She looked at her closet again...she had a choice to make. She knew what the cheerleader outfit would lead to, the leading of cheers, she knew what her old favorite dress would make her
...but what of the rest? She had many items to choose from and in her closet a black dress shimmered.
Athena sat down on her bed and looked at around her room. The clock on her nightstand caught her eye: 3:45pm. She'd missed an entire day of school. How had she let herself get so caught up in the illusion that surrounded her? Surely one of the wards she'd put up in her room, or that she carried with her, would have offered some resistance.
Her wards! Athena's eyes darted from wall to wall. The protection rune she'd hidden by drawing it onto a Nine Inch Nails poster. The knot charm she'd hung from the chain on her ceiling fan. The carved chicken skull she'd placed discretely on the shelf with all her dinosaur figures. Everything was gone.
Athena's breath caught in her throat. Everything?
The teenager jumped up and dropped to the floor, lifting the skirt of her bed enough to look underneath it. She moved two shoeboxes, pulled out a third, and removed from this last one a smaller box.
Empty. She'd taken it. She'd taken everything.
The runes, the wards, all the temporary spells were, in their nature, replaceable.But the Ankh of Ankara was so rare, Athena felt lucky to have even seen something as powerful in her lifetime, let alone owned it. And now Miss Fine had it?
No wonder Athena had been powerless to Miss Fine's whims. No wonder the recent changes had been so much more drastic, so much more visible, than they had before. The Ankh of Ankara was forged in Ptolemaic Egypt, enchanted in Byzantine Turkey, and infused with alchemies and enchantments from half the world's cultures over the years. It enhanced any magic user's latent abilities, took whatever they were good at and magnified it. It was primarily what had protected Athena from Miss Fine in the first place. And now it was gone, and the woman who could previously change a person's mind, could now change a person's whole reality.
No matter what Athena did, Miss Fine could reverse it on a whim. What was she going to do?
