Plague Cult by Jenny Schwartz Page A

waist, moving enough that he blocked the wind from her. She thought the action was automatic, unconscious, but it warmed her more than her fleece jacket.
    The old resort was just visible: seven cabins built around the main building that had a dock out to the river and contained conference rooms and kitchen, plus an office and storage.
    Ruth checked her watch. Ten o’clock.
    “Stay here,” Shawn whispered, nearly soundless, before ghosting away.
    She leaned into the smooth trunk of the oak tree. Its sturdy normality helped her feel secure. In mage sight, she could see the silver of Shawn’s magic still merged with the fringe of her aura, yet stretching out, centering on him, as he scouted the area. Where she couldn’t see him physically, she detected his presence by the silver glow.
    And if I wasn’t connected to him, I doubt I’d see even that. She shoved her hands in her pockets, gripping the can of pepper spray that she carried as a just-in-case. Magic wasn’t always the answer to a problem.
    She forced her gaze from Shawn to study the compound. There were lights in four of the seven cabins, and in the main building. At the edge of its dock, a lamp glowed faintly.
    The river and the woods felt clean. The death magic had rolled out across them before hitting the containment ward, but it hadn’t come from them. Ruth concentrated on the ugliness of the magic, trying to trace it back to its source. It came from the old resort. Not from one of the seven cabins, not even from outside in a scratched circle of dirt. It came from the main building.
    Ruth pressed into the oak tree as a middle-aged man exited one of the cabins, closing its door behind him and rattling the doorknob to check it had locked. Not very trusting. He walked briskly to the main building and entered.
    Lights went on in the far windows. Unless the layout of the building had changed since she was a teenager, that was the large conference room. A couple of her friends had worked at the resort in the holidays, and she’d picked them up on the way to parties, concerts or other events. She wondered if the man was setting up for the meeting Erica had discussed with Jared.
    Or was he setting up for activities that the meeting of a lonely hearts club would hide? The death magic seemed centered in the far end of the building. The longer she stood here, concentrating on the death magic—the opposite of her healers’ talent—the clearer she saw it. Like grey smoke tinted with red lines, yet heavier, as if emptied from a giant vacuum cleaner bag, it clung to the main building and kind of shuddered.
    So far in her healers’ career, she’d been lucky. She’d only encountered death magic twice before, and both times she’d been part of a team with a more senior healer who’d dealt with it. Here, she was the healer. Shawn, guardian and hollerider, could defeat the person using death magic. However, she needed to heal its effects.
    Not that she could bring the dead back to life.
    Death magic, as its name implied, drew its power from sacrifice.
    In its mildest form, and usually called by less ominous names, it could feed on renunciation: the death of a habit, a vow of abstinence, or a surrender could power it. That living self-sacrifice could be immensely powerful not simply for its magic, but because of the intent of the person committing it.
    But the dark ugliness of the death magic here indicated that it was by no means so positive. Whoever had cast this magic had physically killed something. Not a person. The cloud of death magic would have been a roiling storm, a crushing psychic pressure in the compound, if a human had died. Instead, it was relatively weak. A small animal had died.
    The truly evil used death magic because it gave them a sick thrill to kill. The act was as satisfying as the magic raised. However, evil was rare. Most people who used death magic did so because they were scared. They acted out of the viciousness of their fear. It unbalanced