It was Friday. I had one day to solve this case or I had no real future.
My head pounded with a tension headache, and I was too stressed to eat. I almost couldn’t even stomach coffee, so I was in a foul mood as I drove to Mary’s at ten am. I figured most people who were commuting to work would’ve left by now, which meant fewer nosy neighbors watching us break into her house.
“We do this the same as last time,” I told Vas. “I break the ward, and then we poke around until we find something that ties Mary to the murders and leads us to her accomplices.”
“And if we don’t?”
“I don’t need that kind of negativity this early in the morning.”
Vas grinned as we climbed the steps leading to Mary’s front porch. The porch encircled the house, and we moseyed around to the back entrance, where there would be fewer eyes on us.
This time, Vas didn’t argue, staying out of the way while I concentrated on breaking the ward.
Mary’s ward was nowhere near as strong as Beatrice’s. It was almost anticlimactic how fast it broke. Her lock, on the other hand, was tricky. I wiggled my tools for far too long, sweat gathering on the back of my neck as I cursed.
“We’re in.”
I kept my shields down, just in case Mary had any magical booby traps waiting for us, but the house smelled stale. Clutter littered her counters and a thin layer of dust covered everything.
“She hasn’t been here for weeks,” I said as we walked through the kitchen. Mary had cleaned out her fridge. Unlike Beatrice, this wasn’t someone who had just gone on the run. Mary had made sure her house wouldn’t smell like rotting food while she was gone. She was planning to return.
“I’ll check the living room,” Vas said, and I nodded, moving toward Mary’s bedroom. Her bed hadn’t been made, but that didn’t mean much— plenty of people didn’t make their beds in the morning. I was one of them.
I went through her drawers, checked the en-suite bathroom, and scowled. Nothing. I lifted her mattress, although I doubted Mary was dumb enough to hide anything important under it.
It weighed a ton and I bent my knees as I put my back into it.
“Let me help.”
Vas picked it up like he was lifting a sheet from the bed, and I attempted to tamp down my envy. He held the mattress up until I shook my head. He dropped it.
A feather floated to the ground. We both looked at it. Then we looked at each other. I pulled a plastic baggy out of my utility belt and turned it inside out, using it to pick the feather up.
Black, glossy, and unmistakably demon.
“Can you tell whose it is?” I asked, and Vas shook his head.
“It’s a primary feather. That’s all I know. We should take it to Samael just in case he recognizes it. He may even be able to sense the magical imprint it belongs to.”
I closed the Ziplock bag and handed it to Vas. His laugh said he knew I was now avoiding his boss, but he took it from me.
“If a demon was in Mary’s bed, he must’ve had some hint of what she was doing, right?”
Vas shrugged. “She could have lured him here. He might’ve been her first victim.”
“Either that, or he’s working with the witches.”
Vas’s jaw tightened but he nodded.
My phone vibrated, and I pulled it from my pocket. An unknown number had sent me a message and I opened it.
This is Bael. We have autopsy pictures from the witch. Nothing interesting except this anklet.
I studied the anklet. Beads, feathers, flannel, it was almost voodoo. But that wasn’t whatIfound interesting.
On the bottom of her foot, she had a tattoo. A tattoo of a cauldron.I studied it, but it was blurry. Bael had focused the picture on the anklet, and I’d have to ask him to send me another of the tattoo itself.
I showed it to Vas. “No witch I know would ever use the symbol of a cauldron. It’s taboo at worst, ignorant at most— witches don’t need cauldrons when they have a gas stove and oversized pot they can use to create a spell.”
