World of Lupi 10 - Ritual Magic

by Eileen Wilks

  Fire shot up from the candles—fire as red as molten lava. It leaped from candle to candle, then inward to the center of the hexagon, where the six crimson flows collided with each other—and with a seventh, this one from Cullen’s other hand. Rainbow fire, that one, green-blue-orange-purple-yellow, every color but red. It merged with the lava fire and exploded into eye-searing white. White that shot straight up in a brilliant column three or four stories tall . . . and gradually dissipated, like the slow, shiny fade-out of fireworks.

  * * *

  THREE miles away, a woman sat cross-legged on the beach, her head tipped back, her mouth round in a silent “oh” as the brilliant white light faded. It was time to go, and yet she lingered. The wind off the ocean was chilly. It felt good on her hot cheeks . . . hot cheeks, shivery stomach. She’d felt so odd ever since she picked up that knife. For just a moment longer she’d sit here and smell the ocean . . . brine and fish, the Mother’s moist breath. Only she wasn’t thinking of the Mother. She was wondering if anyone had died in that beautiful flash of light. If she’d killed people she didn’t even know.

  You are sad, F’annwylyd?

  “A little.” Apologetically she added, “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

  They would die anyway. Does it matter greatly when?

  It did to them. And to her, too, though he wouldn’t understand that. She hoped no one had been near when the node exploded. The others . . . no, she didn’t regret them. She’d been shocked by how loud the gun was, that was all. She’d owned the weapon for ages and dutifully took it to the firing range two or three times a year to make sure she stayed familiar with it, but she’d never fired it without the protective gear at the gun range. She’d never really thought she’d shoot it anywhere else.

  You grieve. A ghostly warmth stroked her cheek. Though it is not the dead who grieve you. I wish I could put my arms around you. Comfort you.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. Ah, look at her, indulging in melancholy when there were important things to do! Vital things. “Soon. Soon I’ll feel your arms—and all sorts of other parts of you, too.” She laughed, suddenly flooded with a wild, exuberant energy, and bounced to her feet. She had places to go, things to do.

  People to kill. On purpose.

  * * *

  LILY was still blinking bright spots out of her vision when Cullen plopped to the ground with a satisfied sigh. “Glad that worked.”

  “So am I,” Rule said dryly.

  “The node’s still not entirely stable. I think . . .” Cullen tipped his head, studying something only he could see. “Yeah, it’s settling down. Should be safe enough, but I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  “My turn, then.” Lily stood. “I guess you don’t see any power radiating from an ancient artifact or you’d be rooting around, looking for it.”

  “No, but if this Nam Anthessa is as good at hiding as Sam said, maybe I wouldn’t. If you see a knife, don’t touch it.”

  “Sam made that clear. It’s safe to cross the line?”

  “Sure. Not a whiff of power left in it. I may have damaged some evidence. Couldn’t be helped, so don’t bitch at me about it. But the missing blood isn’t my fault.”

  “What missing blood?”

  “There’s no blood on the ground inside the hexagon. Some outside it, but none inside. I think the übrik rune drank it.”

  That was seriously creepy. Lily flashed her light over the ground. “I don’t see any runes.” Though there was a drift of ashy residue of some sort she hadn’t noticed before. And the once-yellow line of the hexagon was burned black.

  “No runes?” Cullen stirred himself to come look. “Huh. That’s weird.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I guess my pyrotechnics burned them up.”

  Lily decided not to worry about it. The scene was already thoroughly compromised—first by the rangers, then by the EMTs, and now by Cullen’s efforts to keep something—either the runes or the node, she wasn’t sure which—from exploding. “Rule . . .” She realized he’d moved. He was a little ways down the trail, talking to Scott. And when had Scott come up past T.J. and his two cops?

  Rule looked at her. “Scott, Barnaby, and Mike are going to stay with you. I’m going to take the others for some four-legged sniffing.”

