But just to be sure, I reached for another phial, this one filled with a glittery pink dust. Hell, for all I knew it could have been actual glitter, but Herald said it was perfect for covering my tracks. Not that I ever left any, mind, but better safe than sorry. I tapped some out onto the ground, grinding my shoes into the dust. The stuff disappeared into my soles, supposedly making it even easier for me to move around without making any noise. Sure, why not. A little bit of fairy dust to help Dust out.
I crept forward, taking care not to make a peep because, magical assistance or no, it wasn’t like I was invisible. I craned my neck in search of the witch’s grimoire, sure that the Pruitts had stashed it away in a highly secure safe or somewhere similar, when I noticed the sound of rustling, like something fluttering, only more dry and, well, papery. Ah, there it was, right on the marble kitchen counter, laid open and flat: The Book of Plagues. How anticlimactic.
It was just as the Lorica had described, nearly a foot in length, the approximate thickness of a phonebook, and bound in a deep red leather. Demon skin, if my dossier was to be believed, though I was never quick to discount little tidbits like that anymore.
Some of the Hands at the Lorica had told me about their experiences with demons, enough to tell me that I’d never want to run into one, and enough to tell me that the witch who handmade this grisly book of shadows was plenty powerful enough to take one down on her own. She probably skinned it herself, too.
And this thing, the Book of Plagues, it wasn’t happy. It thrashed on the marble, as close to thrashing as an animated magical object could manage, its leather warping and stretching as it struggled unsuccessfully to work its way off the counter. To go where, exactly?
“Relax, little buddy,” I said. “You’d just fall right smack on the floor. You’re better off waiting for me to extract you.”
The book rustled its pages in defiance. Best not to make it angry, I decided. You never knew with these artifacts. Some, I’d been told, could be booby trapped, enchanted with failsafes by their crazy sorcerous owners. A rare few, the really sentient ones, could even cast spells on their own.
I pulled out a third phial, this one filled with a dull purple dust. I know, lots of phials, and a hell of a lot of dust, but it certainly beat hauling around bags of gadgetry everywhere I went. This way Hounds could travel light. It made infiltration easier, and much safer, too. This bottle contained a recent concoction by one of the Lorica’s alchemists – Herald himself, actually – and I was told that it’d be perfect for neutralizing, shall we say, more belligerent targets.
The stuff was designed for use on living things, but the way the book was writhing all over the counter I figured it might have a shot of working. I sprinkled some of it across the pages, wincing and holding my breath as the rustling blew some of it upward in a puff of lavender dust.
Still, that seemed to do the trick. Within seconds the grimoire stopped struggling and fluttering as it settled into a quiet, temporary sleep, or whatever semblance of sleep an animated book of shadows was capable of.
And with work out of the way I could take my sweet time, have a little snack. I needed the nutrients to keep growing, or at least that was my excuse. But maybe I’d stopped growing. Pushing six feet at twenty-four, so maybe that was tall enough, but I got hungry when I worked sometimes. Never enough to make myself a sandwich in a stranger’s kitchen, but if they had some food sitting out, hey, I wouldn’t say no.
Incidentally, there was a bowl of fruit on the counter, and a little tray of chocolate truffles, each wrapped in foil. I helped myself to one – okay, three awfully juicy red grapes, and popped a truffle in my pocket. They wouldn’t miss just the one. No big deal, right? Just a couple of treats, nothing serious, or maybe I just thought that way since I had never been averse to a bit of casual thievery.
It started when I was younger, when I learned how to sneak myself a few extra helpings of chicken nuggets at the dinner table while quietly discarding my brussels sprouts. Somehow that transitioned into palming and pocketing trading cards when I was pretending to just check another kid’s collection out at school. At most it turned into nicking a drink, hey, maybe a pack of smokes from a convenience store. The smoking never stuck, but the itchy fingers were there to stay.
Which, I suppose, made me ideal for my current occupation. Still I tried not to swipe anything truly valuable from a scene. The worst was a bottle of beer, which got me into real trouble with my supervisor, who said that it was tantamount to drinking on the job, but come on. A guy could get thirsty. And it was one bottle. That was hardly theft. I mean, I got paid enough.
The Eyes got paid better, though. The Hands, more so. You didn’t get much for being just a Hound, which was all kinds of weird since we did lots of field work. Maybe I just got less because I was new. But yeah, Hound work could get so dangerous, too. Sometimes that danger was a dog. Sometimes, if the homeowner was a little crazier, it was a loaded crossbow. But work was work. Just another day on the job. Sniff something out, fetch it.
Speaking of sniffing, that was when it hit me. After the sweetness of the grapes had faded, I caught a whiff of something different in the air. This sharp scent, like metal, and underneath that, something sickly sweet. In retrospect, I should have sensed it earlier, this metallic tang. I figured that it might have been something the Pruitts had left out in the kitchen, but the reality was far worse. Grislier.
I stepped past the kitchen counter, and there they were. Bodies, sprawled on the floor. Two of them, one male, one female, each haloed in mingled pools of blood that still burned angry and red in the gloom. Symbols were daubed on the floor around them, forming a ring in what I could only guess was a kind of ritual circle.
My heart raced, and the inside of my throat went sour. What the hell had happened here? I only knew the Pruitts from studying their dossier, some preliminary web searches, and watching the videos the Lorica had linked for me, but seeing them splayed out like that, with their insides out on the kitchen floor for all to see? That was the kind of intimacy I didn’t need. Somehow all the research I’d conducted didn’t feel at all like an invasion of privacy, up until the point where I got to see for myself how much blood a person really kept inside them, or how much intestine there really was in the human body.
The near-perfect hole blown straight through Jenna Pruitt’s stomach didn’t leave much to the imagination. N
either did the matching hole that went right through Hank Pruitt’s chest. His heart must have been in there somewhere, strewn amid the gore, one of the pulpier masses on the kitchen tile. It looked like someone had shoved a telephone pole straight through their bodies.
I gagged, and I fought back the urge to retch right there. This wasn’t part of the job. I’d never seen dead bodies before. And that smell of rot? I didn’t know enough to gauge how long their corpses had been there, but I did know that they couldn’t have been dead long enough to start smelling that way.
No, that stench came from the third corpse. The one that had a man’s body, but the unmistakeable dead red eyes, whiskered muzzle, and matted fur of a rodent. It was half man, and half giant rat.
Yeah. Just another day on the job.
Chapter 2
“It’s a god.”
No mistake. That was what one of the guys said, one of the team the Lorica had rushed over to the hillside house the moment I reported the corpses. And no joke, the very moment. The Lorica didn’t kid around with efficiency, and it put its best teleporters on the job.
But we’re burying the lede. A god. The thing-man-creature with a rat’s head was a plague god from the Egyptian pantheon, originally from the Canaanites. Resheph. That was his name.
The first surprise there, of course, was that it was possible to kill gods. The second was the fact that gods existed at all. I had a lot of questions for Thea, but that would have to wait until I got back to HQ. Until then I had to fake enough to pretend that I knew what was going on at all.
Close to twenty men and women had blinked into existence mere minutes after I called in the dilemma. The Lorica’s Wings – mages who specialized in teleportation and transportation magic – worked fast.
Then an hour slid by and the hillside house turned into the very picture of a regular crime scene, only – not at all. They were working double duty, collecting evidence, first of all, but also scrubbing the scene of any signs that might point to the crime being anything but achievable in the realm of humanity.