“That’s it?” Rianna asked.
“That’s it?” Rianna asked.
“I know it’s not much to work with, but we’l try.”
She nodded, but her lips turned down in a grimace. I didn’t blame her. Even together, if we managed to raise the shade from such a smal specimen, it would be a miracle.
With Rianna terrified of leaving Faerie for extended periods of time, my asking her to venture out for a nearly impossible task probably didn’t rate high in her book. Stil , the two of us had raised some seriously impressive shades in the past.
We might be able to raise this one.
“So, you know where the foot was found,” Tamara said as she rol ed the cart to the center of my already drawn, but inactive, circle. “Like the other feet, it was severed by unknown means just above the ankle bone. And like al the others we’ve found, it’s a left foot.”
Why only left feet? Why no other body parts?
“We won’t know gender until DNA results come back,”
she said, “but from an initial examination the foot appears to have belonged to a—”
“Male,” Rianna and I said in unison. There might not have been much of a body, but there was enough to sense gender.
John shook his head. “Okay, geniuses, you’l get your chance to show off in a minute.” When we’d first met, John hadn’t believed I could always tel the gender of a corpse.
Always. He’d rol ed gurney after gurney out for me to identify. “Here’s what I bet you don’t know,” he said. “The boot the foot was found in was laced and double-knotted.
Not like it was being pinched shut but like there was a leg in it when it was laced. And here’s the real mystery. The foot was severed almost four inches below the top of the boot, but there’s not a drop of blood inside the boot and there’s no more damage to the boot than what would be expected of an old, worn-out shoe.”
“So the foot was shoved inside after being severed?”
And drained of blood. But why? “Or are you thinking the person throwing feet in the river missed it because it was person throwing feet in the river missed it because it was hidden inside the boot?”
“Yeah, that’s one of several theories floating around—
none of which is leading us anywhere.” John rubbed at his bald spot again.
“Any luck untangling the spel s on it?” I asked, glancing at Tamara.
She shook her head. “I was hoping that since this one hadn’t spent any time in the water maybe I’d glean something. But it’s just like the other feet we’ve found.”
If we were lucky, we’d be able to ask the shade. I turned to Rianna. “You ready to try this?”
She nodded and held out her hands, palms up. “Are you leading or am I?”
Rianna was the better witch when it came to spel casting, but I’d always had a stronger connection to the grave. “I’l lead.”
I placed my palms flat against Rianna’s and then looked at John. “We’re going to start now,” I told him, and he reached over and flipped a switch on the video recorder. I turned my focus inward.
It took only a smal string of magic to reactivate my circle, and it sprang up around us, buzzing softly. Once it was in place, I nodded at Rianna.
“My magic to your wil ,” she whispered, and though the words themselves held little meaning, she laced them with magic, giving them shape and purpose.
“I wil guide it,” I said, tapping into the energy stored in my ring and giving power to my own words.
The spel activated like a key sliding home in a lock, and where Rianna and my palms touched, her magic poured up to the surface, slipping into my flesh, my blood. Sharing someone else’s magic is a strange, personal, and innately wrong feeling. Like drawing a breath directly out of someone else’s lungs. Being the one giving up magic feels even worse.
Rianna didn’t complain, though the skin around her eyes Rianna didn’t complain, though the skin around her eyes pinched in a wince. Time to get on with it. I dropped my shields.
Only the smal est tendril of grave essence reached for me from the foot. I drew it into me, accepting the chil into my body as I released what little heat I had left into the amputated part. Wind tore through the circle, whipping curls that escaped my ponytail into my face and making Rianna’s lank red hair fan out around her. A patina of gray crawled over the room as the linoleum under us wore away, revealing crumbling concrete underneath. The sheet on the gurney turned dingy and frayed, the worn holes exposing rusted metal. The Aetheric bloomed into twisting colors around us, strands of magic glowing in a low ebb and flow, like a giant magical pulse.