“All the evidence suggests we’re dealing with an unknown element,” said Gav. “The forensic team is still at work, and the victim’s family have been informed.”
I nodded. “If I’m to get involved with this, what exactly can I do? I’ve already been back to the scene of the crime. Nothing there. It’s not the sort of place with CCTV cameras, either. Sure would help to know what the recruit was doing last night. Maybe he ran into the demon and it followed him.”
“We’re still piecing it together. But there are certainly ways of tracking down any new demons in the area.” He spoke with a clear emphasis.
“You seriously want me to do it?”
“We’re under-staffed,” he said simply. “Half of the team doesn’t have the authorisation to deal with demons higher than a Grade Three, which is what we’re looking at here.”
“And the rest are already out on cases, right?” Now I got it. All celestials ranked Grade Three or higher were dispersed around the world on demon cases. Very few remained here. Not only had the city been built by celestials, it was plain impossible for a powerful demon to hide somewhere like this. Or so I’d thought.
“Correct,” he said in answer to my question. “Some of the higher council have expressed reservations about your presence here, but the fact is, we don’t have enough people. Demons like our killer won’t wait until our reserve team gets here to strike again.”
“Okay. I’m the stand-in.” Doubtless several top-ranked Grade Four soldiers would be on a first-class flight back to Haven City, but if the killer struck again before they landed, Mr Roth had decided to place me as the one responsible. Awesome.
“Not exactly. I want to offer you full access to the guild’s resources again, if you’d like.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a metal wristband, engraved with an arrowhead symbol. Burn marks and scratches marked the surface. “You kept it?” I should have expected that degree of sentimentality from my former boss—they guy who’d had my back no matter how badly I screwed up—but I thought I’d pissed him off intensely when I’d turned my back and walked out.
The smell of brimstone drifted over, remaining from the last time I’d worn it when fighting demons. Gav looked at me expectantly. What did he expect me to do, smile and reminisce about old times? Even the smell of dead demon reminded me of Rory.
“Are you sure?” I asked instead of taking it. “It might have slipped your memory, but I caused more trouble than I solved.”
“I’m certain this is the right decision. There’ll always be a place for you here, Devi.”
Not according to some people. I swallowed the bitter responses and took the cuff.
I slid the armband onto my wrist and rotated it until the arrowhead lined up with the mark underneath. Not only did it allow me to direct the celestial energy wherever I wanted to, it also marked a clear challenge to any demon I came across. Not to mention, it was snazzy.
“Here.” He handed me a stack of papers. “Fill those out and drop them off at my office within the next day, if you’d prefer to help yourself to clothes and weapons first.”
“Thanks.” The level of paperwork was one thing I didn’t miss, but the wristband wasn’t the only perk of my newly restored status. My regular human clothes weren’t equipped with sheaths for hiding daggers or padded sleeves to reduce the impact when a demon threw me into a wall. And I was a sucker for a pointy object which could do some damage. Silver stakes—mostly for vampires, but they worked well on some demons, too—and knives were the only weapons we were technically allowed as civilians, but it’s harder to fight demons with a bread knife or a corkscrew.
Still, I couldn’t quell the sinking feeling that we might as well be facing down a demon armed with only a paperclip. A novice dead, with no evidence beside a taunting message. And there were far too many gaping holes in the story as to how the victim had ended up where he had.
I looked up at Gav. “I’ll drop the paperwork off later. When they’re done questioning the novice’s friends, can someone give me an update on what he was doing last night? It might be important.”
“I will.” He nodded. “I know detective work isn’t your forte, but…”
“Killing demons is.” I gave him a grim smile. “And tracking them. I’ll need to use your lab.”
Chapter 4
I had no business even being near the lab, but in my time at the guild, I’d developed a recipe for a potion which enabled a person to see a demon’s aura. No demon could hide what they were, even the ones who were masters of deceit. Really, it was annoying that celestials lower than Grade Four couldn’t see auras while most demons could, but I didn’t make the rules.
Half an hour and only two explosions later, I held a vial of a thick mucus-coloured liquid. It looked as appealing as drinking paint, but I’d used it before and was reasonably confident it wouldn’t poison me. The ashy taste clung to my throat and made me choke uncontrollably, eyes watering. With this potion, not only could I see demons’ auras, I could pinpoint their home dimension. Well, if I described their aura to Dienes, anyway.
The second thing I made was a demonic compass, which would pick up on any demon within a few miles, even if it was too far away for my celestial mark to react to it. That was the tricky bit. Certain substances reacted to demons, but if the source was too strong, they’d break. I settled for taking a standard wristband—the sort that lit up when there were demons nearby—and a magical compass I’d bought at the market, which pointed in the direction of any sort of spell. Then I pulled them both to pieces and made what amounted to a Frankenstein’s monster-like hybrid of both. It’d still fall to bits if it encountered a powerful demon, but only when I was close enough to essentially be standing on top of it anyway. So, the compass would be obsolete.
