Grave Dance

Rianna stood in the doorway, looking unsure until her deep-sunk eyes landed on me. Then a feeble smile broke on her face and she scuttled across the room, her woodensoled shoes clunking on the linoleum floor.

“I’m glad you made it,” I said, since I couldn’t thank her for coming. Then I accepted her hug as she tossed her arms around my neck.

She pulled back quickly. “You’re cold.”

“It happens.” I introduced her to John and Tamara, who both gave me questioning glances when I used Rianna’s name. It took me a second to realize why. They were both good enough friends to know that my roommate in academy was another grave witch, named Rianna McBride—they also knew she’d disappeared a handful of years ago. I hadn’t told anyone I’d found her, and I certainly wasn’t going to get into her being a captive of Faerie. “So which foot do you want us to try to raise a shade from?” I asked, trying to keep the focus on the business at hand.

“How about the one from last night? It’s a good puzzle.” John glanced at Tamara, who nodded and walked back to the cold room.

She returned pushing a gurney covered with a white sheet. A sheet with only the smallest lump in the center.

“That’s it?” Rianna asked.

“I know it’s not much to work with, but we’ll 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 small 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. Still, 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 rolled 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 all 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’ll get your chance to show off in a minute.” When we’d first met, John hadn’t believed I could always tell the gender of a corpse. Always. He’d rolled 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 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 spells 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 spellcasting, but I’d always had a stronger connection to the grave. “I’ll 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 small 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 will,” she whispered, and though the words themselves held little meaning, she laced them with magic, giving them shape and purpose.

“I will guide it,” I said, tapping into the energy stored in my ring and giving power to my own words.

The spell 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 pinched in a wince. Time to get on with it. I dropped my shields.

Only the smallest tendril of grave essence reached for me from the foot. I drew it into me, accepting the chill 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.

“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, especially 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 cell 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 cells took only a little power to raise. An old body reduced to dust and bones needed a lot of magic to fill in the gaps between the memories. With just a foot? We needed to pump enough magic into the shade to fill out the missing body. Difficult. Impossible alone. But together? Maybe. Just maybe.

Our magic filled 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 hell?” 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 ill-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 still made me sick to think about that case, but even though I hadn’t had the full body to raise a shade from, and several of the limbs had been severed prior to death, the shade had still remembered that it once had a full body—the parts had just appeared dismembered. This shade . . . it was like the foot was all 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 spells in the country. But he tried to track the rest of the body on each of the feet, and each spell 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-filled shadows I had almost been able to see around me. They’d been writhing and circling. Was this shade still 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. Chill 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.