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As Reese lifts the hand and turns it over, his familiar leaps onto the desk and sniffs the bones, then lets out a snort and twin streams of smoke rise into the air.
“Please don’t set the evidence on fire,” Johannsson groans, squeezing his eyes shut.
Reese scoops the little beast up against his chest. “The hand is dead.”
“No shit,” Johannsson mutters.
Reese blinks at him for a moment before he straightens. “Oh, I know it’s dead, obviously, but I mean it’sdeaddead.”
“We also noticed a lack of any energy.” Pen looks at Johannsson. “Even bones usually have a residual energy in them. But these are drained dry. It’s significant for what they’re lacking.”
Reese turns the hand so the symbol faces up. “But this is clearly magic of some kind.”
Xander scoots his chair toward the end of his desk and grabs the edge of a roll of paper attached to the side. With a tug, he rips off a piece large enough to cover the top of his desk, and Reese sets the hand down in the middle of it.
When Xander moves the Sharpie over the hand, Johannsson lurches forward. “What are you doing?”
“Magic.” Xander draws a circle around the hand on the paper, then symbols around it that only confuse me.
As an elemental witch, I never had an interest in academia, and the patterns for spell work never came naturally to me. If Flint were here, though, he’d know exactly what Xander is doing.
Xander caps the pen and grabs the roll of paper, ripping off another piece to lie on top. “Reese?”
His brother slips his fingers between the two pieces of paper, and a flash of magic brightens the room.
Xander stares down at the paper. “Huh.”
“What does that mean?” Johannsson demands. “What was supposed to happen?”
Xander peels back the top layer of paper to reveal a blank sheet of white beneath, the circle and symbols he drew around the hand now gone.
My stomach tightens, and Pen shifts restlessly next to me.
Reese clasps his hands behind his back and leans down to peer at the hand. “Fascinating.”
“What happened?” Johannsson demands again.
“We have a magic-eating hand.” Xander picks up the Sharpie and prods the symbol. “But where does the magic go?”
Reese straightens and turns to study Darius. “Are there more symbols on the other remains?”
Surprised, I glance at the blanket he carries, but no hint of the skull shows through the folds of the material.
“No, but it was also in the bone pit.” Darius flips back a corner of the blanket to reveal the boogeyman skull. “We need to deliver this back to the Terror from Beneath.”
“We also need one of the cars out front.” I toss the van keys to Reese, who catches them. “We got slapped with a new kind of tracker on our van. Spell tech. I deep-cleaned it inside and out, but Flint wants you guys to look it over to make sure we didn’t miss anything.”
Reese rubs his hands together. “Sounds like a nice, hands-on demonstration for my class.”
“Just don’t break it,” I drawl. “We’re not looking to buy a new van.”
Xander draws another circle around the hand and different symbols. “I’ll keep working on this. It could take a while to figure out what spell is being used.”
I clap Johannsson on the shoulder. “Better pull up a chair. You’re going to be here a while.”
He mutters under his breath, but grabs the chair from Reese’s desk and pulls it up alongside Xander, settling down to watch like a good little policeman.
“Call as soon as you have something,” Pen says.
