Eileen Wilks - Mortal Sins

Rule shrugged it off. She didn’t understand that—he wasn’t exactly a laissez-faire kind of guy—but the mate bond’s variable proximity clause didn’t bug him the way it did her. “Why worry about it?” he’d said recently. “I don’t get upset when gravity keeps me from floating off whenever I feel like it.”

“But gravity’s a constant! It doesn’t suddenly drag me down twice as hard. I know what to expect with gravity.”

“Maybe the mate bond is constant, too, and it’s our experience of it that varies.”

Since it was her unpredictable experience of the bond that drove her crazy, that didn’t help much. At the moment, though, that aspect of the mate bond wasn’t giving her trouble. It was another variable that fretted at her.

Memory.

It’s normal to forget a name now and then, she assured herself as she accepted the sack and a lidded cup from the kid at the drive-up window. People forgot names all the time.

But to forget the name of the alleged perp? She’d never done that. “Meacham,” she muttered as she pulled out of the parking area. “Roy Don Meacham. Now quit being paranoid.”

She was downing coffee when her purse buzzed. She set her cup in the cup holder, dug her phone out of her purse, checked caller ID and the time, and flipped the phone open. “Hey, there. I didn’t expect to hear from you for another hour or two, given the time difference.”

Abel Karonski grunted. “Explain that to Ida. The woman doesn’t sleep herself, so she’s fuzzy on the concept.”

Ida Rheinhart was Ruben’s secretary and the terror of every agent in the Unit. Lily grinned and looked for a spot to pull over. “Cynna swears that Ida lairs up beneath her desk at night.”

“Lairs, yes. Sleeps, no. How else could she be at her desk calling me at five o’clock in the damned morning?”

“It’s seven here. Hang on a sec—I need to park this thing, or my eggs will get cold while I juggle the phone.”

“Eggs. You’ve got eggs.”

“Well, the yellow stuff inside the muffin was purportedly once inside a chicken.” She’d reached the sleepy peace of an elementary school set in a long sprawl of grass punctuated by swings and a slide. All empty, of course, this early on a summer morning. Parking spots were slanted along its length. She pulled into one and wondered if the dead children had gone to this school. “I’ve got coffee, too.”

“I’ve got coffee. Hotels put coffeepots in the rooms these days, thank God. It’s food I lack. Are you chewing? Do I hear chewing?”

Lily swallowed and grinned. She could picture Karonski sitting in a generic hotel room in his rumpled suit . . . No, he wouldn’t be dressed yet. He probably slept in his shorts, but no way was she going to picture Karonski in his underwear, so she mentally provided him with brown Sansabelt slacks and a wrinkled shirt. Karonski’s shirts were always wrinkled. “Who, me? That would be rude, even though I am in a hurry. I’ve got a meet in twenty minutes.”

“Then you’d better tell me about these bodies you found.”

Another image replaced the one of a wrinkled Karonski. This one had her putting the uneaten portion of her egg sandwich back in the bag it had come from. “Actually, Rule found them.” She folded the bag down so no crumbs could escape, giving the task more attention than it warranted.

“A woman and two kids.”

“Yeah. The locals locked up the father for it even though they didn’t have the bodies, but they had cause. He showed up at the sheriff’s office with the bloody baseball bat. There’s supposed to be a witness, too, a postal worker who tried to help and got whacked.”

“But you detected death magic on the bodies.”

“Yes, and I don’t understand it. Here’s how it looks to me. Either the victims were killed by death magic, or they were killed creating it—as part of a ritual empowering the practitioner. The first one seems unlikely. Physical evidence on the bat marks it as the murder weapon, and there’s a witness. It’s barely possible the perp pounded the bodies afterward in an effort to hide their true manner of death, but that doesn’t fit with his subsequent actions.”

“Disposing of the bodies, then driving back into town so he could hand the sheriff the bat with all that great physical evidence.”

“Yeah. The guy’s nuts, but insanity usually has its own weird logic. I can’t make that fit any kind of logic, no matter how twisted. As for the other scenario . . . evidence at the victims’ home suggested that the kids were killed in their beds, but the mother was chased down. Death magic—the extraction of power through killing—has to be performed ritually, right? That doesn’t sound like the kind of controlled situation a ritual requires.”

“Could be the first kid was killed ritually and the others were taken out because they’d witnessed it.”

“What kind of idiot sets up a ritual killing with others in the house?”

“He’d have to be loony tunes,” Karonski agreed. “Probably a lousy practitioner, too. Maybe he thought he’d spelled the others asleep and got it wrong.”

Lily tapped one finger against the steering wheel, frowning. It didn’t feel right. “They all had it on them. I confirmed that on the scene. Death magic was smeared on all three of them. Would that be true if only one of them was killed ritually?”

Karonski had a deep, windy sigh like a weary hound. “No, you’re right. I obviously need more coffee. Nothing I know makes that possible. Of course, there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about death magic. What I keep having trouble with, though, is the bat. Blunt force trauma is not symbolically correct.”

“Expand on that.”

“Death magic involving human victims is extremely rare, but animal killings aren’t, so we know a little about what’s required. Every ritual I’ve heard of uses a knife or blade. The Aztecs didn’t bash their sacrifices’ heads in. Another thing . . . most Wiccans believe death magic operates the same as blood magic, that they’re related. Blood magic requires a blade and control. You have to control what happens with the blood to use it. Hard to do that if you’re smashing people with a baseball bat.”

Lily shook her head. “I don’t know. Blood magic doesn’t feel the same to me. I know Wiccans believe it’s tainted—”

“We’re not the only ones.”

“No, and you may be right, though the Catholics disagree. But that’s not my point. The thing is, I don’t personally know that blood magic is tainted. I don’t pick up that sort of thing when I touch magic.”

“Unless it’s death magic.”

“Yeah.” Evil. That’s what she touched when she touched death magic, and she did not understand. Power was power, and magic no more held a moral component than did electricity—or so she’d believed until the first time she’d touched a body slain by death magic. “I’m right about those bodies. I’m sure .”

“Hey, I’m not doubting you. Just having a hard time coming up with an explanation. We may not know much about death magic, but what’s happened there violates the little we do know. Have you talked to your pet sorcerer?”

“Not yet. It’s still short of five a.m. in California. I texted him, but I texted Cynna, too, just to make sure.”

Cynna was Lily’s friend. She was also an FBI agent, Rule’s former lover, and the only woman in the world married to a lupus—Cullen Seabourne, whom she was living with at Nokolai Clanhome while they awaited the birth of their child. Cullen was Rule’s friend, a former lone wolf, a stripper . . . and a sorcerer. Sorcerers were supposed to have died out in the Purge; lone wolves were supposed to go crazy cut off from their clans; lupi were never Gifted—and they never, ever got married.