The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(5)

Edwina polished the gold ring until it gleamed as bright as the vein in the stolen memory. Brilliant, valuable, and worth stealing. Yes, she understood her sister’s desire to own something so precious. But taking from the dead or dying was an altogether different matter than taking from the living. She should never have allowed it. No, she saw that now. There’d been the chill of death under the man’s skin, but perhaps she hadn’t accounted for however much time he’d lain unconscious in the cold river mud. Could that have stilled his blood so it pooled away from the skin? As much as she wished to indulge her sister, they should have stuck with the sick and elderly who they knew took their last breaths at Saint Basil’s.

She threw the cloth down on the counter. How could she have been so stupid? Perhaps she’d better pop in at the hospital after all. Better to be sure the man had died properly and wasn’t wandering the halls missing half his mind.

Stars above, helping mortals is rarely a risk worth taking.





Chapter Three


“Seeing stars” was no mere idiom. When the blow had come, the inside of his head had exploded with shattering white light that temporarily blinded his vision to all but the spangled stars that floated on the insides of his eyelids. The savagery of the hit slashed across every crevice of his brain, laying waste to his neck and spine before he’d blacked out. The pain had stolen his breath, his consciousness, and any recollection of what had happened afterward, except for the one odd vision that seemed to be imprinted on his irises. But that part wasn’t real, was it? He’d been clouted before plenty, but not to the point he couldn’t shake loose the rattling inside his head and get on with it. He rubbed his hand over his face as though he could wipe the slate clean, but all it brought was a reminder of his bruised condition.

He blinked, and his vision switched from middle-space staring to locating the source of the person speaking to him.

“Sir, I need you to try and pay attention.” A man stood at his bedside with one hand in his lab coat pocket while the other held a pipe to his lips. A doctor, yes, that’s what he was. Newly settled in his profession, by the look of him, having only just crossed the line from stout youth to the first soft edges of middle age. The doctor’s broad cheek whiskers reminded him of someone, his own father or employer perhaps, but he couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t even recall if he had a father, or a job for that matter, though he knew he must.

“As I said, you’ve had a nasty blow to the head, resulting in a serious subdural hematoma. Indeed, you’ve been unconscious for”—the man in the lab coat checked a giant clock mounted on the wall—“hmm, going on two hours now.”

“A subdural . . .” He tried to mimic the doctor’s words, but his mouth would not cooperate. “Will I be all right?”

“Think of your brain like a wooden crate filled with jelly. You’ve taken a hard smack against the outside of the crate, and all the jelly inside got slammed against the opposite side of the crate from the force. It’s very likely you have a traumatic brain injury, which will require observation.”

“Traumatic . . .”

“Yes, that’s right. And we’ll need to watch for signs of psychosis.” The doctor held up a fountain pen and tracked it in front of his patient’s face. “But you’re showing remarkable and steady progress, I dare say.” The doctor put his pen away.

For a moment, while he’d watched the pen being waved from side to side in front of him, he’d half expected the point of the exercise was to make something materialize out of thin air, which baffled him completely. And yet he had the awareness to know he ought not say so out loud.

“Now, let’s try something else.” The doctor, still new enough in his profession to yet bear some patience for the infirm and indigent, peered through his pipe smoke, squinting as he studied the man before him. “Can you tell me your name?” He awaited the answer to his elementary question with apparent optimism, which eventually soured into disappointment.

There were half a dozen men lying in similar cots beside him in the long room. Vagrants by the look of them. Common sense suggested that every one of them had a name. Some of them had it scrawled on a board at the foot of their bed. He shifted on his cot, trying to remember what he was called but was met with an empty void that yielded nothing. “I dinna think I have a name,” he answered, though he knew that couldn’t be right.

“Of course you have a name. We all have a name. Mine is Dr. Samuel Jones. Head physician on duty.”

When he didn’t respond, the doctor exhaled and put a hand atop his patient’s head, as if feeling for a deviation in the skull. He flinched when the doctor explored too close to the throbbing wound at the back of his head. To his relief, a woman wearing a white apron and pointed white hat approached his bedside to stand next to the doctor. She carried an enamel tray. No, a bedpan. That was the word for it. He clutched his blanket higher, hoping her arrival didn’t mean what he thought it meant, but then she pulled a card out of the pan and handed it to the doctor. A distinct rust-colored stain had spread across the backside of the paper. There was something poetic about the shape it left behind, something that urged him to want to form meaningful words together, but they fizzled in his mind before they could find his mouth.

“This might help. The card was in his coat pocket, sir.”