“Doesn’t look very comfortable.” I indicated the wall he’d been sitting against.
He shrugged. “I sometimes think I hear noises from Aiden’s room during the night. Anyway, I prefer to stay close to him in case we have to run.”
“Nobody followed me here, don’t worry.” I drew in a slow breath. “Keir, I don’t understand why you were affected, but it’s got to be a side effect of being linked. I’m sorry.”
He took three steps, closed the distance between us, and wrapped his arms firmly around me. “It’s not your fault, Jas. Don’t ever think that.”
I hugged him back, vowing never to come close to death again. It really shouldn’t be that hard, considering most people managed to avoid it. Lloyd was wrong, I didn’t have nine lives, I had nine deaths. I glanced at Aiden, my chest tightening. If Keir died before seeing his brother wake up… no. I would never let that happen.
“I remember killing the vampire, but that’s all,” he said. “What tried to kill you?”
“A monster that looked like a fury but could blend into the shadows.” I released him. “I can draw you a picture.”
“No thanks.” He smiled. “I take it you didn’t come all the way here in the flesh just to save me from certain doom?”
“No…” I trailed off. “Oops. I think I left Isabel in the forest. I’d better make sure she’s okay.”
If the Hemlocks refused to tell me their real relationship with the gods, maybe Asher could shed some light on the relationship between blood magic and regular magic. I hadn’t actually told him about my coven yet, though he must have guessed by now. Perhaps now it was time to bring the Hemlocks out into the open.
“I can’t convince you to stay?” Keir wrapped an arm around my shoulder, trailing his lips over mine. “I’ll be waiting if you change your mind.”
“I wouldn’t say no to some company.” I wound my hands into his soft hair and kissed him, the warmth of his touch banishing the chill of the spirit realm from both of us.
“I’ll be right behind you,” he said. “Just warn me next time you run into an unwanted fury.”
“I will.” I would have said it won’t happen again, but that would be asking for too much. “I happen to like being alive, even if I’m on the wrong side of the veil too often these days.”
“It’s where the best of us hang out.” He took my cold hands in his warm ones, then let go. “See you later, Jas.”
I grabbed a sandwich on the way to Asher’s place, taking a roundabout route to avoid walking too close to the site of yesterday’s attack. I expected to find Isabel there, but when I opened the door, I found Asher sitting alone in his usual spot behind the counter.
“Isabel’s not with you?” I asked.
“She went back to her hotel room to grab some spell ingredients,” he said. “What do you want, another stealth spell?”
I hadn’t even used the first one. It was Ilsa who’d needed it in the end, not me. “Are you selling those tattoo pens?”
His brows shot up. “No. They aren’t for sale.”
“You marked Isabel,” I said. “I’m guessing it was your idea?”
He pushed to his feet. “You think I’m a bad influence on your friend, do you?”
“That spell saved her life yesterday,” I said. “Just name the price and I’ll let you mark me, too.”
He tilted his head. “Does that mean you’re going to come clean about which of the gods you’re working with?”
I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not going to tell tales on you, Jas,” he said. “Isabel wouldn’t betray your secret, so I’m asking you. That’s my price. I’d like to know who it is I’m helping.”
“I’m not—I’m not in league with the gods,” I said, disarmed that he’d jumped to that conclusion. “My coven hates them, to be honest. The Hemlocks.”
He took a step back from the counter, looking me up and down. “Oh. Them.”
“You know of them?”
“They disappeared off the radar around the same time as the Bloodroot Coven,” he said. “I assumed the League or the invasion destroyed them.”
“I’m the last survivor,” I said. “It’s a little complicated, but my coven is supposed to stop the Ancients from overrunning the planet. Problem is, they didn’t foresee the mages taking the Ancients’ side.”
“Some of us did,” said Evelyn, but Asher didn’t look up, so she must have meant for only me to hear.
