“What?” I press when she doesn’t continue.
She looks up at me with a line forming between her brows. “Sliced with something that burned as it cut through the bone.”
“What could do that?” I feel my own frown deepening.
She stands up and drops the pen on the floor. She wipes her hands back and forth across each other even though she wasn’t touching anything directly. “I don’t know.”
“Is that a good idea?” I point at the dropped pen. “Could it be used as evidence?”
She waves away my concern with one bloodstained hand. “Like you said, Vlad owns the police force. And it’s not as if they’d be of any use in this investigation anyway. No human could have done this.”
The words land heavy in the room. That was what I was afraid of hearing. “Because of the bones?”
She points at the center of the room where the worst of the carnage is concentrated. “The body’s been laid out like a ritual sacrifice, and the heart’s missing entirely. It’s not any of my family trying to fuck with Vlad because the blood’s all still here. Vlad’s sons wouldn’t have been able to help themselves from at least having a little taste if they’d been the ones to do this. And the timing’s too coincidental with everything else going on.”
I shake my head because I’m not following her logic. “What do you mean?”
Her face is pale as she looks down at the floor, at the arranged body parts. “I was afraid of this. Last month with the circle, everything got out of control when things got so supercharged with all that nuclear energy.”
“What does that have to do with any of this?—”
“We obviously let other things through!” she hisses, looking back up at me with fury blazing in her eyes. But I can see the fear underneath it. “It wasus. We’re the reason for the crack in the planes. Sabra’s mother’s prophecy was aboutus, don’t you get it? What we did to stop the Devourers has also let other spirits through into this world.”
I start to shake my head in automatic denial but then pause to actually think about it. Because a lot of the conspiracy sites I’ve been tracking online have mentioned other disturbances lately. Strange things, like monsters made out of rock who disappear into the shadows at night. Or evil women who seducemen and drain their souls out of their bodies, leaving them as shriveled husks. But I just assumed it was woman-hating incel bullshit taken to the next level with people’s heightened paranoia since the Devourers came.
I look around the room at the uncanny precision of the dismembering. I can’t imagine anything human strong enough to pull a body apart with such disturbing exactitude. “What does the missing heart mean? Is there anything you know of from another plane that would do something like that?”
“The mages have barely mapped any of the other planes, much less used their instruments to look through to the other side to see what lives there.” Her voice is tight with frustration. “You know that.”
I nod slowly, but I’d hoped for something more concrete. I don’t know what I hoped, exactly. I just hate seeing Phoenix so distressed. I hate even more that she’s blaming herself for this. “You were trying to stop the end of the world,” I say as I reach out a hand to help her as she tiptoes among the body parts back to the doorway. She ignores my outstretched hand completely.
“I should have found a better way.” Her voice is small in a way I’ve rarely heard.
“There was no time. And it wasn’t all up to you, if you’ll remember. The danger came from the angels in the first place. If anyone’s at fault, it’s someone from my plane.”
“Well,” she hunches her shoulders inward like she’s trying to make herself smaller, “then I went and got a hero complex about it and fucked things up even worse.”
I scoff at that and hold my arms out to gesture at the world outside the window. “The planet’s still here. How is that worse?”
Her eyes squeeze shut, and briefly, I see emotion flicker across her face. Pain. Self-judgment. A thousand other things she never usually lets me see. I want to pull her into my arms and let her know that, for once, someone else is here to help shoulderher burdens. It’s dangerous to want that, but I don’t like seeing her in pain all the same. I try words instead since she won’t let me touch her.
“You aren’t alone in this,” I whisper, taking a step closer to her.
But that only makes her eyes flash open with a fury I can’t understand. “You have no idea what I am.” The words come out sharp, but there’s something broken underneath them. She shoulders her way past me toward the door. “I have to fix this.”
I follow her out into the hallway. “How exactly are you going to do that?”
“I’m going to find whatever did this and send it back where it came from.”
“Did you find some clue in there that I missed?”
Our feet leave red tracks on the tile hallway. Phoenix doesn’t notice until one of the adoring policemen she used her compulsion on earlier offers to exchange shoes with her. Phoenix looks down at her boots with an expression of distaste.
Irritated, Phoenix wipes her feet off on a student’s welcome mat outside their dorm room. She orders the policeman to clean it and the hallway up. The man nods eagerly and rushes off to find cleaning supplies.
“Besides the fact it was a non-human who did it? No.” She looks away from me, and I see her jaw tighten. “The scent of blood was too overpowering for me to pick up anything else.”
I nod in understanding. The overwhelming presence of it to a blood magic being must have been like trying to see through a fog. “All the blood itself was a clue, though,” she says as we keep walking down the hallway toward the stairs. “Blood isn’t just symbolic of human life in various religious contexts.” She lets out a long sigh. “For some spirits on the other side, it can be a tether. Like a source of energy that also ties them to this plane.”
