Last Breath (21 page)

“Look.” Raven reached down in front of the altar and picked up a shining object. It was a gold filigree chain, a series of charms dangling from the end—one a wing, one a half-moon, one a scythe.

“Angels of the night,” I murmured, taking the necklace from Raven to examine closely. “She had an affinity for reapers.”

“I also found this.” Raven pushed a piece of paper in my hand, her voice choked. “I didn’t know. I don’t think anybody knew. Bliss never told.”

It was a report. Along with five paragraphs of medical mumbo-jumbo was the diagnosis—cancer. Bethany had stage four bone cancer. Six months to a year even with treatment. The test results were dated two months ago; which was the exact time she’d ended communication with all angels except Araziel.

“She willingly took his mark,” I said softly. “She wanted
him
to be the one who took her soul when the time came.”

He was the angel she knew best, the one she’d developed a connection with. Some people made their wills, took care of final arrangements, decided what to prioritize on their bucket list. Bliss gave an angel what amounted to a proxy. When her death came, she wanted a familiar face by her side. I felt for her. I felt sad that I hadn’t known her.

And I felt angry that she hadn’t had the death she’d wanted. Instead of giving her soul unto an angel’s care, she’d had it forced from her dying body and used to power a spell. Tremelay might want to bring these fuckers to justice, but I was suddenly filled with a desire to lop their heads off with my sword.

And Araziel. I thought about my demon mark, about the venom in Innyhal’s voice when he spoke of humans taking souls that weren’t theirs for the taking. Angels and demons had differences, but at their core were surprising similarities. Fiore Noir had killed Bethany Scarborough and taken her soul—a soul that had been claimed by another. A demon would have been furious and hell-bent on revenge. Angels were supposedly beings without emotion, but even if Araziel hadn’t felt the same gut-wrenching anger of a demon, he would have seen the injustice. What is promised to one should not be taken.
Thou shalt not steal
.

I thought of Ronald Stull lying dead in the park and revised my theory that he’d been hit by lightning. There had been nothing killing him beyond an angel looking to right a wrong. Maybe Araziel had reaped the two junkie’s souls a bit early, but I was convinced that Ronald’s death had been an angelic form of justice.

And if I was right, Tremelay wouldn’t get his arrests and I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of beheading these mages with my sword. Because vengeance would belong to an angel.

W
E’D DRIVEN ALL
the way back in Baltimore, so I could show Raven my apartment and brainstorm at my favorite local on ways to rein in an angel when Tremelay called. As expected, they’d found signs of magic ritual at Dead Run along with several bodies.

“Know where Dead Run is?” I asked Raven.

“Uh, no?”

I grinned. “Wanna come with me? I could use both a navigator and an experienced mage.”

Raven leaned back in her seat, slugging down the rest of her beer. “Nope. No way. I heard you say bodies. I’ll face down an angry demon any day rather than get within a hundred feet of a corpse. There’s a reason I don’t do death magic. I cry over roadkill, Aria. I avoid funerals at all cost. Dead bodies are gonna send me right over the edge.”

I didn’t blame her one bit. I’d seen my share of dead bodies in the last few days and wasn’t looking forward to a repeat experience this evening. Still, I’d seen Bethany’s body. This couldn’t be any worse.

It was.

Thankfully Tremelay met me in a parking area, because I wasn’t sure I would otherwise have been able to find the site. Dead Run paralleled Security Boulevard, a swath of green on either side of a meandering creek. There were other parks and even a few cemeteries nearby, turning the entire area into a small bit of solitude. Well, solitude aside from the sounds of traffic on the well-traveled road that was hidden by a thick line of trees and briars.

The ritual spots were well hidden. We sloshed through the creek and scrambled up a muddy bank, then nearly crawled under a thick cover of vines to reach them. Once through the brush, I saw a clearing with the remains of several magical circles. They’d squeezed them in, five in this tiny space.

“They moved.” I muttered, waving my hand toward the numbered crime-scene signs. “Mages can’t do this sort of ritual in the same place without a huge cleansing. It’s easier to shift ten feet over.”

