I adjusted the strap on my shoulder, belonging to my ratty old duffel bag as I climbed out of Ammy’s car. It was a heavy weight, filled with all the random shit I couldn’t fit in my pockets, and everything inside it rattled around noisily every time I moved. Misty -- the little girl had told me her name on the drive -- lived in The Forest. That’s what we called the rich part of town. A bunch of expensive-ass houses in the outskirts of the city, bordering on the woods that surrounded the city’s east end. Her home was on the smaller side of the houses out here. It wasn’t a mansion by any means, but it was still miles nicer than any home I’d ever been inside. It was a cute home, with a bright red door and pretty, green walls. The front yard was obviously well-cared for and was covered in inflatable Halloween decorations.
I looked over at Misty, who seemed to be avoiding the front door. “Did you walk all the way to our apartment?”
The little girl nodded, wringing her bag of change instead of the newspaper clipping. “Um. They wouldn’t let me on the bus without a grown up.”
Ammy leaned down and picked her up. “You know what? Why don’t we sit in the car while Tabi tries to wake your daddy up?”
Misty took a long look at the front door but didn’t answer her, so Ammy just carried her back to the car.
I knocked on the door, but nobody answered it. I took one last look back at Ammy and Misty, only to see the kid burying her head in Ammy’s shoulder and Ammy petting her head softly. With a sigh, I turned around and pushed open the door.
It opened up to the living room. What once must have been a nicely furnished room had been turned over, like a tornado had rushed through it. The blue couch was upturned, the TV’s screen was shattered. There were photos on the ground, snapped and crushed during whatever happened. A man’s body was lying face-up on the ground, one arm extended to the side and loosely gripping a shotgun. He had no shirt on, just a pair of old sweat pants. I didn’t see any wounds, and definitely not any blood. I breathed a small sigh of relief at that and then walked over to the corpse.
I squatted down beside the body, dropped my duffel bag, then started digging through the mess within. I didn’t really have an organizational system in it, which meant any time I thought ‘yeah, I might need that’ I threw something into the bag. The result was a massive ocean of random, cluttered shit that might only be useful in very specific circumstances. Sometimes I worried the overfilled, chaotic mess might someday spell my death; I might take too long digging for something while running from a crazed werewolf or faerie or something and meet a grizzly end. But I could never bring myself to clean it out. I’d always be too paranoid that the next time I went out, it would be the one time I needed that rock salt or the holy water grenade or something.
It took me a few minutes to dig through the mess. Salt? Nope. Don’t need those bullets. Oh, that’s where my old MP3 player went. What is Ammy’s lipstick doing in here? I told her not to touch my bag… Oh, there we go.
I pulled out a collapsible iron baton and flicked it to the side to extend it fully. It pressed against his cheek, mushing the flesh there. Satisfied he wasn’t a Faerie playing some kind of weird trick, I placed the baton in my parka’s pocket and then dug back through my duffel bag until I found a pair of heavy-duty gloves. I’d already learned my lesson about poking around potential crime scenes and getting prints everywhere and that was not a trip to the police station I wanted to relive.
Seeing his face, the man looked a little bit like Misty. He was pale with green eyes, though he had her red hair. His eyes were open, looking like he’d died in shock, and his mouth was hanging open slightly. I didn’t see any wounds on his front, either. I pulled my phone out and then called up Ammy.
“What’s up?” She answered on the first ring.
“Put your headphones in. I don’t want Misty listening in.”
I listened to her messing with her phone, and caught Misty asking what was happening. I sighed as I looked down at the body of the man in front of me. How was I going to explain this to her?
“Okay, go ahead.”
“Found Misty’s dad. No visible wounds, but…” I placed my index and middle fingers against his wrist and counted to ten, waiting for a pulse that never came. “Definitely dead.”
I heard a muffled “stay right here, sweetie.” Followed by the sound of the car door closing. “Do you need me in there?”
I shook my head, even though Ammy couldn’t see it. “No, stay with Misty. I just need to talk this out.”
“Alright. Any idea what killed him?”
I pushed his lips up with the baton, looking in at his mouth. “Not yet.”
“Well, what do you have on him?”
“Nothing weird in his mouth.”
“Weird like what?”
“Sometimes with deaths like this, you’d expect to see a rune on his tongue or his gums. Pull the air out of their lungs and suffocate them. If a wizard really wants to murder someone without getting mundane police on his tail...”
“I get the picture.”
I sighed as I stared down at him. “Nothing on him. It’s almost like he just fell over.”
“Maybe he did? There’s gotta be a million ways to magic someone to death, right?”
“Not this cleanly. If the room wasn’t destroyed you wouldn’t even know there was a fight.”
“Might just be a mundane cause?”
I frowned and looked down at the shotgun, then at the man, and stood up. “I don’t know. Something about this doesn’t really say mundane to me.” I held my hand up until I got to about where I figured the man would have held the gun and followed its line-of-sight.
