A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 263: Bone of My Bone

Siobhan

Month 4, Day 30, Wednesday 7:00 a.m.

Siobhan inhaled sharply as she matched the sensation of wrongness to what she had felt while staring at her treehouse. Except this time, it was so, so much worse. That had been a discordant note in a familiar melody. This was a tune she had never heard before, played by an instrument that grated at her bones inside her flesh like the sound of chalk squeaking across a blackboard.

The crowd shifted again, blocking Siobhan’s sight, and she moved around the edges, trying to find a spot where she could slip through or climb on something to reach a vantage point. As she moved east—downwind—she caught the scent. There was metallic, salty blood, of course, and the smell of viscera and sheep shit from torn-open bellies, but there was also something else, winding through it all. It was ever-so-faintly sweet, but not floral or spicy. Siobhan couldn’t place it, but the certainty of its wrongness was so strong it made her almost lightheaded.

She looked around at the others, trying to gauge if they felt it, too.

A village woman met her gaze. “What did this?” she asked, as if Siobhan should be expected to know.

Someone else answered her. “Blood magic, it must be.”

“Could it be from a malediction?” a younger woman asked. “Like people were talking about a few weeks ago?”

Mr. Hagarty arrived just then, walking calmly. “Dunna’ speak with the tongue of a hag and call down bad luck.”

“Touch wood,” the older woman said, clasping the small, carved figurine of a tree spirit hanging from her belt by a cord. The younger woman slapped her own lips in rebuke.

One hand pressing down his hat to keep it from being knocked off by the jostling of the crowd, Mr. Hagarty pushed his way through everyone. He was tall enough that Siobhan could still see the top of his hat from the edge of the crowd. He stood there taking in the scene, and people quieted, waiting for him to speak.

“This was a slaughter,” he said solemnly. “And the teeth marks…” He clacked his own teeth together several times, and people around him looked both enlightened and horrified.

Siobhan hopped up and down, then crouched again to try to see through people’s legs. What did he mean about the teeth? She backed up, planning to circle around to the other side of the backyard fenced enclosure. Surely, there would be some free spot along the rickety, stick-woven fence that she could climb to see over.

But before she could make it more than a few steps, Grandfather’s voice boomed out. “Step aside!”

The crowd parted for him, and she did her best to keep several villagers as a visual shield between herself and her grandfather. She peeked through a gap and was able to catch a glimpse of his expression as he examined the scene. His emotions passed too fast for her to fully process, but she definitely saw shock at the beginning, a glimpse of what might have been fear, and at the end, a clear and cold anger. She ducked down and away, just in case.

After a moment, a huge black dome sprang into place around the sheep paddock. People jumped back and exclaimed in shock. Siobhan again peeked around a woman’s skirt and saw that Grandfather had his hands cupped in a Circle in front of his mouth.

She knew that spell! He was casting the somewhat whimsically named shadow-familiar, an esoteric spell that relied on a short ritual rather than the modern spell array. It was one of her favorite pieces of magic. However, it was her first time seeing it used for something like this, rather than shadow-puppet entertainment. When she was young, Grandfather had used the spell to animate the stories he read to her before bed. When she had progressed enough in her apprenticeship to learn the spell last year, they had both molded their shadows into simple humanoid forms and then performed a mock battle that pushed the limits of her control but left her laughing ecstatically.

“I will contain the area and investigate,” the old man promised loudly. “Please do not contaminate any evidence by touching things or walking around the scene of the…incident.”

“Not calling it a fungal growth this time around?” Mr. Hagarty asked, not loudly, but more than enough to be heard over the silence.

Shocked murmurs erupted, and as the crowd shifted, the people blocking Grandfather’s line of sight to Siobhan separated just enough that his eyes landed on her.

The old man closed his eyes and frowned. If he weren’t stuck holding the shadow-familiar spell, he might have raised his hands to rub the bridge of his nose, as he did whenever he was particularly frustrated. “Obviously, this was the work of a magical beast. Judging by the fact that it seems to have vomited everything back out again, perhaps the beast has some kind of illness. I worry that, if it is mad, it may continue to act recklessly—senselessly—and endanger villagers…directly.”

Everyone knew what he meant by that. If the beast could kill all the sheep without being caught, then a human was unlikely to be safe either.

“This is not a scene fit for children or the weak of body or heart,” Grandfather said, glancing at a pregnant woman who was taking short, sharp breaths and holding her swollen belly, and then again at Siobhan.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

This was an excuse, Siobhan knew. Grandfather wasn’t the type to condone those weak in Will hiding their faces from reality, nor did he believe that children should be sheltered from the hardships of reality.

He cleared his throat and raised his voice. “I ask that you escort each other home or to your places of work and allow the experts to handle this. I will try to use the remains as a link to hunt down the beast and kill it. Please do not disturb me, as it may affect my ability to root the beast out of its hiding spot.”

One of the village women took Siobhan’s hand. Despite Siobhan’s protests, the woman grabbed a big stick for protection and walked her home while keeping a wary eye out for the potentially man-eating beast.

Siobhan was quiet and sullen the whole way back, and when they finally arrived, the woman patted her head and pinched her cheek. “It’s going to be alright, dearie. Your grandfather will take care of everything, I’m sure. He wouldn’t let you be hurt. Just dunna’ go out playing on your own.”

