Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

She giggled. Wasn’t it just like him to think of it that way? Perhaps later she’d go back to the hospital and finish the man off. It would be a kindness. She hadn’t dared do it before. She couldn’t afford to draw that kind of attention to herself.

But everything would be different soon. Everything. She reached over and stroked the knife that lay in the passenger seat. Delight shimmered through her . . . and power. Ageless, endless power. It was true that at first the feel of the knife had unnerved her. But the knife was like Dafydd. The more she touched it, the more she wanted to touch it.

What couldn’t she do with this much power?

TURNEDout Cullen had been right.

Armand Jones’s ski mask had been acrylic, but polyester would work, too. Not perfectly, and nothing would help if any of them were fool enough to touch the knife. Friar was the only one who could do that safely. Or so he claimed, and Rule hadn’t smelled a lie, so probably Friar believed that. But he claimed that synthetic fibers did offer some protection.

So they headed for Walmart.

There was one not too far out of the way—that is, as much as they knew which way they were going. Friar wouldn’t tell them; he wouldn’t even say how far away the cursed knife was. No surprise there. The bastard wanted to make sure they took him along, didn’t he? It would be hard to double-cross them if he wasn’t close by. He told them what road to take, when to turn. Otherwise he sat in grim silence, his injured leg stretched out on the seat.

Rule sat back there with him, watching him. He’d wanted Cullen watching Friar, too, in his own way, and he didn’t want Lily crowded in between him and their enemy. So it was Lily behind the wheel when they pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart just off I-805. Scott and the others were behind them in the van. One of the men would run in for their synthetic headgear.

Persuasion, compulsion, and corruption. Those were the powers the knife conveyed. Friar had only talked about two of those. Lily was thinking about that as she parked the car on the outside edge of the lot. The van went on by, heading for the front of the store.

Compulsion she was pretty clear about. That was the instant, violent overthrow of free will. Persuasion and corruption were more slippery, but corruption had to be about morality. Doing wrong when you knew it was wrong. Friar didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, so maybe he discounted the knife’s corrupting power as meaningless. He’d maxed out on corruption already. Persuasion . . . that would be more like trickery, wouldn’t it? Becoming convinced that the sky was yellow instead of blue, that up was down. Making a mistake because you weren’t thinking clearly.

When she was under spiritual attack during the fight with the dworg, had that been persuasion or corruption?

Her mind had felt clear. She hadn’t been tricked into making a tactical mistake. But for a few moments, it had seemed okay to kill Santos if he didn’t obey her. Maybe that would have been right and moral behavior for Rule. It wasn’t for her.

It sure sounded like corruption.

Cullen spoke suddenly. “Let’s stretch our legs a minute.”

“I think I’ll pass,” Friar said dryly. “Oh—you didn’t mean me, did you?”

Cullen rolled his eyes and opened his door. Lily climbed out on her side, and Rule, frowning, did the same. “I don’t know how good his hearing is,” he said, “but I don’t want to move far from the car.” He headed for the back of the car, stopping a few feet from the trunk.

Lily followed. As Cullen joined them she said, “Does anyone else wonder if he’s laughing at us? I mean . . . I know Jones wore a ski mask, so Friar’s probably telling the truth, but the idea that cheap ski masks or knitted caps will stop this god he says is so powerful . . . it seems ludicrous.”

“Hmm?” Cullen was clearly preoccupied. “No, that makes sense. It’s not the magic they stop. It’s the vector.”

“Unpack that,” Rule said.

Cullen was surprised. “I didn’t explain already? I got that figured out finally. The compulsion is magical, but it has a spiritual vector. That’s the only thing that fits. The contagion couldn’t travel through inorganics because it’s vectored—mobile—only through spirit. It’s like the plague that way, where fleas were the vector. Maybe one in a million people were actually immune to the plague the way Lily is immune to the compulsion, but the trick to avoiding the plague wasn’t having a superpowerful immune system. It was avoiding flea bites. That’s what we have to do—block the vector. Keep those spiritual fleas away from our crown and brow chakras. I’m pretty sure the brow chakra is the key,” he added, “but best to protect them both, just in case.”

“Just those two chakras need to be protected?” Lily said dubiously. “The contagion didn’t have to get rubbed over Crown’s third eye to take him over.”

“That was like someone catching the plague by sticking their fingers in diseased tissue instead of through a flea bite. And that’s not a great analogy, but . . .” Cullen ran a hand over his hair. “If I tried to really explain, we’d be here all night. Just take my word for it, okay? This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

“Okay. Talk.”

“Friar doesn’t heal the way we do.”

“What do you mean?” Rule asked.

Cullen waved toward the car and the man in it. “The magic’s the wrong color, for one thing. And he’s using way more power than a lupus would. Spending power like crazy.”

“ Her power.” Rule’s lip curled with distaste. “I feel it, sitting so damnably close to him. Are you sure he’s using it for healing?”

“He’s got shields. One of them makes it hard to see details, but I can see the general flow, and huge amounts of active power are localized at his injuries. So yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s doing. Only I’m not sure I’d call it healing.” Cullen frowned, tipping his head. “It’s almost as if he’s remaking his body instead.”

This time it was Lily who asked what he meant.

“I think he’s using what the elves call body magic. Healing and body magic are . . .” Cullen wobbled a hand. “The magic is similar, but they aren’t the same. Like, ah . . . you can do lots of things with your hands, but catching a ball and painting a picture are very different skill sets. Body magic’s not the same skill set as healing. And using body magic to heal is like having a hole in the drywall and, instead of patching it, you take down the whole wall and rebuild it.”

Lily could relate to that metaphor. She’d been living with it for over a month now. “Maybe the Big B’s power can’t be used for healing. Given the way she likes to gobble down death magic, that would make sense.”

“Yeah, probably, but the point is that I don’t know much about body magic. I’ve never watched someone using it and I don’t know how long it will take him to finish. He might be all rebuilt a lot sooner than we’re expecting. I can keep an eye on him, see if he stops spending power in the injured areas, but he could be healed enough to be a problem before that happens.”

Rule frowned. “I’d hoped we could simply walk off and leave him when we got near the knife. If there’s a chance he’s healed or mostly healed, we’ll have to keep him with us so we can watch him.”

“We don’t have to guess how much he’s healed,” Lily said. “We just take the bandages off and check.”

Rule shook his head. “Only with his permission. The terms of the deal don’t allow me to search him a second time.”