Mortal Sins

ELEVEN

EDNA was a six-footer with a linebacker’s shoulders, a sun worshipper’s wrinkles, and a ship’s prow of a bosom. Her hair was short, gray, and straight. She wore a wholly unflattering white oxford shirt tucked into belted khakis. No weapon.

“Crime scene photos,” Edna said, slapping a folder on the conference table. “Rest of it’s in here.” A second, thicker folder landed on top of the first. “Coffee’s in the break room, west end of the building, between the restrooms. Like we all want to hang out at break next to the piss pots, right?”

Lily agreed that those who did space planning for public buildings were idiots, and Edna went to get the key from Evidence.

Like almost everyone in the Unit, Lily had been sent all over the place in the seven months since the Turning, so she was used to quickly setting up a field office. She called a local office supply store, then sat down with the files. First she’d go through the reports, get a picture of what had happened at Meacham’s house four days ago. So far all she had was Deacon’s version.

She’d studied the photos and was halfway through the thicker folder when a muffled drumroll sounded in her purse.

That was Cullen. She frowned, glancing at her watch as she retrieved the toy Rule had given her for her birthday in April—an iPhone. “It’s six forty in the morning in California. What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” Cullen asked. “What could be wrong? You texted me. I called.” The next part came out louder, but muffled, as if he’d turned his head. “How would I know? I’m not the Finder here. All right, all right, I’ll look for it. Just get your beautifully gravid body in and out of that shower fast. The plane leaves in seventy minutes.”

“Plane?” Lily repeated. “Where are you going?”

“Washington—the state, not D. of C. Kidnapping. A little boy this time, four years old. She just got the call.”

Cynna was on limited duty due to her pregnancy, which meant that, unlike other Unit agents, she wasn’t flying all over the U.S. these days. Except in special cases, that was. Cases like this, when a child’s life was at stake. Cynna was the top Finder in the country.

“You’re going with her again?”

“Of course I’m going with her. I’m not about to . . . Lily,” he snapped, and it took her a second to realize he was speaking to Cynna, not her. “I’m talking to Lily, who’s allowed to know about kidnappings and such, right? Since she’s FBI, too, and not likely to give interviews on the subject. Now, are you going to take a shower or not?”

This time Lily caught Cynna’s raised voice. And the slam of a door. “Maybe you shouldn’t yell at the pregnant woman.”

“If I don’t nip back when she nips at me, she’ll think something’s wrong. Tell me about the death magic Rule found.”

She did. Lily was good at condensing a report to the key points, having given plenty of them in her days as a beat cop, then in Homicide. But she didn’t believe in skimping on the details when consulting an expert—she couldn’t know which details Cullen needed. So it took several minutes.

When she finished, Cullen proved once again that he was as bright as he was irritating. “You’re wanting to know just how shaky the limb is you’ve crawled out on, yanking Meacham away from the locals. Was he responsible for what he did, or not? Sorry, love. Can’t say for damned certain sure.”

“You can tell me for certain sure if Meacham needed a Gift to use death magic.”

“To invoke it, yes. To use it? That’s where things turn iffy. There’ve been reports going back to pre-Purge days of . . . Yes, it’s still Lily.” Cullen’s voice took on a different tone. Husky. “Have I mentioned how great you look wet, naked, and knocked up? There’s probably another flight we could catch....”

The next part was muffled, but suggested a moment that should have been more private than it was. Then Cullen’s voice came back, sounding absurdly cheerful, considering he couldn’t have done much in that brief time. “Cynna says hi. Now, where was I?”

“Explaining the difference between invoking death magic and using it.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll give you the short version, because we’re leaving as soon as that luscious body I get to touch whenever I want to is covered—hey, no throwing things!” Lily assumed that bit wasn’t directed at her. “Full disclosure: I don’t know much about death magic.”

Lily paused a beat. “Inconvenient, yet reassuring.”

She could hear the grin in his voice. “That said, I’m eighty or ninety percent sure no one in this realm could perform the invocation ritual solo. And ritual is required—there’s no way of just slurping up power by killing people at random. Meacham couldn’t perform any part of that ritual, but it might—just might—be possible for him to do the killing. The power released by the deaths would be contained within a circle and absorbed by whoever created the circle.”

