Page 87 of A Subtle Scar
I nodded. “Yes. Those were flimsy spells to begin with.”
Detective Rice stopped outside of a door, her hand on the handle. There wasn’t one of those one-way mirror things here, which was a little disappointing. I was aware the humans under the spell were not bad, but I’d still have liked Chandler to watch me through the window as I freed them from their enchantment. Maybe he would have been moved enough to kiss me afterward or ask me to take a quick break in the stockroom, which I had definitely seen happen on hospital shows, and hospitals and cops were really similar. I swiveled my head around to see if the stockroom was close by.
“Any issue with admissibility?” Detective Rice asked Chandler.
He shook his head. “I’ll oversee. That should take care of that, plus, these two’re not going to ask any questions or do any magic unless I ask them to.” He narrowed his eyes at Ronny first, then settled that hard stare on me. “Right?”
“Baby, I promise,” I said. “Whatever you need to solve this crime.”
“Agreed,” Ronny said.
Detective Rice nodded. “Perfect. Let’s get started.”
We all filed into the room in which the necromancer plus a human girl were waiting for us. A thin warding had been set around her, functional, but anchored by nothing more than five talisman coins.
The necromancer, Deacon, had a notebook and some sort of reference book open, and in the former, I could see his amateurish drawings of the symbols we’d seen at the morgue—and from the looks of this woman, going by all the fresh bandages, on her skin as well.
Humans could be really shitty, I knew that, but this? It was vile.
“There you are,” the necromancer said.
“Yeah, sorry. Stuff came up,” Chandler said and stepped across the ash-drawn circle Deacon had created to connect the magic in his talismans.
I watched as Chandler nudged the spell lodged in this woman’s esophagus.
“That’s foul magic,” Ronny said.
“I can agree with that,” Deacon said. “Can you break that binding?”
“Sure they can,” our boyfriend said. Then, he put his hand on the woman’s throat, his thumb and index finger on either side of her esophagus, his other hand on her back, fingers splayed.
“Darling, you shouldn’t—”
But before Ronny could stop him, Chandler was drawing on his magic.
I felt Ronny’s magic reach out at the same time I pushed mine toward Chandler to protect him. This puppet spell, like most of them a few hundred years ago, had a nasty defense built in. A heat spell in this case, unless I was mistaken because a more refined magical force spell was clearly too advanced for this sloppy caster.
Mine and Ronny’s magic settled around Chandler just when his spell took effect.
“Huh?” Ronny and I said together as the woman’s mouth popped open so that she could regurgitate the token the spell was bound to. Her throat moved, and she made some unsavory sounds. There wasn’t the smallest bit of fire dancing around her lips.
The token, that folded piece of paper, bounced off the woman’s knee where it left a spot of saliva on old, baggy pants and landed by her right shoe, which looked faded and battered, something that I’d seen at the thrift stores Ronny liked to frequent, but luckily not the kind of thing he would buy.
“Whoa,” Deacon said.
“Excellent,” Rice said.
“How?” I said.
Chandler grinned at me and Ronny. “Silence ward. Unconventional, but it works on the fundamental principle of the puppet spell.”
“Oh. That’s…like, really smart,” Deacon said.
“Very unconventional,” Ronny said.
“Hot,” I mumbled. Ronny nodded.
The woman started coughing and clasped her hands to her neck. Her eyes, unfocused while she’d been bound, moved, taking in everything around her in slow motion.