  “Okay. Before you Change, would you let T.J. and the rest know they can come up?” Time to put her shoes back on. Lily took out the baby wipes she kept in her purse for occasions like this. By the time she’d wiped both feet—which were scratched and tender in spots, but she didn’t find any blood—and put her shoes back on, Scott and T.J. were coming up the trail together. She didn’t see Rule, but she knew where he was—about forty feet away, and not sticking to the trail.

  “I’ve got to say,” T.J. said when he reached them, “you do know how to mess up a scene, Seaborne.”

  “Would’ve been a bigger mess if the node had exploded.”

  Lily shivered. That answered that question. “T.J., you said you took some pictures from the scene earlier. We need to document what’s changed. Can you have your guy snap some more while I look things over?”

  “Will do. We need the SOC squad. They’re going to bitch enough as it is.”

  “You can send for them now.”

  T.J. called the scene-of-crime people in and gave instructions to his two cops—a woman whose name Lily hadn’t caught and a grizzled sergeant named Armstrong whom she knew slightly.

  While the woman set up a pair of small floodlights, Lily pulled on a pair of the disposable gloves she kept in her purse. She approached the body carefully, avoiding the ashy smears that had been runes, and crouched.

  The burned smell was strong. Some of it was from the dead man’s exposed skin.

  He lay facedown in the dirt. Might not be much face left of it to see when they turned him over, judging by the way the back of his head looked. High-caliber rounds made a mess. A couple feet from his outflung hand lay a weapon—a Sig Sauer P226, either new or nearly new, she thought, playing her flashlight over it. Good gun, but no weapon’s much use if you’re shot from behind. She directed her light at his head, hoping to learn his hair color, but he’d worn a ski mask. What was left of his head was covered by knitted stuff.

  The rest of his body seemed unmarked, aside from postmortem burns. He’d been maybe one eighty, one ninety, and under six feet. Dark turtleneck, dark slacks, dark athletic shoes, all good quality. His right hand was underneath the body. The outflung left hand lacked a wedding ring. No visible calluses. No sign of defensive wounds.

  And the wrong build for Friar, dammit.

  The floodlights came on. Lily put away her flashlight. Sergeant Armstrong began snapping pictures.

  “I’m going to check out the spot I picked for the shooter,” T.J. said.

  Lily looked at him, then studied the way the dead man had fallen. The bullets had to have been fired from the east . . . she shifted to check. “That patch of brush about thirty feet southeast of us?”

  “Not a bad spot to hide while waiting to pick off your targets.” T.J. turned and headed for it.

  Shooting uphill could be tricky, but the slope wasn’t bad there. “You think the perp was already in place?”

  “I don’t see how he could’ve gotten there without being heard,” he said without turning around, “if anyone had been around to hear.”

  Some lupi could move that quietly, but otherwise he was right. So why had he or she waited until the rite was under way? Could the shooter have wanted to create the instability Cullen had shut down with his pyrotechnics?

  A large, black-and-silver wolf slid out of the darkness to meet T.J. at the brushy spot. T.J. froze. “Uh, right. Which one are you?”

  “That’s Rule,” Lily called and went back to studying the scene.

  No knives of any sort visible. The altar, singed now, was next to the body. Things had spilled
when it tipped over—a metal chalice and some other stuff too crispy to identify right away, but no knife. “Why didn’t they use a circle?” she asked Cullen.

  “They had one. It poofed when the rite was disrupted, leaving the hexagon. Which is not a stable array for a node.”

  “They didn’t drive stakes through Angela Ward’s hands and feet like they did Debrett’s. Or this guy’s, for that matter.” Though she suspected he’d been one of the ones throwing the party, which someone else had crashed.

  “It’s all in the timing. Look in the duffel. Uh . . . carefully. Just in case something else is there.”

  She moved to the dead guy’s feet, where the duffel sat, unzipped. Sure enough, it held four metal stakes and a mallet. She rooted around, checking. No knife. “Why hadn’t they used these?”

