Shadow Rites

“I don’t know, but . . .” I stopped and thought before I finished, reluctance in my tone. “. . . there seems to be a correlation.”

“You said the bird might have been magicked to hurt you. Why do you think that?”

“When I first met him . . . Seems like forever. He used his magic to heal me of a werewolf attack.”

My partner gave a slight downward jut of his head to indicate he had heard me and understood.

“Later.” I stopped. “You know the eye on the dollar bill? The one on top of the pyramid?”

Nod.

“I had one of those on each palm. Like a tattoo, the blue color of his magic. I knew he was spying on me. It was in my soul home too, watching me. The eye in my palm this morning was exactly the same eye, but green. In the fight, I saw it again in my left palm, the one the spell started in today. I think I was wrong about the spell being just a scan. I think it did something to me too. I think Gee’s watching eye and the witches’ eye are connected. Somehow. Water?”

Eli poured me another glass from the pitcher beside the bed. It was a cut-crystal pitcher and looked heavy. And I had no energy. I drank the water down. Then two more. I was badly dehydrated and I probably needed a couple of liters of fluid. A gallon of Gatorade might do the trick. I could get that as soon as I was finished with my tale. “In the fight, Gee’s blue eye of seeing was in my palm, open. Then it faded to pale green, the color of the stronger witch’s power. The scent of the spell was weird too: iron and salt and something harsh like burning hair.”

Eli seemed to mull that over, and something in his stance relaxed a fraction.

I let a half smile form on my mouth, and my lips cracked. “Whatever it is, it may still be active. We need a way to thwart the spell.”

“Thwart?” he asked, humor in his voice.

“Magical word. Stuff you’ll learn if you hang around me long enough.”

“It’s what I live for,” he said, a tiny bit of snark in the words. “Is it possible that the spell reactivated the trace of a previous spell in you? Maybe the odd smells were something that tied it all together?”

“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.” Not that I knew what the smells might mean, but at this point it didn’t matter. I needed to focus on stopping the working, not worrying about the ingredients used in the spell. That was something to deal with later. Simply having priorities made me feel better.

“But if one spell, why not more?” I asked. “And which ones? I’ve been hit more than once with magic of different kinds, from vamp to witch to were. Oh, and arcenciel,” the fabled but factual and existent light dragon. “Let’s not forget the weirdest magical thingy of all.”

“Yeah. That is a problem, babe. One of many. And maybe one of many spells, all the way back to the fight that killed the Damours.”

The Damour clan of suckheads had been composed of blood-magic witches. Blood witches. The kind who used the sacrifice of witch children and teenagers to try some really humongous workings, attempting to bring their long-chained vampire children back to sanity. They had killed hundreds of witches over the centuries, and I had nearly died saving my godchildren from them. In saving them, I had been in the presence of some pretty strong black magic.

Sometimes when one is injured in battle, it comes back in a haunting for years after. In my case that haunting was a sort of magical PTSD, which had caused complications in the merging of my Beast soul and my soul. Like what had happened today. Yeah. It felt as though we were close to figuring out the green magic scan.

“I guess I need to be checked for magical booby traps? And the house too?”

“I called Molly. She’ll do some magical mumbo-jumbo on you when they get here. Check for trace spells. Check the house for same and put in the upgraded hedge of thorns as a ward.”

I shook my head, my hair rubbing the headboard with a scratchy sound. My partner had been a step ahead of me all the way except with the last statement. “They can’t stay with us,” I said. “Too dangerous.”

“I tried to talk him out of staying at the house, but he said hotels were impossible to ward. And they didn’t want to rent a house, stay in a place they weren’t used to. And they already had a permanent circle at your house that they could bring up and use to protect you, us, and them. Did you know that? That they had a witch circle at your house?”

“Not surprised,” I said. “They can call up wards around the place pretty easily.”

“Evan said it was a fortress. Or would be when he got finished with it.”

“How about he leaves us a trigger,” I asked, “so we can use it too?”

“In the works, but not something we can use every day. A ‘one use’ ward that will have to be restored by them. But if we’d had it today—”

“I’d still have been spelled,” I said. “‘One use,’ remember? The spell started in my hand, before we could have gotten any one-use ward up and running. Please don’t blame Evan.”

“Please?” he asked, startled.

“I don’t have the strength to make and enforce demands. Yet.”

Eli made a sound that might have been some form of laughter, if laughter could also sound like grief or released fear. He pulled and flipped open his official cell, with its Kevlar exterior and multipurpose functions, and punched a button. Someone said hello and Eli held it out to me. “Tell Alex you’re okay.”