Grave Dance (Alex Craft, #2)(12)
My phone buzzed again, and with a sigh I hit the button to turn it off completely. I wasn’t likely to score a new client without my phone, but clients weren’t the ones cal ing right now. Tossing the phone on the counter, I turned back to my computer. I’d spent the last hour searching the Web for spel s and charms that could detect glamour. So far I’d run across some sketchy-sounding potions that used exotic—
across some sketchy-sounding potions that used exotic—
and probably fake—ingredients, and I’d found a couple of folklore-based glamour-piercing tricks, which, assuming they worked, would be even less feasible than my using my grave-sight whenever I left the house. After al , walking around peering through a stone with a natural y bored hole wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
But I didn’t like the fact I’d run up against glamour two days in a row. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence, and with first the glamoured feet and then the construct, plus the fae from the floodplain showing up in the Quarter . . . Yeah, I’d feel better with a glamour-piercing charm.
Not that I was finding one.
I closed the search browser. I was just going to have to fashion my own charm. Yeah, because I have such a successful history of spellcrafting. At least none of my charms had exploded recently.
As I closed my laptop, the electronic buzz of my TV
turning on hummed through the room. My spine stiffened. I’d reactivated my wards when I came home, and the door that separated my over-the-garage efficiency from the main house hadn’t opened. I should have been alone.
I whirled around, groping blindly for a weapon as I turned.
My fingers landed on the hard plastic of my cel phone—
which wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.
Thankful y, it was also unnecessary.
Roy Pearson, a thirtysomething former programmer—
being deceased complicated the whole holding-down-a-job thing—knelt in front of my television. He was focused, his gaze locked on where he slowly depressed the channel button one click at a time. I might as wel not have been in the room for al he noticed.
“Roy, you can’t just materialize in my bedroom and turn on my TV!”
The ghost looked up, his concentration faltering, and his finger passed through the front of the TV’s control panel.
finger passed through the front of the TV’s control panel.
With a frown, he shoved his thick black-rimmed glasses higher on his nose and his perpetual y slouched shoulders sagged more than normal. “Sorry. I wanted to see if I was on again.”
I dropped the unneeded phone-turned-makeshift-weapon back onto the counter. “Shock news doesn’t age wel . I think your interview probably got trumped today,” I said as I walked across the room to change the channel for him.
A few days ago I’d helped Roy give Lusa at Witch Watch an exclusive—and heavily censored—interview about his part in the Coleman case a month ago. Roy had final y been able to tel the story of how he’d died, and I’d completed my part of a bargain with Lusa that kept a damaging tape of me from being aired—win-win situation.
The interview had been broadcast several times already, and one national newspaper had run an article about it, including a half-page photo capturing Roy looking spectral and spooky, me beside him, my eyes glowing pale green and my hand locked with the ghost’s as I channeled energy into him so he would appear on camera. But despite al the press the interview had garnered, I had the feeling that the construct attack and the tear into the Aetheric would eclipse Roy’s story.
Lusa appeared on the screen as I flipped to Channel 6.
She was back in the studio, but a digital y imposed box beside her head rol ed footage of the smal hole in reality surrounded by crime tape. My picture popped up on the screen, and I groaned.
“What did you do this time?” Roy asked, staring at the screen.
“Hopeful y nothing that wil start another media circus.”
Once upon a time I’d actual y liked Witch Watch—that was before I started appearing on the show semiregularly. I’d better find out what’s being said.
I bumped the volume up and listened to Lusa’s report as I sketched a plan for the spel I intended to cast.
sketched a plan for the spel I intended to cast.
“—are stil debating jurisdiction over the tear, but the Organization for Magical y Inclined Humans has official y confirmed that what we’re seeing is pure Aetheric energy slipping out of the hole. Rumor has it that bil ionaire Maximil ian Bel , founder of the controversial spel crafting school for norms, Spel s for the Rest of Us, made an offer for the property and has attempted to buy access to the tear. The possible implications and dangers of raw magic slipping into reality are actively being debated al over the nation, so for now, the tear is being contained within a circle and the area is off limits to civilians. In other news—”
I muted the TV again. Al things considered, if whatever she’d said about me had been short enough that I didn’t catch it before hitting the volume, it probably wasn’t devastating. At least, I hope not.
“I’m going to cast my circle,” I told Roy as I gathered a quarter-sized wooden disk and a carving knife and headed for the smal circle cut into the floor in the corner of the room.
The ghost shrugged, not looking up from the cereal bowl he was attempting to shove from one side of the kitchen counter to the other. When I’d first met Roy, he hadn’t been able to interact with anything on the living side of the chasm between his plane and mine. He’d received a serious power boost a month ago when I’d been overflowing with energy I couldn’t control and I’d siphoned a load of it into him. Ever since, he’d become a champion poltergeist: knocking things over, pushing buttons, and even managing to hold a pen long enough to write his name in uneven, crooked letters.