Page 40 of A Subtle Scar
I hoped he had strong hands. I liked his fingers. I was getting hard thinking about his fingers. Ronny noticed and lifted one dark eyebrow in my direction. I shrugged. What was I supposed to do, and how come Ronny wasn’t getting hard as well?
Chandler pulled a smaller bag from the bigger paper bag.
“That’s the fiber evidence we found in the field near our most recent victim,” Detective Rice said.
I craned my neck. “It’s been worked with a holding spell thing, but shoddily,” I said. It looked like part of a rope, but it had been torn, frayed, and no wonder. “The spell itself probably frayed it. Imprecise human magic.”
Ronny nodded. “Spells used to be much firmer, even human-made ones.”
Instead of acknowledging us, Chandler held the piece of string in his palms. His eyes fluttered, and his magic spilled out of him.
If I was being honest, I had always preferred the stronger humans—the mages. I knew the weaker ones couldn’t make themselves stronger all of a sudden, and that wasn’t their fault. It was just who they were. But they couldn’t do the most banal of magic, and it was nice to see Chandler’s clear and tidy magic envelop him for a heartbeat like a light bulb flickering on before it fully focused on the string. It was nice to see his strength, and I decided then and there that watching him work magic could easily become one of my most favorite things.
He prodded the magic that remained in the string. I wasn’t exactly sure why he bothered. Some of it disintegrated where he touched it, because that was just how fragile it was, and some of it unwove without him having to do much about it, showing with how little skill it had been worked.
“Ah, you are testing it,” Ronny said. He sounded excited. “You are pulling it this way and that so you can see how it’s been made.”
Detective Rice looked over at Ronny. “Is that what they do when they analyze evidence? It usually sounds a lot more complicated when I ask for an explanation.”
Ronny grinned at her. “Oh, it’s not that complicated. May I?”
Chandler stopped what he was doing to look up at Ronny, who was holding out his hand to Detective Rice. Was Chandler getting territorial? That would be nice. Sweet fuck, I couldn’t wait to be inside him, feel how his strong body would react to that. His shirt, tie, and jacket hardly showed what I’d seen the night before when he’d been wearing nothing but a soft pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt: strong chest muscles and sharply defined collarbones. I had a thing for collarbones, as well as a nice back, because the sight when you got to watch a lover writhe in pleasure, their muscles curling, coiling, body undulating—
Ronny was making it so the human Detective Rice could see what Chandler was doing.
“Huh,” she said.
“Chandler is quite skilled. Normally, the magic wouldn’t be that localized,” Ronny said. “He is very, very good with his magic.”
Chandler caught himself in the middle of an eye roll and finished his examination of the string before putting it away again.
Madison wordlessly handed him a clipboard, and he began jotting down notes.
“It was imbued with weakly woven magic,” he said. “Intended for binding, but also silencing, I believe, and the way it was worked, a talisman would have been used.”
I tilted my head to the side, because I hadn’t at all gotten that much from the little bit of frayed string. I stepped closer to the bag and reached out to touch it.
“Whoa, no touching,” Chandler said, blocking my hand with his clipboard.
“I have a gentle touch.”
“And I have a chain of custody to uphold,” he said, but unless I was mistaken, his pupils had widened a fraction, and the bright light certainly hadn’t shifted, so that was for me. Hmm.
“Whatever you say, baby,” I purred in my most seductive voice.
Chandler narrowed his eyes, but he said nothing, just stared a moment, then went back to writing. I leaned over. He had nice handwriting.
I focused on the string in the bag though. Maybe there was something stale in the magic on it, something like you got from human artifacts, but if so, it was minute, and I wasn’t sure if it was real or if I was imagining it. Yet, Chandler had sounded certain.
“We assumed the perpetrator wanted to work magic but wasn’t a magic user,” Detective Rice said, breaking Chandler’s concentration. “Are you telling me they might be?”
“Well, from just this? Probably. But I’m sure Dr. Williams will agree that if they are, they haven’t received proper training. Having said that, with the right combination of artifacts and spells, a non-magic user might have been able to create this effect as well.”
I didn’t think any of the humans really received proper training in magic, but this was the first time I’d ever actually heard a human admit as much.
“Agreed. Pouring magic into an object like a piece of rope is rather basic,” Madison said. “No one would even think to do that, not after the first few months of magic training. You’d direct your magic to the knot or the breaking points, or you’d make something that holds a spell much better like a metal chain.”
“Maybe they were never given training. Or maybe they want to tell you something by doing what you would recognize as an error in the working,” Ronny said, ever understanding when it came to human nonsense.
