Page 123 of Specters & Spotlights

She took a breath before continuing. “I’ll try to anchor things from my end, but you’ll need help—volunteers to complete the circle. People who are willing to stand inside the magic, who believe. Candles. Lots of them. Real ones. Fire draws the boundary.”

“Okay,” Elise said slowly. “So we summon him, trap him, run water, speak the words, and do it onstage—in front of an audience.”

Cici hesitated. “Yeah. And one more thing.”

Elise tensed. “Of course there’s one more thing.”

“It has to be Lark,” Cici said. “She’s going to have to be inside the circle, onstage. She’ll be the summoning focus.”

“What?” Elise asked, her voice sharpening.

“She’s already the focal point. Elizabeth Bennet, center stage, all eyes on her. It makes her the perfect anchor. The spell will draw the Specter to her. But she has to be willing. It won’t work otherwise.”

Elise stared at the scuffed linoleum, the checklist forming faster than she could grab hold of it. The circle. The spell. The water, the candles. The right words, the right timing. The stage. The audience.

And now… the cast and crew.

“We’d have to tell them,” she said quietly. “The cast. Crew. The entire tech team. We’d need them to help make the circle happen. To be witnesses. I don’t even know if they’d believe us—let alone agree to it.”

Graham stepped closer. “They’ll do it,” he said, voice steady. “You don’t give yourself enough credit. They trust you.”

Elise exhaled slowly. It wasn’t just the spell. It was the timing, the trust, the precision. But she wasn’t alone.

“One day,” she said. “To prep a stage, run a show, and banish a nightmare.”

She smiled faintly, the weight still there—but now shared.

“Let’s get to work.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Graham

Graham would probably have been concerned, if he’d had the bandwidth to be concerned.

A week ago, he would’ve filed all of this under fiction and theatre people being theatre people. Now: spells. Specters. Ghost mimes. He’d watched Elise speak to the air like it was normal, and he’d… adjusted. Not gracefully, but quickly. Alarmingly quickly, if he stopped to think about it.

He did not stop to think about it. He filed it away for later, in the same mental drawer as existential dread and taxes.

Because Elise was already moving, already in motion like the plan itself had wound her up. They’d been scurrying around the theatre all afternoon—phone pressed to her ear with Cici, scribbling requirements on whatever scrap paper they could find, arguing over timing and sight-lines and what could be changed without breaking the finale. They’d mapped out the precise adjustments the rain scene would need onstage—where the circle could live, how the water would hit, what had to be said and when—and then they’d started the harder part: translating it to other people.

Cast. Crew. Jen. Anyone who would need to be in the right place at the right time tomorrow without asking too many questions.

They had covered a lot of ground in a couple of hours.

By the time Graham finished talking Jen through the latest changes to the call sheet, Elise had somehow managed to unpack the wig trunk.

He wasn’t sure how she did it without growing a second set of hands. One minute the wig blocks had been stacked like a puzzle, and the next the essentials were out, organized, and show-ready.

Jen, meanwhile, had been… surprisingly accepting.

He’d expected pushback. Not because Jen didn’t care, but because she cared too much. The finale was sacred in a touring show: precise blocking, precise timing, the kind of choreography that lived in muscle memory across an entire company. You didn’t tweak it the day before a performance unless you wanted to be haunted by angry notes for the rest of your career.

If everything went according to plan, the audience would never know the difference. They’d see the scene, feel the beat, applaud on cue. It would look almost like what they’d get on Broadway, or in any other city on the tour.

But if there was a producer in the house—or a choreographer, or anyone with the show’s original blueprint burned into their retinas—they’d know. Jen would be the one taking the earful later for allowing deviations.

She seemed to have accepted that risk without hesitation.