Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

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.