“Now I see why Isabel seemed so certain you could defeat the Whisper single-handedly,” he said. “As for the tattoo pen, it’s either priceless or worth nothing at all, depending on who holds it.”
“Does it work the same now the Whisper is dead?” I asked. “What exactly is their relationship? The gods and the symbols, I mean. She was—inside the ink. That can’t be the case now she’s gone, can it?”
“The Whisper isn’t dead.” He reached behind the counter, pulling out a drawer. “But the ink in these pens contains the essence of the gods’ magic in its purest form.”
He tossed a pen onto the desk, which rolled to a halt in front of me. Looked like an ordinary sharpie to me. I picked it up, a shiver running across my shoulder blades. “I thought gods’ magic and witch magic didn’t mix.”
“Says who?” He closed the drawer, turned back to the counter. “It has the same source, does it not?”
“It… does?” I halted, the pen suspended in mid-air. “My coven implied they were the ones who created the symbols used in blood magic. Our ancestors, anyway.”
He coughed. “I doubt it. The symbols we use for witchcraft today are nothing more than a shortcut. You could draw a smiley face and it would have the same effect, if you put enough power into it.”
He made to take the pen from me, and I yanked back my hand. “Don’t you even think about it.”
“I’m not going to tattoo a smiley face on you, Jas. I’ve seen far worse, besides. There was one witch who made a living telling gullible humans that the only way to stave off the pox was to tattoo a naked man on their left buttock.”
I choked on an unexpected laugh. “Is that the real reason blood magic was banned?”
“Maybe.” He coughed again, his mouth curling up at the side. “I’m not lying, Jas. The ink in that pen is drawn directly from the gods.”
I lowered my hand. “My magic doesn’t react well to the Ancients. Natural enemies and all.”
Yet it had worked just fine when I’d used it to banish the Whisper. Why, then, had my Hemlock magic reacted so violently when I handled the Moonbeam? It even reacted against Ilsa. Not that Asher knew she carried the power of an Ancient. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure how much Isabel had told him. He hadn’t known I was a Hemlock witch, but that didn’t explain why he knew so much about the Ancients.
“I told you,” he rasped. “It has the same source. All types of magic do, when it comes down to it.”
I gaped at him. I’d known witchcraft and necromancy had the same power source, but not the Ancients. And not blood magic.
The rituals were once used to communicate with the gods, Cordelia had said. Yet the gods must have reached out to humans first. Now I knew the Ancients and the Hemlocks hadn’t always been enemies, her words took on a whole new dimension.
“How do you know so much?” I placed the pen back on the desk, my palms damp with sweat.
“My coven was a little more adventurous than most,” he said. “We knew the true meaning of blood magic. In essence, it’s simply the same as creating a regular spell, except the effect is attached directly to you. You can ward yourself or use an amplifying rune to enhance the effects of another spell you’re already using.”
“And mage marks,” I put in. “That’s what they are, right? A variation on the same spell. Creating a two-way link between two people.”
Which wasn’t all that different to the spell binding Evelyn and me. Except one of us was dead, and it didn’t appear as a physical mark.
He scoffed. “H
ypocrites. They might not use the same pens my coven did, but it’s still blood magic. They slide by the law by pretending it doesn’t count as witchcraft because they aren’t witches.”
“Figures,” I said. “So how did blood magic gain the reputation of being the most evil form of magic imaginable? Because people used it in ritual summonings?”
“Essentially,” Asher said. “Those rituals give regular blood practise a bad name.”
“Who taught you all this?” I asked him. “I guess you didn’t get this pen from a market stall.”
His jaw tightened. “No. This particular marker was taken from the Orion League after they fell, which they in turn stole from the Bloodroot Coven. Maybe the gods would frown upon us for using their power, but they aren’t all like the Whisper. The pen contains a fragment of their magic, nothing more.”
The door clacked open and I tensed, but it was only Isabel.
“Oh—Jas,” she said, with some surprise. “What’re you doing with that pen?”
“Experimenting,” I said. “I might need a hand.”
