Last Breath (7 page)

“Aria, you need to get out of town. Go visit your family for a few weeks or something, but get out of town.”

Huh? Did she know? How could she have known? It had been a long time since I’d seen Raven, but the woman I knew never would have participated in the ritual I’d seen in that building.

“There’s a mage here in Baltimore doing human sacrifice. I was calling to warn
you
.”

“They do that there. And shit is going down. It’s been going down for a while, but now it’s really going down. Stay out of it and get out of town.”

They do that there?
I was in Baltimore, not some island in the South Pacific full of natives with strange customs that included human sacrifice.

“You
know
? This is commonplace? Mages in Baltimore regularly power their magic through murder?”

Raven made a soft noise. “Not all groups are Haul Du. This is not your fight, Aria. Get out of there.”

How could this
not
be my fight? “Raven, there is a woman dead in a bathtub. A mage died this afternoon by a demon’s hand. I might not have been in Haul Du for long, but this sort of thing shouldn’t be a regular occurrence.”

“Who was the mage?”

I replied before I even wondered at her question. “Ronald Stull.”

I heard her snort. “He was an ass. No loss there.”

Probably not, but that didn’t mean I could just walk away from a demon loose and out of hell, or a woman who’d been murdered to power another’s magic. “I need to know who the mages are that did this. Which wizards in Baltimore are performing human sacrifice?”

“Hell if I know. Look, Aria, we don’t associate with those guys. The only reason I know Ronald Stull is because he screwed Reynard over on a luck charm once. Other than that, we don’t hang with them. They do death magic. It’s an acceptable magical practice. If there are a few bad apples who take it too far and use human sacrifice, then I don’t know about it. I’ve heard rumors, but that’s it. All I can tell you is some magical violence is brewing and you need to be out of the way. Got it?”

No, I didn’t, but before I could respond, she’d hung up. I knew better than to try and call her again, so instead I sat by my car and waited for the police. I didn’t have to wait for long.

Within minutes the place was overrun with red and blue lights. They’d moved a few of the barriers aside and driven right down the brick pedestrian path to park in front of the crime scene. I followed on foot, catching up with them as they were swarming the building like a group of armed ants.

I hugged myself, knowing that whatever story I told them was going to make me look suspicious. And I’d need to think up something fast. I couldn’t exactly tell the law I was a Templar, and that even though I’d refused to take my Oath I still had a self-imposed duty to sleuth supernatural occurrences in my adoptive city. And confiscate powerful magical items so they could be secured in The Temple. And protect Pilgrims on the Path—whatever that meant anymore...

The looney bin might have better meals than I’d eaten this past month, but they didn’t run around parks in plastic armor with foam swords or spend hours crafting cappuccinos and butter nut lattes for a caffeine-deprived public. I liked my life, and I really liked the direction it was heading. Well, except for tonight. Tonight sucked.

A man in uniform approached me. “Are you the one who found the body?”

I had an urge to laugh. I was the only one here beyond the rats and flies. Yeah, I’d found the body. It wasn’t like the police presence had drawn a curious crowd of onlookers. The area had remained a ghost town even with lights flashing everywhere.

And I got the feeling that was an odd thing. Old Town Mall wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, it was smack dab in the city. There were neighborhoods nearby. I’m sure people cut through this area on their way home or to activities elsewhere in Baltimore. I was the only one here besides the police, and I’d been the only one here since I’d arrived.

Death magic wasn’t something that reacted well to disturbances, and someone wandering into the middle of your sacrificial ritual would be pretty bad. Whoever had done this wasn’t just morally bankrupt, they were powerful enough to protect the area from intruders—both living and those of the spirit world. But why wasn’t I affected? The coldness of whatever had been held outside the ritual area, as well as the humans that normally frequent this area had all been kept away, but I’d passed right through the barrier. I’d driven down here, walked up the street and poked through the stores like nothing had happened.

“Yes. I found the body.”

He nodded and motioned me over to a squad car where a man with crumpled khakis, a crumpled shirt, and crumpled hair stood. The uniformed guy left, and Man-Who-Doesn’t-Own-An-Iron and I stared at each other.

“You found the body?”

