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

bottomless hole in the earth would bother me, especially this close to a flare. I was afraid something had come out of that hole and odds were, it wasn’t friendly.
    The Sisters of the Crow had broken the first rule of witchcraft: don’t dabble. Either do it right, or don’t do it at all. Before one ever tried to cast a spell, one had to prepare for the consequences.
    Had they been worshipping the Goddess, an embodiment of nature, a kind of all-purpose amalgam of benevolent female deities popular with cults, little harm would have come to them. The Goddess, much like the Christian God, was too all encompassing and benign. But they had worshipped the crow, which pointed to something dark and very specific. And the more specific the god, the less wiggle room its worshippers had. It was the difference between telling a child, “Don’t do anything bad while I’m gone” and “If you touch this vase, I will ground you for three days.”
    Until I identified the crow, I had to fly blind. Unfortunately, everyone from Vikings to Apaches had a corvid in their mythology. Crows created or swallowed the world, delivered messages for a handful of gods, served as prophets, played tricks, and if they were Chinese, lived in the sun and had three legs. Nothing at the site had pointed to any particular mythos. Not even Bran—no accent, no meaningful peculiarities in clothes, no nothing.
    What I needed was a big fat clue. A mysterious note laying it all out. A deity popping out of thin air and explaining it to me. Hell, I’d settle for an annoying old lady with a knack for solving mysteries.
    I actually stopped and waited for a second to see if a clue would fall out of the sky and land at my feet. The Universe declined to oblige.
    Trailer twenty-three stood twenty yards to the left of the tower, the first story in a cluster of three trailers. Kindly described by the woman as “yellow,” the trailer’s color matched that of cloudy overnight urine. It smelled like urine too, although I couldn’t pinpoint whether the stink came from the trailer itself or from the heaps of trash surrounding the cluster.
    A series of runes in black and brown ran along the side of the trailer. On closer look, the brown was uneven and flaking off. Blood. I wondered what poor stray had to die for Esmeralda’s lovely decorative display.
    A rusted metal porch that looked like it must’ve been a sewer grate in its previous life led to the front door. It buckled under my weight, but held, and I made it to the door.
    â€œWait, what about those?” Julie pointed at the runes.
    â€œWhat about them?”
    â€œAren’t they magic? Mom told me Esmeralda said she had a spell on her trailer that would cut your fingers like glass.”
    I sighed. “It’s a chunk of a ballad from the last page of the Codex Runicus, an ancient Nordic law document. Very famous. It says ‘I dreamt a dream last night of silk and fine fur.’ Trust me, if there was a ward on this trailer, the Honeycomb would’ve gobbled it up by now.”
    I examined the lock. Nothing fancy, but I was never good at lock picking.
    Footsteps. Coming toward us, three pairs. And something else. Something sending ripples through the volatile fabric of the Honeycomb’s magic. Julie felt them too and ran up the porch to me.
    The footsteps drew closer. I turned slowly. Three men were approaching the trailer, the first stocky and thick across the shoulders, the other two leaner. The taller of the leaner guys carried a long chain wrapped around his arm. The other end of the chain disappeared between two trailers. All three looked suitably menacing. The chain carrier hung back, sidestepped an eddy of magic, and jerked the metal links.
    A local shakedown team. Out in force, three on one, plus whatever it was on the other end of the chain. They knew where I was headed, they knew I had money, and they knew who I worked for, otherwise