Chapter 26 #2
She furrows her brow as she thinks, her silence eating away at my hope, but her eyes widen as realisation dawns on her, and my pulse quickens.
She leaps from her seat and skips over to the bookshelf, her bare feet almost silent against the tired carpet.
She runs a long finger along the spines of my books and plucks out one of the largest tomes, needing two hands to hold it as she carries it over to me and thuds it down on the table.
I recognise the cover: The Key To Higher Magic.
Just owning this would gift me a stint in the cells at the Division.
I lean back from it warily, the burden of this last week feeling heavy on my shoulders. “I can’t risk using magic, Stryx, not for a while. I’ve only just started feeling myself again.”
She shakes her head earnestly. “You don’t need to, but it has a passage about recognising other magics. It could help us identify any spell that may have been used on her blood.”
It seems like Stryx has taken to reading my books whilst stuck in here if she knows that. Given its nature, it’s not a book I’ve taken to reading often, let alone front to back.
The script inside is cramped and precise, ink faded to the colour of old tea. Marginal notes—many in a different, sharper hand—thread between the paragraphs like roots. Stryx bends over the page, her ears twitching, and I read over her shoulder.
The book describes patterns to watch for rather than incantations. The felt-signs of someone mapping intent into matter—a cold that does not come from temperature, but from absence, or a crystalline filigree that forms along a liquid’s surface under certain spells.
Stryx’s eyes darken as she reads the next page. “There’s a way to draw the intent out,” she breathes. “Not by repeating words, but by listening with the kind of stillness the book describes. It can show you the intent it was bound to.”
Right…okay then.
It’s not often I come across something I don’t understand, but none of this makes any sense to me at all. Though given that Stryx has a different type of magic to me, and a better understanding of magic in general, I take her word as gospel and hand her the phial, letting her take over from me.
She cups the phial of blood between both hands and closes her eyes.
Her lips move silently and the air around us shifts with her magic, the sort of pressure that makes the skin tingle.
Her blue aura escapes her, the tiny crescent tattoo on her forehead shining, and the tome’s margin notes seem to match her glow for a heartbeat before they dim.
Her breath catches, and she reaches one hand out and gently touches my shoulder.
Immediately, images—not quite tangible, more like impressions—rise like steam against glass in my mind, a latticework of sigils wrapped around a single, diaphanous concept.
A memory of ice, formed not by cold, but by will, holding shape far beyond the body’s reason to keep it.
And threaded through all of it, the faintest, most deliberate intention.
I shiver. I don’t know what Stryx has done, but it’s worked.
My skin prickles and I force myself to breathe. “It’s a sort of…binding spell?”
She opens her eyes slowly. They’re red-rimmed from fatigue.
“Yes, I think so,” she agrees. “Her blood was spilt with particular intent, but the spell was frozen, like the act of the blood spilling triggered something.” She skims a finger along the text.
“The book calls this kind of hold a long hush. It can provide many uses–” she gasps “– Octavia, it can trigger a temporary coma.”
I flip the page, my heart thundering. Under Binding Arts- Common Uses, a neat paragraph catches my breath.
“This says the ritual for creating a coma-like state is triggered by blood loss. It’s risky, though—the victim could bleed out before the spell is completed…
” I feel something tighten inside my chest like a fist. “Gods, Stryx, it says it needs two litres of blood to activate. They all lost around two litres. Someone must have tried this,” I whisper.
“But failed? Could this be a pattern of failed rituals?”
Stryx’s jaw works. “It fits…though the wound must be extremely small for it not to be obvious. If you bind this spell to the blood, but it only triggers when the blood is spilt, you could kill without evidence. You wouldn’t need to be there at the time of death.”
My teeth gnaw at my lower lip. “That could be why the first two were found in locked rooms. The moment of death was delayed. Their memories were siphoned, leaving them in overwhelming panic, leading them to barricade themselves, not realising they were already dying. It still doesn’t explain how they bled out, though. ”
Stryx knots her fingers in her lap, her voice almost a whisper of anger. “This isn’t something a petty killer can just improvise. Whoever did this must have planned it meticulously, and have a very particular kind of cruelty. Do you think it ties back to the cult Raph mentioned?”
I meet her gaze, hard with resolve, but before I can speak, our attention snaps to Quill as he starts scratching away at his parchment. I recognise the handwriting as Chief Starling’s and my stomach drops.
I need you at the Division now. We’ve located Xavier.
There’s something you need to see.