Normally, I’d have gone to the spot where the victim was last seen alive, but it was pretty clear the last place our demon had been was back at the crime scene, whether it’d actually committed the murder there or not. However, using any kind of magic came at a cost, and if the demon had taken up residence in this dimension, it’d need to recharge at some point. If it’d expended a ton of energy burning someone from the inside out, it’d likely head for somewhere with a big crowd, and at this hour in the morning, that place was the train station, not five minutes away from the celestial guild’s headquarters.
I attached my mutant of a homemade compass to a necklace and slipped it around my neck. At worst, I’d draw attention from every preternatural being in the area, but at least it felt like I was actually getting somewhere.
I looked up from clearing the table in the lab and found myself face to face with Louise, apparent dater of vampires.
She sniffed. “What have you been doing in here? Making brimstone soup?”
“Taking up a side career as a scientist,” I said. “I’m guessing Gav sent you to update me?”
“Yeah.” She wore a sour expression that suggested she did not appreciate being sent on errands. Much less after her fellow teammate had been killed. “Nobody knows how Caleb ended up in that alley. He got off work at five, went home, then went out for a drink on the high street. So how he ended up on the opposite side of town is bizarre. The people he was with said he left early. Apparently didn’t make it home.”
I frowned. “Just how far away, exactly?” I’d suspected the demon had hit him with a spell somewhere away from the crime scene, but now I thought about it, there was a limit on how far someone could walk while burning from the inside out. Unless the spell hadn’t activated right away.
“Too far to have walked to the alley,” said Louise. “Unless he ran. But there’s no footage, and he’d have passed at least three train stations with cameras running on the way over. We think he climbed through people’s gardens near that alley, but he wasn’t a rule-breaker, and he’d have no reason to. He’s—he was—smart.”
“Smart people do stupid things when they’ve been drinking,” I said, but she was right… there wa
s something fishy about how a celestial would end up alone in a back alley near an area frequented by vamps and other preternaturals in the first place. And if they did, they were more likely to get cornered by a horny vampire. Not catch on fire.
“They were questioning his celestial partner,” she added. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“By ‘they’,” I said slowly, “you mean the inspector’s here. Don’t you?”
Inspector Deacon had been the final straw which had caused me to quit, after refusing to accept my report on Rory’s death and suggesting my carelessness was to blame for the whole thing. As someone who’d lost his former partner when the old guild burned down four years ago, you’d have thought that’d make him more empathetic to my situation. Instead, he’d turned into an even more uptight rule-stickler who commanded his Grade Four soldiers to unleash full force against any demon, even the most harmless ones.
Needless to say, we didn’t get on well.
“Yes, he is. But anyway, if you want more information on the case, Caleb’s partner is in the inspector’s office right now.”
“Because what you really need after learning your friend died horribly is an hour with Inspector Stick in the Mud.”
“I know, right?” She grimaced. “Hope he didn’t keep her for long. Anyway. Can you do me a favour and warn me if he’s leaving his office? I’m meeting someone and I’d rather he didn’t see me leave the guild.”
“Okay. Aren’t you on duty?”
“Nope. Everyone in Caleb’s unit has been given the morning off.”
“Sure,” I said, with a shrug. “I planned to talk to his partner, if she’s still around.”
“She will be.” Louise skirted around me into the lab. Perhaps it was paranoia, but I hung about an extra few seconds to watch her through the small glass window in the door. Apparently I suspected everyone these days.
A slender figure slipped through the door at the back of the lab, wearing a thick hooded coat that covered his entire body from head to toe, and a balaclava. Vampire. I made to pull out my weapon, then she ripped his balaclava off and threw herself on him with more force than a starved vampire faced with a horde of humans.
Looked like the novices were right about the vampire boyfriend. But why sneak him into the back door of the guild? Likely for the same reason as the stunts I’d pulled as a novice: because breaking the rules gave a thrill like few other things. Apparently it was worth risking the inspector noticing—and also risking the vampire in question dying a horrible, painful death if any daylight got into the room. Guess that was why she’d picked the window-less lab.
Speaking of whom. I backed away from the lab at the sound of a familiar voice carrying down the corridor. Inspector Deacon’s voice was a dull monotone, the sort that fitted a robot more than a human, and that pretty much summed the guy up. I headed towards the noise, and found the man himself inside one of the offices, surrounded by novices who looked possibly more frightened than they’d looked at the prospect of being murdered by a demon. The inspector projected a level of authority far beyond his six-foot-tall frame, and despite being in his late forties and completely bald, he still had the muscles from his days hunting demons as a celestial soldier. One of the best. Too bad his sense of humour had retired from hunting before he did.
“Devina Lawson,” he said. “What exactly are you doing here?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’ve been asked to help with the case.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “This is an ongoing investigation. I’m in the middle of a questioning.”
“What, all of them at once?” My gaze swept across the novices. “If you’re going to play detective, maybe you should lock the door. Or hire some actual detectives.”
“Your attitude clearly hasn’t changed, Celestial Lawson.”
“Why change a good thing? I’ve been told I need to hear the latest on how the victim came to be where he did.”
“Apparently he figured out how to walk through walls,” said one of the novices. “He walked three miles in approximately five minutes.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Might the demon’s magic have caused it?”
