Last Breath (8 page)

“I didn’t kill her,” I argued. “I came to the address on that paper, and I’ll admit that I got nosy. And I know a lot about this stuff. I’ve spent my whole life studying this. My father has a library full of old manuscripts, and I’ve had access to some of the oldest texts in Europe. I’m going to find out what’s going on here because that’s what I do. That’s my calling. It’s what I was born to do. I’m happy to share information with you as long as you keep an open mind, and as long as you don’t lock me in a cell. Or shoot me. I’d really like it if you didn’t shoot me.”

He looked over my shoulder, then dug a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Stay here until I speak with the techs. But just in case the dark fae spirit you away in the next five minutes, I’d like it if you call me in the morning, once you complete your research.”

Now it was my turn to stare at him in astonishment. The man walked past me, brushing my shoulder lightly with his arm on the way. I held the card between my thumb and forefinger, watching as he spoke with the white suited, booted people. Then I tore my gaze away and looked at the card.

Detective Justin Tremelay. My mind screeched a one-eighty. Tremelay. Bernard of Tremelay had been the Grand Master of The Temple in 1153. It was a weird coincidence that the very detective investigating this case had a last name that harkened back to our Order’s roots.

So many of the Templar families had been exterminated after that black Friday when the King of France demanded the Pope denounce us as heretics. Our family had survived, as had many of the English and German families. Areas where the King of France had scant hold hadn’t suffered as badly as those within his reach. A few of the Italian families had also survived, sheltered by the decentralized power structure of the duchy system in that country. But the Tremelays had been wiped out—at least we’d thought. Not that it mattered. The guy thought I was high, or a crazy academic who saw the occult in everything.

Or not. I watched as he jerked his head to look over at me, his mouth a tight line. Just as quickly he turned to face the tech and continued speaking with him.
Told you so
.

A few seconds later he was jogging back over to me. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that we don’t want details of this murder to be made public at this time.”

Or at any time
, I thought. I’d promised Janice that I’d clue her in on any goings-on, but I wasn’t sure how she’d run a story like this. Breaking the news of an occult murder that police were keeping under wraps would be a huge scoop and it would also send the public into a tailspin of terror. Gang violence was a daily occurrence in this town. Ritualistic human sacrifice was not. That would be up to Janice to spin how she needed, though. A promise was a promise, and I couldn’t hold this sort of thing back from her. Especially when I might need her help. These two murders were somehow linked—Ronald Stull’s demon-related death, and this ritual. It could be a coincidence that one of the mages involved in this ritual got sloppy with a demon summoning, or it could be something more.

And that got my brain working. Maybe Ronald hadn’t screwed up a summoning and got himself killed. Maybe the demon had been a supernatural hit man. Mages who worked death magic, especially death magic using human sacrifice, had to have secrets. If Ronald had been widely reviled as an asshole, perhaps one of his buddies had killed him.

There might not be a direct cause and effect from one murder to the other. Not that anything I had right now was more than just theory. I needed to figure out what the bone was, what the symbols and magical parameters told me the death ritual was for, and what the sigil under a very dead Ronald indicated. Lots of unknowns.

“What do you think about all this?”

I jerked my attention back to the detective. He was asking my opinion? Well, that was quite the change from stupid-girl-looking-to-buy-drugs label I’d had previously.

“I’ll let you know what I think once I do some research. I’ve got an early shift at the coffee shop, but hopefully I can get a few hours in before I head off to sleep.” There was no need to tell him I’d probably pull an all-nighter on this one. I’d been pulling a lot of those in the last few weeks. It’s not like I’d be able to sleep with all this running around in my brain. I was one of those people that couldn’t rest until I got the answers I was looking for.

“The coffee shop on Pratt.” The detective consulted his notes. “What is your current home address?”

I told him, then gave an exaggerated yawn. “Well, better get back home if I’m going to be digging through books before bed.”

I headed toward my car, with the detective keeping pace beside me. “Books? Wouldn’t the internet be easier?”

