Sacrificial Magic. Stacia Kane

looked at the blackened lines again. “Maybe they used lighter fluid to mark the spell? So they could burn it after. Burn the spell, change it with fire.”

      Terrible shifted his feet. “So you ain’t can get a feel on who done it, aye? Causen that energy’s all fucked up from burnin.”

      “Right.” Her smile refused to be denied for that one; she felt it spread across her face. That felt good. Almost as good as seeing color rise up his neck, the way it always did when he was right about something and she told him so.

      With effort she kept herself from trotting up to him for a kiss. Not really the time. Not when things might have been smoothed over between them—mostly—but she still had to worry about who had told Slobag about this building being empty. Not when some pasty-faced guy she didn’t know stood there, and no one was supposed to know about them.

      And especially not when they stood in a roomful of horrible magic. It might not have felt like that at the moment, but somehow she didn’t think the spell had been done to make bunnies happy or something.

      That foreboding feeling, that certainty, grew stronger as she walked around the lines, trying to somehow separate what she saw on the floor like so much burned or rotten meat from the living, breathing person it had once been. Had been only the day before, apparently. And the pattern emerging didn’t really make it any better.

      She looked up; all three of the men were looking back at her expectantly. No pressure or anything.

      “It’s a hafuran,” she said.

      Bump raised one lazy eyebrow. “The fuck that one is?”

      “It’s a kind of sigil. Not a sigil, but a design, a symbol.”

      “Thinking I coulda fucking guessed on that me own fuckin self, yay?”

      “This is a Church symbol, though. It’s …” She stepped sideways, both to get farther away from the symbol and to get closer to Terrible, before she pulled the collar of her polo open, pulled aside the crewneck of the long-sleeve shirt she wore underneath it. “See? I have one here.”

      Actually she had two, but the one just below her collarbone was the easiest for her to show at that moment; the other was on her opposite biceps, and no way was she pulling her arm out of her sleeve and lifting the shirt up to show that one.

      Terrible folded his arms and inspected it, just as if he hadn’t seen it dozens of times already, hadn’t kissed it, caressed it. Her skin warmed under his gaze and she started talking again to distract herself. “It builds energy, is all. We all get them because it—well, we get a lot of different sigils and runes and symbols and stuff, but this one is an all-around power enhancer. Whatever we do, the hafuran makes it stronger.”

      Bump leaned over to peer at her skin too closely; he smelled like kesh smoke and one of those sleazy colognes that promised to make men instantly attractive but actually just made them smell like men who wore sleazy cologne. She didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. Whatever. He couldn’t see down her shirt, he was just being a dick. Their relationship was imbalanced, yes, and Terrible worked for him, yes, but one thing she never had to worry about anymore was that Bump would try to touch her in places she didn’t want him to touch. Which was pretty much anywhere.

      “Be one of you fuckin Church things, then, this be the fuckin Church doing it? Killing Eddie, meaning.”

      “No!” Was he crazy? “No. It’s a Church symbol, yeah, but it’s not like we’re the only ones who can use it. Anyone can use it, it could be anyone.”

      She couldn’t tell whether he believed her, but he let it go. “So what they there givin the fuckin try an make stronger? Why them fuckin doin this to Eddie?”

      She moved on to Pasty. He didn’t know about Terrible, obviously, because he stood way too close.

      “Ain’t thinking I see good enough.” He reached out to grab her. Pervert.

      Pervert whose face grew even paler—she hadn’t thought that was possible—when Terrible grabbed him by the hair and slammed him back against the wall.

      A moment of silence; Pasty’s momentary glare turned into acquiescence, a silent gaze at the floor. Fucking right it did. What was he going to do, fight Terrible? Ha. She would say she’d like to see that, but enough death lurked in that room as it was. Pride rose in her chest. Maybe that was mean of her, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t wait to get him home, either.

      Bump cleared his throat, interrupting the images beginning to form in her head, part memory, part fantasy. He’d asked a question and she guessed he wanted her to answer, not stand there like a dope staring at Terrible.

      So she blinked, hard. “I don’t know. Obviously—well, not obviously, but I assume—they used the hafuran to make whatever ritual they did stronger. And whatever the ritual was probably wasn’t a very good one. Most clean magic doesn’t require a murder to get it going.”

      “Be one of them death curses?”

      “I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel like anything at all, because of the fire. But I don’t think so.”

      She started walking around it, inspecting the floor as closely as she could. Maybe they’d done something to alter the hafuran, to make it do something else?

      She pulled on a latex glove and grabbed a roughly rectangular chunk of wood. More lines might have been preserved under the burned body, and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to touch it—or anything that came in contact with it—with her bare hands.

      “Lemme get that one.” Terrible was halfway across the room already; she barely managed to get her hand up in time, to get her mouth open. “No, don’t. I … you don’t know where the lines are, I don’t want them to shift. I’m fine, I’m okay.”

      Bullshit. The lines wouldn’t shift. What she didn’t want was for him to step into something like that when she didn’t know what the sigil on his chest might have done to him. The month before, he’d touched a toad fetish—a dead toad stuffed with horrible magic, used to create a glamour—and passed out; granted, it was a hideous fetish and had made even her physically ill, and granted, the energy she felt right now was weak and not particularly negative, but still.

      He knew it, too. His eyes caught hers, and in them she saw the knowledge, the frustration of it. Oh well. Better frustrated and alive. As much as it sucked, keeping him alive and safe was worth any amount of gross.

      And it was gross. In a couple of places the body didn’t want to move; it’d … melted, sort of, into the cement, and when those parts finally did shift, it was with a horrible squelching sound that turned her stomach.

      But she saw enough to convince her their murderous friend probably hadn’t added any extra runes or anything to the hafuran. It was still a possibility, of course, but she didn’t think it was the case.

      Trying to figure out what the hell they’d been trying to do without feeling anything from it was like being half-blind; missing some of the information she usually got as a matter of course. It made her feel awkward, unbalanced, even under her still-damn-good high. Hell, that high was the only thing that allowed her to even move the body without being sick; she could retreat into it, force herself not to really see what she was doing, not to really think about it.

      And to photograph it. Through the lens she noticed a few more things, still visible despite the char: hafurans carved into the skin of his hand and a piece of his chest. Hafurans scattered around, more of them in darker burn-lines on the cement beneath the body.

      Well, maybe “scattered around” wasn’t exactly right. “Carefully placed” described it better. “Completely fucking disgusting” described it best of all, but that didn’t really give her any clues, except that the person who had done this was probably, well, completely fucking disgusting.

      But then, anyone was capable of any manner of atrocities if they wanted something bad enough.