This poor woman hadn’t had any time to mourn her teacher and mentor since running from this place the night before, and now she was faced with the aftermath. Stepping over, I put an arm around her shoulders, and to my happy relief, she sagged into me.
Over the last few years, I hadn’t had much practice with people, but Veronica was different. Rather than wanting to push her away like I did most everyone else, I wanted her close. It was a strange feeling, if I was being honest.
“I’ll let you do what you need to do,” she said, backing away to the wall by the door.
“This won’t take long,” I said. “The office isn’t very big.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, wiping at her eyes.
It made me sad to see her like this. In the short time I’d known her, Veronica had been more vibrant and engaged. Since getting to the academy, she’d become more subdued and sad. Not surprising given all that had happened here, but it still didn’t make me feel good about it.
Leaving her in her mourning, and getting into a more investigative frame of mind, I went about inspecting the room. Obviously, the murder weapon was gone. Unfortunate, but to be expected. Instead of checking that, I knelt to look at the bloodstain. There was no spatter anywhere else in the room that I could see, which meant there hadn’t been any sort of struggle. Balthazar had been caught totally unaware, and most likely by someone he knew. The initial strike had to have been savage and quick enough that he’d have been in too much pain to cast a spell. The guy might have been dead before he hit the ground if the blade struck his heart. The small size of the blood puddle gave credence to that theory. If he’d died fast, the heart wouldn’t have had time to pump blood out.
As I moved about the room, Veronica stood near the center and sniffed the air.
“I’m not noticing any specific scents,” she said. “Most are faint and jumbled. He was always having meetings and counseling sessions in here.” She sighed in frustration. “It basically smells likeeveryonein the school all at once. Whoever did it might have used a scent blocker.”
“It’s okay,” I said, giving her a reassuring smile. “It was a good idea to try.”
I moved to the desk, hoping there might be something more here than there was in his classroom. The first few drawers turned up nothing, other than the fact that Balthazar had an unhealthy obsession with gummy bears. The guy had four different bags throughout the desk.
The final drawer, the largest, was at the bottom left of the desk. Reaching down, I grasped the handle and slid it out, freezing the moment it was open. I stared down in surprise at what greeted me. Rather than an open drawer filled with pens, paper, and boxes of paper clips, I found a locked lid with a combination dial on top.
“The fuck?”
“What did you find?” Veronica said, coming to join me.
“He’s got some kind of lockbox built into the drawer,” I said, then went about trying to see how strong it was. The entire compartment appeared to be made from metal rather than wood. Touching the top, I sensed a strange static-like charge that told me an enchantment was at work. I doubted I could get into this thing even with a sledgehammer or cutting torch if that was the case.
Veronica stared down at the dial while I ran my fingers across the seams of the drawer, looking for any weakness to exploit.
“Can you try to open it with magic?” I said.
She licked her lips, a crease between her eyes.
“Maybe, but let me try something first.”
To my surprise, instead of casting some sort of spell, she placed her fingers against the dial and began spinning it back and forth, pausing at certain numbers, then spinning the opposite way, until the lid clicked as it unlocked.
“What thehell?” I turned to look at her, my mouth falling open. “Balthazar gave you the code?”
She shook her head and smiled sadly. “I tried Wendy’s birthdate as the code.” She shrugged. “It worked.”
The man had loved his niece so much that he’d used her birthday as a code for something he considered important. I would never meet the guy, but it seemed like he’d probably been decent and good. It pissed me off even more that someone had butchered him right here in his own home.
Throwing the bitter thoughts aside, I lifted the lid and peered inside. Instead of a treasure trove of items, all that was inside was a leatherbound notebook. The cover sported the same inverted hammer sigil I’d found on the tracker in Veronica’s shirt.
I flipped it open. The pages were lined like a journal, and each one had some scribbled notes on every page. Pausing, I read from a random page near the center:
December 9th: One dozen dove’s eggs, sacrificed via fire for luck.
December 29th: The skin of one deer, sacrificed via fire for confidence.
January 12th: Blood of a vole, racoon, and possum, sacrificed via water for sleep and rest.
February 19th: One pound of beef, sacrificed via earth as a gift with no blessings required.
My frown deepened as I flipped through the pages, going all the way to the front. Each page was the same. Sacrifices. Though it never said to who.
