Shallow Grave by E A Copen

Author:E A Copen [Copen, E A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

“You’re going to do something stupid,” Khaleda said, leaning against the stainless-steel wall of the elevator. It wasn’t a question, but a statement, showing she’d read at least a little into what I’d said to Emma.

I focused on the numbered buttons and offered a grunt in response.

“Let me guess. Based on your limited skill set, it can’t be many things. You need to forge a sympathetic link between a soul and its body.” She paused, probably waiting for me to confirm it. When I didn’t, she went on. “The soul part will be easy. Now that you’re a Horseman, you can interact with souls on more than just this plane. You’ll plunge yourself into the place between here and the After, call on the soul as you would a ghost and command it to appear. But doing that will drain you.”

I turned my head. She leaned lazily in the corner, looking better than anyone who’d been through rotten water and had no sleep ought to. Her legs were crossed and her hands gripping the handrails to throw her shoulders forward. My attention went to the vials still at her waist and then the curves of her hips.

I turned back around. “Don’t suppose that quick pick-me-up we talked about earlier is still an option?”

“You’ll need more than a magical energy drink to do what you’re thinking, necromancer. Hovering so close to death, you’ll need to pull on life to come back. Someone else’s life forces. Someone more than human.”

With the amount of energy I’d expend, I’d need a lot to recover. More than I could get from Emma’s greenhouse or even Emma herself, should she have been willing to give it. That was the real reason animal and human sacrifice had been incorporated into magic in the first place. Equal exchange.

To pull a soul from where it lurked, even if that place was on Earth, I’d have to travel through the land of the dead. Without the right protections in place, I could get stuck there. I needed power, power that I could generate in a number of ways. Some more preferable than others.

Lots of energy became available when something died, something the universe did when life left the body. The explosion of arcane forces was the result of a living thing just stopping. Sometimes, a soul could harness enough of that on the way out to become a ghost. Sometimes, someone like me could walk by and scoop up residual energies in a place and store it in something for later.

But death wasn’t the only way.

Birth was another time where the same massive amounts of energy could be harnessed. A lot of really nasty generational spells could be cast by inducing labor and using that energy. Or a white witch could use the same power to cure infertility. The nature of the magic energy was different, lending itself to different things, but I could harness it for what I wanted. It’d just require me to be casting a ritual in the middle of a birthing room, which wasn’t going to happen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.