Last Breath (2 page)

“I hear the ambulance. Can you go meet them and show them where to go?”

She hesitated, eyeing me with suspicion.

“I just moved here six months ago and have never been in this park before today. I’m not even sure where my car is at this point.”

Melissa nodded. “I’ll be right back.” She eyed my stick. “Stop poking him, for heaven’s sake.”

The moment she was out of sight, I did more than poke him. In spite of the dangers of touching a demon-slayed corpse, I dove right in, digging through the cloak pockets and mentally cataloguing spell components. Rue, wormwood, gold filings, salt. A whole lot of salt. I didn’t have much time, so any papers I found I pocketed, feeling a twinge of guilt. Melissa knew him. I was hoping she knew him well enough to help the paramedics notify next of kin.

By the time the medical personnel rounded the knoll, carrying a stretcher and led by Melissa, I was standing beside the body, stick tossed aside and an innocent look carefully composed on my face.

“Holy crap.”

I didn’t think trained emergency staff were supposed to be quite so shaken by the sight of a dead body. After all, they’d probably been first on the scene to far more gruesome murders than this. Or not. With the blue smoke cleared, Ronald’s chest cavity looked like he’d been part of some horrible sacrifice. Ribs were cracked and spread upward like bony towers. Lungs and heart were completely missing, leaving a bloody, muscle lined hole where the organs had been.

They set the stretcher down and eyed the body. “I’m thinking the lightning hit the ground, then rebounded and took him in the back.”

Melissa gagged and turned her head. I leaned closer, wanting to see both the sigil and the back of the body. If the paramedic’s hypothesis was correct, then the guy’s backside would be a blackened, burned mess. Maybe they were right. Maybe my paranoia over the recent vampire and necromancer events was making me see magic around every corner. Ronald had a bunch of spell components in his pockets. He could have had copper sulfide and other stuff in the ones his body had blocked me from searching. He could have been killed by lightning that left an odd pattern on the ground.

Or not. The two men rolled the body over. His backside was untouched beyond the blood that had seeped under him and stained his cloak. And the burn mark on the ground was clearly a sigil.

“What the hell? Rob, take a look at this.” The two men shook their head over the burn mark, commenting that it was the weirdest lightning strike they’d ever seen.

Me, too. Usually there was a blackened smoking tree, or a charred piece of earth with a circular section of burned and melted foliage radiating out from the impact area. Not this weird, squiggly burn. I tried to commit it to memory, wondering how crass I’d look if I took out my cell phone and snapped a picture. Probably pretty crass. Sigils were tricky though. One mark reversed, or slightly higher, called a completely different demon. That’s why this particular form of magic required a detailed practitioner, and why it had a high rate of casualties. Had Ronald practiced magic outside of his LARP activities? If so, this might have not been a hit, but simply a case of a sloppy summoning coming back to bite him.

Like
my
sloppy summoning. I hugged myself, remembering the violent demon who had appeared instead of Vine. I’d barely managed to shove him back to hell. And I was well aware that if someone else summoned him and he got loose, he could very well come after me.

Was that what happened with Ronald?

Melissa and I followed the stretcher to the ambulance, all of us walking in silence. The rain had tapered off to a light mist. Once the sun came out, the humidity would be unbearable. I couldn’t wait to shed this plastic armor, and I’m sure Melissa felt the same about her sodden cloak. She was worse off, drenched-clothing wise. The plastic armor had at least shielded some of my body from the rain, but she was soaked through. Her hair was stuck to her face and neck, the headdress absurd on top of it all. I touched a hand to my own hair, thankful for the braid that I always wore when fighting. It might not be the most flattering hairstyle for me, but at least I didn’t have wet hair clinging to my skin.

The police were at the ambulance, as were the press. I recognized one of the reporters, and she nodded to me. Janice. Was it just last week we’d met to discuss the Robertson murders? She was going to think this was an odd coincidence, me being here.
I
thought it was an odd coincidence my being here.

The officers took down our names and information. It all seemed straight forward. No crime scene photos. No yellow tape. Just a guy killed by a lightning strike, and our information to ensure all the boxes were filled out on the form.

