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big glass of tea along with the book, I found a shady spot under one of the large oaks in the massive back yard. Lying on my stomach on the quilt, I read Rozella’s notes on energy work.
    Much in the same way a person can only do so much with their muscles unless working to make them stronger, a witch can only do so much with their magical energy without practice. That was the point of some energy work. We’d never done much of this when I was her student but I always knew Rozella could do more than she taught me. She had no desire to hide knowledge from me, but she fervently believed there were some things a student needed to seek out on their own. It wasn’t her fault I’d never sought certain things on my own.
    I hadn’t brought a candle with me but had something else in mind to try. I’d been doing a lot of thinking about what appeared to be my natural affinity for the element of fire. What else could I do with that besides light candles?
    There were many different flavors of witchcraft but there were some common denominators among them. One of those was the four natural elements of earth, air, fire and water. Those four elements corresponded to the four states of matter–solid, gas, plasma, and liquid. My desire to go beyond the party trick of lighting candles without a match led me to research plasma. Other than bad memories of science classes in high school, I didn’t get much out of it. An idea for a very basic experiment occurred to me and I’d been waiting for the time to try it.
    Wishing I’d brought an empty glass, I drank the rest of the tea and tossed the ice into the grass. I laid the book aside, along with my glasses. Drawing into a sitting position, hands resting lightly on my thighs, I did a slow grounding. Despite having spent a great deal of time here, I still wasn’t as familiar with this plot of land as I was with my own. Opening myself up, I reached out to the energy around me. The earth below, the sky above, streams and underground water sources, trees and vegetation–all of them flowed together into a natural rhythm. Beyond that was   the man-made energy of the city itself. Point and counterpoint. Or if not that, then at least two separate rhythms that somehow managed to work together, like an improbable mash-up of two radically different pieces of music.
    I expected all of that and had felt it before. What shocked me was the bang and clatter of something atonal, chaotic. Hard bop on meth, instead of cool jazz or trance blues. Concentrating on the discordant notes, it overtook everything else until its rattle was the only thing I could feel. A rushing wildness, dark and hungry, pulled at me. It pressed against my chest and tugged at my limbs. Fear exploded in my gut, followed quickly by recognition. That recognition saved me from what might have turned into a nasty panic attack. Reaching for calm, steady earth, I pushed away the chaos and took slow even breaths.
    It was the flood. The land, the people, every source of energy in the area had been traumatized by the flood. There hadn’t been enough time yet for any real healing, so the menace still lurked just beneath the surface of things. And if it was at all present, that meant it could continue to affect things.
    My breathing got a little out of sync as fear nibbled at the edges of my thoughts. I had to distract myself or pretty soon all I’d be able to think about was my destroyed home. Hard bop on meth was not really a good analogy for this area. Well, the meth part worked. What other musical analogy might work to describe the flood’s leftover energy? I struggled to come up with something but the best I could do was “redneck Rammstein.”
    I would not be sharing that tidbit in conversations with either Daniel or Blake.
    After giving myself several minutes to calm down, I turned my attention back to my experiment. I shook the last remnants of liquid from the tea glass then placed it on the ground bottoms up, trapping air inside.