mouth with a paper towel. "This girl still here?"
Butters lifted his eyebrows. "Yeah. Miss Blanche. Why?"
"I think maybe Molly can help."
Molly blinked and looked up at me. "Um. What?"
"I doubt it's going to be pleasant, Molly," I told her. "But you might be able to read something."
"Off of a dead girl?" Molly asked quietly.
"You're the one who wanted to come along," I said.
She frowned, facing me, and then took a deep breath. "Yes. Um. Yes, I was. I mean, yes, I will. Try."
"Will you?" I asked. "You sure? Won't be fun. But if it gets us more information, it could save someone's life."
I watched her for a moment, until her expression set in determination and she met my eyes. She straightened and nodded once. "Yes."
"All right," I said. "Get yourself set for it. Butters, we need to give her a few minutes alone. Can we go get Miss Blanche?"
"Um," Butters said. "What's this going to entail, exactly?"
"Nothing much. I'll explain it on the way."
He chewed on his lip for a moment, and then nodded once. "This way."
He led me down the hall to the storage room. It was another exam room, like the one we'd just been in, but it also featured a wall of body-sized refrigerated storage units like morgues are supposed to have. This was the room we'd been in when a necromancer and a gaggle of zombies had put a bullet through the head of Butters's capacity to ignore the world of the supernatural.
Butters got out a gurney, consulted a record sheet on a clipboard, and wheeled it over to the fridges. "I don't like to come in here anymore. Not since Phil."
"Me either," I said.
He nodded. "Here, get that side."
I didn't want to. I am a wizard, sure, but corpses are inherently icky, even if they aren't animated and trying to kill you. But I tried to pretend we were sliding a heavy load of groceries onto a cart, and helped him draw a body, resting upon a metal tray and covered in a heavy cloth, onto the gurney.
"So," he said. "What is she going to do?"
"Look into its eyes," I said.
He gave me a somewhat skeptical look. "Trying to see the last thing impressed on her retinas or something? You know that's pretty much mythical, right?"
"Other impressions get left on a body," I said. "Final thoughts, sometimes. Emotions, sensations." I shook my head. "Technically, those kinds of impressions can get left on almost any kind of inanimate object. You've heard of object reading, right?"
"That's for real?" he asked.
"Yeah. But it's an easy sort of thing to contaminate, and it can be tricky as hell—and entirely apart from that, it's extremely difficult to do."
"Oh," Butters said. "But you think there might be something left on the corpse?"
"Maybe."
"That sounds really useful."
"Potentially."
"So how come you don't do it all the time?" he asked.
"It's delicate," I said. "When it comes to magic, I'm not much for delicate."
He frowned and we started rolling the gurney. "But your only half-trained apprentice is?"
"The wizarding business isn't standardized," I said. "Any given wizard will have an affinity for different kinds of magic, due to their natural talents, personalities, experiences. Each has different strengths."
"What are yours?" he asked.
"Finding things. Following things. Blowing things up, mostly," I said. "I'm good at those. Redirecting energy, sending energy out into the world to resonate with the energy of what I'm trying to find. Moving energy around or redirecting it or storing it up to use later."
"Aha," he said. "None of which is delicate?"
"I've practiced enough to handle a lot of different kinds of delicate magic," I said. "But… it's the difference between me strumming power chords on a guitar and me playing a complex classical Spanish piece."
Nutters absorbed that and nodded. "And the kid plays Spanish guitar?"
"Close enough. She's not as strong as me, but she's got a gift for the more subtle magic. Especially mental and emotional stuff. It's what got her in so much trouble with…"
I bit my tongue and stopped in midsentence. It wasn't my place to discuss Molly's violations of the White Council's Laws of Magic with others. She would have enough trouble getting past the horrible acts she'd committed in innocence without me painting her as a psycho monster-in-training.
Butters watched my face for a few seconds, then nodded and let it pass. "What do you think she'll find?"
"No clue," I said. "That's why we look."
"Could you do this?" he said. "I mean, if you had to?"
"I've tried it," I hedged. "But I'm