CHAPTER 2
I DROVE BACK to the subdivision. The phone in the first house worked, and I dialed Biohazard’s number with Luther’s extension from memory. I could’ve just reported the whole thing to the front desk, but this was bad enough that I had to cut through the red tape.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang.
Come on, Luther.
The line clicked. “What?” Luther’s irritated voice said.
“It’s me.”
“Whatever it is, Unclean One, I don’t have time for it. I have important wizarding to do—”
“Someone boiled two hundred people and dumped the liquid and their remains near Serenbe at a Walmart distribution center.”
Silence.
“Did you say ‘boiled’?”
“I did.”
Luther swore.
“The mass grave is unsecured and magically potent. There are no bugs in it, Luther. No insect activity anywhere for approximately a quarter mile. I’ve got a basic chalk ward around it now, and Teddy Jo’s watching it. The sheriff’s department is coming today to process the scene, so if you want to get here before them, you have to hurry. It’s off South Fulton Parkway heading west. I’ll mark the turnoff for you.”
“I’m on my way. Do not leave that grave site, Kate. You do whatever you have to do to keep anything from spawning in there.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll sit on it.”
I hung up and dialed home. No answer. Figured. Curran was still out.
I called George. Conlan was down for a nap. He had eaten some cereal and successfully run away from her twice.
I hung up and dug through the kitchen of the dead house for salt. A big bag waited for me in the pantry. I carried it outside to the Jeep just in time to see Derek hefting four forty-pound bags like they weighed nothing.
“Where did you get this?”
“Found a communal hunters’ shed,” he said. “They must’ve used this for a deer salt lick. There is more.”
“We’ll need it.”
We headed toward the shed.
“Talk to me about scent trails,” I asked.
“Human,” he said. “But there’s something else with it. A screwed-up scent. When you smell a loup, it smells wrong. Toxic. You know there will be no talking. Either you kill it or it will kill you. These things stink like that. Loup but no loup.”
“Corrupted?” I guessed.
“Yeah. That’s a good word for it. They took the people out to the mouth of the subdivision.”
I waited but he didn’t say anything else.
“And then?”
“The scent stops,” he said. “It reappears by the puddle.”
“Stops like they teleported?”
“Pretty much.”
I’d run up against teleportation a couple of times. Teleporting a single human being took a staggering amount of power. The first time, a gathering of very powerful volhvs, Russian pagan priests, had done one, but it had taken a sacrifice to do it. The second time had been a djinn. Djinn were elder beings, extremely powerful and very rare. There simply wasn’t enough magic in the world to support the continuous existence of one. That particular djinn had been imprisoned inside a jewel. It was a sophisticated prison that sustained him between magic waves, when technology was at its highest. Even so, he’d required a human with a significant reservoir of magic whom he’d possessed in order to do his tricks, and then he’d hidden in Unicorn Lane, where some magic flowed even during the tech, for his final act.
How the hell did whoever this was disappear two hundred people?
I really didn’t want to deal with another djinn. I’d had a stroke, well, several small strokes simultaneously, and almost died the last time.
I turned to Derek. “Could you tell from the scents if all of the people disappeared at the same time?”
“Yes, and they did.”
“Two hundred people and whatever herded them,” I thought out loud. “Teleportation is right out. Too much magic. It has to be a pocket reality.”
Derek glanced at me.
“Remember during the last flare when Bran appeared? He spent most of his time in the mist outside of our reality.”
“I remember the rakshasas and their flying palace in a magical jungle.”
Of course he did. After what they’d done to his face, he would never forget them. “This is probably similar. Someone came out, grabbed a bunch of people, and took them somewhere.” Which would imply the presence of an elder power, which meant we were all screwed.
The elder powers—gods, djinn, dragons, the great, the powerful, the legendary—required too much magic to exist in our reality. They did exist somewhere, in the mists, in other realms or dimensions, loosely connected to us. Nobody quite knew how it all worked. Nobody knew what would happen if one of them manifested and was caught by a tech wave. Conventional wisdom said they would cease to exist, which was why the only time we saw any elder beings was during a flare, a magic tsunami that came every seven years. During the flare, the magic stayed for at least three days, sometimes longer.
This area wasn’t particularly saturated with magic. If we were dealing with an elder power, this one had balls. Normally, my knee-jerk response was to blame every odd, powerfully magical thing on my father, but it didn’t feel like him. I hadn’t sensed any familiar magic, and there was nothing elegant or refined about dumping the remains like that in some forgotten parking lot. My father’s magic shocked you with beauty before it killed you.
“It took two hundred people to its lair to boil them?” Derek asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they want the bones?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure if the bones were incidental to this. There are worse interpretations.”
Derek stopped and looked at me.
“They may have boiled them slowly while they were alive to torture them,” I said.
He turned to the shed.
“The world is a fucked-up place,” I told him. “That’s why I’m glad I have Conlan.”
He gave me a sharp look.
“The world needs more good people in it, and my son will be a good person.”
IT TOOK OVER two hours before the loud snarling of enchanted car engines announced Biohazard’s arrival. Two SUVs fought their way up the road, growling and spitting. Behind them a heavy armored truck brought in a cistern. Behind that came two more SUVs. The vehicles spat out people and containers of orange safety suits. They took one whiff of the air rising from the puddle fifty yards behind us and got masks on.
Luther strode toward us. Stocky and dark-haired, he was wearing boots, a pair of stained shorts, and a T-shirt that said KNIGHT IN THE STREETS, WIZARD IN THE SHEETS.
“I like the T-shirt,” I told him. “Very professional.”
He didn’t rise to the bait. He just stared at the jellied mass grave. We’d made a basic salt circle around it. The pavement was too broken for the chalk lines.
“I’ll need a statement,” he said. “From the werewolf and Thanatos, too. Where is he?”
I nodded. Teddy Jo had taken a spot on top of the warehouse roof, looking down at the grave. Black smoke curled from him, swirling around his body. If he’d had the power, he would’ve plucked the remains of a young couple from that grave and resurrected them. But he didn’t. None of us did. Only gods brought people back from the dead, and the results were usually mixed, to put it kindly.
“He’s grieving,” I told Luther. “One of his people is in that. He can’t shepherd his soul to the afterlife. To do that, he would have to perform rites over the body, and there is no way to separate it. He can’t bring the body back to the family. He is very angry, so I would be gentle in my questioning.”
Luther nodded.
I told him about the scent trail disappearing. The more I talked, the deeper his frown grew.