Last Breath Read online

  I sniffed, noting the lack of footprints in the dust as I made my way toward the back gallery. Whoever had been here, they either had a hide-your-tracks spell, or they were using another entrance. I was betting on the former, otherwise why leave the front door unlocked and free of wards. In fact, the lack of wards was something bothering me almost as much as the lack of symbols on the circle perimeter. The aroma of burning sage and the invisible line that blocked a cold energy was all I had here. Maybe I had the wrong building. Maybe some kids had been hanging out on a back step, smoking some weird herbal blend and blowing it in through the broken windows. Maybe I was thinking of any excuse I could not to go farther.

  I wasn’t always such a coward, but that dead body today had shaken me more than I wanted to admit. The image of an empty rib cage sprang from my memory and I shut my eyes, shaking my head. Now wasn’t the time to freak out. Sage. It was just sage, and despite what I knew its uses could be, there were other, far more innocuous explanations for the smell. I’d seen no blood, no salt, no wards or runes or magical symbols of any kind.

  And the icy energy? I was going to ignore that, stiffen my spine and just keep going.

  The middle room of the gallery was as filthy as the front one, and free of any hint of magical undertakings. The rear room was the same. I noted the back entrance was a locked steel door, and that the windows were tightly sealed with plywood boards. Nothing. I nearly collapsed in relief, shaky from the adrenaline that had fled my body. I was so relieved that I almost missed the little saucepan just inside the back door. It was the cheap kind that you find at thrift stores, aluminum with yellow sides splattered with stains and burn marks. Inside was a pile of ashes. Burned sage leaves curled gray on a charred bundle of twigs. Someone had smudged the building, but it looked like they hadn’t done anything but smudge. I doubt they would have gone to all the bother to remove all trace of their magical workings only to leave an old pot of ashes by the doorway. But why go to the trouble to smudge and not use the building?

  I frowned down at the ashes, remembering ceremonies and spells from my own grimoire and other research. Sage to clear the space either before or after the ritual—or both. But sometimes sage was used during a ritual, on the outside of a magical space.

  It was to keep the bad shit away that might be drawn to a dark working. Or even keep the bad shit contained in case the protections inside the circle failed. I caught my breath, adrenaline surging again as I peered into the pot and took out my keychain.

  In spite of regular church attendance, Sunday school, and education in a variety of spiritual belief systems, my family wasn’t what I’d call particularly religious. But we were Templars, and when you were born with a mission from God, you tended to follow the general path. My keychain was a seven inch, 14k gold crucifix. It was perfect for fending off vampires, but also could serve as a faith-based focus to bless a space or guard against malevolent spirits.

  It was also very useful for digging into a pot of ashes when I wasn’t sure if what was in there would take my finger off. I wasn’t about to risk my sword, or the butter knife that I’d swiped from my kitchen and spent long nights spelling. The keychain was expensive but replaceable, and beyond its spiritual significance, it wasn’t imbued with any magical powers whose presence might set off a particularly stealthy ward.

  I stirred the ashes, waiting for them to settle before shining the light downward into the pot and peering over the edge. There, among the burned leaves was a shining white bone. I grimaced, wishing I’d brought tweezers. I really needed some kind of Templar readiness kit if I was going to start doing these things regularly. A multi-tool. Some rope and bungie cords. Chalk and a mirror. A Glock.

  I dumped the pot over, spilling the ashes and bone onto the dusty ground. If only I’d been packing a tissue, or paper towel. Something else to add to my Templar kit. But I didn’t have any handy and this old gallery was empty of anything except broken shelving.

  The moment the mixture hit the ground I felt it. Icy winds that stirred nothing. Something tickled along my spine and I jumped, spinning with my sword outstretched. It encountered only air. And the beam from my flashlight revealed nothing.

  But it was cold—way too cold for an August night. My breath fogged the air in front of me and from out of the silence I heard a scream.

  Some noises practically stop your heart, some send a surge of adrenaline through it, some cause you to cower and cringe. This one locked me in place. I could do nothing but stand and wait for the wail to end. It tapered off with another rush of cold, and abruptly everything returned to normal. I began sweating from the sudden change in temperature, and noted the faint noise of crickets that had been silent before.

  My body desperately wanted to flee, but my mind prevailed. I still had that feeling of being watched, still felt the lingering remains of cold energy, but whatever that Big Bad had been, I got the impression it was gone. For now. Which meant I needed to hurry if I was going to figure out what the heck was going on here in Old Town Mall, and what Ronald Stull had to do with any of it. Starting with the contents of this pot.

