Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“How would you tell?”

“You’d ask the one who cast it—”

“Or the one who designed it,” Vi added. “Do you know who that was?”

I shook my head. “It’s a really old spell, which is probably why you don’t know it. It was lost for centuries, until a dress designer in Paris rediscovered it in an old grimoire. But he was only using a piece of it, in some magical couture he was designing. As far as I know, he never cast the whole thing.”

“But somebody did,” Vi pointed out.

I looked at Marco. “Any ideas?”

He’d been part of Mircea’s family for years, before he’d thrown in his lot with me. He probably still didn’t know everybody, because the family was huge and spread across the globe. But he knew more than I did.

Yet he was shaking his head. “Could be a lot of people. The master keeps a sizeable group of magic workers on staff—”

Vi snorted. “Yeah, crap magic workers. Only the dregs work for vamps.”

“Maybe at some courts,” he corrected. “But when it comes to senate members? They can take their pick.”

“Of who?” she challenged. “The covens might sell them some magic, from time to time, but they don’t work for them, and the Silver Circle sure as hell—” She stopped suddenly, at the increasingly sardonic look on Marco’s face. “You aren’t serious.”

“The Black Circle?” Saffy said, sitting forward, her drink forgotten.

Marco rolled his eyes. He seemed to like the newest additions to my court, but was frequently appalled at how ignorant they were about vamps. Sort of like the way they were surprised by how little anyone understood the covens—their sayings, their customs, their taboo topics, etc. I was running a regular United Nations around here, where everybody was having to learn to understand each other.

But it was a slow process.

“You act like they’re the only competent off-the-grid mages,” Marco said. “But there are plenty of decent ones—and some better than decent—who get into trouble with the Circle, or with some other magical organization, and need a place to roost. But they don’t want to join the dark—”

“So they join the vampires?” Vi looked like this was news to her.

“My father was one,” I confirmed. “He was a necromancer, which meant that the Circle didn’t trust him and wouldn’t employ him. He ended up working for Tony Gallina, one of Mircea’s masters, and then Mircea met him and tried to lure him away for his own court.”

“Did it work?” Saffy asked.

“No.” I sipped the drink she’d left by my elbow despite it not being smart, because it had been that kind of day. “He died before then.”

There was a small silence, and then Vi spoke again. “Well, if you don’t know who cast it, then you have two choices. There are people who specialize in spell removal, who can do some forensics and try to figure out the key. But they are probably also going to figure out who you’re linked with in the process, and if you don’t want that to get out—”

“It can’t get out.”

“Then your only choice is to get him—or whoever cast it for him—to agree to remove it,” Vi said.

I scowled.

Great.

“Which you need to do anyway,” she pointed out. “Or he could just have it recast whenever he wants.”

But Saffy was shaking her head thoughtfully. “Not if one of the components is missing.”

“Meaning?”

“Lover’s Knot—it’s in the name. Cassie said the spell works on incubus magic, using the emotional bond between two people as a conduit to link their power. So, we cast an anti-love spell. No conduit means no link.”

“There are anti-love spells?” I asked, surprised.

Saffy nodded. “If there’s a spell, there’s usually a reverse as well. Levitation charms to defy gravity, for example, can also be used to greatly increase it, making things too heavy to lift.”