Kate Daniels 02 - Magic Burns

once more and whirled, impossibly fast. I caught a glimpse of a clawed foot, a flash of a long muscled tail, and then it was gone, back into the churning water.
    A Japanese salamander. Big one, as tall as Julie at least.
    â€œWhomper,” Custer said and waved me on with a dismissive flick of his hand.

CHAPTER 6
    THE TWISTED PATH TOOK US DEEP INTO THE HONEYCOMB , into the maze of twisted trailers. As I passed, I sensed people beyond the windows watching me. Nobody came out to say hello. Nobody wanted to know what my business was. I had a feeling that if I stopped and asked for directions, I’d get no answer. If someone wanted to snipe me from behind one of those misshapen funhouse-mirror windows, there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it. Julie felt it, too. She kept quiet and scurried in my footsteps, casting wary looks at the trailers.
    Ahead the path ran into a tall tower of debris and split, flowing around it. The tower itself, a contorted monstrosity of trash and metal junk, rose to nearly forty feet. Near the top it tapered to a slender point merely five feet across before widening abruptly into an almost square platform. As I stopped to gape at it, two furry animals the size of a cat but equipped with long chinchilla tails and shrew snouts scuttled up the rubble and vanished in some hidey-hole.
    I kept moving, my thoughts returning again and again to the hole in the ground at the Sisters’ gathering place. The pit bothered me. Any bottomless hole in the earth would bother me, especially this close to a flare. I was afraid something had come out of that hole and odds were, it wasn’t friendly.
    The Sisters of the Crow had broken the first rule of witchcraft: don’t dabble. Either do it right, or don’t do it at all. Before one ever tried to cast a spell, one had to prepare for the consequences.
    Had they been worshipping the Goddess, an embodiment of nature, a kind of all-purpose amalgam of benevolent female deities popular with cults, little harm would have come to them. The Goddess, much like the Christian God, was too all encompassing and benign. But they had worshipped the crow, which pointed to something dark and very specific. And the more specific the god, the less wiggle room its worshippers had. It was the difference between telling a child, “Don’t do anything bad while I’m gone” and “If you touch this vase, I will ground you for three days.”
    Until I identified the crow, I had to fly blind. Unfortunately, everyone from Vikings to Apaches had a corvid in their mythology. Crows created or swallowed the world, delivered messages for a handful of gods, served as prophets, played tricks, and if they were Chinese, lived in the sun and had three legs. Nothing at the site had pointed to any particular mythos. Not even Bran—no accent, no meaningful peculiarities in clothes, no nothing.
    What I needed was a big fat clue. A mysterious note laying it all out. A deity popping out of thin air and explaining it to me. Hell, I’d settle for an annoying old lady with a knack for solving mysteries.
    I actually stopped and waited for a second to see if a clue would fall out of the sky and land at my feet. The Universe declined to oblige.
    Trailer twenty-three stood twenty yards to the left of the tower, the first story in a cluster of three trailers. Kindly described by the woman as “yellow,” the trailer’s color matched that of cloudy overnight urine. It smelled like urine too, although I couldn’t pinpoint whether the stink came from the trailer itself or from the heaps of trash surrounding the cluster.
    A series of runes in black and brown ran along the side of the trailer. On closer look, the brown was uneven and flaking off. Blood. I wondered what poor stray had to die for Esmeralda’s lovely decorative display.
    A rusted metal porch that looked like it must’ve been a sewer grate in its previous life led to the front door. It buckled under my weight, but held, and I made it to the door.
    â€œWait, what about those?” Julie pointed at the runes.
    â€œWhat about them?”
    â€œAren’t they magic? Mom told me Esmeralda said she had a spell on her trailer that would cut your fingers like glass.”
    I sighed. “It’s a chunk of a ballad from the last page of the Codex Runicus, an ancient Nordic law document. Very famous. It says ‘I dreamt a dream last night of silk and fine fur.’