“Naturally,” said the inspector. “There’s no other possibility, and no reason to repeat all our information to you.”
“I’m part of this investigation,” I said, then addressed the novices. “Which of you was the victim’s partner?”
“I was,” said Sandra Yun, a girl I knew from the weeks I’d spent mentoring novices as one of the guild’s annoying annual compulsory ‘team-building’ exercises. “That’s the part I don’t understand. The reason he left the pub early last night was because we were supposed to be on a mission today.”
“What sort?”
“Bag and tag mission. Suspected rogue vampire. Two others caught the vamp instead.”
“And might this vampire be connected to his death?” I asked dubiously. I didn’t think so, somehow. Vampires were susceptible to bursting into flame in daylight under any circumstances. No demons necessary. The attack had happened at night, besides.
“Perhaps. We’re still waiting for him to calm down. He’s in the jail. But he’s blood-crazed and can’t string a sentence together. He was caught miles from the crime scene. He can’t even sign his name.”
I guess I can’t see a blood-crazed vampire writing creepy text on the wall in brimstone, either. “Okay. Just checking. Vamps can’t use magic, anyway.”
“Maybe he has friends in low places,” said another novice. “Netherworld-low.”
“I got that,” I said. “And I don’t think so.” Vamps didn’t get on with demons, despite falling into the same untrustworthy category as other preternaturals. If they did, they wouldn’t get into fights with warlocks so often.
Inspector Deacon glared at me. “If you’re quite finished, Celestial Lawson, this meeting is over. What is that around your neck?”
I looked down. “Homemade demon detector.”
He gave me a disapproving look. “Put it away. Your hazardous lab experiments shouldn’t leave the building.”
“Does he normally hold important meetings with the door open?” I asked the novices in a stage whisper on my way out. Nobody laughed. Guess the doom-and-gloom atmosphere had got to them. They weren’t yet at the stage of cracking jokes over dead bodies like those of us who’d lasted longer in the field.
I turned to Sandra as I was leaving. “If you don’t mind my asking, what was he like as a person?”
“He was… fine,” she mumbled. “I mean, he worked hard. Top grades. No trouble with demons. He was barely qualified, for the Divinities’ sake. I don’t understand why they’d target him.”
“Me neither,” I said. “I’m sorry.” There wasn’t much more to say. I didn’t do deathbed talks well—I’d barely lasted five minutes at Rory’s funeral before slipping out the back door. He’d have understood, though. If the guild had listened to me, he’d have had a private funeral, not a public one shared with a half-dozen other celestials. All celestials who died in the field were buried in the guild’s private cemetery here in Haven City.
Thinking of Rory’s funeral didn’t help my unease about this whole situation. But I had the demon detector, as ridiculous as it looked, and now I apparently had free reign to hunt for the killer.
Okay. Do your thing, demon detector.
I switched it on, and left the guild through the front doors, heading for the train station.
A pair of glass doors led into a wide open space dominated by a giant statue of an angel, which bathed the whole place in golden light. People gathered in front of the display boards, while others dragged suitcases between the many cafes and restaurants open even at this hour in the morning. I wove in and out of the crowd, searching for an aura that looked out of place. Most people’s were muted. Only the preternaturally inclined were visible—and there were a few here, mostly warlocks. No vampires, for obvious reasons—aside from Louise’s balaclava-wearing boyfriend, they tended
to sleep during the day, sometimes in actual coffins. As for the handful of warlocks, they looked barely more awake than the humans did, and their auras were hardly visible. Maybe the demon was too scared of the angel statue to show itself here.
I boarded a train along a route I didn’t normally travel by, taking me into the more preternaturally inclined part of town. The theory of the vampires’ involvement was probably false, but demons were also drawn to their own kind, and there were an awful lot of warlocks living close by. Thanks to careful planning, they were housed in certain areas, with enough distance from the ordinary humans to stop complaints about being cornered by blood-starved vampires or woken in the early hours of the morning by warlock spells causing explosions.
Unfortunately, everyone seemed to be asleep, and the streets were almost deserted. Right… it’s a Saturday morning. I worked whenever jobs came in, and the guild operated on a shift system, so I forgot most sane people were sleeping in or nursing hangovers.
Despite my own general lack of alertness, I’d walked for half an hour before realising I’d somehow wound up back at the pub I’d been at last night. The compass device around my neck glowed bright as a beacon.
Damn. Is there a demon here after all?
The pub wasn’t open yet, so I slipped down the back alley. The glow intensified, pointing at the wall where I’d summoned Dienes.
“I know there are traces here, you stupid thing.” Two hours in the lab and the compass had led me back where I’d started. I might as well have walked around a steel building with a metal detector. What a waste of time.
At this rate, I’d have spent more time near the murder scene than the rest of the guild. Muttering a curse under my breath, I backtracked and circled the pub again. Maybe one of the vamps did know something, but they’d be asleep. I was contemplating breaking into the place to hunt for traces when the tracker lit up with a loud beep.
Demon. The trace was unmistakable, and easy for me to pinpoint. Right behind me. Thanks for that, handy device.
Celestial Magic (Celestial Marked Book 1) Page 4