  Turning back around, I picked up the bone and hurriedly stuck it in my jacket pocket, exhaling when I didn’t burst into flames or fall through the floor. I knew a lot of stuff, but bone identification wasn’t on the list. I wasn’t sure I even had the correct texts to figure out what animal the bone was from, and the answer would be important. Every little detail was important when it came to magic. Whether the bone was a crow or a cat or a rat would mean all the difference in exactly what the practitioner was smudging to protect against, as well as give me some indication of what the icy presence had been.

  But in the meantime, I had some adjoining buildings to search, and the thought gave me the creeps. Smudging an empty building either meant the area of ritual was large or whatever they didn’t want to find them was pretty scary. Either one made me think twice about proceeding. I could go home, check out what this bone was, then come back in the daylight when less scary stuff was up and about.

  But that left time for someone to clean up after themselves. Besides, daytime posed its own risks and I doubted whoever was in charge of revitalizing this area would like a woman prowling around the condemned buildings. It was now, or quite possibly never.

  The next store was locked up tight. I squeezed down the narrow side alleyway to the rear and found the back door equally secure. Looking in through the gaps in the window boards, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Which left either the building on the other side of the gallery, or one across the street.

  I was feeling a bit like a coward so I tried the one across the street. The door was nailed shut, but with some wiggling and considerable muttered curses I was able to wedge myself through two boards that blocked a rear window.

  It wasn’t the smell of sage that came to me the moment I got inside but something else. The thick, sweet, coppery scent of blood hit my nose. It was summer, and in spite of the thunderstorm, today had been hot. Either the blood had been used in a ritual within the last day, or something had been added to it to help keep it fresh. Steeling myself for the worst, I readied my sword and my flashlight, and walked forward.

  This building had been sectioned off into a maze with shelves and partitions. No wonder they’d gone out of business because the layout was a shoplifter’s dream. No employee could hope to be able to see what customers were doing with all little nooks, crannies, and aisles to hide in. There weren’t enough security cameras in the world to monitor this kind of layout. And it wasn’t even ideal for magic. As I’d learned trying to do a summoning in my apartment, carpet, walls, and fixtures meant the biggest space for a circle was teeny tiny. Summoning a demon was dicey enough without pissing one off by summoning them into a space too small to even turn around in.

  Of course, not all magic was geared toward summoning. I’d always been fascinated by the greater spirits and that had been the avenue that the majority of my clandestine studies had taken. I wa
s well aware that there were many rituals that benefited from a small, enclosed space. So I wasn’t overly surprised when I rounded a corner and laid eyes on a literal blood bath.

  Bath. As in bathtub. Not one of those beautiful, clawed-foot ones that you see in posh home-improvement magazines either. This bathtub looked like something out of a third-world hillbilly digest. It was little more than a white plastic hundred gallon stock feeder, and it was more red than white.

  I choked back the bile that rose in my throat. Flies swarmed all over the tub. Blood stained the sides and the linoleum floor beneath, nearly obscuring the white chalk circles and symbols. I needed to take pictures of the magical space to research later, but I only had two hands and was reluctant to put down either my flashlight or my sword.

  The sword won. I propped the flashlight up on a nearby shelf and pulled out my cell phone, snapping pictures as I held the weapon with a white-knuckled grip. That done, I pocketed the phone, picked up the flashlight and moved forward to look inside the tub.

  I had no fear of triggering wards or encountering residual magic from the ritual. Death magic was horrific, but it was efficient. Every last bit of energy derived from the killing went to its intended purpose. As messy as the site was from a crime-scene perspective, it wasn’t at all messy from a magical one.

  Not that those facts made me feel any better. Something had died in that tub and I didn’t want to know what. But Ronald had died too, and clearly he’d been connected to whatever went down here. From what my LARP friends said, Ronald’s death had been no great tragedy, but he was still a human being. He was still somebody’s son or husband or brother. And beyond that, a mage doing sacrificial magic in my city was unacceptable. Spells powered by the murder of another human weren’t all unicorn sparkles and fairy dust, and besides the spell, death magic drew bad stuff. Beings of the underworld were attracted to it. No doubt that was why they’d smudged a large area around the ritual with sage.

  I looked over the edge of the tub and choked. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill death spell, if there was such a thing. This was the stuff of nightmares, and no amount of sage and bones was going to help us if what happened here was what I thought it was.

  Chapter 7

  I’D AT LEAST had the forethought to stash my sword and butter knife back in my car before the police arrived. Yes, I called the police. As much as I didn’t want to deal with all the questions and red-tape bureaucracy, I couldn’t leave a dead woman to rot in the ruins of an abandoned store.

  I also called Janice, leaving her a message to meet me for breakfast in the morning. She’d been a huge help to me before, and I’d sorta agreed to give her first scoop on this sort of thing. What the reporter was going to actually do with a demon slaying and a death-magic ritual murder, I had no idea.

  My next call was to Raven. I was shocked out of my mind when she picked up on the first ring.

  “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.