“It hit the ground right where we found him,” Melissa told them. “We were in a role playing game. The others are at the other end of the park, but we were out doing reconnaissance. The lightning hit, and there was static everywhere. The thunder nearly deafened me. When the rain came down, we ran for shelter, and that’s when we found him.”

Straight forward. The police turned to me and I nodded. What else was I going to say? That I suspected the victim of black magic? That I believed a demon had killed him rather than a random act of nature?

“They say your odds of getting struck by lightning are about the same as winning the lottery,” Janice murmured. She’d moved close behind me and was staring at my foam sword with curiosity. “Too bad he didn’t buy a Powerball ticket.”

I doubted one would have negated the other. And I was now wondering the odds of being killed by a demon. Probably a lot higher if the victim was involved in the dark arts.

The ambulance left. The police left. Melissa left after texting her group to tell them the news of Ronald’s passing. In short time I was standing on the curb in the light rain, alone aside from a reporter who didn’t seem inclined to get back into her warm, dry car.

“Can you show me where you found him?”

I hesitated, not sure whether Janice just had a morbid fascination with scenes of death, or whether she suspected something. I wanted to go back anyway to get a picture of the sigil before it was disturbed. Not that I wanted Janice or anyone else seeing me taking a photo of a spot where a man had supposedly been electrocuted to death.

“Sure. There’s blood though.”

The idea of blood didn’t seem to bother the reporter. She fell in beside me, shortening her stride to keep pace with my shorter legs. “What were his injuries?”

Yep. Morbid. Creepy. There are things you expect a reporter to ask about, and things you don’t. This was in the things you don’t category. “Nothing on his back besides bloodstains. It looked like he took the lightning strike to the chest.”

There. That should do it.

Nope.

“So burned, blackened skin and fabric? Or melted? Most lightning deaths are from heart failure caused from the electrical charge, but a direct strike would have left burns.”

This woman missed her calling. Why was she a Baltimore City reporter and not off in a CSI crime lab, or working for the FBI?

“His rib cage was blown outward. Heart and lungs were missing. Judging from the small amount of blood and the damage to his cloak, I’d say the wounds cauterized with heat that also burned his clothing.” There. That ought to shut her up.

And I just realized that I sounded as if I should be in a CSI crime lab or working for the FBI, not whipping up lattes part-time in the Inner Harbor.

Janice stopped. From the shock on her face I wondered if I hadn’t gone a bit too far in my description. “You said his ribs were exposed, like something inside had exploded them outward? And heart and lungs were missing?”

“Yeah.” I backpedaled, realizing that I was sounding way to knowledgeable, and pretty callous. “I’ve never seen lightning hit anything beyond a tree, though. And I’m no medical professional. I’m sure I was mistaken.”

The reporter shook her head and began walking at a more rapid pace. I jogged to keep up. “Over there.”

I pointed and we swerved left to arrive at the patch of ground with the sigil. Ronald’s body had smudged the outline a bit. Hopefully enough of it was undisturbed for me to get an idea of what demon it referenced. Now if only the reporter would go away so I could snap a picture.

“Holy crap! David said one of their players had been killed—like really killed, killed. Is this where it happened?”

I looked up to see Brandi approaching, somewhat out of breath. The rest of my team was jogging up. So much for a private moment to snap a picture.

Luckily Brandi didn’t have the same scruples as I did. Nor did anyone else in the group. Everyone chatted excitedly and took photos of the sigil, exclaiming that they’d never known someone who’d died by lightning.

“Umm. It’s kind of tragic that this happened to one of the players.” I tried to interject some humanity into the moment that was quickly becoming a paparazzi frenzy. “He was just here LARPing, and then he was dead. It could have been any of us.”

“Could it?” Janice asked, leaning down to swipe a finger across the burned grass. She’d already taken her own picture of the sigil. “Why wasn’t there a fire? And why is the burned section greasy?”

I knew why, but nobody would believe me if I told them. At least nobody present would believe me. Well, Janice might. She’d taken the reality of vampires and necromancers with very little convincing less than a week ago. Demons probably wouldn’t be that much of a stretch for her.

