I pointed at it. “Urine.”
Andrea craned her neck and raised the camera. “Such glamorous jobs we have. Taking pictures of pee stains.”
I turned my head. An identical stain marked the other wall, exactly across from the first one. “That’s why we do it. For the glamour.”
“A shaman?” Andrea asked.
“Possibly.”
All living things generated magic, and humans were no exception. The magic was in the blood, in the saliva, in tears, and in urine. Body liquids could be used in any number of ways. I sealed wards with my blood. Roland made weapons and armor out of his. But urine usually pointed to a more primal magic. Shamans, witches, and some neo-pagan cult practitioners all used urine. People who considered themselves close to nature. It tied in with animals marking their territory and a number of other primal things.
The cayenne line looked like some sort of ward to me, and the presence of urine confirmed it. Someone had marked a boundary on the floor and sealed it with their body fluid, probably to contain something. What was anybody’s guess at this point. With the magic down I sensed nothing, not a drop of power.
I stepped over the cayenne line and padded forward, pulling Slayer from the back sheath and staying to the right to give Andrea a clear shot.
The camera clicked. A moment and the Polaroid slid from it with a faint whirr. “One more . . .” Andrea murmured.
“All that glassware and the delicate instruments on the counters and nothing is broken. You’d think with all his training Laurent would’ve put up a fight.”
“Maybe he knew his attacker and didn’t view him as a threat until it was too late.”
That would make Adam Kamen or another guard the prime suspect. A bodyguard wouldn’t expect to be assaulted by a man he guarded or his own buddies. Everybody else would’ve been met with violence.
Laurent’s corpse showed no wounds except for a long black scar that cut his body from his chest down to his groin: a vertical line that split into three at the navel, like an upside-down imprint of a crow foot or like some perverse peace symbol torn out of its circle. Unusual cut. Looked almost like a rune.
The camera clicked, flashing, once, twice . . .
The magic hit, rolling over us like an invisible tsunami. Andrea raised the camera and pushed the button. No flash. Not even a click. She glanced at the camera in disgust. “Damn it.”
The black scar shivered.
I took a step back.
A faint shudder ran through the body. The black line trembled, its edges rising, and boiled into movement. Oh shit.
“Kate!”
“I see it.”
The body swayed. The chains creaked, louder and louder. Power swelled, straining within the corpse.
I backed away to the ward.
The corpse’s stomach bulged, the black line swelling.
I stepped over the cayenne pepper line. Magic sparked on my skin.
The black scar burst.
Tiny bodies shot at us and fell harmlessly on the other side of the line, drenching the floor in a dark torrent. Not a single speck of black made it over to us.
Behind us, Henderson exhaled. “What the hell is that?”
“Ants,” I said.
The black flood swirled, twisting, slower and slower. One by one the small bodies stopped moving. A moment and the floor was completely still.
Dead ants. A five-gallon bucket full of them strewn all over the floor.
The body rocked back and forth. All of the man’s flesh had vanished. His skeleton was stripped bare and the skin hung on the bone frame like a deflated balloon.
“Oookay,” Andrea said. “That’s one of the freakiest things I’ve ever seen.”
WHEN FACED WITH THE FREAKIEST THING YOU’VE ever seen, the best strategy is to divide and conquer. Andrea decided to m-scan the scene, while I took the enviable task of interviewing Henderson. He didn’t look pleased.
I maneuvered him to a steel patio table sitting between the house and the workshop. We sat in the hard metal chairs. From here both of us could watch the workshop and the driveway, where Andrea prepared to swipe the m-scanner out of the Jeep and Grendel prepared to escape the moment she swung open the door.
The portable m-scanner resembled a sewing machine covered in clockwork vomit. It detected residual magic and spat the result out as a graph of colors: green for shapeshifter, purple for undead, blue for human. It was neither precise nor infallible, and reading an m-scan was more art than science, but it was still the best diagnostic tool we had. It also weighed close to eighty pounds.