  “Most rites have three stages,” Cullen said. “First stage is traditionally called the invocation, though I prefer the term ‘definition.’ That’s when you invoke or define the powers you’ll work with and your intent. Second one gathers power. In this case, that meant tying in to the node, which would have happened at the very end of that stage. Third stage shapes and directs that power. They didn’t get that far, but it says nasty things about the kind of shaping they had in mind that it called for a form of crucifixion and murder.”

  She chewed on that a moment. “You think they were planning to use the knife the way they did on Debrett.”

  “Looks like, yeah.”

  “But they were interrupted at the end of the second stage, when they’d tied in to the node. That’s why it went unstable?”

  “Basically. I’ll spare you the long explanation of why this rite would do that when others wouldn’t. Short version: nodes are not safe.”

  “I’m wondering if the shooter knew that would happen. Picked that moment on purpose. If the node went boom it would get rid of the bodies, wouldn’t it? And any other evidence the shooter might find inconvenient. Would he or she need to be familiar with the rite to know when they reached the end of the second stage? Or would they have to be able to see magic the way you do?”

  “Huh.” Cullen’s eyebrows lifted. He looked over his shoulder at T.J., who was crouched on the near side of the brushy thicket, shining his flashlight over the ground. Rule was sniffing nearby. “From that distance . . . maybe not. It depends on a lot of variables, but it’s certainly possible he could feel it when the node was brought in. Likely, even, if the shooter was an experienced spellcaster himself.”

  “Or herself.”

  “You have someone in mind?”

  “No, just keeping mine open.” Lily stood. “Would this hypothetical spellcaster know how long it would take for the node to go boom?”

  “Without the Sight? No, and even with the Sight you’re just guessing. There are spells that would tell him it was unstable, but not how long it would take to hit the threshold. Well, there’s one that might, but it takes a couple hours to cast. He’d have to be remarkably stupid to hang around an unstable node that long.”

  “Not to mention a body or two.” She nodded, satisfied. “Our perp didn’t hang around. He or she got the knife and got the hell out. Either he didn’t bother to make sure both victims were dead or he didn’t care. When the node went, it would take out anyone nearby. He wasn’t counting on the rangers hearing the shots. Or on you being able to do whatever you did.”

  “I am a wonder and a half,” he agreed.

  “Rule thinks he’s found something,” T.J. called, “but damned if I know what.”

  Lily turned to see Rule loping up the slope toward them. The young patrol officer squeaked like a mouse, but she didn’t reach for her weapon, and the sergeant was made of sterner stuff. His eyes widened, but that was all. Rule stopped at the edge of the hexagon, his head lifting in surprise. His nostrils flared. He walked up to the body and lowered his head.

  “He isn’t going to, ah . . .” The sergeant looked worried.

  Lily pretended he wasn’t wondering if her fiancé was likely to eat the victim. “Wolves’ sense of smell is better than just about any other mammal’s, except for bears. His nose can be very useful.”

  After giving the body a thorough sniff, Rule moved outside the hexagon—this time to the side near the drop-off. He sniffed that thoroughly, too, then peered over the edge. The drop-off was steep there. A cliff, really, with a rocky bit of beach below.

  He Changed again. The patrol officer squeaked a second time, probably because Rule was now very naked. “Lily,” he said, “the dead man is Armand Jones.”

  “Friar’s lieutenant?” She turned to look at the body. It was the right height and build. She’d hoped it might be Friar, been disappointed that it wasn’t, but Jones . . . that fit, too. “You’re sure.”

  “Oh, yes. I made a point of learning his scent.”

  “A falling-out among thieves, then. Not the way I first thought. Jones must have taken the knife. Sam did say it’s persuasive. Maybe it called to him or something, or maybe this was a power grab, pure and simple. Friar wanted the knife back. He would have known exactly when to fire to make the node unstable—”

  But Rule was shaking his head. “Friar was here, yes. I found some of his blood outside the hexagon. I suspect he spilled quite a bit more inside it. He was among those shot, not the shooter.”

