Spell Blind by David B. Coe

for so long, I had lost hope. That month’s phasing hadn’t been the first time I considered putting my pistol to my head.
    He still stared at me, and now he said, “You are trying to learn something of a theft. It has been many turns of the moon since last you learned anything of importance, but still you try. There is a single token from this theft that you possess; a knife with a broken blade. Get it now.”
    I started to say something, then stopped. He had described a robbery Kona and I had been struggling with for the better part of six months. His understanding of the case was crude, but detailed enough to be convincing. This proved nothing, of course. My delusion, my knowledge. But that broken knife was in the house, just as he’d said. Kona and I were certain it had been used to jimmy a window or door and had been broken in the process. But we’d yet to figure out where the thieves had entered the building. We had stopped by the warehouse again the day before. We wandered around for a while, but found nothing new. When we were done, Kona asked me to return the knife to evidence. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I wasn’t all that dependable in the middle of a phasing.
    “Get it,” Namid said, his voice like white water on the Colorado.
    I retrieved the knife from my jacket pocket, pulled it from the evidence bag, and held it out to him.
    “What do you see?” he asked, making no effort to take it from me.
    I glanced at it, lifted it closer to my eyes. “Son of a bitch!”
    “Tell me what you see.”
    I wasn’t even sure how to describe it. A faint glimmer of yellow light danced along the edge of the blade, like fire. It was brightest at the broken end, but it radiated all the way up the hilt. How had I not seen this before? How had Kona missed it?
    “It’s glowing,” I said at last.
    “What color?”
    “Yellow.”
    “That is magic, or to be more precise, the residue of magic.”
    “What?”
    “Yellow is not a strong color. Had the conjuring been done by a more accomplished runecrafter, the color would be red or green, perhaps even blue. And it would have vanished long ago. Someone with true craft can mask his conjuring. You are searching for a crafter with the most rudimentary skills.”
    “You’re making it do that. What am I saying? I’m making it do that. I’m imagining all of this.”
    “No. You see it because you are a weremyste. Your magic allows you to see what is left of spells conjured by others. It is part of your gift.”
    “Then why haven’t I ever seen this before?”
    “Because you did not know to look for it. And I was not there to show you. You will never fail to see it again.”
    I shook my head. “I’m not a sorcerer.”
    “Not yet. But you have power. If you did not, you would not see anything more than a broken knife.”
    Despite what Namid had shown me, I was slow to believe he was anything more or less than a product of my own psychotic imagination. I’d seen my dad lose his mind, the process slow and painful, and I had known for years that this was my fate, too. I knew my dad was a weremyste, and that I was as well, but I had never given much thought to what that might mean. I certainly hadn’t ever believed that much good would come of whatever powers I possessed. Magic had been the source of too much pain in my life for me to see it in any other way.
    After some time that first night, Namid left me, no doubt fed up with my stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he was real. But he appeared again the next morning and we resumed our argument. At first, I took his return as evidence that my descent into permanent insanity had already begun. But Namid was persistent to the point of relentlessness, and with time I came to believe that he was real and that all he’d been telling me about magic and my own gifts was true.
    Even more, everything he said about the warehouse robbery turned out to be dead-on accurate. The knife hadn’t been broken jimmying anything; it