She
knew she needed magnets for one of the compulsion spells, and she
needed the pomegranate for the spell to give her third cousin some
self confidence, but she needed other things too, and she wasn’t
quite sure what they were. She thought she needed some kind of nut.
Something about nuts and wisdom? Pecans, maybe? She wasn’t quite
sure how to begin, which was a crappy trait in an investigator. It
was easier at work. At work, you just started with the phone book.
Gnosti didn’t have phone books, did they? Was there a spell she
could do to find the missing information?
She should know this. Technically, she was a
mage who’d been doing this her whole life. At least, she was in the
body of someone who had been doing this her whole life. That
counted for a lot. In some ways, she felt more and more like Susie
every day. Susie’s memories overcame her own memories. Susie’s
interests appealed to her more too. But sometimes things didn’t
mesh quite right.
Sometimes she tried to do something that
Susie had done as easily as playing a scale in C, and found that
she didn’t have the first clue how to go about it. In those cases,
it was best to just let her thinking brain shut off and do things
completely on intuition. It was like when you were trying to
remember how a tune went. If you pushed at it, it never came. You
had to think about how the tune made you feel, and where you were
when you heard it, and sooner or later you’d find yourself humming
it and tapping out the notes.
Susan picked up a cloudy piece of glass with
a flower etched on it. Intuition said she needed it. She also got a
metal spring from a mattress, some moss that had been growing on a
utility box, and eight sprigs of pine, plucked from a branch that
was pushing through a leaning wooden fence.
When she got back to the house and read
Susie’s spellbooks, she found that intuition had gotten her
everything she needed for Hadley’s spells except beeswax, linen,
and hair from the target (target being Hadley).
She still didn’t have any idea how to
investigate the murder of the dead fey, so she did two things she’d
never done in her entire life.
She exhumed a corpse, and she went to work on
her day off.
When Susan wanted to see gnosti, all she had
to do was concentrate on her third eye, as though someone were
lightly touching her between the brows. It would start to tingle,
and a moment later, any garden fey or other magical creatures
around would appear. She wondered if Brian would be able to see
this little fey now that he was dead. Was their invisibility
something intrinsic, based on the fact that they weren’t entirely
of this world, or was it a power they had to exert to keep
themselves safe? She’d asked Maggie once, but Maggie didn’t have a
clue. Susan went to work, carrying the body in a shoebox filled
with ice. It smelled like the dead sparrow that got stuck between
the bedframe and the wall for a few days when it flew back there
trying to escape Zoë’s cat and couldn’t get out again.
“Son of a bitch, what’s that smell?” someone
said, as Susan walked down the hall of the office complex.
Well, that’s one metaphysical question
answered. They were in this world enough that the non-mage types
could sense them. Susan pushed open the door to the office and
looked around until she found her boss.
Brian was tall, blond, ruddy complexioned,
and perpetually cheerful. Susan had never seen him not smile. Even
when he called in from the field, he sounded like he was smiling on
the phone. It kind of worried her at first, and she waited for the
other shoe to drop, but after a few days of working for him, she
realized she was dealing with the rarest of rarities: a genuinely
nice guy.
Brian was scanning a database when she came
in, feet resting on the edge of his L shaped desk. He was flipping
a pen around his thumb absentmindedly, and occasionally stopped
long enough to check a name off a list. He looked amused, as though
he were
knew she needed magnets for one of the compulsion spells, and she
needed the pomegranate for the spell to give her third cousin some
self confidence, but she needed other things too, and she wasn’t
quite sure what they were. She thought she needed some kind of nut.
Something about nuts and wisdom? Pecans, maybe? She wasn’t quite
sure how to begin, which was a crappy trait in an investigator. It
was easier at work. At work, you just started with the phone book.
Gnosti didn’t have phone books, did they? Was there a spell she
could do to find the missing information?
She should know this. Technically, she was a
mage who’d been doing this her whole life. At least, she was in the
body of someone who had been doing this her whole life. That
counted for a lot. In some ways, she felt more and more like Susie
every day. Susie’s memories overcame her own memories. Susie’s
interests appealed to her more too. But sometimes things didn’t
mesh quite right.
Sometimes she tried to do something that
Susie had done as easily as playing a scale in C, and found that
she didn’t have the first clue how to go about it. In those cases,
it was best to just let her thinking brain shut off and do things
completely on intuition. It was like when you were trying to
remember how a tune went. If you pushed at it, it never came. You
had to think about how the tune made you feel, and where you were
when you heard it, and sooner or later you’d find yourself humming
it and tapping out the notes.
Susan picked up a cloudy piece of glass with
a flower etched on it. Intuition said she needed it. She also got a
metal spring from a mattress, some moss that had been growing on a
utility box, and eight sprigs of pine, plucked from a branch that
was pushing through a leaning wooden fence.
When she got back to the house and read
Susie’s spellbooks, she found that intuition had gotten her
everything she needed for Hadley’s spells except beeswax, linen,
and hair from the target (target being Hadley).
She still didn’t have any idea how to
investigate the murder of the dead fey, so she did two things she’d
never done in her entire life.
She exhumed a corpse, and she went to work on
her day off.
When Susan wanted to see gnosti, all she had
to do was concentrate on her third eye, as though someone were
lightly touching her between the brows. It would start to tingle,
and a moment later, any garden fey or other magical creatures
around would appear. She wondered if Brian would be able to see
this little fey now that he was dead. Was their invisibility
something intrinsic, based on the fact that they weren’t entirely
of this world, or was it a power they had to exert to keep
themselves safe? She’d asked Maggie once, but Maggie didn’t have a
clue. Susan went to work, carrying the body in a shoebox filled
with ice. It smelled like the dead sparrow that got stuck between
the bedframe and the wall for a few days when it flew back there
trying to escape Zoë’s cat and couldn’t get out again.
“Son of a bitch, what’s that smell?” someone
said, as Susan walked down the hall of the office complex.
Well, that’s one metaphysical question
answered. They were in this world enough that the non-mage types
could sense them. Susan pushed open the door to the office and
looked around until she found her boss.
Brian was tall, blond, ruddy complexioned,
and perpetually cheerful. Susan had never seen him not smile. Even
when he called in from the field, he sounded like he was smiling on
the phone. It kind of worried her at first, and she waited for the
other shoe to drop, but after a few days of working for him, she
realized she was dealing with the rarest of rarities: a genuinely
nice guy.
Brian was scanning a database when she came
in, feet resting on the edge of his L shaped desk. He was flipping
a pen around his thumb absentmindedly, and occasionally stopped
long enough to check a name off a list. He looked amused, as though
he were
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