Ritual Magic

were already sending over supper most nights,” Lily said, sitting down and unwrapping her sandwich. “And they buy in bulk to save money, so when I decided to start packing a lunch, I asked Scott to add a few things to the grocery list for my lunches and let me know how much I owed. He agreed. Early the next morning that week’s Kitchen Carl sent me a packed lunch. They’ve been doing that ever since.” She snorted. “And they’re all remarkably bad at numbers. Not a one of them can figure out how much I owe for my share of the groceries. I finally quit asking.”
    Pot roast, she discovered when she took a bite. With butter pickles. Yum. She swallowed and chugged down some Diet Coke. “What did you learn from the crime scene pics?”
    “The sigil on his chest looks like a sidhe rune.”
    Lily didn’t quite spit out her Coke. “God, no. Not another evil elf.”
    “Probably not. Not many in our realm know sidhe runes, but they aren’t completely unknown, either. I’ll need to check my source materials to be sure, but I thought I recognized a couple of the runes drawn inside the circle, too. They look more like ancient Sumerian.”
    Lily’s eyebrows went up. “Someone’s blending disciplines, you think? I could send copies of the relevant photos to Fagin, see if he can ID them.” Dr. Xavier Fagin was the preeminent authority on pre-Purge magical history.
    “Good idea. He’s got an impressive library still in spite of those assholes and their firebomb. Now tell me what you know about the ritual.”
    Lily filled him in between bites, ending with their failure to identify the body they no longer had.
    “Huh.” Cullen frowned. “Let me know when you get the labs back on those samples.”
    He meant the samples taken from the substances used to draw the circle and the runes. “Okay. Keep in mind that the lab may not get consistent results. There wasn’t much magic left on—”
    “I thought you said all the magic was gone.”
    “The contagion was completely gone. There was still a tiny tingle of magic in the circle itself—about what I feel if I walk in Isen’s house barefoot.” Which was not, as she used to think, entirely from the traces of magic left on the floor by so many lupus feet. There was some kind of stealth node under the deck behind his house—one that didn’t give off the usual drifts of stray power that Cullen called sorceri. Whenever she asked Isen about it, he smiled and changed the subject. Isen could be really annoying sometimes. “And no, it didn’t feel like
arguai
. And no, I can’t describe the difference, but I can feel it.”
    Cullen’s frown tightened a notch. “Describe the contagion again. Your experience of it.”
    “Icky. Gooey. Like something that had been dead a long time and was soft with corruption. A lot like death magic, really, only mushier, and without the ground glass. And it moved. Maybe that’s why it seemed alive to me, as if it had intention. As if it really wanted to crawl all over me.”
    “Huh.” He thought about that a moment. “Maggots?”
    “What?”
    “What was the movement like? Like maggots crawling around inside the corruption, or like the magic itself was in motion?”
    She had to stop and think. “More like it was made up of maggots—soft, putrid, dead maggots that were still moving and wanted to get on me.”
    “Now there’s an image I didn’t need to have in my head,” Cynna said.
    “Tell me about it.” Cullen had fallen silent, as if she’d given him something to think about. She couldn’t imagine what. “Why did you want to know, Cullen?”
    “Trying to figure out if something was moving the contagion or if it moved on its own.”
    “Miriam thought I was projecting. She said the contagion couldn’t have intention.”
    “Miriam lacks imagination sometimes,” he said absently, bending to pull a small spiral notebook out of Cynna’s purse. “If something’s never happened before, she thinks that means it can’t happen.”
    Lily tended to think that, too, but she’d had enough evidence to the contrary in the past year to understand how wrong that was. “I figured you’d ask me about the body dissolving.” That being the spookiest thing she’d ever seen.
    He didn’t answer, busy thumbing through his little notebook.
    “How can you figure out if the contagion was moving on its own without looking at it?”
    “I’m thinking. Stop talking to me.”
    “See? Grumpy as a gorilla with a cold,” Cynna