“The three victims were killed at some distance from each other, separated by walls. Doesn’t sound like there was a circle.”

“No. Bludgeoning with a baseball bat doesn’t fit what I know, either. But again, on this particular area of magical practices I am not an expert.”

“Get to the part about how using death magic is different from invoking it.”

“It’s possible to create a charm or talisman even a null could use. Hellish hard, but it can be done. So technically, it’s possible for someone like Meacham, someone without magic, to have used a talisman.”

“Talisman?” Her heart gave a sudden, scared jump in her chest. “Is that another way of saying artifact?”

“Not exactly, but you probably aren’t interested in the precise definitions.”

“No, I’m not.” Absently, Lily rubbed the place on her stomach where the skin was shiny-smooth . . . a burn scar. Cullen had given it to her last year, but she didn’t hold it against him. Not considering the alternative—an ancient staff powered by death magic in the hands of the man it had driven mad. The staff had been used to control others.

It had also sent Rule to hell, along with part of Lily. The part that ended up dying there.

“Déjà vu all over again?” Cullen said gently. “I don’t know what’s going on in Halo, but it’s not the staff. I burned it, Lily. Mage fire doesn’t leave any remnants behind, not even ash. That staff is gone.”

“Okay.” She grabbed a good breath and let it out. “Okay, that’s not it, but I hope you’ve got some ideas to offer in its place.”

“Three possibilities.” She heard what sounded like the trunk of a car slamming, followed by Cynna’s voice, indistinct in the background. “One: someone discovered yet another powerful ancient artifact and is feeding it. Two: your perp or perps discovered or invented a kick-ass coercion spell and forced Meacham to kill his family, somehow using those deaths to gain power themselves. Three: your victims were killed, and Meacham coerced, through some unknown but innate magical ability.”

Lily didn‘t like any of those possibilities, but . . . “Number one’s the simplest.”

“Not really. Hold on a minute.”

Cullen told Cynna to chill, that he could drive and talk at the same time, at least until they hit the highway. That last was a concession to Cynna’s condition, Lily figured. All lupi had fast reflexes, but Cullen’s were off the charts. He could probably drive, talk, and play with fire—literally—and still react quicker to traffic than most people.

She heard a car door close. “You still there?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah. You don’t like Door Number One?”

“I included it only to be thorough. Even if we ignore the fleetingly small chance of yet another ancient artifact turning up—and recent experience to the contrary, they remain more legend than reality—power like that tends to draw attention. Earth isn’t interdicted anymore. If an ancient artifact turned up here, maybe blown in by the power winds, all sorts of bad-asses would have hoofed it to our humble little realm and be duking it out now for possession. Hard to miss that sort of thing.”

That made sense. “And Door Number Two? Coercion spells aren’t supposed to work.”

“Yeah, but if someone invented one that almost worked . . . maybe that’s why Meacham’s nuts and his family’s dead. The spell sent him into a homicidal frenzy instead of making him do . . . whatever. Not that I really think that’s what happened—it doesn’t explain the death magic—but I can’t rule it out.”

Meacham didn’t seem a likely target for some hotshot coercion spell. What could he have had that anyone wanted? “You’re going for Door Number Three—an innate magical ability. But it wasn’t a demon, Cullen.”

“Maybe the traces of demon magic faded before you touched the bodies.”

She rubbed her temple. “Possible, I guess, but I’ve found traces lingering more than two weeks after someone made a demonic pact. That’s not the same as possession, but . . . shit, I need to know more. Do demons use or, ah, invoke death magic?”

“You can consult about that possibility with my resident demon expert here, after I get off the phone. Which will be in a couple minutes. We don’t know much about out-realm beings, do we?”

“You think something crossed during the power winds. Not an artifact, but a—a being or a creature.”

“I hate to say yes. It’s here-there-be-dragons thinking—we don’t know what’s out there, so we draw whatever shapes suit us. But that does seem the most possible of the possibilities.”

