Evander frowned. This would fit with what he was sensing.
He scanned the sitting area with its worn furniture. A small kitchen was visible through an archway. Bookshelves lined every available wall.
There was something else in the air, a sweet, sickly smell that made his nose wrinkle and his scalp prickle with instant recognition.
Shaw’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “Noctis Bloom.”
Durand lowered his brows, confused. “Noctiswhat?”
“Noctis Bloom. It is a powder derived from a flower,” Leon explained. “The Metropolitan Police and the London Arcane Division have confirmed its use by dark mages.”
Durand stiffened. “Dark mages? Wait. You believe dark magic was used to commit this crime?!” He reverted to French in his alarm.
Several of the gendarmes looked up warily at that.
“We don’t just believe it, Inspector,” Evander said. “We know it was.”
Durand’s face tightened at his unshakable statement.
“Through here.” He indicated a doorway on the left. “I shall leave you to it.”
The study was worse than Evander expected.
The vestige of dark magic filling the space took the form of a bone-chilling cold that sucked all the heat from the vicinity and pressed against his senses like a suffocating blanket. He took a shallow breath and allowed a sliver of fire magic to warm his blood.
It became easier to breathe again.
Gérard Molyneux sat slumped in a chair before a large desk, his head tilted back at an unnatural angle. His eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling and his mouth was frozen in what might have been a scream. But it was his skin that made Shaw gasp and sent a shiver of alarm racing down Evander’s spine.
It had taken on a greyish cast, as if all the colour and vitality had been leached from his body.
Papers were scattered across the desk and floor. Books had been pulled from shelves and left where they’d fallen. A lamp lay shattered near the window, the oil staining the floorboards.
“He fought back,” Rufus observed, his sharp gaze sweeping the room. “Or someone searched the place after he died.”
“Both, I think.” Leon moved carefully around the perimeter of the room, his eyes tracking something Evander couldn’t see. “The books near the desk were pulled down during a struggle.”
“But those by the window were moved more methodically,” Fairbridge observed thoughtfully.
Evander approached the body, every instinct screaming a warning. Now that he was in the room where the crime was committed, he could detect an added quality to the dark magiche’d detected upon entering the building. One he’d only recently come up against.
He focused his senses, allowing his Archmage abilities to map the residual energies clinging to the room and the corpse, hoping he was wrong.
It took but a moment for him to confirm his suspicions.
The realisation settled in his gut like ice.
This wasn’t just dark magic. It was the hybrid magic from the Musgrave case. The one he’d first felt in the hidden chamber beneath Whitley’s lab, in the Royal Institute for the Arcane in London.
A sick feeling swept over him.
He had a nasty suspicion as to why Molyneux’s body looked the way it did.
CHAPTER 18
“Shaw,”Evander said tensely. “Tell me what you see.”
Shaw set down her bag and pulled on a pair of gloves, her expression focused. She circled the body once, then twice, before crouching to examine Molyneux’s hands.
