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In the morning Tina ate a quick breakfast and waited impatiently for her grandmother to be ready to watch her while she entered the meditative trance where she would be able to try out her new spell forms. She started with the most promising spell, a simple blast of air similar to what she'd used on Nathaniel before. It proved to be heavily flawed, draining far too much energy despite the boundary glyphs she included in it. So she moved onto her next best choice.

This spell included the glyph for fire, which was why it was only her second choice. She didn't want to hurt Nathaniel, after all, only defend herself from him. It proved to be almost as flawed. Once she'd gone through all the spells she and her grandmother came up with only one of them seemed very promising. It used a glyph she wasn't entirely sure of the purpose of, though, which was why it was one of her least favorite. But she was almost certain it wouldn't take too much power, and would block any spells Nathaniel tried to throw at her.

Charlotte woke her from her trance to get her to eat a late lunch. By then Tina was exhausted and Charlotte insisted she not do any more trance work for the rest of the day. When she pointed out that Tina would need her strength if Nathaniel did attack her, she reluctantly agreed.

After lunch they went over the spell forms they had devised and Tina explained as best she was able why they didn't work right. "Obviously, our understanding of how the glyphs work together is still far from complete. I would have sworn this air spell would have worked perfectly, but it turned out to be one of the worst ones of the group!" Charlotte said.

Tina nodded, "Yeah, I never would have thought that magic blocking spell would turn out to be the best of the bunch. I've only seen that glyph a couple of times in old journals and wasn't entirely sure how it worked. But it seemed to work perfectly in practice. Hopefully I won't need to use it, though."

"I don't think there's too much danger of that. At least not yet." Charlotte said. "I imagine Nathaniel will go looking for information from some of the other coven members before he even thinks about coming after you."

Charlotte had Tina watch her after dinner so she could do her own trance work. She was still far behind Tina in her ability to manipulate glyphs, but was making progress. Having to have someone else on hand to wake her limited how much she could accomplish, though, and her granddaughter's training was her primary concern.

Tina woke her earlier than planned, as she was exhausted and having difficult staying awake. Charlotte was similarly fatigued so they both went to bed early.

Tina found herself unusually busy at work on Monday, due to both Tiffany and Sarah being exhausted. She wondered what was going on with them, but learned during lunch that Sarah had been attacked after work on Thursday by John! He was one of the guys who were fired just before she started working there, because of the way he treated Sarah. Nobody seemed to know exactly what happened and Tiffany and Sarah weren't talking. The only thing anyone seemed to know for sure was that he attacked her, and that somebody hurt him pretty badly to stop him.

She assumed that had something to do with why they were so tired. She decided not to talk to Sarah about it so as not to upset her. She tried asking Tiffany, but she wouldn't say anything about it. Work kept her pretty busy after that. By the time she was off she'd all but forgotten about it, as she was exhausted herself.

She found her grandmother pouring over their glyph notes when she got home. "Hi Grandma, learn anything interesting?" she asked.

"Hi Tina. No, not especially. Working in trance seems to be the most effective way to study these glyphs." Charlotte replied.

"Yeah, it's too bad we can't keep track of the passage of time better when we're in that trance." Tina agreed.

The phone rang and Charlotte went to answer it. She frowned as she listened, said, "Alright, thanks for calling, and be careful." and hung up.

"What is it Grandma?" Tina asked worriedly.

"Nathaniel attacked Rose. Willow and her friend Becky managed to distract him though, and they all got away without injury. They're all rather frightened of what he might do next, as you can imagine." Charlotte replied.

"We should have set a trap!" Tina said.

"Maybe. Then again, maybe that call would have been to let us know one or more of them were injured or killed trying to trap him. He's extremely dangerous, you know." Charlotte admonished.

"Yeah, I know, but..." Tina said, trailing off as she got a strange, far away look in her eyes. "...what...?" she said softly, just before she passed out.

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To Be Continued…

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