I leaned on my staff to help keep my balance and fought to close down my extraordinary senses. I took a moment to catch my breath as the sense of dark power faded. As I had at the other attack points, I took a natural beeswax votive candle out of my duster’s pocket, put it downin the center of the patch of dark energy, drew a chalk circle about it while focusing on my intention, and lit the candle with a murmured spell. Then I stepped back and waited.
The candle flickered to life, yellow and bright, and then after a moment burned down to a low point of purplish flame, exactly as it had at the other locations.
Bear came up beside me and looked at the candle. “Well?” she asked.
“They’re all from the same source,” I said quietly. “Same color, same energy.”
“So, a person,” Bear mused.
“Or the same group of people,” I said, nodding. “Map?”
Bear handed me a paper street map of Chicago we’d been using. I unfolded it, took a pencil out of my pocket, and marked the latest location.
“How far can you throw a curse like this?” Bear asked.
I shook my head. “Not really a specialty of mine,” I replied. “Line of sight would be pretty straightforward.”
“But seems unlikely,” Bear said.
“It does,” I said. “Curses can take a while. If they used a focus like a recent lock of hair or blood from the victim, they’d have been able to hit them from anywhere on the continent, theoretically.”
“Theoretically?”
“In practice, there’s lots of things that get in the way,” I said. “Degrade how much energy gets through. Running water like rivers and streams. Certain kinds of stone, especially if they’re piled up into mountains. Barriers of thresholds around homes can get in the way. Storms, which are generators of energy themselves. Probably other things I’m not aware of, too.”
“These sites are all within about a one-mile radius,” she noted.
I looked at the map. “Yeah. They are.”
“So maybe whoever is doing it doesn’t have the kind of strength it takes to project it very far.”
“Maybe,” I said, nodding. “Or maybe they’re using a poppet or simulacrum to create the link.”
“Like a voodoo doll?”
“Exactly like that. You can make one of those with pictures and maybe one of their possessions. Could reach out farther than line of sight, but not as far as if you’d had bits of them in your possession. Weak practitioner, maybe half a mile. Maybe a few more miles if you had help.”
Bear grunted.
I took the map and started estimating distances. After a moment I sighed. “Dammit.”
“What is it?” Bear asked.
I held the map where she could see it and used the end of the pencil to point at a single block I’d circled. “Here’s the block that’s most equidistant from all of the attack sites,” I said.
She frowned and looked at the map and then back up to me. “That tells us something, too, yes?”
“Yes,” I confirmed wearily. I pointed at a corner of the block. “Right there. That’s Bock Ordered Books.”
Chapter
Thirty-Two
The next night, I brought Maggie back to the castle for the weekend, had dinner with her, got her and Bear set up with a movie courtesy of Bob, and then slipped out quietly and went over to Bock Ordered Books to see if I could catch anyone in the act.
Veils are pretty basic magic, though I have zero innate talent with them. A lot of practice while training Molly, when she’d been my apprentice, meant that I’d become a barely passing student with them, but by the time you added deep shadows, patience, discipline, and a lifetime of practice at moving quietly when necessary, I wasn’t going to get spotted by anyone without extraordinary senses.
I set up across from Bock Ordered Books, an unassuming building located on a quiet commercial block, and waited.
