Free Spell Blind by David B. Coe Page B

the Blind Angel case when you were on the force, didn’t you?”
    I thought about this and realized in about half a second that my name was in articles about the murders published at the time. “Yes, that’s right. Kona and I worked the case from the start.”
    “You investigated the very first murder?”
    “Gracia Rosado. Twenty-one. Five feet, two inches; 127 pounds. Born in Hermosillo, came to the States with her parents when she was seven, lived in Mesa at the time she died.”
    Billie opened her mouth, then closed it again.
    “To you this might be a great story, but I lived it for a year and a half. Longer, really. I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped living it.”
    “Can you do that with all the victims?” she asked in a hushed voice.
    “Probably. Do I really need to?”
    “No.”
    Before she could say more, a waitress arrived with our pizza. She eyed the recorder, put the pizza on the table next to it, and gave us both odd looks.
    When she was gone, Billie sipped her Coke and leaned forward. “Why do you think he blinds them?”
    Because he’s a weremyste, like me. Because he’s drawing power out of them in some way—through their eyes—and using that power to make his magic stronger.
    A part of me wanted to say it, just to see the expression on her face. For all I knew, it could have been the biggest story her blog had ever seen. Because while most people knew that magic was real, few understood anything about the workings of spells, and fewer still could say that they knew a weremyste.
    We were around, of course, in more places than most people would have guessed. We were cops and school teachers, doctors and lawyers. Hell, there were weremystes in the military. At one time, if the claims that flew around the magical community could be believed, back in the early ’70s, and again in the early ’90s, the Pentagon tried to create a special unit of magical Green Berets. It makes sense: combine that level of military training with spell-casting ability, and they’d have a force that was all but unstoppable. But as with all efforts to integrate weremystes and their magic more fully into American society, the effort foundered on the phasings and their effects on our minds. Special Ops guys went through vigorous psychological screenings. They lived violent dangerous lives, and they needed to be available at a moment’s notice, 24/7. Throwing a three-day phasing into that equation created problems, both immediate and potential. As far as I know, the Magic Special Ops program never got off the ground. As far as I know.
    And its failure pointed to the larger problem that weremystes faced. The stigma that surrounded mental illness in this country was a heavy burden, for those who were ill as well as for their families, in large part because mental illness was still so poorly understood. Well, so was magic. And as a result that stigma was far worse for those whose mental problems came from being weremystes.
    This was why most of my kind used blockers to hide their abilities, and to spare themselves the effects of the phasings. Blockers were a family of drugs, the first of which came into use centuries ago. Many of them were legal; a few, like Spark, were not. But all of them, including Spark, affected weremystes the same way. Rather than getting us high, they guarded us from the psychosis of the phasings and suppressed our magic. If a weremyste was willing to give up magic, he could use blockers to avoid the phasings and the insanity that inevitably came with them. Seems like an easy choice, right? How many people could afford to lose their minds for three nights out of each month? How many people wouldn’t do everything possible to avoid an otherwise inevitable descent into insanity?
    But for a few of us, the choice wasn’t quite so clear. Blockers were an all-or-nothing deal. I couldn’t take them for the three days around the full moon and cast spells the rest of the month. That would have been great if it