say hello." Alynne's announcement dragged Carlene's attention back to the present. "He's demanding to know who I am and why I'm using this phone. Sexy accent though." She turned her mouth back to the phone. "Hey, say that you knew our passion was doomed from the start. Why? Because I’ve always wanted to hear that from a man with a sexy Swedish accent." Her fingers tightened around the receiver. "Yeah? Same to you and your mother!"
"Alynne!"
"Should you be burning that colour?"
Carlene got herself under control just as a number of magazine pages began to curl. "Tell him Beth Aswith is dead."
"He says he knows."
"Tell him that while she was alive, she gave a fire elemental a body."
"He says he knows and when she died it returned to fire."
"Tell him it's still around and it wants another body."
"He says that's impossible and that you don't exist and then he called me something that probably wasn’t an endearment and he hung up." Holding down the button with one finger, she pointed the receiver at the smouldering edge of the worktable. "Should I put that out before I call the next number?"
*
Six of the other seven wizards were even less inclined to believe or help. The seventh's line was busy.
Carlene thought over everything she knew about wizards and, had she a mouth, she would have smiled. As it was, she burned a bundle of lavender. "They must be calling each other."
"And that's good?" Alynne asked, waving the heavily scented smoke away.
"Oh yeah. They know someone's in Beth's workshop."
"That's bad?"
"Well, they can't just leave you here, there's dangerous stuff lying around."
"Oh yeah, I could really give someone a major hernia asking them to lift those boxes of National Geographic . So one of them's going to show up?"
"No, all of them. They can't leave you here, but they don't trust each other not to try and rip off Beth's spellbook, making the rippee significantly more powerful than the others 'cause he or she would then have access to all Beth's spells as well as their own. Wizards maintain a very delicate balance of power."
"And once they're all here, they'll give you a body?"
Carlene burned brighter. "They may not want to, but I'm sure we’ll figure out a way to light a fire under them."
*
The only uncluttered area in the room was on top of the workbench so that's where all seven wizards appeared – four women and three men of various races, every one of them looking annoyed. The crowded conditions resulted in a lot of pushing and shoving and the experience didn't improve their moods.
Carlene finally ended the bickering by moving just a little too close to a flask of mentholated essence.
The magical resonance of the explosion faded into a stunned silence broken by Alynne's impressed observation. "Cool. Cough drops."
Seven jaws dropped. Seven right hands rose and traced the sign of banishment.
Carlene felt herself flicker, felt the pull of pure burning, and suddenly remembered that in spite of syndication on three networks, she'd still never seen the episode of Friends where Rachel moves into Monica's apartment and loses the big hair and she wasn't going anywhere until she had.
Seven sets of silver brows drew down.
"That should have worked," a small Asian woman muttered, staring down at her hand in confusion.
Burning a little more oxygen, Carlene danced forward. "You have to know something before you can banish it."
"We know fire."
"Yeah, but you don’t know me."
A tall man in a turban sniffed disdainfully. "It is clear you have been corrupted by human thoughts and feelings."
"Well, duh."
"You should never have been given a body," declared a blond man hiding most of his face behind impressive whiskers. "In creating you, Beth Aswith created a perversion."
"Perversion!"
Alynne leaned away from the sudden heat. "Have you, like, really considered the consequences of making her angry."
One hand clutching the smoking edges of his beard, the blond man added weakly, "And,