I’d never performed this type of magic, but I understood why they’d done this. When creating charms or amulets, or even summoning Goetic demons, a magical space soaked up some of the energy from each use. That was normally a good thing—a mage wanted to be able to rely on an extra punch of energy if needed. But death magic was like a sort of strip mine. The murder, the soul, the energy of the site, it all went into the intended storage device. Which left the area bare and battered, and somewhat vulnerable.

Unusable. Just walking across the abandoned spaces made me feel tired. It was as if the ground itself were trying to leach the life-force from my body. It was one more thing that would have made the Baltimore group inelegant, unsophisticated, and brutish in the eyes of their DC counterparts.

“What do you think?” Tremelay asked. There were several other officers, ones in uniform, who looked at us curiously.

Here’s where I pretended to be an expert. “These sites were clearly used for death magic. The symbols may have worn away or been removed, but there are still signs of the magical space. There were sacrifices here, one in each spot. No more than one, though. So five people died here, unless there’s another clearing with additional sites.”

The two dudes in blue looked impressed. Tremelay less so. “Is there anything here that can tie the ritual areas to a specific victim? I want your take on it before I get the CSI guys in here to rip up grass and stuff for DNA.”

I shook my head. “Honestly the techs will do a better job than me at pinpointing who died where. The victim doesn’t change the method of the ceremony.”

Different victims had different levels of energy to give, though. It made me think of Bliss with her cancer and her angel mark. Would her energy have been less than ideal? Was her soul less potent because of its mark? Had her death, as horrible as it was, yielded a disappointing result for the mages?

The thought enraged me. As much as I wanted Tremelay to bring them to justice, part of me hoped that Araziel
did
catch them. I hope the angel took his time about it, too. Although with angels that wasn’t likely. Justice was justice. An eye for an eye. Personal suffering as punishment wouldn’t mean as much to an angel as it would to a human.

“The bodies are over here.” Tremelay’s voice was soft. He’d walked over to me, careful to avoid smudging the circles further. I felt his hand on my arm, gently urging me forward.

I didn’t want to go. I’d been grossed out and intrigued when I’d seen Ronald’s body. I’d been horrified when I’d discovered Bethany in the sacrificial tub. But this… Somehow in the last few days this whole thing had burrowed through my academic interest in demons and magic and landed in the freak out zone. I’d been in Bliss’s house. I’d petted her cat. I’d read her journal. These weren’t just bodies. These were people whose hopes and dreams had come crashing down with the stab of a knife. And with soul magic, they didn’t even have the promise of an afterlife to look forward to. It was the worst of wrongs, and I couldn’t look dispassionately upon their remains.

But I had to. Anything I could find out that might help Tremelay find the killers and put an end to this was worth it. And didn’t these people deserve to be mourned? Didn’t they deserve to have their deaths regarded with a sense of outrage, their bodies and their pain burned into my memory forever? I might be a stranger, but the connection of a stranger was better than remaining undiscovered in a park for years, or becoming a John Doe among so many at the morgue.

The bodies were laid out in an adjoining clearing, lined up on tarps and in various stages of decomposition. It was August in Maryland. I’d been upwind before, but no fortuitous breeze could lessen the stench that hit me when I approached that clearing.

Tremelay cleared his throat. “There was a ditch, kind of like a mass grave but it wasn’t completely filled in. They didn’t use lime or anything to speed decomposition or hide the smell. It’s like they knew they’d be gone and using another site by the time these were found.”

Five ritual areas. Five bodies. I looked at the nearest one, blackened and still oozing. “Probably dead for two weeks,” the nearby tech mentioned. “Although it’s hard to tell exactly. There’s a lot we’ll have to factor in before we can get a solid timeline on these guys.”

I yanked my shirt up to cover my nose and mouth, not caring if I was flashing my bra to the techs and Tremelay. Then I looked upward into the leafy canopy and pushed down my nausea. It was just flesh, just decomposing flesh. I needed to get over it and help.

So I did. I compared this to the only frame of reference I had—road kill. Two weeks in the August heat, but in the bottom of a ditch and sheltered from the sun. I didn’t envy these crime scene techs their job. Not in the least bit.

