Page 12 of Bound By Fire and Magic
Shame tightened Nana’s face, no doubt at the thought of her son conjuring. “He may be off somewhere trying to find out how to destroy it.”
“I found this, too, in the ashes.” Elle held up the photograph fragment. “I can’t see what it was. My magick won’t go deep enough.”
Roz took the piece and closed her eyes. She took several deep breaths. “It has the essence of Shadow Magick, too. Only powerful Deuces can reach past the barriers. I see…” Her eyes blinked beneath her closed lids, and they snapped open. “Nothing.”
You lie, Nana.
“Try again. Please.”
With an impatient sigh, Nana closed her eyes. The moment her eyes blinked, Elle grasped her arm. The photograph also flashed into her mind.
Elle gasped and dropped her hand. “Stein?”
Nana’s expression grew stern. “You have opened a can of worms by bringing him here. But he is here now. The worms are free.” She wiggled her fingers, which under other circumstances would have been funny.
But nothing about this was funny. “I’m not going to hide evidence, not like some people I know.” She made a point not to look at Kirin. But Roz had almost hidden the truth, too.
Kirin pushed away from the desk and came closer. “Huff was burning a picture of my father while doing some dark magick?”
Nana’s hands shot out, one toward Elle, one reaching for Kirin. “I need to see the creature.”
Kirin eyed her gnarled hand. “Through some kind of Deuce sorcery?”
Elle clasped her nana’s hand. “If we put ourselves back in the scene, she can experience what we did.”
His eyes widened. “She’ll invade my mind?”
“A scary thought, no?” Nana smiled. “You must trust me, boy.”
Kirin’s mouth tightened, but he took her hand. That simple gesture took Elle’s breath away.
Nana closed her eyes. “Be in that moment again.”
Elle pulled herself back to seeing Kirin fighting that thing, of summoning her energy into her orb and throwing it. She heard Nana’s sharp intake of breath as both of their memories and feelings bombarded her at once.
A couple of minutes later, Nana jerked her hands free as if they were getting burned. “The entity is a tulpa.”
Elle asked, “Is that the same as a thoughtform?”
“Both are created by the intense concentration of a powerful mind. A thoughtform is more like a ghost. Even Mundanes have been known to create them. Tulpas, in terms of the Hidden, are created with Shadow Magick and, as you saw, are more physical in nature. For a while they do their creator’s bidding, but eventually they break free. They feed on the energy in which they are made and continue to act on it.”
Elle said, “I remember you telling me about a Deuce who brought back his dead wife’s spirit and then died soon afterward. You were trying to dissuade me and my friend Gina from using dark magick to contact her dead brother. I thought maybe you’d made it up.”
“It happened, child. The bereaved man created the tulpa with the intention to resurrect the visual form of his wife. For a while, the tulpa obeyed. Others even saw the wife’s image. The man’s lifeless body was found sometime after that. They figured that when the tulpa broke free it fed on the man’s desperation and grief. Given the timing, it probably took three days for the tulpa to suck his life’s essence out of him.”
Kirin clenched his fists. “Lyra said our father’s bedroom was a wreck, as though someone—or something—attacked him. Huff created that tulpa to kill my pop.”
Elle hated the thought. “No. He wouldn’t go that far.”
“Think about it, Elle. It holds angry energy, and it wants to kill.”
“But if that’s true, where is his body?”
His mouth tightened. “That’s what we have to find out.”
She turned to Nana. “What happened to the tulpa? They must have gotten rid of it.” What she really wanted to know was, how could they get rid of the one at the factory?
“Normally its creator must destroy it in a long, arduous process, standing in the same circle in which he created it for protection. In that man’s case, the creator was gone. A Deuce had to stand in the circle and summon the same god who helped create it. The Deuce emerged from the wreck of the house having destroyed the tulpa, but he was not allowed to share how it was done. The gods need to feel necessary. Powerful. Not many Crescents worship them anymore, so they take their power where they can get it.”
