Grave Dance(10)

Tamara might not have been a healer or a practicing doctor, but as a medical examiner, she knew injuries and she was definitely familiar with fatal wounds.

“She’s in shock, but her injuries aren’t serious. What the heck were you two doing? Why didn’t you get off the street?”

I didn’t answer. Both Tamara and Hol y knew I was on close personal terms with a soul col ector, but I wasn’t about to tel Tamara that Death had been here. When I blinked at her without answering, Tamara shook her head.

“You want to tel me what happened?” she asked, sounding more like a cop than an ME—if you hang around enough cops, it rubs off.

“The beast was a glamour. I disbelieved it.” Or at least, it was partial y glamour. The magic in the disk felt familiar was partial y glamour. The magic in the disk felt familiar and definitely witchy, not fae. And then there was that mist that Death vanished. What was that creature? Had that strange fae sent it? He’d warned me that I would regret revealing the feet.

“Yeah, you disbelieved a glamour out of existence.

Everyone on this street wil probably relate the same thing.

But how do you explain that?” Tamara pointed to where Hol y and I had faced the beast.

Two feet above the sidewalk was a fist-sized patch of darker air. Swirling colors escaped the dark patch, reaching out of it in amorphic tendrils.

The Aetheric.

I’d merged realities.

I shot Tamara a panicked glance. I couldn’t close the rift

—I didn’t know how. We could cover it . . . Maybe if we moved a table over it, no one would notice.

Yeah, like a direct hole into the Aetheric wouldn’t be noticed on a street ful of witches.

People were already looking up, their attention leaving Hol y. Several crept forward, reaching for the escaping tendrils of raw magic, their expressions a mix of suspicion and amazement. A tangle of green energy wrapped around a male witch’s extended finger, and he gasped. Then, his eyes ful of wonder, he looked up, his gaze fal ing on me.

Crap. I couldn’t explain the tear. I looked away, not even wil ing to try.

Tamara glanced down at the charm wrapped in tissue on my palm. “What’s that?”

“It fel out of the beast when it vanished.” I held it out for her inspection.

The front of the copper disk was engraved with runes. A couple of them looked familiar from a class I’d taken back in academy, but I was pretty sure they were the archaic forms. Several of the runes I’d never seen before, but despite the fact that the beast had been mostly glamour, the runes didn’t look like the twisting, hard-to-focus-on fae the runes didn’t look like the twisting, hard-to-focus-on fae glyphs I’d run into a month ago. Crimson wax sealed the back of the disk.

I was a sensitive, and a damn fair one. I could sense magic, could often tel the purpose and sometimes even recognize the caster. But the spel s on the disk were beyond my abilities. Luckily, Tamara was an even more skil ed sensitive—at least when it came to witch magic.

She studied the disk, biting her lip as she turned it over with the tissue. Leaning forward, she peered into the thick wax.

“This magic . . . There are spel s twisted on top of spel s,”

she whispered. “I can’t decipher a thing in this mess, but the signature of the magic . . . it’s familiar.” She looked up.

“Alex, whoever charmed this disk—I think they’re also responsible for the spel s on the feet.”





Chapter 3

The panic caused by the construct’s attack paled in comparison to the utter chaos that overtook the street once the officials arrived. Every law enforcement entity in the city wanted to claim jurisdiction. The FIB showed because the glamour implicated the fae, the NCPD came because it was an attack on citizens on a city street, the MCIB—

Magical Crimes Investigation Bureau—arrived because of the nature of the crime, and the OMIH—Organization for Magical y Inclined Humans—came because witches were involved. Even a representative from the AFHR—

Ambassador of Fae and Human Relations—made an appearance.

With no one clearly in charge, I decided to side with the people who tended to bat a paycheck my way every now and then: the good old-fashioned police. I turned the charmed disk over to their anti–black magic unit. The ABMU officer dropped it into a magic-dampening evidence bag, and then, after making me repeat what happened on the street twice, turned me loose. I didn’t mention Tamara’s suspicions that the caster who’d charmed the disk had also been responsible for the feet in the floodplain. The ABMU

had the very best forensic spel crafters in the city; they would unravel the spel s on the disk.