Then I felt really fucking stupid, because the wall was riddled in bullet holes. Obviously enough that I could have seen them if I just turned around. Thankfully, the wall did yield a clue. A white-ish stain, smack in the middle of the bullet spread. “Found something.”
“What is it?”
I carefully navigated around the broken stuff on my way to the wall. “A stain.”
“Our walls are covered in stains.”
“Yeah but it’s a white stain.” I poked the stain with my iron baton, which made the white splotch hiss and smoke. It started to shine and went from white to constantly cycling through every color in the rainbow, and gave off a soothing pine scent.
“...I hear that hissing. Faerie blood?”
The stain grew smaller and smaller as I held the baton against it. “Faerie blood. Smells like pine, so that makes it Summer.”
“Hm… What kind of Summer Faerie kills without leaving a trace? That sounds like it’s more up Winter’s alley.”
Even after the stain was gone, the pine smell lingered powerfully. “Well, that’s the thing. It did leave a trace. Living room is fucked all to hell. I don’t think it killed Misty’s dad.”
“So, are we thinking wizard? Leashed a Faerie to do his muscle work?”
“Warlock, maybe. This is too messy for The Collective.”
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With no other clues out in the living room, I grabbed my duffel and headed into the hall.
“The fight didn’t move past the living room. None of the pictures in the hallway are messed up.” There were a lot of them. For a six year old, Misty was very photogenic, and was the spitting image of her mother. The only thing, even, that Misty seemed to take from her father was his hair and maybe his nose. Everything else came from her mom. They seemed like such a happy family, if the photos were anything to judge by.
Something caught my eye on the floor. A sparkle in the carpet that caught in the light of the sun filtering in through one of the living room windows. I knelt down to get a closer look, but the change in angle had the sparkle disappear.
“There’s something shining on the floor.”
“What do you mean?”
I put her on speaker and then flipped my phone’s flashlight on, waving it around until the light caught on the sparkle again. There were a lot of them, actually. A little line of tiny little twinkly things. I pushed my finger tip on one and felt something hard push against my skin. Pinching the little thing between my fingers, I brought it up close. It was a clear stone of some sort, from what I could see, but so tiny and fine it was difficult to really get a clear picture of what it was.
“There’s… a trail of little stones?”
“Like rocks?”
“No, like little… crystals, I guess.”
I stood up and then followed the shiny, crystal trail. I was forced to keep low to the ground to make sure my phone’s flash caught on them. The little trail led me down to a room at the end of the hall. It was clearly Misty’s parents’ room, though it had been worked over like the living room. The blankets and sheets had been thrown all around the room, the contents of the dresser at the back wall were thrown all over the floor, and one of the drawers was laying cracked where it was tossed aside in what I figured was anger at being unable to find whatever my alleged warlock was after. And unlike the living room, there was blood here. It wasn’t a lot, but I could see a dark splotch of it against the corner of the bed frame. My hands felt a little shaky as I took a closer look and pressed my baton to it, but the dried blood didn’t react at all. Human blood was always worse than anything else, even dried.
“There’s dried blood on the bed frame,” I reported to Ammy, bringing my phone around to shine a light down behind the frame.
“Faerie again?”
“Human.” I crouched down, seeing something that caught my attention by the bottom of the bed. There was an indent in the carpet, by the leg. I “hmm”ed and got down on my hands and knees to shine my light under the bed, and sure enough there were more indents by the other legs.
“I know that hum. Whatcha got, Sherlock?”
“The bed’s been moved. I can still kinda see where the legs used to sit.”
“You think it’s related? People move their beds all the time.”
“No way to know ‘til I actually look, dummy,” I chided her as I got down on my stomach and crawled under the bed. The light didn’t illuminate much other than dust bunnies and some discarded papers, but my gut was still telling me there was something down here I was missing. Unfortunately, none of the dust bunnies were feeling very talkative.
“Find anything down there?”
“Nope. Just dust. Nobody’s even cleaned under here in ages.”
“Maybe there’s something in the mattress? Maybe they hid something under it, like in that fabricy thing in a box spring.”
“I wouldn’t be able to check if they did without pulling the mattress off. It’s one of those heavy wood frames,” I said, as I rolled over onto my back to look at the wooden slat that separated the sight of the mattress from me, “with the big wooden board under…”
My flashlight caught a shape drawn onto the board. I couldn’t see it too well from my angle. “What the fuck is that?”
“What is what? What’d you find?”
I shimmied on my back to slide myself a bit further under the bed until the shape was directly above me. My suspicions were immediately confirmed when I saw it: It was drawn in what looked like red chalk. A small circle, no larger than the palm of my hand, with lines drawn in what to the untrained eye would appear like a random, chaotic pattern, with smaller circles drawn along the various lines at seemingly random intervals. It was unmistakably a rune, but it wasn’t Runic Standard.
“There’s a rune under the bed. Looks like chalk, so it wasn’t meant to last. Couldn’t have been here more than a week if it’s been active the whole time.”
I could hear Ammy once more telling Misty to stay put as she got out of the car to talk to me in private. “Protection rune?”