The tech kindly waited for me to get a grip before continuing. “These other ones were probably killed on the following days in order, the last one four days ago.”

I walked by the victims, trying to find anything in their faces and naked bodies that I could use.

The tech walked with me, gesturing toward the line of corpses. “We’ll need to wait for the M.E. to weigh in, but none of them appears to have been restrained by rope or tape. They may have been drugged. We’ll see what the tox screens say.”

They’d say no. Drugged victims wouldn’t yield as much energy and wouldn’t be worth all this effort. I’d done some research in my spare moments and although I didn’t have a vast store of information on death magic, some of the dark arts books I’d acquired due to their demonology chapters did outline the basics of the rituals. It was a disturbing read. The victims were held by the arms and legs, but still fully aware at the time of the ritual. It was recommended the victim be in a state of panic at the moment of sacrifice. Terror lent an extra punch to the energy collected. The whole thing made me sick.

I put some much needed distance between myself and the bodies. “So no marks at all? No signs they were smacked on the head when they were taken, or bruises anywhere?”

The tech shook his head. “It’s summer and it’s been kinda hot the last few weeks. Decomposition is pretty bad on the older ones. There are some tattoos and scars I can make out on the recent ones. This last one has a really weird burn mark on his waist.”

That was an odd coincidence when I also had a “weird” burn mark on
my
waist. Did the guy work in food service and have a run-in with a hot pan? Because it would be beyond strange for two people to have the same demon-mark on their left side.

“See? It looks like a cigar burn, only it’s bigger. And it’s completely round. It must have hurt like heck to leave a scar like that. That’s a third-degree burn kind of scar.”

My brain did a one-eighty. I held my breath and leaned down to look at the man’s waist. His skin had a mottled tone and was stretched considerably in bloat, but the round mark on his side was as clear as the nose on my face. And as clear as the scar on my own side. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. This man, this last victim, he had been marked. Demon marked.

But was it a demon or an angel? I closed my eyes, trying to recall what I could of Bliss’s naked body sprawled in the tub. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember if she had the same mark or not. She had to have
something
on her that confirmed my suspicions about her deal with Araziel.

“Hey, Tremelay,” I called. The detective turned his head toward me. “Can you call down to the morgue and ask them if Bethany Scarborough had any scars on her waist? Round, like a really fat cigar burn or a hickey. Raised skin. White. It should have been obvious.”

The detective tilted his head, one eyebrow arching skyward. “Okay. I’ll check.”

I looked again at the body before me. “Any idea who this is? Who any of them are?”

The tech shook his head again. “They were naked with nothing to ID them. I took finger prints of the ones I could. If they’re in the system, we’ll know by tomorrow. If not… well, it depends on whether they match any missing persons’ reports or not.”

“Ainsworth!” I looked up and saw Tremelay motioning to me. With an apologetic smile at the tech, I jogged over to him.

“M.E. says there
was
a mark, but it’s not what you described. It looks to be more like a birthmark of sorts and it’s right over the center of her chest. He’s sending a picture.”

“The heart chakra,” I commented.

“I don’t know about chakra, but it’s not over her heart. It’s right in the center of her sternum. But the mark does kinda look like a heart.”

“That’s where the chakra is,” I replied. “It’s not over the heart organ, it’s on a center line with the other chakras. It’s called the heart chakra because it’s the focal point for compassion and mercy.”

His phone dinged and he swiped it, raising his eyebrows as he handed it to me.

I looked down at the picture of a brown birthmark in the rough shape of a heart right between the curve of two breasts. It was perfectly placed, and I was darned sure it hadn’t been there since Bethany’s birth. Still, it was best to check these things before I went off on crazy theories.

“Can you do one more thing? Check with Bethany’s immediate family and see if she had this mark from when she was a child?”

Tremelay took his phone back, his eyes never leaving my face. “What are you thinking, Ainsworth? It doesn’t look like a tattoo or any kind of burn. It looks like a birthmark.”

I raised the side of my shirt. “The point is it
doesn’t
look like this.”

The detective bent over, tilting his head to look at my waist. I felt fingers lightly touching the skin next to the mark, then nothing as they drifted over the raised surface of the scar.