Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3)

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Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3) Page 10

by Stephen Penner


  Maggie rolled over in her bed, ascending out of the dream like a bubble rising slowly to the surface of the water. Then she pulled the covers against her face and finally let herself cry.

  19. The Witch Bone Is Connected to…

  It was like a puzzle. Putting the pieces together. Except it wasn’t like a puzzle. There was nothing to solve. The pieces went where the pieces went. The mystery wasn’t in the putting together of the bones. The mystery was in the bones themselves. And the solution was in extracting it.

  The hand bone connected to the arm bone…

  Frankenstein’s monster was coming along nicely. But there was more work to be done.

  20. Picking a Destination

  Maggie turned the picture frame over and over in her hands. Her morning coffee was cooling to just the right temperature and the bright sun rising outside belied the cooler autumn day it was bringing. The peacefulness of the morning gave her a chance to contemplate both the object in her hand and Philip’s ‘business’ proposition.

  The business position was actually an invitation to the conference Hamilton was speaking at. The university had already paid for Sarah to attend, so he was allowed to go in her stead. It was being held October 31-November 1 on the Isle of Lewis, near the world-famous Callanish standing stones. He’d given her the conference brochure as he explained the arrangement, but she had completely tuned him out when she flipped through and came across the description of the stones:

  Dating back over 4000 years, the Callanish standing stones are second in importance only to Stonehenge. The heart is a central circle of 13 tall stones where excavations uncovered a chambered tomb reported to have contained human remains. From there four limbs run out in line with the cardinal points of the compass.

  When she’d come to, Philip was apologizing for the sleeping arrangements. “The college only booked one room, but I’ve been assured I can bring a guest.” ‘Business’ indeed. She told him she’d think about it.

  Shaking the suggestions hidden in both Philip’s invitation and the description of the Callanish stones, Maggie took a drink of her coffee and returned her full attention to Sarah’s broken picture frame.

  She’d never really thought about it before, but the entire point of a picture frame was to make the viewer look at something else. Its job was to accentuate the photo without overpowering it. Frames for sale in a store usually had some sort of fake picture inside, and even the ones with words and decorations were still designed to highlight, not overpower, the image within.

  So an empty picture frame fairly screamed in the silence of its omission.

  She turned it over again and looked at the rectangle which had once housed an image important enough to Sarah MacKenzie to first display, then destroy. So many questions…

  What picture was in here?

  Why is the frame broken?

  And, and she peered closer at the few glass shards embedded in the frame, Is that blood?

  *

  Just a trace. That’s all she needed. Just some trace of the person.

  Warwick sipped from her scalding coffee and allowed herself a smile as she opened her computer’s browser. She enjoyed the challenge of it. Finding someone who didn’t want to be found. It used to be more difficult, more challenging. Now, with credit checks for apartments and shopper’s cards at grocery stores, it was harder to avoid being found. Most people didn’t even think about it. It was the ones who did who were fun to hunt. Prey who knew the lion was watching.

  With the grave-robbing case successfully delegated to Willis, Warwick had turned her attention fully to Benson’s hotel murder. Ordinarily, she might not have been that interested in a homicide in another jurisdiction, but the connection to her local suicide had piqued Warwick’s interest. Nevertheless, the leads were turning up dry. But that only meant other leads needed to be pursued. You might not be able to get blood from a stone, but you can get water from a cactus, if you know how to go about it. She knew one of those apparently dry leads was Devan Sinclair, the Aberdonian who had rented the room where the body was found.

  His bookstore was closed and gone. His last known address was now someone else’s flat. He had no known family alive. But Scotland wasn’t that big of a country, and he couldn’t use cash for everything.

  Time to draw blood.

  *

  Maggie set the frame on her coffee table and knelt in front of it as if to pray. She had an idea of what she wanted to do, but wasn’t sure of the details. A plan without a blueprint. A premise, but no script. A hope, but no words.

  Well, some words. Probably. It was one of the spells she had, if not mastered, then at least used a few times, and therefore remembered. Mostly. She was pretty sure.

  The divination spell. Extracting information from an object about a person who had been in contact with it. She’d used it a few times before and each time it had produced a vision for her to view. To date, she’d simply unleashed the spell and sat back to watch the phantasmic show that would coalesce in front of her face. This time, she wasn’t entirely sure what to expect because she wasn’t entirely sure if she could remember the spell correctly. She wondered what might happen if she got it a little bit wrong. Would it simply not work at all? Or would she get some other result, unsure how it might relate to the frame and Sarah?

  Well, she thought, only one way to find out.

  *

  There was more than one way to find someone, Warwick knew. Or rather, there was more than one way for someone to give themselves away. Apartment application. Bank account. Debit card. Most people didn’t even think about the cybertrail they left everywhere every day. You could tell the ones who did by how much less of a wake they generated. But refusing the supermarket discount card didn’t do much if you still used your debit card to pay. Either way it was a blip on the screen.

  Someone who had no blips at all—that’s what stood out. Devan Sinclair was standing out. The last activity on that identity was the hotel room. She assumed he had come there on holiday.

  Then she remembered: never assume.

  She almost missed him.

  *

  Maggie closed her eyes and sighed. She really missed her Dark Book. But she supposed that’s why she was pursuing the leads. Using what she could recall of the magic to track down the source of it. Or at least the user’s manual.

  She took a deep breath and tried to calm her thoughts. Then she opened her eyes again and spoke the spell—to the best of her recollection.

  “

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