“Yeah, if I wanted to sort through millions of wacky, fake-magic sites and video game references. Most of the real stuff isn’t on the internet.”

“Isn’t everything on the internet nowadays?” He’d stuffed the little notebook in his back pocket.

“No magic user is going to put his carefully crafted spells up on the internet for a bored Goth teen in Cleveland to perform. Would you want some novice trying to summon a lesser demon, or in this case performing death magic? It’s irresponsible to throw stuff like that out there for the uninitiated to mangle with potentially deadly consequences.”

He paused by my car as I fumbled in my pocket for my keys.

“So you really
do
know how to do this stuff? You’re a wizard who just happened to stumble upon this because she was meeting a hot guy?”

I unlocked the car. “I’m not a wizard, I’m a Templar with minor skills in certain areas of magical practice.”

I knew enough to be dangerous. And based upon my last attempt at summoning, dangerous was exactly what magic was in the hands of anyone below an adept level. Which included me. Simple wards and illusion, that’s what I was going to stick to from now on. No more demonology for me, and definitely not anything remotely close to death magic.

“You’ve got a sword in your car.”

Crap. I did. Trusty was on the front seat, close enough for me to grab if I needed it. And I thought it very interesting that Detective Tremelay noticed the sword even with the look-away spell.
Very
interesting.

“I… I do reenactments.” I did. Sort of.

He leaned in and squinted at the foam sword and plastic armor still in the back seat of my car. “You wouldn’t have happened to have been at the park this afternoon where that reenactor guy got hit by lightning, were you?”

Double crap. My name was on the police report, so there was no sense lying about that one. “Yes. I was with another person during the storm and we were the ones who found him.”

“What an amazing coincidence.” His eyes met mine, and I felt like a bug pinned to a board. “I look forward to your call tomorrow morning to update me about the results of your research, Miss Ainsworth.”

I started my car. “Aria. I’ll call you. And in the meantime you might want to see if there are any photos from the crime scene of the lightning strike death this afternoon. You might be very interested in the burn pattern under the body.”

I pulled away before he could respond, a smirk curling up one corner of my mouth. This was fun, taunting the somewhat slovenly Detective Justin Tremelay. He might still think I was a bit off my rocker, but at least he was willing to consider information from all sources when faced with a ritual murder. And he hadn’t hauled me off to jail.

And he was interesting, in a rumpled, middle-aged sort of way.

I
N SPITE OF
my poo-pooing the internet, that’s exactly where I went to try to identify the bone. I might have a library’s worth of books on mythology, various supernatural beings, and magical spells, but when it came to naturalistic pursuits, it was a big fat zero. Edible plants, mushrooms, butterflies, birds, and animal bones all were subjects I’d never explored beyond the bare basics. Templars weren’t expected to forage for food, survive the zombie apocalypse, or track wild animals, thus I couldn’t tell an oriole from a robin. For all I knew, this bone was from someone’s chicken lunch.

Three hours later I knew what the bone wasn’t. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t a skull or vertebrae. And it wasn’t from a bird.

That was about it. All the long bones looked the same, in spite of expert instruction to look for ball ends, notches and curves. If this was a long bone, then it was from a fairly small animal—a squirrel or maybe a rabbit or cat. Heck if I knew. Luckily one university site offered an identification service, so I took the best pictures I could with my phone and sent them off with the fifty dollar fee, wincing at the expenditure. There were no vampires bankrolling this investigation, and I doubted Detective Sleeps-in-his-Clothes would chip in to cover my expenses. I’d need to start watching my funds, or I’d be right back where I started two weeks ago—behind on rent and living on a Ramen noodle diet.

Then I turned my attention to the symbols at the death magic ritual. Most of them I quickly crossed off as the usual runes a mage would use when delineating a protective space for spell-work. Slowly I made my way through the remaining symbols until I’d identified all but one. They’d performed a type of protection spell, one used to keep the casters safe as well as to contain… something. That something was the remaining symbol.

