“Let me see her.”
I let her strip Hol y’s arms off me, and as I felt the tingle of a healing charm being invoked, I slammed my shields back a healing charm being invoked, I slammed my shields back in place. My vision didn’t immediately revert to normal, and I squinted in the bright midday light, which I now perceived as dim and ful of shadows. In the dimness, I searched out my purse. I’d dropped it—I didn’t remember when.
Sometime between Hol y’s firebal and my disbelieving the construct.
I final y spotted the red bag a couple of feet away. As I stooped to grab it, I noticed a smal copper disk. The charm from the beast. I pul ed a tissue from my purse, and, as inconspicuously as possible, plucked the disk from the sidewalk. Through the thin paper, the spel s charged in the disk hummed faintly, but whatever they had been, they were defunct now. The sound of sirens rang in the distance, and I backed away, carrying the disk with me.
Tamara pushed her way through the crowd. She leaned over Hol y for several minutes before straightening and glancing around. Her gaze landed on me, and she made her way over to me.
“You okay, Alex?”
I nodded, rubbing my hands over my chil ed arms. “She’s okay, right?”
Tamara might not have been a healer or a practicing doctor, but as a medical examiner, she knew injuries and she was definitely familiar with fatal wounds.
“She’s in shock, but her injuries aren’t serious. What the heck were you two doing? Why didn’t you get off the street?”
I didn’t answer. Both Tamara and Hol y knew I was on close personal terms with a soul col ector, but I wasn’t about to tel Tamara that Death had been here. When I blinked at her without answering, Tamara shook her head.
“You want to tel me what happened?” she asked, sounding more like a cop than an ME—if you hang around enough cops, it rubs off.
“The beast was a glamour. I disbelieved it.” Or at least, it was partial y glamour. The magic in the disk felt familiar was partial y glamour. The magic in the disk felt familiar and definitely witchy, not fae. And then there was that mist that Death vanished. What was that creature? Had that strange fae sent it? He’d warned me that I would regret revealing the feet.
“Yeah, you disbelieved a glamour out of existence.
Everyone on this street wil probably relate the same thing.
But how do you explain that?” Tamara pointed to where Hol y and I had faced the beast.
Two feet above the sidewalk was a fist-sized patch of darker air. Swirling colors escaped the dark patch, reaching out of it in amorphic tendrils.
The Aetheric.
I’d merged realities.
I shot Tamara a panicked glance. I couldn’t close the rift
—I didn’t know how. We could cover it . . . Maybe if we moved a table over it, no one would notice.
Yeah, like a direct hole into the Aetheric wouldn’t be noticed on a street ful of witches.
People were already looking up, their attention leaving Hol y. Several crept forward, reaching for the escaping tendrils of raw magic, their expressions a mix of suspicion and amazement. A tangle of green energy wrapped around a male witch’s extended finger, and he gasped. Then, his eyes ful of wonder, he looked up, his gaze fal ing on me.
Crap. I couldn’t explain the tear. I looked away, not even wil ing to try.
Tamara glanced down at the charm wrapped in tissue on my palm. “What’s that?”
“It fel out of the beast when it vanished.” I held it out for her inspection.
The front of the copper disk was engraved with runes. A couple of them looked familiar from a class I’d taken back in academy, but I was pretty sure they were the archaic forms. Several of the runes I’d never seen before, but despite the fact that the beast had been mostly glamour, the runes didn’t look like the twisting, hard-to-focus-on fae the runes didn’t look like the twisting, hard-to-focus-on fae glyphs I’d run into a month ago. Crimson wax sealed the back of the disk.
I was a sensitive, and a damn fair one. I could sense magic, could often tel the purpose and sometimes even recognize the caster. But the spel s on the disk were beyond my abilities. Luckily, Tamara was an even more skil ed sensitive—at least when it came to witch magic.
She studied the disk, biting her lip as she turned it over with the tissue. Leaning forward, she peered into the thick wax.
“This magic . . . There are spel s twisted on top of spel s,”
she whispered. “I can’t decipher a thing in this mess, but the signature of the magic . . . it’s familiar.” She looked up.
“Alex, whoever charmed this disk—I think they’re also responsible for the spel s on the feet.”
Chapter 3