A Fistful of Charms by Kim Harrison Page B

that did the same things many of my eminently legal earth charms did. And that’s what scared me the most.
    Mood going introspective, I flipped the page and found a curse that would encase someone in a thick layer of air to slow their movements as if they were in molasses. I suppose one could use it to gain the advantage in a fight and kill them with a blow to the head or knife thrust, but would it tarnish one’s soul if all you did was slow them down so you could slap a pair of cuffs on them? The more I looked, the harder it was to tell. I had assumed demon curses were black as a matter of course, but I truly couldn’t see the harm here.
    Even more worrisome was the potential power they all had. The curse detailed before me wasn’t the illusion of molasses that black ley line witches used to give people bad dreams in which they were unable to escape something or to help a loved one. And it wasn’t the earth charm that had to be laboriously cooked and targeted to a specific person, which resulted in slower reactions, not this almost complete immobility. The demon curse took the quick implementation and wide range of application of a ley line charm and harnessed it in a pair of “polarized” amulets, thereby giving it the reality and permanence of earth magic. It was a mix of both. It was the real thing. It was demon magic, and I was one of two people who could both walk under the sun and kindle it.
    â€œThanks, Trent,” I muttered as I turned the page, my fingertips prickling. “Your dad was a peach.”
    But I wasn’t complaining. I shouldn’t have lived to puberty. The genetic aberration that I was afflicted with killed every witch born with it before they were two. I truly believed that Trent Kalamack’s father hadn’t known that the same thing that was killing me had made it possible for me to kindle demon magic, accidentally circumventing a genetic checks-and-balances. All he knew was his friend’s daughter was dying of an ancient malady and he had the wisdom and technology—even if it was illegal—to save my life.
    So he had. And it kinda worried me that the only other witch Trent’s father had fixed was now suffering a living hell as the demon Algaliarept’s familiar in the ever-after.
    Guilt assailed me, quickly quashed. I had told Lee not to give me to Al. I’d warned him to get us the hell out of the ever-after when we had the chance. But no-o-o-o-o. The wicked witch from the West thought he knew everything, and now he was paying for his mistake with his life. It had been either him or me, and I liked where I lived.
    A freshening gust of wind blew in, carrying the hint of rain and shifting the curtains. I glanced at the book before me and turned the page to find a curse to pull out someone’s intelligence until they had the brain of a worm. Blinking, I closedthe book. Okay, so it was easy to figure out that some of them were black, but was there such a thing as a white curse?
    The thing was, I knew earth magic was powerful, but giving it the speed and versatility of ley line magic was frightening. And the mixing of the two branches of magic was in every curse. In the few hours I had been sitting here, I found curses that shifted mass to line energy or vice versa, so you could actually make big things little and little things big, not just project the illusion of a size change, as with ley line magic; and since it also involved an earth magic potion, the change was real—as in “having viable offspring” real.
    Nervous, I pushed myself away from the table. My fingers tapped the old wood in a quick rhythm, and I glanced at the clock. Almost six. I couldn’t sit here any longer. The weather was shifting, and I wanted to be in it.
    Surging to my feet, I snatched the book up and knelt at the low shelf under the center island counter. I didn’t want to shelve it with my usual library, but I certainly didn’t want the