Kate Daniels 02 - Magic Burns by authors_sort Read Free Book Online

better.
    â€œThey met here,” Julie volunteered.
    â€œRight here?” I fed a little more power to the sword. It didn’t bulge.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œDid you ask the other witches about where your mom might have gone?”
    â€œGee, I’d love to, except none of them came back.”
    I paused. “None?”
    â€œNope.”
    That wasn’t good. Entire covens didn’t just disappear into thin air.
    â€œI’m going to break this ward. If something ugly comes out of there, run. Don’t talk to it, don’t look at it. Just run. You got me?”
    â€œSure.” Julie’s tone plainly pointed out that she’d have to be crazy to listen to some idiot woman who doesn’t even have a gun.
    I dug my feet into the ground and pushed, putting all of my weight behind the hilt. The blade quivered under the strain. It was like trying to push a baseball into a wall of dense rubber, but giving the saber more power would leave me too drained to defend myself against a magic attack.
    Sweat broke on my forehead. Oh, screw it.
    I shot my power through the blade. With a sweet whisper, Slayer cleaved through the invisible barrier. Steel struck stone with a loud clang and the white rock slid an inch out of its place.
    A shudder ran through the circle. The stones blinked into reality and I scrambled to my feet. Brilliant light rippled through the air above the broken ring, a silvery aurora borealis gone mad as the forces held captive in the ward flailed, unleashed. The glow flared and streamed to the ground in a torrent of pure white. The ward burst. The magic aftershock pulsed through the building and caught me in a dizzying whirlpool. My teeth chattered, my knees shook, and I clutched at Slayer’s hilt, trying to keep the saber from slipping from my trembling fingers. Julie cried out.
    So much power…
    Viscous drops slid from Slayer’s metal, evaporating in midfall. I felt it too, a fetid smear staining the building—the magic of undeath. There was enough of it to make a layman vomit. I turned to the circle. A dark hole gaped in the broken ring of the stones. I leaned over the edge and glanced into the black hole, grimacing at the reek of rotting flesh emanating from the moist earth.
    Deep.
    So deep I didn’t see the bottom.
    The walls of the shaft were smooth and even, punctuated by roots severed cleanly at the edge. The hole stank of damp soil and moldering bodies. I picked up one of the stones and ran my thumb over its smooth surface. Rounded and pale, like a pebble from a river bed.
    No mark, no glyph, no sign of a spell. Just a ring of white stones that no longer hid a bottomless hole in the earth. The Sisters must have let something into the world, something dark and evil and it claimed them for its own.
    Julie sucked in her breath. A corona of dark spills appeared around the hole. With a faint buzz, a fly landed on the nearest stain, closely followed by another. Blood. Impossible to say how much—the ground had soaked up most of it. As I looked at the blood circle, I noticed three impressions in the ground, each a small, roughly square hole in the dirt. I connected them in my head and got an equilateral triangle with the pit smack in the middle. Three staffs arranged in a triangle to summon something? If so, where did they go?
    The heap of crates behind the hole shivered, as if about to melt with Julie on top of it. With a faint magic tremor, a skeleton materialized right below the kid, nailed to the crates by four crossbow bolts.
    â€œFreaky,” Julie said.
    No kidding. For one, the skeleton had too many ribs, but only five pairs attached to the sternum. For another, not a shred of tissue remained on the yellowed bones. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve said it had weathered a year or two in the open somewhere. I leaned closer to examine the arms. Shallow bone sockets. I was no expert, but I’d guess this thing could have bent its elbows