“Yeah. You always sleep in your clothes?” It was too late for this, and I’d been through enough today. Two dead bodies, and my former best friend admitting that death magic was a normal occurrence in Baltimore? Yeah, not a good day. That’s the only explanation I had for my snappish reply.

“No, but I couldn’t exactly show up to a crime scene naked.”

He dug around in the squad car for a pen and notebook while I gaped. Is this the way cops talked to people? It seemed terribly unprofessional, but then again so did his appearance. And I couldn’t help but run my eyes over him, rather intrigued by the idea of him naked at a crime scene. It was hard to tell what was under the wrinkled clothing, but I’ll admit I was mildly interested in finding out.

“Name?”

“Solaria Angelique Ainsworth.”

He blinked, his pen pausing on the pad of paper. I produced my license and handed it to him, figuring it was easier than spelling out the God-awful name my parents had “gifted” me with.

“Virginia,” he commented, holding the laminated card up to the light.

“I moved here six months ago. I know, I know. I need to get a Maryland license at this point. I promise it’s on my agenda.”

It wasn’t. I was hoarding my stash of cash from the vampire job, and changing my license plus the registration on my car would take pretty much every last dime I had.

“College?”

He was a man of few words as well as less-than-ideal grooming habits, and I still didn’t know his name. I’d finished college four years ago, but at least he hadn’t mistaken me for thirty like the vampires had.

“Graduated. I work part-time at Holy Grounds off Pratt.” He raised an eyebrow and I felt the need to elaborate. “History degrees don’t carry much weight in the job world. I can tell you all about the forth crusade while I whip up a cinnamon dolce latte though.”

He smiled. And he was kind of cute when he did so. Although I wasn’t exactly the best judge of men right now. It had been a really long dry spell for me. Maybe I
should
have taken the night off and invited Zac into my apartment and my bed. There was no trusting my judgement at this point. One smile, and I was ready to start throwing panties.

“Huh?” I realized he’d asked me a question and was waiting patiently for the answer.

“Can you tell me exactly what happened, starting with what brought you here to when you discovered the deceased?”

Oh yeah. Story time. I took my license back and stashed it in my pocket, feeling the outline of the bone I’d taken from the sage pot as I did.

“There was a guy, a customer on my shift today, who ask me to meet him and gave me this address. I came here, went in, and looked for him. That’s when I found the body.”

Did I mention how I was the worst storyteller ever? I think my Latin is slightly worse, but making crap up is a close second. It’s why I was always in trouble as a child. I could never concoct anything plausible enough to cast a hint of doubt on what naughtiness I’d actually been up to.

“So a man asked you to meet him after dark in an abandoned store in a bad part of town—a store you needed to climb through a window to enter.”

I produced the slip of paper with the address on it and gave it to the cop. Or detective. Whatever he was.

He looked at it and slid it between the pages of his notebook. “And how hot was this guy? I mean, he had to have been a total Adonis for you to show up here. You do know who Adonis is, do you?”

Jerk. “My history degree did include basic Greek and Roman mythology, but I may be a bit rusty.”

“Well, you don’t seem to be high, but I’ve got to say I doubt your ‘cute guy’ story. I really don’t care if you were meeting a dealer here. I’m not in Vice, I’m in Homicide, and I’m trying to investigate a murder. And I really need to check out this dealer of yours if he’s selling drugs in a building where a gruesome murder has taken place.

Gruesome. He hadn’t even been in there yet, hadn’t seen the tub of blood and the symbols around the floor. Just wait ’til he got an eyeful of that one. Unless there was a magician moonlighting by dealing smack, he wouldn’t find the killer by roughing up the local drug lords.

“I don’t do drugs, although I do enjoy an occasional alcoholic beverage. Look, I’m still fairly new in town. The guy said it was a mall, so I figured we were going to hook-up in the parking lot outside a Sears or something. I’ll admit this wasn’t what I expected, but I figured after driving down here I’d see if he was inside.”

His eyes shot to mine. “And you weren’t afraid? A young, beautiful woman in a bad part of town casually leaves her car, walks down a dark pathway flanked on either side by abandoned buildings, and climbs through the window of a boarded up store. Seems rather reckless.”

