Sarah McMillan returned to her own home around the same time as Jon had, and immediately felt a vague dizziness. She must be out of breath, she figured. She'd been running very quickly. And of course she had! She was about to earn herself The Stone! A smile formed on her face as she shrugged off her weariness and skipped over to the bathroom to wash off her sweat-ruined makeup.
The Stone! How had it ended up in Lake Point, of all places? How had it ended up in Jon Gibson's hands? There are some artifacts more powerful than The Stone, but not that many. And considering that Jon still had it, and Sarah hadn't noticed anyone else's fingerprints on him, she might be the only person in town aside from Jon and Karyn to know about it.
But Athena DeVries was going to be a problem. She was friends with Jon's sister, and a much stronger magic user than Sarah, she hated to admit. If Athena spent too much time around Zoe, or even worse, too much time inside the Gibson house, it's almost certain that she'd detect either the stone itself or the enchantment that Sarah had placed on Jon. And it wasn't like Athena to be the Magic Police, but surely she wouldn't just let Sarah have The Stone because she'd called magical dibs.
Sarah briefly wondered if there was a way to "extend" Athena's illness just to keep her away from everyone until Sarah had everything secured. But surely that would backfire.
Another wave of dizziness. Maybe that was just her adrenaline crashing? Sarah had no way to know that those waves happened to be timed precisely with the moment that Jon entered his second trance, and the moment that he'd turned on his washing machine. Sarah had made herself the engine of the spell, the source from which the talisman channeled its energy. And it was drawing more than she had planned on.
But Sarah was unaware. So she drank some Gatorade, assembled every magical object she had access to, and began preparing spells and runes and hexes for any eventuality that may arise. She cut strips of fabric from the boxers she'd taken from Jon, used them to bind some of the spells directly to him. It was a good variety of general magic, and magic attuned to Jon. It wasn't fool-proof, but it was the best Sarah was going to be able to do with a single night's preparation.
Even so, she stayed up until the early hours of the morning, all but ignoring her parents, going over everything she'd made, everything she'd prepared, to make sure she knew exactly how to use each and every item.
