Bad Bones: A Fun, Fast-Paced Urban Fantasy: Blood and Magic Book One (Blood and Magic Series 1) by Lauretta Hignett

Author:Lauretta Hignett [Hignett, Lauretta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

I sent Daniel back to the bar and headed to my apartment, winding through the alleyways on the way home. I wandered down Lumiere Avenue, thinking about the blood witch who snatched Denise.

Why would a blood witch want a half-pixie who was practically human? It made no sense. The only reason a blood witch would want anyone, of course, was blood.

Blood was powerful—perhaps the most powerful conduit of energy in our realm. It carried with it deep magic, but it was so corrupting. It was a dark path that witches were warned about when they first started practicing.

The problem was this: Blood made every magic ritual much more powerful. Put a little menstrual blood in your beauty spell, and in the morning, your skin will be as clear as a baby’s butt. Collect a little dribble of blood you got from punching your little brother in the nose, drop it into your charisma charm, and you’ll find yourself getting more free drinks at the bar than you could ever dream. Slit the throat of your elderly neighbor, and you’ll be able to bind the spirit of your dead daughter back to her corpse and turn her into a walking, talking toddler zombie.

Okay, I was a bit of an extreme example. But it was a neat and tidy downward spiral, and almost impossible to come back from. Blood magic corrupted your soul. You needed more and more.

Even worse, the spells you performed always worked, but they came with horrific consequences. A good luck charm would give you top marks on an exam, but it might take the luck from your teacher, who would die in some horrific, tragic accident and leave you stranded without someone to teach you anymore. A fertility spell would give you octuplets, which would all be born dead.

And you couldn’t stop. More blood, more magic. My mom, as far as I knew, had been the only exception.

She murdered my elderly neighbor to get the blood she needed to bind my spirit back to my corpse. And it worked. And the consequences, as predicted, were horrific. Probably so horrific, she was shocked almost into a catatonic state.

Another witch might have killed someone else, and tried to magic up a body for me, or reverse the decomposition of my body. My mom didn’t. She tried everything she could think of without using any more blood magic, and eventually crawled on her hands and knees to High Priestess Marcheline. Mom begged her to help me, and to bind her magic so she could never practice again.

I never understood why the binding was necessary until much later. The temptation to practice blood magic was overwhelming. Mom had a huge hit of magical meth, and the itch for more was never ending.

Marche agreed, and performed the binding, taking mom’s magic away for good. It stopped the itch, but the temptation never really went away. Technically, mom could undo the binding with enough blood magic. So the fear was always there, lingering under the surface.

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