Forthill rubbed his cheek with one hand, his expression worried. “I’ll speak to him.”
My mouth twisted with a fraction of the hot bitterness I felt in my stomach. “That’ll work. He looks like a reasoned-discourse kinda guy.”
“Harry,” Michael chided me gently.
I took another breath through my nose, closed my eyes, and exhaled slowly. That had come out a lot harsher than I’d meant it. “Yeah, okay. Might be true, but it wasn’t called for.”
One of the Brotherhood offered me a bottle of water, and I took it gratefully. I drank half of it, thinking.
See, the thing was, Carl wasn’t wrong. That spell was as nasty a little working of black magic as I had ever run across. Pure nerve painfrom every nerve, nonstop. If the curse wasn’t broken, it could definitely kill someone over the course of days, and there weren’t a whole ton of people in town who could stop it.
I could. Possibly Morty could get an angle on it, if he would be willing to try—his ectomancy was a niche form of magic, but within it he was as powerful as anyone on the White Council, and this spell was spirit-world adjacent. Maybe the Ordo Lebes, a crew of low-powered practitioners who got a lot done by working in teams, could break the curse, too.
Of course, this was not a chump-level curse.
Which meant that, barring newcomers to town I wasn’t aware of, the list of suspects was the same as the list of potential helpers.
And black magic left…stains. A residue. It could be sensed.
It could be tracked.
And if it built up enough, the Wardens would get wind of it. They’d start prowling Chicago, which was the last thing I needed.
“Michael,” I said quietly. “Where was Daniel when the curse hit him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was at home and got the call to come here.”
“On patrol, after sundown,” Forthill supplied. “Over by McAnally’s.”
My stomach twisted a little.
Over by the bazaar.
Where some of the magical crowd had gotten roughed up by normies.
I traded another look with Michael, whose face had become grimmer and more lined at the words. Michael had been around the block. He knew about magic. And people. He could see it the same way I could.
“We don’t know yet,” I said.
“About anything,” he agreed. “We need to know more. Father, can you be more specific about where the men were when all the attacks happened?”
“I can,” volunteered one of the Brotherhood guys.
“Bear,” I called. “Get the car. I need to check something out.”
—
We stopped at all of the sites where members of the Brotherhood had been attacked. The oldest one barely held a trace of dark magic. It gotprogressively stronger as we went to the more recent ones. Daniel had collapsed several blocks from McAnally’s, and we went there last.
I got out of the Munstermobile’s passenger side, since Bear had insisted on driving. She barely fit in the driver’s seat but managed the old hearse smoothly and confidently. She’d been driving since, well, cars, and had taken all the extreme-driving training she could, so it was just possible she was better at it than me.
We pulled up to the spot where Daniel had been cursed, and I got out, wrapping my duster around me more by reflex than because I needed it against the cold. I closed my eyes for a moment and focused upon my wizard’s senses, reaching out, opening myself up to the flowing energy of magic in the immediate area.
It was a creepy area. The lights weren’t back yet. The buildings were almost entirely businesses, and none of them were open late. Only the lights from the Munstermobile made it possible to navigate safely. Abandoned cars lined the street. Trash had piled up where the wind had swirled it. Eerily, there wasn’t a person in sight. A manhole cover had vanished from an entrance to the sewers, and I had a very clear and loud intuition that it hadn’t been done by human beings. Seemed like an excellent area to find supernatural trouble after dark, which is probably why the Brotherhood had been here in force.
I gave the open manhole as much room as I could while I walked by it and paced down the street until I hit a spot of sidewalk that put up a phantom resistance to my moving forward, like a spot of deep, soft, stinking mud. Though there wasn’t a physical stench, my body reacted as if there had been, as the nauseating sensation of the residue of black magic washed over me.
Images flickered through my mind as I stood there, as they had at the other points. I caught a flash of Daniel’s voice letting out a hoarse cry, and the perspective of the street shifted in my mind as I felt the sensation of him pitching abruptly over onto his side.