  “But—is there a trail? Did he—”

  “I think he went over the edge. I don’t see a body.”

  She chewed on that in silence a moment. “Friar’s dead or badly hurt. Jones is dead. And whoever shot them must have the knife.” It didn’t make sense. Had the Great Bitch decided to ditch Friar and sent a new henchman to get the knife?

  “T.J. and I found bullet casings by those bushes. That’s where the shooter was. That’s what I came to tell you. The scent I found there belongs to Miriam Faircastle.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “WHAT do you mean, you aren’t going to pick her up for questioning?” Lily wanted to reach through the phone and shake Karonski.

  “Pipe down, Lily. You heard what Sam said about this knife. If she’s got it—and it sure as hell sounds like she does, or maybe it’s got her—we do not want to get close enough for it to start with the compelling and corrupting. We want Miriam Faircastle and that knife contained. Once she is, I can question her over the phone.”

  Okay. Okay, that made sense. She was maybe a little excitable. “How do you plan to contain her?”

  “Ruben has to sign off on this, but if he does, I want guards, armed guards, outside her home. We’ll evacuate her neighbors. We can’t let her leave and we can’t let anyone in there with her until Sam gets back.”

  “Wait. He’s already left?”

  “Right after you did. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be gone. Well, he said it would be at least two weeks for him, but from our perspective he might return anytime between now and a couple weeks from now. Something to do with the way he’ll travel through those dissynchronous realms.”

  “Can Ruben authorize holding someone under . . . I guess it’s an extreme form of house arrest . . . for a week?”

  “Looks like we’ll find out.”

  Lily disconnected and frowned at the activity around her. The SOC crew had arrived and were having a meticulously grand time. Two were on their hands and knees, sifting the scrubby grass near the lookout point. One was carefully scooping bits of blood-soaked soil from just outside the hexagon into baggies. Friar’s blood, according to Rule’s nose, which Lily trusted at least as much as any DNA analysis. Rule and T.J. stood near the edge of the drop-off gripping one end of the rope Barnaby dangled from, sniffing at places a falling body might have hit on the way down.

  Barnaby had an unusually good nose, even two-legged, but they didn’t expect him to find much. When Friar got supercharged by his goddess a few months before, he’d acquired several useful skills, including a trick like the demonic abili
ty to go out-of-phase. Dshatu, demons called it. Friar had used it to get away before. From what Lily could tell, it was an immaterial state, which was probably handy if you found yourself falling off a cliff.

  There was no shot-up, smashed-up body at the foot of the drop-off; therefore, Friar had probably gone immaterial when he fell. While he was out-of-phase, he wouldn’t leave a scent or blood trail. But he couldn’t drive a car while he was dshatu, and getting away would have been a priority. Rule had sent two of the others off four-footed to check spots where he might have parked a car.

  Thirty feet away, two SOC officers were checking out the bushes where Miriam Faircastle had apparently waited on the best moment for murder.

  The corruption must have leaped from Officer Crown to Miriam when Miriam was trying to remove it. In retrospect, that was obvious. He’d woken up screaming, but free of the taint; she’d gone on to plan and execute murder. Had they been wrong about the icky magic only being able to travel through organic substances? Had Miriam been stupid enough to ignore that safety precaution? Had she just been careless?

  Whatever had gone wrong, Lily was kicking herself for not checking Miriam herself. It seemed so bloody obvious now. The corruption left the officer, so where did it go? Only that still didn’t explain everything. Why had the corruption compelled Miriam to shoot Friar and Jones and Angela Ward and steal the knife? If the corruption was connected to Nam Anthessa, then the knife itself seemed to be acting against Friar.

  Lily huffed out a breath and told herself to brood later, when she had time. She turned away from the busy scene and headed for the south side of the trail.