She nodded and held out her hands, palms up. “Are you leading or am I?”
Rianna was the better witch when it came to spel casting, but I’d always had a stronger connection to the grave. “I’l lead.”
I placed my palms flat against Rianna’s and then looked at John. “We’re going to start now,” I told him, and he reached over and flipped a switch on the video recorder. I turned my focus inward.
It took only a smal string of magic to reactivate my circle, and it sprang up around us, buzzing softly. Once it was in place, I nodded at Rianna.
“My magic to your wil ,” she whispered, and though the words themselves held little meaning, she laced them with magic, giving them shape and purpose.
“I wil guide it,” I said, tapping into the energy stored in my ring and giving power to my own words.
The spel activated like a key sliding home in a lock, and where Rianna and my palms touched, her magic poured up to the surface, slipping into my flesh, my blood. Sharing someone else’s magic is a strange, personal, and innately wrong feeling. Like drawing a breath directly out of someone else’s lungs. Being the one giving up magic feels even worse.
Rianna didn’t complain, though the skin around her eyes Rianna didn’t complain, though the skin around her eyes pinched in a wince. Time to get on with it. I dropped my shields.
Only the smal est tendril of grave essence reached for me from the foot. I drew it into me, accepting the chil into my body as I released what little heat I had left into the amputated part. Wind tore through the circle, whipping curls that escaped my ponytail into my face and making Rianna’s lank red hair fan out around her. A patina of gray crawled over the room as the linoleum under us wore away, revealing crumbling concrete underneath. The sheet on the gurney turned dingy and frayed, the worn holes exposing rusted metal. The Aetheric bloomed into twisting colors around us, strands of magic glowing in a low ebb and flow, like a giant magical pulse.
“Is this what it’s always like for you?” Rianna asked, her green eyes glowing brightly as she looked around us.
“The land of the dead? Yeah, recently.” I wasn’t going to mention anything about the Aetheric, especial y not while being recorded. I hadn’t realized that she would share my ability to see across the planes when we shared our magic.
I reached out with magic before she could ask any more questions. My ability to raise shades had nothing to do with the amount of Aetheric energy I could channel and everything to do with the wyrd ability that both Rianna and I had been born with. I reached out with that portion of me that touched the dead, and Rianna’s magic answered, reaching with mine. As I poured the two magics into the foot, they flowed together, twisting, twining, not like they were one single note of music, but like two harmonious notes vibrating together, building toward a crescendo.
I reached deep with the magic, searching for a shade. In theory, every cel in the body stored the life’s memory—the trick was having enough magic or the body having enough copies of those memories to give form to the shade. A new body with lots of cel s took only a little power to raise. An old body reduced to dust and bones needed a lot of magic old body reduced to dust and bones needed a lot of magic to fil in the gaps between the memories. With just a foot?
We needed to pump enough magic into the shade to fil out the missing body. Difficult. Impossible alone. But together?
Maybe. Just maybe.
Our magic fil ed the foot and flowed beyond it. I felt the shade forming before I even opened my eyes.
It worked.
Or not.
I stared, horrified, not at the shade of a man but at the single, ghastly glimmer of a foot. Just a foot.
The foot-shade hopped across the gurney, and though we’d poured enough energy in it to raise ten shades, the stump at its ankle led to nothing.
“What the hel ?” John stepped through my circle, making both Rianna and me shudder—I had talked to him about crossing active circles. He leaned closer to the foot, watching its strange dance. “Where’s the rest of it?”
Good question. One I had no answer for. I glanced at Rianna. Her eyes were wide, the whites glimmering as she watched the il -formed shade bounce across the gurney.
“Does that mean it was severed prior to death?” Tamara asked. She at least respected the edge of my circle. Of course, as deeply entrenched in magic as she was, she’d have had to shatter the circle to cross.