The shop’s wards tingled along my skin as I stepped through the threshold. I’d never been in this shop before. The types of magic I could create didn’t require any outside components aside from the occasional storage vessel, like the silver charms dangling from my bracelet—not that I’d created most of those either. I sucked at traditional spell casting. But my ability to sense magic was acute, and the wards on the doors had some hard-core theft deterrents that prickled at the edge of my senses. Of course, most magic that used components required items that were rare or hard to acquire, or were just plain dangerous, so it probably wasn’t surprising that such extensive wards were in place.
Not everyone could feel wards though. Clearly the corpse I’d followed in didn’t comprehend the extent of the shop’s theft-deterrent system.
I’d entered only minutes behind him, but he almost barreled into me as I stepped through the door. His shoulder brushed me at the same moment he hit the antitheft wards, and several things happened at once. The wards snapped to life, blaring a warning to the shopkeeper to let him know something was being stolen. Simultaneously, a theft-deterring paralytic spell sparked across the would-be thief, locking his body—and the merchandise—in place.
Unfortunately, while the wards were powerful, they weren’t terribly specific. Where his shoulder touched mine, the spell jumped from him to me, immobilizing me as well. Under normal circumstances, that would majorly suck. Under these circumstances? It was so much worse.
My magic still identified him as a corpse. I could feel the grave essence lifting off him, clawing at me. My mental shields were strong, but my magic liked dead things. A lot. And I hadn’t raised a shade in nearly a week, so my magic was looking for release. Typically I made a point not to touch the dead. Now I couldn’t get away.
My magic battered against the inside of my shields, looking for chinks in my mental walls that it could jump through. Fighting the spell holding me was a waste of energy—I was well and truly caught—so I focused all of my attention on holding back my own magic. But I could feel the chilled fingers of the grave sliding under my skin, worming its way into me and making paths for my magic to leach into the animated corpse frozen against me.
I wanted to open my shields and See what the thing in front of me was truly made of. But if I cracked my shields to gaze across the planes of reality and get a good look at the body, more of my magic would escape. And too much was already whispering through my shields, making fissures where more could follow. Sweat broke out on my paralyzed brow as I poured my focus into holding my magic at bay.
But I was touching a corpse.
The grave essence leaking from the body clawed at the fractures my magic was chewing through my shields, and it was too much. If I could have stepped back . . . But I couldn’t.
All at once a chunk of my mental wall caved, and the magic rushed out of me. Color washed over the world as the Aetheric plane snapped into focus around me. A wind lifted from the land of the dead, stirring my curls and chilling my clammy skin. I could see the network of magic holding me in place, as well as the knot of magic in the sprung ward, but more important, I could see the magic coating the corpse in front of me. And it was a corpse, no doubt about it, the dead skin sagging, bloating.
But under the dead flesh, a yellow glimmer of a soul glowed.
Which meant the body was both dead and alive. Considering it was up and walking around, it was a heck of a lot more alive than a dead body should have been.
The soul inside was the color I associated with humans, so this wasn’t a corpse being worn and walked around by something from Faerie or one of the other planes. I’d never seen spellwork like what shimmered across the dead flesh, but whatever kind of half-life the man existed in wasn’t going to last much longer if I couldn’t get ahold of my magic.
The hole in my shields wasn’t huge, but I could feel my magic filling the body. And the grave and souls didn’t get along. I couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of magic, but I managed to slow it to a trickle.
I’d barely noticed the crowd gathering around us until one of the shopkeepers began releasing the spell holding us. If the antitheft paralyzing spell was dropped, I’d be able to get my distance from the corpse.
But either he wasn’t a very good witch, or he was stalling—likely to wait for the cops—because he was taking his sweet time, and more and more of my magic was flowing out.
I’d ejected souls from bodies before. While souls didn’t like the touch of the grave, they tended to cling to their flesh pretty hard, and it took directed magic to pry them free. I was actively fighting expelling the soul, and only a small portion of my magic had filled the corpse, but the soul’s connection to the body felt weak, tentative.
I couldn’t shift my gaze to the shopkeeper, but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. Oh please, release the damn immobility spell.
Too late.
In a burst of light, the soul popped free of the corpse.