I bit my glove and pulled it off my right hand, then gently traced the lines of the rune with my finger. I might have been leaving prints behind, but I doubted the police would even think to check down here. “No idea. It’s custom work. Intricate circuitry.”
“You think they’re unregistered mages? She did say her mother said they were illegal. They might be in an illegal coven.”
“Runework this complex isn’t just unregistered mages. Whoever made this had Collective training, or knew someone who did.” I continued tracing each individual line with my finger, trying to figure out the author’s stroke order. Stroke order was extremely important in runic magic. Each line-and-circle pattern made up a circuit, and the order they were created dictated the way the mana flowed through the rune and, therefore, the kind of spell it made.
“So… Warlocks.”
“I don’t think this was her family, but yeah. Definitely a warlock.” My finger scratched off a little bit of chalk dust as I traced the circuits in the rune. The chalk was coming off, so it was either burnt out or already served its purpose. And based on the circuitry, I was getting a good idea of what, exactly, the rune was for.
“Why are you so sure?”
“This thing looks pretty old school. The way the circuits are connected makes a few different crosshatch patterns and kinda muddies the whole thing, but… if I’m tracing this right, it’s a tracking rune.”
“On a bed? Why would you need to track a bed?”
I took a picture of the rune, just in case I needed to look at it later. “No, this kind of tracking spell tracks locations, not people. This wasn’t a random home invasion, someone marked Misty’s parents specifically.”
“Why would they disappear her mom and kill her dad if they wanted to track them?”
I looked around under the bed. From where I was, if I were to be drawing this, I’d have had a perfect angle of the hallway to see if anybody was coming. I’d see their shadows long before I even saw their legs.
“Our warlock had been in the house before the attack. They put this here while they were… I don’t know. Casing them? I’ve got a good angle down the hall and there’s no windows that could see me from here.”
“...You think they were in the house while the warlock was there?”
“Or he wanted to make sure he could see them coming.”
I stared at the rune. The circuitry was definitely custom -- Runic Standard doesn’t like overlapping circuits. Too much room to fuck up your strokes and make a wildly different spell. The only reason someone would do something like that would be to obfuscate their tracks, since reverse engineering is not a skill most Runists have. I made a mental note to thank Marrick for instilling a love of study in me early and then clambored my way out from under the bed.
“This was a reminder,” I said with a grunt as I pulled myself up. “The warlock wanted to remember this house. Can you do me a favor? Google home invasions around here. There’s gotta be a reason Misty’s family was targeted.”
“On it, but how is that gonna help us?”
I pulled my glove back on, cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder to give me both hands to do so. “No way this was the warlock’s first hit. The more of these we find, the more I can put together a pattern and figure out what the hell he was looking for. I doubt Misty has any idea.”
“I wouldn't wanna ask her to relive this all anyway.”
I grunted in agreement as I headed to the closet. Misty mentioned she hid in one, and I figured this would be as good a closet to check as any.
The closet was open, and there was a small pile of those little crystals sitting against one corner. So many of them piled atop one another I could see them without the help of the light. They made maybe half-a-fistfull altogether, but compared to the barely-visible trails everywhere else it was a shocking amount. I moved into the closet and crouched down to look at the crystals and frowned.
“More crystals in the closet.”
Ammy clicked her tongue. “Wonder what they are?”
I wasn’t entirely sure, but I dug in my duffel for a little sandwich baggy and collected a little pinch of crystals into it. I looked over to the bed as I did this, and stared at the end of the bed. The end with the dried blood was closest to the closet. I sealed up the baggy and then adjusted myself in the closet, sitting down in the corner with the crystals to look out at the bed. I felt a cold shiver down my spine as a morbid picture started to play in my mind. Misty, huddled up in this dark corner, the closet not quite fully closed; the corner of the bedframe visible through the crack. She wouldn’t be able to see the intruder, probably, but the shape of her mother’s head hitting the bedframe? It would be painfully visible.
“I think Misty saw the attack.”
“It didn’t sound like she did?”
I reached over to grab the closet door and slide it closed, to test my theory -- which worked better than I thought, as I couldn’t get it to close completely. It was broken, apparently, and from the corner I could look out at the bedframe.
“She said her mom put her in the closet. There’s a corner covered with crystals, and the door doesn’t close all the way. If I sit here, I can see that bloody bedframe. She saw something. I’m sure of it.”
Ammy was silent on the other line for a while. “Do you think she saw our warlock?”
“No way to be sure,” I murmured to myself, staring out at that bloody corner. It was dry, and yet my heart still sped up. I still felt shaky, and it only got worse when I couldn’t help but imagine that poor woman hitting that corner and leaving that little splotch of blood.
“Should… Should we ask her?”
The question lingered in the air, neither one of us feeling qualified to ask a kid to relive that trauma, but both of us knowing if we wanted answers we’d have to do it. I decided it would be better to mull it over with some ice cream before really jumping into that barrel of worms.