“Are you sure?” Isabel said. “I wouldn’t say I’m an expert yet. I don’t think you need any help returning to your body from the spirit realm, either.”
Actually, I think I do. “I wouldn’t mind being able to stop myself from being controlled against my will, though.”
“I thought you trusted me,” Evelyn said.
I cast her a sideways look, but neither of the others acted like she’d spoken. Either she didn’t want Asher to see her, or she was in one of her moods. It was hard to tell with Evelyn.
“And sometimes my body gets attacked when I’m in the spirit realm,” I added. “Can I see your mark?”
“Sure.” Isabel pushed up her sleeve, revealing a faint tattoo mark on her warm brown skin. “It’s like the mages’ marks.”
“We were just talking about that,” I said. “Can you teach me?”
“Go right ahead,” said Asher. “But if you’re going to use your experimental powers under an amplifying rune, please don’t do it in my shop.”
“We’ll behave,” said Isabel, holding up her arm so I could see the mark. “Can you copy that?”
“Sure.” I pressed the point of the pen to my skin. Keeping an eye on Isabel’s arm, I copied the symbol onto my own wrist. The skin tingled a little, but the pen glided smoothly, finishing the symbol.
“I expected something more dramatic,” I admitted. “Okay, I’ll use the amplifier, too.”
I pushed up my other sleeve and drew the amplifying symbol from memory. My skin tingled, but my Hemlock magic didn’t react. As Asher had said, it was a low dose of the gods’ magic, hardly noticeable.
“Now are you going to tell me your plan?” Asher asked.
“Nope, because I don’t have one,” I said. “I wanted to prove Lord Sutherland’s guilt, but he’s carrying around a device that can suck out people’s souls and has spies planted inside the necromancer guild.”
Asher’s eyes grew round. “He’s carrying what?”
“He stole the device from the necromancers,” I said. “How many people attacked you at the market yesterday? Might some of them have got away?”
Someone had conducted the ritual that had nearly killed Asher and Isabel. We’d found three bodies, but unless they’d turned their weapons on themselves, there was at least one missing perpetrator.
“It’s worth checking,” Isabel said. “Would it help if we returned to the scene of the crime?”
“All right.” I gave a grim nod. “I think I have an idea.”
10
The abandoned shop where the ritual had taken place was deserted, which came as no surprise since we hadn’t reported the crime. Who were we supposed to tell, the mages? They’d sent the necromancers to their deaths themselves.
I stepped over the bloodstained hardwood where Asher had lain, tasting bile at the back of my throat. Isabel moved in behind me, her hands clenched at her sides.
“I’m glad he survived,” I said. “He was lucky.”
“He has almost as many lives as you do, Jas,” she said. “Uh, not in the same way, though.”
“No…” Asher wasn’t a shade, and however he’d injured himself, it hadn’t even been reversed when Evelyn had used her healing magic on him. “You like him. Don’t you? Just how often have you come back here since my exile?”
An embarrassed smile came over her. “I have enough responsibilities with my own coven. I’m not naïve enough to think anything can come of this.”
“You deserve to be happy, too.” Until this morning, I hadn’t known that she’d been forced into the role of coven leader early because her mentor had died due to the Ancients’ magic. Now did not seem the time to broach the subject, not on top of a site of ritual magic which had spawned a shadowy monster.
I pulled out my phone to act as a torch, scanning the blood splatter on the floor where necromancers had died. Someone had removed their bodies, but the blood remained, along with the faded lines of the chalk circle.
I knelt down beside it, reaching for a spell. “Isabel, can you stay here and keep an eye out in case something else comes crawling out of the ashes?”
“Sure.” She stepped back, shining her phone’s torchlight into the room’s corners.
I pulled a tracking spell off my wrist and laid it carefully down on top of the blood-splattered floorboards. Then I pushed my Hemlock magic into it, tapping on the amplifying mark as I did so.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then I plunged forwards, headfirst, into a vision of the same room I was already in. At least five or six individuals stood on the bare wooden floor, wearing long cloaks with their hoods pulled up to hide their faces. Necromancer cloaks.
