The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(2)

Mary leaned over the man and held one hand against the left side of his forehead. There might have been a twitch of discomfort, but it wasn’t enough to erase any doubt he’d be dead soon. With her other hand she pressed on the man’s chest. An instant later an aura of blue light rose out of his throat to form a tiny cloud above his body. Quick as a bird after a moth, Mary grasped the thing with both hands. Cupping the memory between her palms, she blew air into the hollow space inside to preserve it.

“Come, Mary. The tide’s rising. We need to head for home.”

Her sister stood with the man’s memory cradled in her palm, an orb of iridescent cobalt and gold that could pass for a fisherman’s glass float. Edwina pinched her brows together, inspecting how brightly the multispectral memory glowed. She could see why her sister had been drawn to the shiny thing.

“All right, pocket it and let’s be off,” she said. Edwina waited, eyes on the shoreline, while Mary shrank the shimmering orb of energy in her palm down to a solid sphere by clasping her hands together and whispering her preservation spell. Edwina peeked over her shoulder and saw that the memory had retained its iridescence so that it resembled a precious stone or a piece of sea glass rather than a child’s marble, as was often the case with Mary’s finds. “Pretty,” she said and hooked her arm in her sister’s.

“I’ll store it with the others,” Mary said. “I must have over a dozen such gems now, each a deeper shade of blue and gold, though none so dazzling as this one. Someday I hope to discover what all the different veins of color mean.”

Not without finding a way to speak to the dead, thought Edwina, but she let it go. She didn’t wish to spoil her sister’s good find. Both their good finds, actually. If the right buyer entered the shop, the gold ring might bring in enough to tip the scales toward a profit for the month. All in all, it was a good morning of scavenging along the foreshore. Well, perhaps not for the unfortunate man they’d left lying on the riverbank.

North of the embankment they spotted an officer making his rounds. Naturally, it wouldn’t do to speak directly to a member of the police force. Not with a dead body involved. Or even a nearly dead one. And definitely not when those who had found the dead body were considered by some to be contrary. Curse that boy. They’d learned that lesson well enough before.

Instead, Edwina nudged a thought toward the officer by singing the message in a melody. Her sister might have a talent for spotting shiny corpse lights rising off the dead, but she could sing a spell better than any woman in her clan.

Her song trilled through the morning mist, and the officer, cocking his ear, headed for the river. At least the authorities could retrieve the poor man’s body before it was swallowed by the rising water. Edwina patted her sister’s arm and trotted up the cobblestones toward their third-story flat, a good deed done in the early morning gloaming. But before they turned the corner at the top of the road, a shrill call from the officer’s whistle pierced the morning calm, shrieking loud enough to shake loose her denial. She peered at the dark line of the embankment, at the moving lights of men rushing to answer the call to save another human being, and knew.





Chapter Two


Edwina’s feet touched down on the wood floor of their attic bedroom. She threw off her shawl, letting it drape over one of two single beds. Mary followed and remembered to shut the window behind her before bounding on top of her quilt.

“Light the lamp.” Edwina caught her breath as she braced her hand against the chest of drawers.

Mary blew on her fingertips, illuminating the barely suppressed smile on her face before she touched the flame to the wick. She blew across her fingers, and a curl of smoke and sulfur floated up to the rafters.

“He may yet die.” Edwina tried to convince herself as much as Mary. “Things go wrong even in hospital. Complications. Infections.” She caught herself pacing the floor and forced herself to sit and take off her muddy boots. And yet her mind still whirled. Had he seen her face? Mary’s? Mortals have terrible night vision. Why on earth hadn’t he died?

“For all we know, he’s laid out in the mortuary already,” Mary offered.

Possibly, thought Edwina. But if not, they’d left a man alive in the world without a memory, one precious enough to him that its aura shone brightest at the moment death nearly took him from the world. It was wrong to wish for a man’s demise, but if Mary was right and the man had already gone stiff with rigor mortis, there was no question his death would make life simpler.

“I’d been so sure,” she said, opening and closing her hands as if they were suddenly foreign to her. “He was cold to the touch. Not a spark of life left to feel.”

“Do you want to see my treasure in the light?”

Mary was her fraternal twin, yet sometimes it felt as though the biological gap between them were years wider than the minutes that had lapsed from one birth to the next. Since childhood, Edwina had been forced to behave almost parentally to a sister with a penchant for games and cunning laughter. Never a care for the consequences, that was her Mary.

“Go on, then.” Edwina undid the laces on the secondhand men’s work boots she used for scavenging the foreshore and slid them off. Later she’d bang them against each other in the alley to get the worst of the mud to fall off. And Mary’s, too, when her sister was too preoccupied with the city to do it herself.