“Yeah. Sucks that someone got killed like this, but honestly it couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” Zac chimed in. “It’s like fate. It’s like divine retribution or something.”

So Ronald was not a favorite. No wonder everyone was busy snapping pics and tweeting.

“Melissa, their other mage, said he was new to the group?” I asked.

Brandi snorted. “New to them maybe, but not new to us. He’s made the rounds and been thrown out of just about every gaming group in town. Arrogant asshole. And he cheats.”

How did one cheat at throwing beanbags at an opponent? “Cheats how?”

Brad shrugged. “I don’t know. In Other Worlds, he showed up with this insane character roll-up. We made him roll the stats again, just because he was plus twenty on everything. He got the same numbers. He always made his saves, always rolled max on his hit points. We made him use a set of our dice because we were beginning to think his were fixed. Still, the guy always came out on top.”

“And if you argued with him, or took the last diet Mountain Dew, then your character began having the worst luck ever,” Zac added. “Ones every roll. I went through three characters in one night. It was no fun, so we told him not to come back.”

Sounded like a real sore loser, as well as a sore winner. “Did he get back at you guys in any way after you threw him out?”

“Food poisoning the next game night, but we couldn’t really blame that on him. He wasn’t even there, and the crab dip did taste a little off.”

“Ronald was a total ass,” Charles added. “I don’t know what he was putting in his bean bags, but those suckers left a mark.”

I looked down at the burned sigil in the grass. Either Ronald’s luck had run out, or some gamer with a grudge had rolled a natural twenty.

T
HERE WAS A
box waiting for me right outside my apartment door. Lately my great grandmother had taken to sending me an odd assortment of stuff in what I assume was meant to be a care package, but this wasn’t from her. I stared at it with the caution of a bomb squad technician while fingering the hilt of my sword because whoever had sent me the package was a mage.

No one had ever stolen Gran’s packages, but whoever sent this wanted to make sure the neighbors didn’t walk off with it. There was a nasty hex attached to it that would deliver the equivalent of an electric shock to whoever picked it up. It was a clever spell, designed to go live only when the package reached its destination. Clever, because the folks at the post office wouldn’t take kindly to being zapped every time they touched the thing. The big black rune in the lower corner clearly told anyone knowledgeable in the magical arts what the hex was. It was easily dispelled with a single word.

But still I hesitated. I wasn’t on particularly good terms with any mages since Haul Du had tossed me out. Maybe there
was
a bomb inside—a magical bomb that the wizard wanted to make sure detonated only in
my
face and not some random person’s. But why would any of them want me dead? I hadn’t done anything wrong besides hide the fact that I was a Templar from them during my initiation period.

“
Delens
.” I held my breath. The rune faded and my shoulders slumped with relief when a thick black checkmark appeared in its place. I recognized that checkmark. It was the stick-figure equivalent of a bird, and the symbol Raven used to sign all her stuff.

Normally I would have been irked that she hadn’t put the mark in clear sight and saved me the near heart attack, but she had good reason to be cautious about identifying this package as from her. All the mages in Haul Du had been forbidden to have any contact with me once I was ousted. Raven had been my best friend, but she’d walked away from that friendship to stay with the magical group that had been her passion for the last decade.

It still hurt, even though I understood why she’d made the choice she had. A friendship of six months, no matter how tight, wasn’t worth giving up the shared knowledge that came with being a member of Haul Du.

But this? I’d called her last week to warn her about my disastrous attempt to summon the Goetic demon Vine. Hopeful that this might be some tentative first-step toward a renewal of our friendship, I picked up the package and took it inside.

A note fell out as soon as I tore the paper off, and I opened it before the box itself.

Thought you might need this since you’re clearly continuing your education on a solo basis. Please be careful. I’ll be really pissed if I see your obituary in the paper. R

I smiled at the little check mark bird accompanying Raven’s initial. Whatever was inside, this note had made my day. Heck, it had made my year. When she’d turned her back on me and refused to return my messages, I’d thought I’d never hear from her again. Yes, she’d finally answered my call last week, but I figured that would be the end of it.