Beautiful? I’d been sometimes called pretty, but no one outside of my parents had ever claimed I was beautiful. I held the detective’s gaze and smiled. “I assure you that I am completely capable of defending myself against any attacker.”

Well, almost any. And the detective didn’t realize that at the time I’d been clutching the sword, now in my car, with a panicked grasp. Yeah I was afraid, but I’d been taught that fear was a good thing. It kept you from doing stupid stuff. Sometimes it kept you alive.

“Okay, ninja girl from Middleburg, Virginia. I’ll buy that. Now why were you in the building across the street from the address on this slip of paper?”

Oops. Yeah, that. I shrugged, giving him another vacuous look. “I couldn’t read the numbers very well in the dark.”

I was blowing this whole thing. I couldn’t act like a ditz one moment, antagonize the cop another, then go on to give him “I’m a badass” vibes. If I didn’t get my act together, I was going to wind up in jail, or at the very least down at the station for a very long night of questioning.

“What’s in the building across the street? The address on the paper?”

Wrinkled clothing or not, this guy was sharp. “Nothing. The door was unlocked and I went in but there was nothing there except a pot by the back doorway with some ashes in it. I figured I had the wrong building, so I checked this one out.”

He shook his head. “A pot? With ashes?”

I sucked at lying, and I was really wanting to go back to my apartment and do a little research before going go to bed so I figured it was time to try the truth.

“Burnt sage. In a saucepan.” No way I was telling him about the bone. At least, not until I’d figured out what it was.

“Sage.”

Okay. The one word responses were getting on my nerves, especially now that he’d started repeating me.

“Sage. Sage sticks are sold in bundles in new age or magical supply stores, and sometimes at craft fairs. They’re often burned with lemon verbena or prairie grass to sanctify a holy space or to protect against malevolent spirits.”

He blinked. “Malev… malevolent?”

“Malevolent. You do know that word? I don’t have a dictionary on hand, but I’m sure you can Google it on your phone.”

Oh, I was being very bad. It would serve me right if I spent the night in jail.

Detective Crumpled Pants didn’t seem offended by my slight. “So you believe that someone was practicing a spiritual something or another across the street? And I guess it’s an amazing coincidence that there was a murder in this building, here?”

Might as well get this over with and get to bed, whether that be in my apartment or in a jail cell.

“It’s not just your run-of-the-mill murder in there,” I told him. “It was a ritualistic sacrifice. I won’t know exactly to what purpose until I do some research, but there was some bad juju going on in there, and the sage across the street was to make sure dark fae, gremlins, hellhounds, or demon avatars didn’t interfere.”

He stared at me open mouthed. “I’m rethinking my drug dealer theory. What exactly did you take and why did it have such a delayed reaction?”

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the pictures. “These aren’t the best quality. I’m sure your CSI dudes in there will have much better shots.”

“You took pictures?” He voice rose in volume. “You encounter a dead body with blood everywhere, and you snap selfies?”

“I did
not
take selfies! And I didn’t see what had been sacrificed until after I’d taken the pictures. For all I knew it could have been a dog or a hundred rats.”

The man drew himself up. It was then that I realized he was quite a bit taller than me, and that in spite of his slim build, he was fairly buff. I might have given him the bravado speech earlier, but I wasn’t sure that this guy couldn’t pummel me to a bloody smear. Especially if I didn’t have my sword. Although if I tried to skewer him, he’d probably just shoot me. My eyes went to the gun in the holster at his shoulder.

“History major. History of what? The idea of a slaughtered dog or a hundred rat corpses doesn’t faze you? You sneak into an abandoned building for a romantic tryst, find a tub of blood with some kind of satanic symbols around it, and you take pictures first and call the cops later?”

There was a lot to refute in his statement, but I seized on the most egregious. “Black magic has nothing to do with Satan. Well, it might depending on if they were summoning demons or not. But beyond that, those who follow Satanism as it exists today don’t truly worship Satan as defined by the Christian church.”

I saw several police exit the building out of the corner of my eye, and saw a team enter with a collapsible stretcher. The man in front of me tilted his head, as if he wasn’t sure whether to charge me with murder or not.