AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Oh, right. Dead guy’s guts.
“So if you want to find the witch who did it,” he said, “why don’t you just do a tracing spell on whatever magic she used here?”
Warm brown eyes met his, and for an unguarded second, surprise registered in her gaze. “Right,” she said after a moment, more to herself, “you’d know some things about how we work after you absorbed Lydia’s and Estelle’s memories.” Her brows drew together. “Wait. Didn’t you say the memories fade along with the stolen powers after some time? It’s been seven months since you killed them. How do you still know these things?”
He shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Sometimes, fragments stay.”
Which was disconcerting, to say the least. The more he killed and the more powers and memories he absorbed, the more bits and pieces of all these strangers’ lives and minds settled into his head…and sometimes, they merged with his own thoughts and memories to the point he couldn’t tell if he’d acquired this particular piece of knowledge by taking someone else’s life.
A wandering mosaic of death, he was.
Hazel regarded him for a few seconds longer, then sighed. “Well, analyzing the power signature used here would be a good idea if it weren’t blood magic. But as it is, I can’t do a trace without getting tainted.”
“Tainted?”
“This is evil.” She waved at the scene. “If I tap into the residual magic to figure out whose signature it is, some of it will latch on to me and…cling. You can think of it like a pool filled with feces with some valuable info at the bottom. And I’d have to dive down without any protection and run the risk of getting infected by whatever germs and bacteria are thriving in there.”
He grimaced at her analogy. “So no tracing this shit.”
“Literally.” Her mouth quirked in a wry smile, and his stomach did something funny at the sight.
He cleared his throat. “What about that concealing magic you were talking about?”
“Too faint to trace.” She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll have to find this witch by other means—and be careful about it.”
“Why?”
The look she sent him made him alternately flash hot and cold. “How much do you know about what’s going on in our community right now?”
He gave a nonchalant shrug. “You’ve got yourselves some civil war–style issues. Juneau’s gone, and you’re trying to reunite both sides, but there’s bickering?”
She huffed a dry laugh. “Bickering. That’s a way to put it.” With a sigh, she added, “The peace we’ve won is fragile. If this were any other time, I’d launch a full-scale, official investigation into this murder and have every witch in the community undergo some borderline illegal questioning to ferret out the killer.”
He blinked. “You? Illegal? You can’t even bring yourself to jaywalk.”
“If the light’s red, it’s red, and you shouldn’t—” She stopped short, pressed her mouth into a thin line, and glared at him.
His smirk only seemed to make her scowl worse. For whatever reason.
He tilted his head. “And you can’t question every witch with one of your patented truth spells because…?”
“We don’t use truth spells on each other.” A wicked glint in her eyes. “They hurt like crazy and are a violation of privacy.”
It was his turn to glare. She sure hadn’t had a problem using one on him when they’d first met.
“Without probable cause, I can’t use violent means to interrogate other witches—and truth spells are a form of violence. I would have to use normal methods of questioning, but…” She pursed her lips. “With the situation being as volatile as it is, the news that one of us is butchering humans for evil gain will upset the entire process of reconciliation.”
“I’m not following as to why.”
Her smile was sardonic. “We’re starting from a place of mistrust. If we are to rebuild the bridges we’ve burned, we need to learn to trust each other again, but we still very much have two factions, even if the line between them has officially been wiped away. And chances are high that one side will immediately assume the killer is among the opposite faction, and the mistrust we’ve been trying to break down will flare to new life when every former Aequitas will suspect all former Draconians of either being the murderer or harboring her. Can you not imagine what will happen when this gets out?”
Tallak straightened from his position against the wall, snapped his finger, and pointed at her with a grin. “You’ll have a…wait for it…witch hunt.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head, and muttered something sounding like, “Why, dear gods, why?”
With her eyes closed, would she notice if he sniffed at her real quick? The smell of blood and gore permeated the air and assaulted his nostrils, and he really just needed one good nose-full of her balmy scent to overwrite the olfactory impressions of this abattoir.
She opened her eyes just as he was inching toward her, and he aborted the mission with a deft side step as if interested in some details of the murder scene on the other side of her. Dammit. Just one sniff, that was all he needed. Maybe if he pretended to…
