Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

Lily didn’t quite spit out her Coke. “God, no. Not another evil elf.”

“Probably not. Not many in our realm know sidhe runes, but they aren’t completely unknown, either. I’ll need to check my source materials to be sure, but I thought I recognized a couple of the runes drawn inside the circle, too. They look more like ancient Sumerian.”

Lily’s eyebrows went up. “Someone’s blending disciplines, you think? I could send copies of the relevant photos to Fagin, see if he can ID them.” Dr. Xavier Fagin was the preeminent authority on pre-Purge magical history.

“Good idea. He’s got an impressive library still in spite of those assholes and their firebomb. Now tell me what you know about the ritual.”

Lily filled him in between bites, ending with their failure to identify the body they no longer had.

“Huh.” Cullen frowned. “Let me know when you get the labs back on those samples.”

He meant the samples taken from the substances used to draw the circle and the runes. “Okay. Keep in mind that the lab may not get consistent results. There wasn’t much magic left on—”

“I thought you said all the magic was gone.”

“The contagion was completely gone. There was still a tiny tingle of magic in the circle itself—about what I feel if I walk in Isen’s house barefoot.” Which was not, as she used to think, entirely from the traces of magic left on the floor by so many lupus feet. There was some kind of stealth node under the deck behind his house—one that didn’t give off the usual drifts of stray power that Cullen called sorceri. Whenever she asked Isen about it, he smiled and changed the subject. Isen could be really annoying sometimes. “And no, it didn’t feel like arguai . And no, I can’t describe the difference, but I can feel it.”

Cullen’s frown tightened a notch. “Describe the contagion again. Your experience of it.”

“Icky. Gooey. Like something that had been dead a long time and was soft with corruption. A lot like death magic, really, only mushier, and without the ground glass. And it moved. Maybe that’s why it seemed alive to me, as if it had intention. As if it really wanted to crawl all over me.”

“Huh.” He thought about that a moment. “Maggots?”

“What?”

“What was the movement like? Like maggots crawling around inside the corruption, or like the magic itself was in motion?”

She had to stop and think. “More like it was made up of maggots—soft, putrid, dead maggots that were still moving and wanted to get on me.”

“Now there’s an image I didn’t need to have in my head,” Cynna said.

“Tell me about it.” Cullen had fallen silent, as if she’d given him something to think about. She couldn’t imagine what. “Why did you want to know, Cullen?”

“Trying to figure out if something was moving the contagion or if it moved on its own.”

“Miriam thought I was projecting. She said the contagion couldn’t have intention.”

“Miriam lacks imagination sometimes,” he said absently, bending to pull a small spiral notebook out of Cynna’s purse. “If something’s never happened before, she thinks that means it can’t happen.”

Lily tended to think that, too, but she’d had enough evidence to the contrary in the past year to understand how wrong that was. “I figured you’d ask me about the body dissolving.” That being the spookiest thing she’d ever seen.

He didn’t answer, busy thumbing through his little notebook.

“How can you figure out if the contagion was moving on its own without looking at it?”

“I’m thinking. Stop talking to me.”

“See? Grumpy as a gorilla with a cold,” Cynna announced. “It won’t bother him if we talk because he won’t notice, and I want to know about the body dissolving.”

“It seemed to go through all the stages of decomposition, only on fast-forward. They ran some tests on the soil and found the kind of organic traces you’d expect to find in a burial site . . . about fifty years after the burial.”

Cynna’s forehead wrinkled. “Do you think it was a way of getting rid of the evidence? They couldn’t have expected the body to be found as soon as it was, so they could have done something to make it self-destruct. Not that I know of any way to do that, but it happened, so it’s possible. If Hardy hadn’t gone looking for the body—oh, that reminds me. I’ve got a message for you from him.”

Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “You do?”

“Isen wanted me and Cullen to meet Hardy, or for Hardy to meet us, or maybe he thought Hardy would talk me into staying at Clanhome. Or maybe, being Isen, he had something else in mind altogether. I went along with it because I was curious. I’ve never met a saint.”

“Do you think you have now?”

“I don’t know. I liked him, even though he’s got this way of looking at you as if he’s been reading your diary. Not that I’ve ever kept a diary, but . . . how do you know if someone’s a saint or not?”

Lily had no idea. “He seems to know things he shouldn’t. Not without getting tipped by, uh . . . someone or something. The question is what side is tipping him off.”

“Even people without magic can have visions. If drugs or magic aren’t involved, then spirit is. Would that mean he really is a saint?”

“It means that he had a valid warning for me once, so if he gave you a message for me, I’d probably better hear it.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Hardy kept singing ‘I’ll be calling you,’ emphasis on the ‘you,’ until I asked if he had a message for you. He nodded a lot, then he went like this.” She hummed the refrain from “Riders on the Storm,” then switched to singing, “‘There’s a killer on the road . . . da-da-da . . . squirming like a toad.’ Just like that, with some of the words left out.”

Lily huffed out a breath. “Unless he’s trying to warn me about a killer toad, I don’t get it.”

“Me, neither. Isen told him that probably wasn’t enough information to help, so . . .” Cynna launched into another song.

Lily stared. “The candy man? He’s warning me about killer toads and the candy man?”

“He added a few bars from something called ‘I Want Candy’ by the Strangeloves.”

“That can’t be a real band.”

“I never heard of them, but Isen has. I guess they’re an older band.”

Lily shook her head. “I suppose Hardy means well—saints have to mean well, right? But I don’t see how that helps. Unless he’s not a saint and is getting his information from the dark side of the Force, in which case he doesn’t mean well. And it still doesn’t help.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cullen said.

Surprised—and too inured to Cullen’s habits to be any more than a little annoyed—Lily looked at him. He’d put away his little notebook. “Was that a general suggestion, or were you actually listening?”

“I meant,” Cullen said with exaggerated patience, “that of course the man’s a saint. Isn’t it obvious?”

“No. And you wouldn’t be my first choice for spotting holiness.”

“He made me want to squirm. Made both of you feel like that, too, didn’t he? When he looks at you, it’s like he’s shining a light right through to the back of your skull. Shine a light in a dark place and you get roaches scurrying for cover. We’d all rather think we weren’t full of roaches.” He raised his eyebrows. “What, did you think saints were supposed to make you feel good about yourselves? That’s Sesame Street ’s job. Saints make people uncomfortable, which is why people usually kill them.”

After a moment Cynna said, “He has a point.”

It was more insight than Lily was used to from Cullen, and it made her uncomfortable. Kind of the way Hardy had. Which was practically proof Cullen was wrong, because she was abso-damn-lutely sure that Cullen Seaborne was no saint.