Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(45)

Her head, a wet red mess, rested against her right shoulder. The killer had bitten through her neck from the left, nearly severing it in one bite and leaving the head attached only by a narrow strip of skin and flesh. Her white blouse and shreds of her bra hung off her body, blood-soaked and torn, and her chest cavity gaped open, the broken shards of ribs slick with dark blood. More blood colored her khaki capris.

Someone, probably Biohazard, had drawn a protective chalk circle around the rug and the body. Standard procedure. The chalk would delay the reanimated corpse long enough for the firebug to torch it.

I approached the circle to get a better look at the body. No heart. Only a puddle of dark blood pooling inside. The blood was still liquid. Once the heart stopped pumping, the blood settled within the lowest points of the body due to gravity, turning the skin an ugly mauve. The process was called livor mortis, and it started anywhere from thirty minutes to four hours after death, reaching its most pronounced stage in about twelve hours. Alycia’s body showed no signs of it.

She was killed a couple of hours ago, at most. The creature had come through the window and attacked her right there on the rug—all the blood was confined to it. It likely bit her neck first, knocking her down, then straddled her and broke open her chest to get at the heart.

Past the body, almost all the way at the other wall, a large desk waited, with an office chair pushed back from it, but still upright. Two smaller chairs lay overturned against the desk.

I blinked and the office blossomed into colors. Gossamer tendrils of the palest gold bordered the window, stretched in thin lines across the floor, then exploded over the body into a familiar cascade. No other strong magic signatures. Just assorted blue traces, old and faded, likely left by students or other visitors to the office days ago.

I blinked it off.

The same creature that killed Pastor Haywood murdered Alycia Walton. Both of them likely handled the same item. The “Christian” artifact had a guardian. It was an established practice in the ancient kingdoms. I’d come across it once before, and I had been taught how to do it in case I ever needed to protect something of significance. If you had enough power, you could bind a magical beast to an object you wanted guarded. Once bound, the object emitted magic that only the beast could feel, and anyone who touched it would be stained by it. The guardian would track that stain until it killed the thieves and retrieved the object or died trying.

The old myths were full of such stories. The dragon watching over the Golden Fleece, the spriggans guarding fae treasure, the Pixiu who craved the smell of gold and secured it in the homes of their masters. Both Pastor Haywood and Professor Walton had touched the artifact, and the guardian had punished them for it.

It probably couldn’t get to the artifact itself or the thief who owned it now. Whoever it was either knew about the curse or was very lucky.

Now the ma’avir’s confession made sense. He’d said that Moloch wanted Pastor Haywood’s killer. The artifact wasn’t important to Moloch. The divine beast guarding it was. Why?

If I got my hands on the artifact, the beast would come for me. I had to find this magical trinket.

Selling an artifact required three people, an expert to assess its magic, a historian to trace its provenance, and a broker to calculate its value and facilitate the sale. The magic expert and the historian were dead. I had to find the broker. As long as I had the broker, the guardian would come to find them, and the ma’avirim would follow.

“Why was she here late at night alone?” Stella wondered.

“Working on a book, apparently,” the firebug said.

Steps echoed down the hall—someone walking toward us, briskly.

I surveyed the scene again. The more I could figure out about the artifact’s guardian, the better.

“How old was Professor Walton?” I asked.

“Forties,” the firebug said.

“No cane, no mobility problems?”

“If she had a cane, we didn’t find it.”

“What are you thinking?” Stella asked.

I carefully walked around the circle to the desk and stood behind it. I could see both the door and window. The desk had been positioned to enjoy the view of the woods. “About twelve feet to the door?”

Stella nodded. “Give or take.”

I pointed at the window. “A giant flying creature tears the grate out of the wall and tries to force its way inside. It’s too big, so it claws at the window frame, trying to wedge its way in. You’re a forty-year-old college professor sitting behind this desk. Your next move?”

“Run for the door,” the firebug said.

“Twelve feet.” Stella’s eyes narrowed. “She should’ve made it.”

“She jumped out of the chair,” the firebug added. “It’s pushed back. But then she didn’t run.”

“Why wait?” I thought out loud.

“Maybe the creature has some sort of hypnotic magic gaze?” Stella said.

“But she jumped out of her chair and came around the desk,” the firebug said. “If there was some sort of hypnotic gaze, she would have stayed seated. If it was me, I would come around the desk so I could fry its ass without damaging the furniture.”

“Maybe Professor Walton had some sort of offensive magic we don’t know about,” I said.

“She didn’t,” a new voice said.