I crouched beside the sheet. The concrete beneath was marked—scuffs, drag lines, the violent geometry of fear.
“She fought back,” I murmured.
“Hard,” Mira agreed, crouching beside me. Her shoulder brushed mine, grounding me. “Defensive wounds on both hands—fingernails are a mess—and she left half the mortar from those bricks underher tips. She didn’t go quietly. But look at the bruising around the throat. That’s where it gets strange.”
She lifted the edge of the sheet.
The victim’s face was angled slightly away, blonde hair matted and tangled. Too young. Skin ashen under the lights. But it was her forearm that drew my eye. A sigil was burned stark against the flesh—a sharp, dark triangle. Dark. Precise. Purposeful.
“That’s not random,” Dane said with a low voice.
“No. It’s deliberate. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Mira let the fabric fall back into place, careful and controlled. She stood and crossed to an open evidence case on a nearby crate. “We found this near the body. Looks like it shattered, maybe during the struggle.”
She lifted an evidence bag. Inside sat a metallic splinter—jagged, dark, and no bigger than half an inch. It looked like it had snapped off something much larger.
The moment my eyes locked onto it, the burn in my shoulder exploded.
The ache ignited into a sear—blinding and immediate, like an invisible brand had been pressed against my skin. The pain radiated outward in a hot swell that blurred my vision for half a second. I gritted my teeth, forcing myself not to flinch, but my hand jerked up involuntarily towards the spot.
Dane’s head snapped towards me immediately, amber flashing under his gaze. He saw too much. Always had. “Selene?”
I let my posture slacken, dropping my hand. “Fine. Just… a muscle spasm.”
The lie tasted bitter. Dane studied me, scanning my face. He missed the magic, but he didn’t miss the reaction.
“Can you run it through magical analysis?” I asked Mira, voice tighter than I’d like.
“Already logged. Should have prelim results by midday.” Mira turned the bag slightly, letting the shard catch the light. “The alloy is strange. It feels… heavy. Even through the plastic.”
I didn’t answer, staring at the serrated metal. The heat thrummedunder my skin, vibrating in time with the object. A magnet pulling at iron. I needed to get out of here. The air was too thick, the magic too loud.
“Let’s get the CCTV,” Dane said, stepping between me and the evidence, breaking the line of sight. He knew I was rattling apart, even if he didn’t know why. “If she was dragged here, cameras on the main road might have caught something.”
I nodded, grateful for the distraction. Anything to look away from the shard that was currently singing to my scars—a low, insistent tremor that vibrated against the old, ruined skin on my back. I’d never felt this resonance until today; the frequency was alien, yet my bones seemed to recognise the cadence.
Seeing Talia unspooled like this hit me with the force of a physical violation. The hollowed-out silence she’d left behind made my skin crawl. As a half-blood, my magic was supposed to be a quiet, wavering thing, yet the sight of a magically emptied body made something deep inside me recoil. It was a vacuum clawing at my own chest, a reminder of how fragile a life became when the light was torn out of it.
I looked back towards the body, now a sharp, sheet-draped outline beneath the warehouse lamps. Even with the grey skin hidden from view, the image of that emptied vessel lingered—a life snuffed out with surgical precision. Seeing a pure-blood dismantled this easily stripped away any illusion of safety.
We crossedto where Mira had set up a portable workstation on a stack of crates, the rugged laptop glowing harsh and blue against the gloom. My shoulder still burned, a low-grade fever trapped under the skin, but moving away from the shard helped dampen the screaming nerves to a manageable ache.
Mira tapped a few keys, pulling up grainy footage timestampedfrom the previous night. “First clip,” she said. “Street corner, Old Quarter. Time reads 00:47.”
The screen showed a rain-blurred street, lamplight reflecting off wet cobblestones. A figure emerged from The Lantern’s Rest—blonde hair, dark coat, moving quickly beneath the downpour. Talia. She paused beneath the pub’s awning, phone pressed to her ear, and even through the rain, her body language read clear: tired but unhurried. Not afraid. Not yet.
“Boyfriend called her here,” Mira said. “We checked her logs. He offered to collect her.”
The footage played on. Talia stepped to the kerb and raised her hand at a passing taxi, but it didn’t stop. She waited another moment, huddled against the deluge, before setting off on foot.
“She cuts through towards her flat,” Mira said, switching cameras. “It takes about fifteen minutes, but she never makes it past the junction.”
The feed jumped to a new angle—a bus stop where the corrugated shelter was barely visible through the driving rain, Talia ducking beneath it, arms wrapped tight around herself. For thirty seconds, nothing changed; just a woman waiting out the storm.
Then the streetlights guttered.
Talia’s head jerked up. Even through the grainy footage, the shift in her posture was unmistakable—pure instinct. A Calysteri sensing the shift in the air before the threat arrived.
Then the camera itself stuttered.
