“Is this what it’s always like for you?” Rianna asked, her green eyes glowing brightly as she looked around us.
“The land of the dead? Yeah, recently.” I wasn’t going to mention anything about the Aetheric, especial y not while being recorded. I hadn’t realized that she would share my ability to see across the planes when we shared our magic.
I reached out with magic before she could ask any more questions. My ability to raise shades had nothing to do with the amount of Aetheric energy I could channel and everything to do with the wyrd ability that both Rianna and I had been born with. I reached out with that portion of me that touched the dead, and Rianna’s magic answered, reaching with mine. As I poured the two magics into the foot, they flowed together, twisting, twining, not like they were one single note of music, but like two harmonious notes vibrating together, building toward a crescendo.
I reached deep with the magic, searching for a shade. In theory, every cel in the body stored the life’s memory—the trick was having enough magic or the body having enough copies of those memories to give form to the shade. A new body with lots of cel s took only a little power to raise. An old body reduced to dust and bones needed a lot of magic old body reduced to dust and bones needed a lot of magic to fil in the gaps between the memories. With just a foot?
We needed to pump enough magic into the shade to fil out the missing body. Difficult. Impossible alone. But together?
Maybe. Just maybe.
Our magic fil ed the foot and flowed beyond it. I felt the shade forming before I even opened my eyes.
It worked.
Or not.
I stared, horrified, not at the shade of a man but at the single, ghastly glimmer of a foot. Just a foot.
The foot-shade hopped across the gurney, and though we’d poured enough energy in it to raise ten shades, the stump at its ankle led to nothing.
“What the hel ?” John stepped through my circle, making both Rianna and me shudder—I had talked to him about crossing active circles. He leaned closer to the foot, watching its strange dance. “Where’s the rest of it?”
Good question. One I had no answer for. I glanced at Rianna. Her eyes were wide, the whites glimmering as she watched the il -formed shade bounce across the gurney.
“Does that mean it was severed prior to death?” Tamara asked. She at least respected the edge of my circle. Of course, as deeply entrenched in magic as she was, she’d have had to shatter the circle to cross.
“No,” I said, and Rianna shook her head. “I’ve raised shades that have been dismembered. This isn’t the result.
Remember that case three years ago when the parts were found in three different trash bags?” And the bag with the head and right arm had been found almost a week after the rest. The vic had died of exsanguination as his limbs were sawed off one at a time. It stil made me sick to think about that case, but even though I hadn’t had the ful body to raise a shade from, and several of the limbs had been severed prior to death, the shade had stil remembered that it once had a ful body—the parts had just appeared dismembered. This shade . . . it was like the foot was al the dismembered. This shade . . . it was like the foot was al the man had ever been.
“Okay, so then what is this?” John pointed to the flailing foot.
“I don’t know.” Unhelpful. That’s what it was. How could a foot forget it had been part of a body? “It’s like the rest of the body just ceased to be.”
John grunted. “You sound like the tracker I consulted.
Good reputation, best tracking spel s in the country. But he tried to track the rest of the body on each of the feet, and each spel failed. He said he’d never seen anything like it and it was like there was no rest of a body out there to find.
How is that possible?”
I had no idea. The shade jumped off the gurney and hopped across the floor. It bounced against the edge of the circle, sending a tremor through the barrier. I shook my head. “Why is it stuck in perpetual motion?” I asked aloud, though I knew no one could answer. Would the other dismembered feet do the same?
I thought back to the circle at the vacant lot and the rage-and pain-fil ed shadows I had almost been able to see around me. They’d been writhing and circling. Was this shade stil stuck in whatever had happened inside that circle? I watched the foot hop about. There seemed to be a pattern to its movement, but with only the one foot I couldn’t guess what it was.
“We should put it back,” Rianna said, her voice wavering.
Chil bumps had broken out down her arms, though I wasn’t sure if they were from fear or cold, and she looked exhausted, overused. Not that I wasn’t.