“What the hell is that thing?”One of the mages yelled, forgetting Corps’ stoicism when the black smoking nightmare punched out a tentacle-like strand and tried to wrap around his throat.
He cursed it to oblivion, and that piece disappeared, but the rest was fast, vicious, and determined.
And then it jumped for the boss again, and it took all three of us to haul it away from his face.
He had shields up by then, because he wasn’t stupid, but I was suddenly less sure that they would have saved him.Because my foot was burning, and one of the other mages was screaming, and my wolf wanted out so badly that the arm under my warded gauntlet grew, and black fur flooded down the muscles.Cyrus cursed and grabbed me because he thought my wolf was forcing a Change, which it kind of was, only that was a good thing.
The added strength and her fury worked where my magic alone hadn’t, and we slammed the writhing little bastard against the floor andbeatit andcursedit andbeatit some more, until I felt my floorboards splintering and the subfloor cracking and the wicked spell losing coherence under the double assault of fury and magic.
“Don’t finish it off!”Hargroves snapped, right before I was about to grind the last of it into what was left of my nice, new carpet.He flicked a wrist, and a warded pouch appeared, like the kind we used for evidence collection, only about a hundred times thicker.
He grabbed the last of the bastard, which now looked less like a shadow Hargroves and more like a limp, black, tattered dishrag, steaming slightly at the edges.He shoved it into the pouch, and we all held our breath for a second to see if it would escape.But although it flailed around a little, it quickly gave up, because it was almost out of juice and the pouch was like glass, too.There was nothing for it to grab hold of.
It settled into a seething, blackened lump in the middle instead, and gave the impression that it was glowering at us.
I sat down on my burned and still-smoking carpet and contemplated passing out again.
“Chindi,” someone said from beside the door, and I looked up to see Jen standing there.
“What?”Sophie asked, trying to see over the boys’ huge, furry backs.“What’s that?”
“The malignant residue of someone who died by violence.”
“Residue?Like a ghost?”
“No.More like...emotional radiation.”
“Come again?”I said harshly.
Jen bent forward to get a better look at the thing in the ward, her expression fascinated rather than repulsed.“The Navajo believe that a person has multiple spiritual aspects,” she said.“The animating force, or breath of life; the personal identity, or essence of who you are; the mind or awareness, basically your ability to reason; and the residual spiritual energy made up of a lifetime’s emotional weight—rage, fear, loss, and pain.
“When a death goes well, the mind dies, the spiritual energy dissipates, and the essence moves on to a new plane of existence.But when someone is murdered, or their life ends badly for some other reason, a chindi may be created from the residue of all that spiritual energy that stays behind like a malignant cloud.
“It’s not a ghost—it doesn’t think.But some necromancers can use it to do certain tasks.”
“Like what?”I asked sharply.
She shrugged.“A lot of things.Chindis can be bound to an item, making anyone who touches it sick, or to a place, causing whoever lives there to constantly be paranoid or exhausted.They can be used like spiritual acid to weaken wards, or like metaphysical static to mask other magic.You can even sick them on a person, to suppress their will or awareness for a short time, and essentially program them to do something mindlessly—”
“Such as?”Hardgroves demanded harshly, startling Jen, who hadn’t seemed to notice him there.Possibly because her eyes had never left the thing in the ward.And when they did, they weren’t friendly.
The Corps had promised my students that their reward for fighting in the war would be freedom after the conflict ended.But nobody, including me, really believed that.Mainly because the kids who had gotten out were the most powerful of the stable sort, those whose abilities and lengthy imprisonment hadn’t driven them mad.
They were the kind that, in non-war conditions, the Corps would be the most worried about.And once those conditions returned?Yeah, that’s exactly what the kids thought, and they were very likely right.
But the magical world was their world, too, and letting it fall to the dark didn’t guarantee any better treatment.They were imprisoned by one side and exploited by the other.And while the Corps did allow some of them to mingle with the rest of the world after they learned how to suppress who they were well enough, I doubted Jen saw much difference between the two groups.
Her expression certainly said so, loud and clear.
“Jen,” I said quietly, because pissing off Hargroves wasn’t going to help them.He might even be the guy to decide their fate one day.
“Nothing major,” she finally said.“Chindis are weak sauce—”
“That was weak?”one of the guards muttered.
“—with their only real value being that few people know about them, or how to protect from them.But they’re not like a compulsion spell that can overwrite your moral compass—or whatever passes for one,” she added deliberately, still looking at the boss.“Like it couldn’t make you poison someone, but might cause you to forget to give grandma her daily pill, and risk her having a heart attack.”
Hargroves’ eyes narrowed.“And how do you know all that?”
