The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(27)
The guilt of what she and Mary had done to him festered the longer she watched him try to sort it out until she was compelled to speak. “We sent a policeman to come for you as soon as we left the embankment,” she said. “But by then we thought you were already . . .”
“Dead?” he finished for her.
“The chill in your blood had diminished your aura. That’s why I took you for a mortal at first. I couldn’t understand how you’d survived, but, of course, if you had been mortal, I doubt you would have.”
He knelt not to look at the ground at his feet but to get the vantage point of the land down shore from a man crouching. “Does she do it often?” he asked, standing again. “Remove people’s memories?”
“It’s part of Mary’s nature.” She picked up a tangle of fishing line and seaweed that had snagged on a rock. “She’s drawn to the shape and color of the transition between life and death. The corpse lights.” As Edwina spoke, she tied the fishing line around the skull, covering the eye sockets with the seaweed.
“She’s attracted to corpse lights?”
“The outflow of one’s life energy continues on, separate from the physical being after death. The floating memory forms bright-colored orbs that my sister collects. She compresses them into stonelike objects. Baubles, she calls them. Of course, you’ve seen how she does that already.”
He’d stopped taking in the scenery and instead focused on her with that familiar unsettled look. Everyone who ever learned the truth about her sister’s rare gift got the same expression on their face—fear of death, fear of someone disturbing the sanctity of their passing. As if their death were beyond corruption. As if her sister were some kind of degenerate. Ian was quicker at letting the thoughts pass like a shadow over him than most. He was a disciplined one. Well, once his restored memories had reined in the impulsive side she’d witnessed in the shop. She suspected his true nature was a cautious yet curious one, setting aside judgment long enough to learn the truth of a thing. He even offered a grudging smile in admiration of her sister’s unique skill before asking the question everyone always posed: How does she find the dead?
Sniffing out the dead was also in the Blackwood sisters’ nature, as surely as finding a prize that sparkled on the ground.
“We volunteer to sit with the old and infirm at Saint Basil’s,” Edwina said. “It isn’t hard to find death there.” She decided it was best to return her find to the river, so she found a crevice in the embankment wall where the rising tide would accept her offering later. She placed the skull wrapped in seaweed between two stones covered in slick green slime and said a quick blessing for the dead.
After, Ian absentmindedly pressed his fingers to his neck above his Adam’s apple. Again. She’d seen him do it three times since he awoke in her father’s bed. A quirk? A sore throat? Or something else? Though Hob had restored the man’s memories with his protective magic, she couldn’t be sure how complete the imp’s spell would prove. Or her sister’s, for that matter. Memories were malleable. Changeable. Unreliable, wispy things. Magic couldn’t change that. Not until they were removed from the body and could be solidified in stone.
Ian held any further curiosity about Mary in check, letting his attention drift back to the shore, where the water had moved closer by several feet. The river had risen significantly since they’d climbed down the steps near the pier. Sometimes unpredictable, the rising water could catch the unsuspecting walker by surprise until they found themselves trudging through dangerous mud. Or worse, stranded on a small spit of high ground until it, too, eventually sank beneath the dark water.
“We should probably think about heading back,” she said with a nod to the water as it lapped against the stones and shards of broken pottery.
“It’s an odd location, is it not?” He scanned the treacherous terrain of the foreshore again. “For a man to be walking in the dark?” Ian was speaking more to himself than to her, as if going over some chain of events in his head that could account for his body lying on the foreshore in the wee hours of the morning. “You did say it was just before dawn.”
“The water was on the rise then too.”
“Aye, of course it was.” Ian seemed to have got the scent of something. Something important. “And if you hadn’t found me, I’d have drowned and my body would have been carried off on the tide. Perhaps I’d have washed up on some shore a half mile away, or maybe I’d have been lost to the sea, never to be heard from again.”
It was a gruesome thought, one she wasn’t sure served either of them well to dwell on. “It’s a lucky thing we found you.”
“Nae, it couldn’t have been random,” he said. “I obviously wasn’t out here fishing or even mudlarking. So why else would I climb down to a stretch of the foreshore in the dark?”
“I wondered if you hadn’t fallen off the embankment.”
“Aye, but wouldn’t that have broken a rib or arm?” Ian paused, as though thinking or revisiting a memory or feeling. “I was drawn here. Following someone.” He paced over the rocks and rusty nails poking out of the mud. “Perhaps I discovered something someone didn’t want me sharing.”
“Something about Sir Elvanfoot’s son? Isn’t that what you were investigating?”