Andrea opened the Jeep door and thrust her hand in. Grendel lunged and collided with her palm. The impact knocked him back. Andrea grabbed the m-scanner, yanked it out of the Jeep, and shut the door in Grendel’s furry face. The attack poodle lunged at the window and let out a long despondent howl. Andrea turned and headed to the workshop, carrying the eightypound scanner with a light spring in her step, as if it were a picnic basket. Shapeshifter strength came in handy. Too bad the cost of Lyc-V infection was so high.
Henderson watched Andrea walk across the yard. “A shapeshifter?”
“Yes.” You got a problem with that?
“Good.” Henderson nodded. “We could use her nose.”
I took out my notepad and my pen. “How many people are assigned to this detail?” Rene had said twelve, but it never hurt to check.
“Twelve, including me.”
“Three shifts of four guards, eight hours each?”
“Yes. Day, night, and graveyard.”
I wrote it down. “Which shift do you work?”
“I alternate between evening and graveyard. I worked the evening shift yesterday, fourteen hundred to twenty-two hundred.”
Figured. Most trouble happened after dark, and Henderson struck me as the type of man who wanted to meet trouble head on and punch it in the teeth. And the one time it did show up, he’d guessed wrong and missed it.
“When was the body discovered?”
“Oh six hundred at shift change.” Henderson crossed his arms. The good master sergeant plainly didn’t like the way my questions were going. Strange. Rene had already given me most of this information, so why did talking about it twist his panties in a bunch?
“Could you walk me through how the body was found?”
“Each shift has a shift sergeant. At five fifty-five a.m., day shift sergeant Julio Rivera and graveyard shift sergeant Debra Abrams made a routine check on the subject in the workshop.”
“Why the workshop? Why not the house?”
If Henderson’s face could harden any more, it would crack. “Because the man was last seen entering the workshop.”
If I still had my Order ID, this entire conversation would’ve gone a lot smoother. The ID commanded instant respect, especially from a former soldier like Henderson. His world broke into two camps, pro and amateur, and right now he pegged me for a hired gun of the second category. Rene had ordered him to cooperate and he was a company man, so he answered my questions, but he didn’t exactly recognize my right to ask them.
“Did Adam often work through the night?” I asked.
“Night, day, morning, whenever it struck him. Sometimes he’d work all day, sleep for two hours, and go back to work, and sometimes he’d do nothing for two days.”
Aha. “When was the last time he was seen?”
Muscles played along the master sergeant’s jaw. “Three hours past midnight.”
I closed the notebook. “If I had an erratic subject who wandered to and fro between the workshop and the house whenever the inspiration struck him, I’d have my guys checking on him every hour. Just to make sure he didn’t break perimeter and blunder off into Sibley in a creative daze. And I don’t even have two stripes on my sleeve.”
Henderson hit me with a hard stare. It was a heavy stare, but it had nothing on looking into Curran’s golden irises when he was pissed off.
I held his gaze. “My job isn’t to pass judgment.
My job is to find Adam Kamen and his device. That’s all. Whatever happened here is between you and your chain of command, but I need to know what it was so I can move on. If you make it hard for me, I’ll go through you.”
He leaned forward an inch. “Think you can?”
“Try me.”
Henderson was a large man, and he was used to people backing down when he pushed. He was a guard and a soldier, but he wasn’t a killer. Oh, he would shoot back if someone shot at him first, and he might stab you if it came to it, because it was his job, but he wouldn’t slice a man’s throat and step over his twitching body while the hot blood spurted on the ground. I would. And it wouldn’t bother me much. In fact, I’d been out of action for over two months now. I missed it, missed the edge and the fight.
We stared at each other.
I would kill you in an instant with no hesitation.
A slow recognition rolled over Henderson’s face. “So it’s like that,” he said.
That’s right.
Henderson narrowed his eyes. “Why would Rene bring your kind in?”
“What kind is that?”
“You’re not a soldier, and you’re not a PI.”