“What are you doing?” asked the smallest of the cloaked figures. His voice was high, scared.
“What nature intended for us,” said a female voice. The speaker was tall and thin, and her hood moved as she approached the area I’d appeared in, revealing pale features and blond hair. I know her. She’s at the guild. She also hadn’t been among the dead, that I’d seen.
The blond woman moved forwards, a knife in her hands. One of the other necromancers gasped. “What are you going to do to us?”
She grabbed the closest necromancer by the scruff of his neck, slicing the knife across his throat. His body hit the ground next to me, blood spilling across the wooden floor.
I’d seen enough. Letting the spell fade out, I lurched to my feet, squeezing my eyes shut in the hope that the room would stop spinning.
“Jas, what did you see?” asked Isabel.
“The ritual.” I swallowed down the taste of sour bile. “There are still spies at the guild and they didn’t all die in the sacrifice. I have to warn the others.”
“You saw their faces?”
“One of them.” I dug in my pocket for my notebook and pen and sketched out the blond woman’s face from memory. “I’ve definitely seen her at the guild before, but I’m not sure she’ll be there now. She might be lying low if she suspects we might have tried a tracking spell.”
“Did she leave any traces behind that we can use to track her?” Isabel paced around the ritual site. “I guess not, if she’s still alive.”
“I can try anyway.” I reached into the ashes of my collapsed tracking spell, feeling for the spark of magic that remained beneath the surface. The blond necromancer had stood right here. I pulled her image into my mind’s eye and focused as hard as possible.
I’d used magic without props beforehand. Asher himself had said the actual symbols didn’t matter as much as the intent, as I’d known applied in necromancy for years. In its purest, rawest form, magic came direct from nature, and held no limits.
Especially for a Hemlock witch.
If Evelyn was confident that I had power enough to kill the leader of the Mage Lords, then I should be able to use a simple tracking spell without an anchor.
Magic flowed to my hands, lighting them up in green iridescen
ce. Isabel exclaimed aloud. “Jas—what are you doing?”
“Testing a theory.” The glow brightened, and a tugging sensation propelled me towards the door. “Whoa. I think it’s working.”
“You’re tracking her?” Isabel’s dubious tone faded as she saw my hands glowing, a thin thread of light running from me through the closed door.
“I think she’s close.” I nodded to Isabel. “Let’s go.”
I strode down the street, following the tugging sensation of the tracking spell. It grew stronger the further we got from the market but didn’t appear to be leading us towards the guild, either. Keir hovered behind me, occasionally grabbing a vessel to have a look around. He didn’t seem surprised by my display of magic, but my conversation with Asher had reminded me that I’d neglected my witch magic lately, forgetting how useful it could be for tracking people I hadn’t seen face to face yet. The amplifying mark on my arm tingled as I walked, and I suppressed the urge to scratch it.
Finally, the tracking spell gave a firm tug, like a piece of elastic growing taut. Spotting a necromancer patrol coming the other way, I ducked into an alley, pulling Isabel along with me.
“I think she’s with them,” I whispered.
“Are the others her allies?” she whispered back.
“Not sure.” If not, then it meant they were her next sacrifices. You won’t get past me.
As I’d suspected, the blond necromancer slowed her pace when she drew near to our hiding place, sensing the presence of another necromancer.
The instant she looked our way, I pounced. Two knockout spells flew from my hands, hitting her companions. They dropped like stones on either side of her.
“Nice try.” I strode out to meet her. “But you won’t be making any more sacrifices.”
She snapped out a hand and a blast of power rushed towards me. I conjured a shield to deflect it, feeling the sizzle of magic against my skin. Witch magic.
“Who are you?” I raised my shield, pushing back until her attack dissipated. “You’re not a witch.”
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