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She’d had a hunch this might be the case, having read about something like this in the literature on blood magic that she’d found.
At her words, Rose’s eyes flicked to the butchered human still lying spread-eagle on the ground.
“Yeah,” Hazel said darkly. “To remove the sigil, it would take black magic. A sacrificial death, done in a ritual like this.”
Rose said something in Fae that sounded suspiciously like a shocked curse.
With a deep sigh, Hazel once more rummaged through her bag. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this.”
Rose’s eyes were wide. “What?”
“I’m going to have to trace the lingering magic signature of the witch who did this.” Her hands shook as she pulled the tools out of the bag. “I didn’t want to do this before because magic as dark as this taints you when you try to trace it.”
“Taint?”
“Change me in a bad way. It would seep into me and corrupt my own power. One reason that this type of magic is forbidden is that it will twist the power of whoever touches it. The witch who’s been committing these murders? She’s rotting from the inside. It may not show on the outside yet, but it will over time. Her magic will never be as it once was. It will decompose like a fouling corpse and turn so dark that either she’ll go mad with violent urges, or her magic will simply stop working.”
Covering her mouth with one hand, Rose took a step back. “And now you will touch this? When it will do this to you?”
Hazel shook her head. “Not exactly. There are ways to protect yourself from these effects when you handle black magic secondhand. I didn’t know that before—it’s not something we witches learn as part of our regular education.” Here she shot a meaningful look at Rose. “Black magic is so rare that most of us never have to deal with those who dabble in it in our lives. It’s a special kind of knowledge of how to handle it when a witch in your community tries this. I only found out when I did more reading on blood magic today.”
“How does it work?”
“Well,” she explained, “normally, in order to trace a magic signature, you’d pull the lingering energy into an object to hold and transport it.” She held up a small plastic container. “Then you’d place this object in a circle of power and start a spell that will pull the magic signature out of the object again and then break it apart to analyze it. You also place a piece of paper in the circle, and as the spell identifies the familial magic of the witch who wielded the magic, it will write out the family name—in the blood of the head of the family. That witch might feel a pinch when the spell draws the blood.”
Rose stared at her, eyes glowing with interest.
“Now, in order to make sure that none of the black magic of the collected energy will drench the power circle and seep into me via my active connection to the circle and the tracing spell, I need to ward the circle. It takes quite some time because I need to lay the ward points in exact intervals of twelve hours, five of them to complete a pentagram, but it’s necessary due to the intense energy I’m warding against. Once that is done, the ward will lock the black magic inside the circle and keep it from slipping outside and into me. I can then start the tracing spell, and it will spit out the family name of the witch responsible.”
Grim anticipation pounded in her blood at the thought of this. If only she’d found this information on warding last week—she’d already know the identity of the witch. Or, rather, know which family to bring in for targeted questioning to weed out the perpetrator.
“But it only tells you the family name?” Rose asked. “Not the name of the witch?”
“Yeah. Sadly, that’s the limitation of the spell. It can differentiate between the energy signatures of separate witch families, but it’s not able to pinpoint individual witches within a family. But it’ll be enough.” She gritted her teeth. “Once I know the family, I’ll know to concentrate my efforts on flushing out the guilty witch in their midst.”
She picked up the plastic container again, a simple box with a lid, its form susceptible to drawing in energy. Basically, any object that could be opened and closed would do, and it needn’t even be opened when pulling in the magic signature.
Placing the container right next to the dead human, she stepped back into the circle and motioned for Rose to join her.
“The gathering of the magic shouldn’t taint us,” she said, “because it’s not as intensive as the tracing spell, but let’s be extra careful. This circle should ward off any secondhand effects the lingering energy might cause when I pull it into the container.”
Rose nodded and joined her in the middle of the salt circle.
Hazel made sure to reactivate the protective barrier by pricking her finger and touching her blood to the salt. Her magic hummed in the air.
Weaving her hands, pulling and threading, she gathered the lingering energy of the witch who’d worked this ritual. Since this was the most recent murder scene, enough of the magic signature of the witch still hung in the air, clinging to the layers of the world like morning dew to grass. Or, in the case of this energy, it would probably look more like sludge.
With a hiss, the magic signature was sucked into the container, which rattled once and then stood still.
“Is it done?” Rose whispered.
“Yes.”
“Can we…touch it now?” Rose peered at the box with a healthy amount of skepticism.
Hazel nodded. “As long as it’s in the container, our handling it is not any different from us walking around here and being in close proximity to passive black magic. It’s only when we try to do something with that energy, like trace it, that we would be in danger. But I’ll have wards in place for that.”
She’d lay the first one tonight.