“I used to be an agent of the Order.” I nodded at the workshop. “And she is a retired master-at-arms knight. Rene brought us in because it’s not our first rodeo. What happened to your shift, Master Sergeant? This is the last time I’m asking.”
Henderson drew himself upright. He wanted to send me packing. I saw it in his face. He thought about it, but he must’ve glimpsed something he didn’t like in my eyes, because he unhinged his jaw. “The graveyard shift fell asleep.”
“All four guards?”
Henderson nodded. “Except de Harven.”
“At their posts?”
Henderson nodded again.
Crap. “How long?”
“Approximately from zero four until the shift change.”
Two hours. More than enough time to kidnap a man. Or to slice his throat, bury him in the forest, and steal his magic project. How the hell did de Harven fit into it? Did he surprise the thieves? Of course, Adam Kamen could’ve killed his über-bodyguard and bolted with the goods. Because he was secretly a ninja, adept at mortal combat and vanishing into thin air. Yes, that was it. Case solved.
Trained Red Guardsmen didn’t just fall asleep on their own for two hours in the middle of their shift. Magic or drugs had to be involved. Even so, three of the guards passed out while de Harven went into the workshop. And why wasn’t he impersonating Sleeping Beauty? “Where are the guards now?”
“Both graveyard and day shifts are waiting by the house. I figured you’d want to talk to them.” Henderson paused. “There is more. We’ve searched the area.”
“Found something?”
“We found something, alright.” Henderson rose and strode farther behind the house. I followed. A large Humvee waited, parked under an oak. The canvas top was pulled back, exposing the rear bed containing two rucksacks and a plastic bin. Henderson set the bin on the ground and opened it with careful precision, as if he expected a pissed-off copperhead inside.
A simple rectangle of pale cotton lay inside the bin, displaying an assortment of herbs. Green poppy heads, hops cones, silver stems of lavender with purple petals, catnip, valerian, and a thick pale root, curved almost like a man in a fetal position, his legs bent at the knees. Mandragora. Rare, expensive, and powerful.
Traces of fine brown powder dusted the fabric. I touched it, licked my fingertip, and the familiar peppery taste nipped at my tongue. Kava kava root, ground to dust. There was enough herbal power here to put a small army to sleep.
I’d seen this before. The herbs had been combined with several pounds of dried kava kava powder, bound in cloth, treated with some heavy-duty magic, and then sealed. At the right moment the owner of this magic bundle tossed it on the ground, breaking the seal, and the pressurized magic exploded, spreading kava kava dust through the air. Instant knockout for anyone with lungs in a quarter-mile radius. They called it a sleep bomb.
The sleep bombs were invented shortly after the very first magic wave as a means of crowd control to peacefully subdue the panicked population during the Three-Month Riots. Back then magic was a new and untried force, and there was some question as to whether the sleep bombs would work. Unfortunately it was soon discovered that when the cops dropped the sleep bombs into the crowd, they worked so well that some of the rioters never woke up. The bombs were outlawed now.
Making a sleep bomb required a crapload of magic power, expertise, and some serious money. The best mandragora came from Europe, and kava kava had to be imported from Hawaii, Fiji, or Samoa. That cost a solid chunk of change. Adam had investors with deep pockets. Perhaps one of them had decided not to share the candy with the rest of the class. Sleep-bomb the guards, kidnap Adam, grab the device, keep all profits for yourself. Good plan.
I needed to get a list of those investors.
I glanced at the guts of the sleep bomb spread out on the cloth. All those herbs packed a magic wallop even when sealed. “Rene said this place was warded.”
Henderson nodded. “Twice. The inner ward starts at the top of the driveway and protects the house and the workshop. The outer starts at the bottom of the driveway and circles the property.”
“Are we inside the inner ward right now?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the threshold?” The defensive spells varied by intensity. Some let nothing through; some let specific magic through.
“If you’re magic and not keyed to it, you can’t pass,” Henderson said. “It’s a level-four ward.”
The level-IV ward would keep out pretty much anything. “So a shapeshifter wouldn’t be able to pass through it, correct?”
