glasses. He had worn them since he was eight and believed himself to be fully human. He used to have a normal life, a normal school, a normal family, a normal everything. It was after he learned that his family wasn't his real family that he distanced himself from the humans. He isn't part of them anymore. He lives day-by-day, dead-end job after dead-end job, while his real life takes place in the supernatural world.

Poplars, sycamores tall enough to scratch power lines, and apple trees sprouted from the park's hills, covering the cemetery where Mrs. Turner was buried. On the other side of the alley was a neighborhood full of tiny homes with large families nearby and the Summer Hill Police Department in their midst. No-one except a bunch of self-proclaimed monster slayers left their homes this late. And even if they did, his glamour allowed Jonathan Frost to sneak around unsuspected.

Nathan crouched, reached for his belt, and removed a piece of chalk. Sorcerer Roman might have been a monster, but he taught Nathan about mind magic – the one discipline the Academy didn't teach. He drew a large, beautiful pentagram onto the street with a prong for each element – fire, water, earth, air, and spirit. The use of sigils for summoning was a tradition that went back to King Solomon. He had struck a deal with Seraphiel under which Otherworldly creatures may be allowed to enter the mortal realm, provided they did not leave a clearly defined region. With an outer circle to round the pentagram off, Nathan defined it as clearly as he could.

On previous days, he tried summoning Msr. Turner's ghost from the nearby graveyard to talk to her, but he never learned divination. He was still young, still in his twenties, and much like the humans, he lacked time to master more than one discipline so far. For his divination, he needed to summon someone else. Someone thousands of years older than him with experience in every magical discipline and a name Darcy did not find out.

He placed bread sticks around the circle he had drawn and drew salt lines around it to strengthen the containment circle. One property of Otherworlders was that the more they grew in age and power, the more they lost their humanity, and the more antipathic weaknesses they acquired. Nathan had no aversion to iron yet a few years ago when he had fully human properties. And even now, salted bread was something Titania hated and he was fine with.

Moreover, the restraints the Veil placed on him were laxer than those on his godmother. Titania could easily break free from his ward, but the energy required might constitute a Veil breach.

He looked around, careful that no practitioners were nearby, and whispered "Morgan, Morgan, Morgan."

And just like that, rifts to the Otherworld formed. Fairy dust poured into the circle, coalescing into a tall, female, humanoid shape. The dust formed a pale woman clad in a leaf-green linen shift along with an ankle-long, loose-cut tunic reminiscent of Early Medieval fashion. Flowers and a small tiara decorated her flowing brown hair. Everything about her looked so artificial. So photoshopped, for the lack of a better word. Her ageless face lacked any of the blemishes or rough edges real people had and her smile felt plastered on. Her ears, as pointed as knives, gave away her fae nature.

Even with the salted bread around her circle, Nathan needed to clutch his scarf at all times to control the magic containing her. Titania – or Morgan le Fay, as most knew her - had been summoned. Even the high wizards of the Council could not have accomplished this feat without her explicit cooperation. She stood perfectly still, but if she did the magical equivalent of twitching a muscle, the circle would break, and surrounding towns might get incinerated.

A supernatural's power could grow with people's awareness. Arthur's myth was known to everyone, even if his wicked half-sister's fey nature was less well-known. After bringing him to Avalon, she had settled down under a false name in Summer Queen Mab's Seelie Kingdom, proving that even the brightest Sun cast dark shadows.