“This creature would—well, feed, I guess. That’s what you mean. That it uses the energy generated by death magic.”

“I don’t know. I could draw some pretty shapes for you, but I do not know.” And ignorance pissed Cullen off. “And even my best possibility doesn’t really fit, dammit. It doesn’t fit all the facts.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lily, you aren’t thinking. Death magic clung to your corpses and to Meacham for four days, but it didn’t cling to Rule for more than moments. It knocked him out, then just went away. And there is nothing I know of to explain that.”

Shit. Double shit. That should have jumped out at her, the one variation in a solid pattern.

“Somehow he shed death magic like a duck sheds water,” Cullen was saying. “And no, that doesn’t sound like any natural lupus ability I ever heard of. Unless there’s something about being two-mantled . . . I don’t see what, but there’s a helluva lot I don’t know about mantles.”

“You must know more than I do. You’re affected by one.”

“You can be affected by sunlight without knowing shit about photons, frequencies, or nuclear decay. You need to talk to Rule, maybe Isen. Someone who’s carried a mantle or part of one.”

“I’ll do that. You have any other ideas?”

He didn’t. He made a vague promise to see what he could turn up. The vagueness meant he didn’t want to tell her what kind of stones he’d be looking under, but she had no problem with that. He passed the phone to Cynna, who snorted at the notion of a demon using death magic.

“But they eat something other than flesh when they eat an animal,” Lily said. “Or each other.”

“Well, yeah, but . . . look, it isn’t the same. Most of us—people who’ve, uh, studied this—think demons eat the life energy of whatever they consume, but it’s a biological energy. Material. Probably magical, too, since they get the memories of whatever they eat. But death magic involves spiritual shit. Demons can’t touch the spiritual shit.”

“By spiritual shit, do you mean souls? Karonski wasn’t at all sure souls were affected by death magic.”

“Yeah, but Abel is Wiccan. Wiccans focus on this life, not what comes after. They don’t talk much about souls. They don’t really have a theory or dogma about what souls are.”

“I suppose you do?”

“Sure. Your soul is the part of you that loves. Say, what do you think about Daniel Abel?”

The part of you that loves. It couldn’t be that simple . . .

“Lily?”

She tried to remember what Cynna had just said. “What about Abel?”

“Daniel Abel. For the baby’s names. His middle names, that is, because I think kids should have their own first names, but the middle one, that’s a good place to connect him to people who matter. So I was trying to decide between Daniel and Abel, because I’d like him to be connected to my dad, but . . . well, I wouldn’t have gotten straightened out without Abel, you know? Cullen thinks we could give him two middle names. Do you think that’s too much?”

“Two’s okay. You probably don’t want to go for three. What about his first name?”

“Still stuck there.”

“Well, if you do name your baby for Karonski, I want to see his face when he finds out. He’ll melt right down to goo. Listen, I’d better go.”

When Lily put her phone down, she was smiling in spite of the ache that had set up residence at the back of her skull. She glanced at the files, grimaced, and decided to retrieve her laptop before diving in. It was in the trunk of her car.

She needed to make some notes about her discussion with Cullen anyway, so this wasn’t entirely an excuse to get up and move. But it felt good to move, to hurry down the stairs and get a breath of muggy, unprocessed air when she left the building. It would have felt even better to just keep going. She needed a run.

That wasn’t happening anytime soon. In the morning, maybe.

She got her laptop and had just closed the trunk when she heard her name called. Turning, she saw a tall, thin man striding toward her from the far end of the building, his head thrust forward and long, skinny legs covering ground fast, like a stork in a hurry.

Lily sighed. Ed Eames was a reporter with the AP. She’d had some interaction with him in D.C., and he wasn’t a bad sort—the dim, amiable exterior hid a sharp mind and a bulldog’s tenaciousness, but he played fair.

“Can’t give you anything, Ed,” she said when he reached her, and almost managed to sound regretful. “Not even an off-the-record hint. It’s too early in the investigation.”

“Oh, well. Maybe later.” He smiled in that vague way he had. “That wasn’t why I stopped you, though. I’m the one with something to say off the record . . . about Alicia Asteglio.”