“Correct,” Henderson confirmed.
“We just watched Andrea walk to the car and back. The magic is up. Where is the ward?”
We stared at the driveway.
Henderson pulled a chain from around his neck. A small piece of quartz hung from the metal next to his dog tags. He marched to the driveway and held out his hand. The stone dangled from the chain. Henderson stared at it for a long moment, swore, and turned down the driveway. I followed. At the foot of the gravel road Henderson waved the crystal again. It remained dull.
Henderson looked at me. Wards were persistent spells and they didn’t just go missing. It was possible to break a ward—I’d done it a few times—but wards began to regenerate almost immediately. They absorbed magic from the environment. If the wards had been broken, they should’ve started rebuilding themselves as soon as the new magic wave came. We were standing right at the ward boundary and I felt nothing. It was as if the defensive spells had never been there in the first place. That just didn’t happen.
Besides, having your ward shattered felt like a cannon fired inside your skull. Sleep bomb or not, if someone had burst the wards, the guards would’ve awakened.
“The wards are gone,” I said. Kate Daniels, Master of the Obvious.
“Looks that way,” Henderson said.
“Were the wards present last night?”
“Yes,” Henderson said.
“Sleep bombs emit magic even when sealed. You can’t carry one through a level-four ward, so it must’ve been brought in during tech. Did Adam have any visitors?”
“No.”
Muscles played along Henderson’s jaw. I didn’t need to spell it out. The person who had dropped five grand worth of rare herbs onto the inventor’s lawn was wearing a Red Guard patch on his sleeve. And since everybody else was off in dreamland, that left Laurent de Harven as the most likely culprit. The Red Guard had a mole in it, and since Rene had handpicked people for this assignment, the buck stopped with her. She would have steam coming out of her ears.
That still didn’t explain what had happened to the wards.
Andrea emerged from the shed, carrying an m-scanner printout in her hand.
“We have a problem,” I told her.
“More than one.” She handed me the paper. A wide strip of cornflower blue sliced across the paper, interrupted by a sharp narrow spike of such pale blue, it seemed almost silver. Human divine. That was an unmistakable magic profile, one of the first everyone learned when studying m-scans. De Harven had been sacrificed.
HENDERSON PACED BACK AND FORTH AT THE TOP OF the driveway. The three remaining guards from the graveyard shift stood in front of him at parade rest. Judging by Henderson’s face, he was unleashing an ass-chewing of colossal proportions. Both Debra and Mason Vaughn, a stocky redhead, looked pissed off and embarrassed. Rig Devara did his best to pretend to be pissed off and embarrassed. Mostly he looked bored. According to the file, he was the most junior of his shift. Usually shit rolled down the hill, but by the time it got to him, there would be nothing left.
Andrea and I watched from the porch. Henderson had a lot of frustration to vent. He wouldn’t be coherent anytime soon.
“We have a dead body and the weather is warming up,” I said. “We have to figure out what to do with de Harven or he’ll go ripe.”
“What do you mean, what to do with him? We’ll just call it in to Maxine and . . . oh, fuck it.” Andrea grimaced.
Yeah. The telepathic Order secretary, who conveniently took care of minor details like dead bodies, was no longer available. Welcome to the real world. If we called it in to the cops, they would quarantine the body. Neither one of us was law enforcement, and getting access to the corpse would be next to impossible. We might as well load our evidence into a rocket and send it to the moon.
I started toward the house. “If the phone is working, I’m going to call Teddy Jo.”
“You’re calling Thanatos? The guy with the flaming sword?”
“He is Thanatos only part of the time. The rest of the time he’s Teddy Jo, who isn’t that bad of a guy. He bought a mortuary freezer a few months ago for a job he had to do. It’s sitting in his shed.” I knew this because the last time I stopped by Teddy’s place, he bellyached for an hour about how much the damn thing had cost him. “I’m going to make him an offer and see if I can take it off his hands. I think he might have a body bag or two to throw in with the freezer.”
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