I wasn’t all that worried in spite of the fact the mages had poured an obscene amount of power into this spell. The symbol wasn’t the sigil of a Goetic demon, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t any of the major demons either. It didn’t follow the same lines of the sigils indicating higher spirits. This one seemed home-grown.

A lot of magic was. This symbol could represent a rival mage. To keep them safe from a magical hit, such as what I suspected happened to Ronald. It could be to contain an actual person—to keep another wizard in his hometown, or to hold his magical working back.

If the latter, that would require a huge amount of magical energy. Restricting someone’s movements was more difficult than a charm to win a scratch-off. If the spell also acted as a magical shield… well, no wonder the human sacrifice. It would take me forever to puzzle out who or what the target of this spell was, and I didn’t have forever. The specifics of whatever the mages were containing would have to wait because I had only a few hours left before I needed to get ready for work.

I eyed the clock and started in on the research I should be able to finish before my shift began—the sigil under Ronald’s body. Enlarging the pictures from my phone, I copied the sigil onto paper, drawing the blurred sections in red. There were several possibilities that I noted as I poured over my reference books, but as the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky, I hit pay dirt. Even with the blurred sections from rain and the shifting of the body on the grass, the sigil burned into the ground under Ronald’s body could be none other than Araziel.

The angel of Taurus, which was the astrological sign associated with the Hierophant in Tarot. The Magician. The Light of God. Often confused with Azrael, who was cast out of heaven as one of the leaders of the tenth choir who engaged in carnal relations with human women. Araziel was little known outside of Cabalistic circles or those who specialized in higher spirits.

Goetic demons were one thing. They were lesser demons, inclined to help rather than attack. Summoning a Goetic demon took skill and confidence. Summoning a higher demon took adept status and enough power to compel and bind. But summoning an
angel
? My blood ran cold at the thought.

Of all the stupid, reckless things to do. Demons were sort of like us. Well, sort of like super-powered serial killer psychopaths, but still there was a frame of reference there. A practitioner could study them and anticipate their actions. They were somewhat predictable, their motivations and actions tended along well-worn pathways. Angels were inscrutable, impersonal, and unpredictable. In spite of all the cute cherub statues and the prevalence of personal, spiritual attachments, the actual beings were nothing like what people thought they were. Of all the ghouls, demons, demigods I could encounter in the course of my life, angels scared me the most.

And Araziel wasn’t an angel I’d even think of calling upon. He was the angel who separated the soul from the body upon death, kind of a godly grim reaper. Which was all fine and good if the person in question was actually dead before the angel’s action. In theory, angels were on a tight leash connected to the firm hand of God, but we were beings of free will and so were the higher spirits.

If one of us were foolish enough to summon an angel, to unhook the leash from the collar, well, who knows how long they’d roam among us before they were called back home. And who knows how their morality would twist and change if an angel found himself in the physical realm among humans.

I rubbed my eyes, wondering if this was an occasion for Emergency Beer. Probably not. The way the last few weeks had gone I had a feeling there was a bigger Oh Shit occurrence in my future that would be more worthy of Emergency Beer than this revelation. Still, Araziel was bad news. I had no idea how to track a loose angel, or send it back under heavenly controls.

I eyed the orange streaks of dawn through my window. With any luck I could grab a quick nap before I needed to get ready for work. Of course, that meant I’d have nothing to tell Detective Wrinkle Pants when I called him later. It would probably be a day or so before I heard back from the bone people, and telling him an angel was involved in Ronald’s death wouldn’t do much for my credibility in this investigation. I needed to press on and see if I could determine anything concrete about the murder at Old Town Mall, otherwise I was likely to lose Detective Tremelay’s confidence. And I found myself oddly reluctant to lose the one person in the city police department likely to take me seriously when I discussed summoning and magical societies. Well, somewhat seriously.

An hour later I threw in the towel. I was too tired to do more than stare at the pages, and I needed to get a minimal amount of sleep before my shift. At least I had a list of possibilities, and I’d hit the research again after I got off work.