But the woman had misjudged what was on Siobhan’s mind. It was true that she was frightened, but all of the burning suspicion and curiosity that she had tried to set aside had now returned. Those feelings had irreversibly taken root in her heart when Grandfather threw up that shield of shadows. Anything he didn’t want her to see, she needed to examine twice or even thrice.

That evening, Grandfather and Claudio, who had gone to join him, returned late. Both looked tired and irritable, and Claudio gave her a weary shake of his head that she couldn’t interpret.

Siobhan kept her mouth shut on the questions that threatened to burst free. Only a fool continued to bang their head against an immovable wall. And she was not a fool. If she could not go through, she would go over, around, or tunnel underneath.

It was hard not to fall asleep. Rather than snuggle in the poisoned lure of the bed, she paced back and forth on silent, sock-clad feet and somehow managed. In the dead of night, so late that it was closer to dawn and even Grandfather should be asleep, she crept out. Rather than going straight to the front door, she tiptoed toward her parents’ room. The door was neither locked nor warded, but the hinges creaked slightly due to neglect.

This was the only room that she hadn’t cleaned during her punishment, but Grandfather also hadn’t bothered to check it. There was faint musty smell, and the air carried a distinct, humid chill that burrowed right past Siobhan’s clothes and made her skin prickle.

She shook the feeling off with a shiver and went to the wardrobe in the corner. She ignored the clothes within, crouching to open the smaller boxes at the bottom, where Mom had kept several of the artifacts she and Father used during their travels. They were empty. Siobhan stared for a moment. “Father must have taken them,” she whispered.

She turned and looked under the bed instead. There were two wooden boxes, shorter than a standard chest, and both scraped a bit against the floor as she moved them. She winced and waited for what felt like a long while with her ears pricked, but when nothing happened, she turned her attention back to the boxes. These ones were locked, but that didn’t stymie her. She searched around until she found Mom’s jewelry box, in which she kept simple wearable artifacts rather than any gaudy gold or jewels. It was empty, too. She stared for a while. Maybe Grandfather had burned her magical trinkets in the pyre. Or maybe Father had taken them. That last thought made her deeply uncomfortable, but she pushed it aside and lifted out the box’s inner tray to reveal the hidden compartment below.

This held one bracelet carved from a single piece of bone—which Mom had once told her came from one of their ancestors—and two keys, one for each of the boxes. None of these were particularly dangerous or important. If they were, they would have been kept locked up in the workshop, probably.

Siobhan slipped the bracelet onto her wrist and ran her fingers over the tiny glyphs carved over the otherwise polished surface. She hadn’t seen the bracelet for years, since she was still tiny, but she remembered Mom talking about it. It was an artifact charged with a spell that would shoot an attack with the same motion someone would use to draw and release an arrow from a bow. Except it required a hair to work—Siobhan wasn’t quite sure how. Mom hadn’t wanted to show her, because the charges were low after being passed down through several generations, and Mom didn’t know how to recharge it. Supposedly, the spell contained within wasn’t powerful enough to match the basic attacks Mom could do with Paimon, so its only real value to her was sentimental.

If Siobhan met the rabid beast, perhaps it would be useful. Its attack was certainly more powerful than anything she could pull off herself.

Within one of the boxes, she found an armored leather cloak sewn with hundreds of mottled, green-and-brown-painted metal plates. The leather was stiff and cracked in several places, and the cloak much too big for her, but she threw it on anyway, faltering and then bracing herself under its surprising weight.

Within the other box, she found some shoes that definitely wouldn’t fit her and a forearm-length stick with a gnarled bunch of roots on the end. The latter, she assumed, was some kind of weapon. She took it out and swung it experimentally, then squinted at it suspiciously. It was a weapon, and not some kind of magical potion component…right? She tucked it into her pocket.

On the way out of the house, she grabbed the extra-large umbrella at the door, too, since it seemed like a potentially better weapon to bash things with.

The night was so dark she almost couldn’t see her own feet walking along the path, but once she had gotten far enough from the house, she took out the light crystal mechanism that she had removed from one of the lamps in her room. With her eyes so adjusted to the dark, it was more than enough to light the way. But something about being a small beacon of brightness in the vast night made her feel vulnerable.

Out here, the possibility of danger felt much more real, and that single sheep’s leg she had seen lying amongst the blood and slime kept flashing into her thoughts. Was it possible that she had made a mistake coming out here on her own? Even walking beside someone useless, like Rory, would have made her feel less exposed. In the worst-case scenario, perhaps the beast would eat him while she took the chance to escape.

But in the end, nothing attacked her. In fact, nothing happened at all, all the way down to and through the village.

The barrier of pure blackness was still surrounding the sheep paddock, and for a moment, Siobhan feared that she had been mistaken, and Grandfather was still here, hidden inside. But then she realized that, more likely, he had replaced the shadow-familiar spell with some kind of slow-release ward that did basically the same thing.

Just to be sure, she poked the half-bubble first. When nothing happened, she poked part of her head through and saw absolutely nothing. At first, she thought that the bubble was thicker than expected, but soon she realized that no light was passing through, so of course she couldn’t see anything. Holding her breath, she braced herself and stepped forward with the light crystal.

Grandfather wasn’t waiting on the other side. But there was nothing else, either.

There were no sheep corpses, no signs of an attack or a magical beast. Any and all evidence of the bodies was gone, including the cloven hoof-prints. It was as if the sheep had never even been there.