Grave Dance

Tamara pushed her way through the crowd. She leaned over Holly for several minutes before straightening and glancing around. Her gaze landed on me, and she made her way over to me.

“You okay, Alex?”

I nodded, rubbing my hands over my chilled arms. “She’s okay, right?”

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 Holly knew I was on close personal terms with a soul collector, but I wasn’t about to tell Tamara that Death had been here. When I blinked at her without answering, Tamara shook her head.

“You want to tell 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 partially 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 will probably relate the same thing. But how do you explain that?” Tamara pointed to where Holly 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 full of witches.

People were already looking up, their attention leaving Holly. 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 full of wonder, he looked up, his gaze falling on me.

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

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

“It fell 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 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 tell the purpose and sometimes even recognize the caster. But the spells on the disk were beyond my abilities. Luckily, Tamara was an even more skilled 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 spells twisted on top of spells,” 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 spells 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 Magically 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 spellcrafters in the city; they would unravel the spells on the disk.

“Did you see where it came from?” one woman asked another as I passed beyond the police barricade.

I hoped she was talking about the magical construct and not the tear into the Aetheric. After all, a beast rampaging through a major metropolitan area was not an everyday occurrence. Aside from the time a bear had escaped from a Georgia zoo a couple of years back, I couldn’t remember hearing of any similar situation. But the beast was gone, and the tear was still here. And it was drawing attention.

I’d merged planes of reality before, but last time—well, actually, the only other time—I had been in a private residence. A private residence that happened to belong to the governor of Nekros. He was a big mover and shaker in the Humans First Party, an anti-fae/anti-witch political group. The governor also happened to be my father, and ironically, fae, but neither of those facts was common knowledge. He must have paid a considerable amount to keep the events surrounding the Blood Moon quiet, and neither my very short arrest nor the fact that an entire suite of rooms in his home now touched multiple realties had shown up in the papers.

I didn’t personally have the required money or influence to hide a patch of merged reality in the center of the Quarter. Especially not with a street full of witnesses, the media already arriving with cameras out and recording, and a whole slew of legal alphabet soup on the scene. So I did the only thing I could: I avoided questions about the tear.

Or at least I tried.

“Miss Craft, why am I not surprised to see you here?” a sharp female voice asked.

I cringed, and then tried to hide the reaction as I turned. “Agent Nori,” I said to the FIB agent I’d had the displeasure of meeting the day before. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Doubtful, but I need your statement. Tell me what happened here.”

“My friends and I were finishing dessert and talking about our day. Everything seemed normal enough. Then I noticed the fae who threatened me at the swamp. He was watching me. I pointed him out just before we heard the screaming. We all looked in the direction of the sound, and that was when we saw the beast. It came from somewhere up the street.” I pointed to where the cars were being cleared from the road. “I lost sight of the fae in the panic that ensued. Several witches tried to conjure against the beast. My friend Holly threw a fireball at it, and the beast charged her. When I disbelieved in the construct, it vanished.”

“It takes a hell of a lot of conviction to destroy a fully autonomous glamour.” She frowned at me, her dark eyes searching my face. When I didn’t say anything, she continued, “So, what can you tell me about that?” She pointed at the hole in reality.

I forced a casual shrug. “Maybe something to do with the beast?” It wasn’t a lie. It was a question.

Agent Nori’s frown etched deeper, the movement tugging on her high cheeks. “Do you make a habit of disbelieving glamour, Miss Craft?”

I’d have liked to say no, but there was photographic proof from a month ago that showed me walking through furniture and candles at a crime scene. In my defense, I hadn’t been able to see those glamoured objects, not even as hazy outlines like I’d seen with the beast. “I don’t go out of my way to do it, if that’s what you mean.”

“And do tears into the Aetheric appear anywhere you disbelieve glamour?”

“No.” At least I could answer that one definitively.

Agent Nori stared at me a long moment, as if trying to decide if I was lying. Or maybe she was trying to determine if I was capable of lying. Fae couldn’t—though they could bend the truth until you’d swear up was down. At the floodplain, Nori had hinted that she knew I had fae blood. Now she appeared to be weighing how much sway it held over my words.

She must have reached some conclusion because after a moment she said, “The ABMU has a charmed disk in evidence. It looks like witch magic. You are aware that fae rarely use complex charms?”

I nodded. By “rarely use” she actually meant that most couldn’t use witch charms. The Aetheric resisted something about the fae nature. When I used my second sight, I could see the magic bend away from their very souls.

“Knowing that,” she said, “you still insist that the attack was committed by a glamour?”

I faltered. I’d disbelieved the creature, not dispelled it. That fact indicated that its form was held together by glamour. But, it was undoubtedly a magic construct. When I didn’t say anything, her gaze moved past me.

“I’m sure I’ll see you around, Miss Craft.” She walked away, and I let out a relieved breath.

Relief felt premature as a pair of heels clicked a fastapproaching tempo on the sidewalk behind me.

“Alex Craft, a moment of your time,” said a perky, and far too familiar, voice.

I didn’t turn. Not immediately at least. I recognized the voice: Lusa Duncan, the star reporter of Nekros’s most popular news program, Witch Watch. And if I knew Lusa, there was a camera pointed at me right now. Taking a deep breath, I pasted on my professional smile and prepared myself to face the press.

She pushed her mic at me as soon as I turned. “Word in the Quarter is that the police have called you in to consult on the Sionan floodplain foot murders and that the FIB is now involved. What can you tell us?”