Magic wasn't a term that Emma particularly liked. It was too loaded, too many cultural assumptions, to many Disney movies and bad fantasy novels, too many games of Dungeons and Dragons. Yet here she was, looking at what what was unquestionably a magic wand. An athamae. With quick firm strokes she began sketching the thing on her notepad, capturing the runes, rendering the shadows with the edge of her pencil. Magic was about directing the will, the more precisely focused an idea, the better the result. That was why ritual magic required things like wands, circles, repetitive chanting. Emma was able to do much the same thing in her head, to much greater efficiency by applying mathematical reasoning, integration, limiting functions, nested parentheses and Fourier transforms provided much greater degrees of repetition and accuracy if one could train ones mind to use them instinctively. 

Torn from still living wood, carved with a bloody finger nail, attributes redolent of symbolic meaning. She tapped the tip of her pencil thoughtfully, flicking free a few flecks of graphite. Had it been improvised at the scene? That seemed unlikely given the restraints of the runes and sigils, that was a lot of work for a rush job. Created relatively soon before use though, symbolic tree? From the sister's grave? Possible, she made a note to find out where the sister had been buried.

Emma took a sip of coffee and leaned close to Morgan. Her skin buzzed weirdly as she drew close, like it had years before when her first real boyfriend had kissed her by the lake in Lucerne. With the mental discipline of a practitioner and a mathematician she shoved the weird bundle of sensations away.

[b]"Looks like a channeling spell of some sort, they forced and awful lot of energy through the athamae, probably attuned specifically for the spirit in question,"[/b] Emma whispered to the other woman. It came out a little hoarser than she had intended, like the back of her throat was suddenly raw.

[b]"Ill know more once Robert has done some forensics and I can touch it, do you recognize the runes?" [/b]They weren't from any tradition she was aware of, but there were as many different runes and arcane scripts as there were practitioners.