“Sublime.” Avery removed her coat and rolled up her sleeves. “But if I do not find anything, I am locking you in a closet.”
She was answered with a rasp that sounded suspiciously like an epithet.
The garbage smelled earthy, a bit like grass or unripe tomatoes. She picked through it carefully, navigating around discarded tea leaves and wet napkins. She had dug around for nearly five minutes, her right arm submerged to the elbow, before she gave up, putting the bin back into the cabinet with frustration. Nothing.
Riddle hissed.
“What?” Avery demanded. “What do you want me to see? There isnothinghere. Whatever you thought was there has clearly been emptied.”
The cat’s ears flattened, though whether it was annoyed by this revelation or that he did not have the ability to converse back wasn’t clear.
She moved to the sink. Its design differed slightly from that in her apartment, but the concept was relatively similar. She carefully turned the knob on the right and rinsed off her arm.
As she shook her arm dry, she looked back to the witch’s familiar, then the still-open dish rack cabinet. Was he trying to draw her attention to a particular dish? That there had been company? These were things to ask Saga. Perhaps something the old woman consumed had caused the heart attack. There were plants that if consumed could incite one, English yew being the first to come to mind. She considered the plates. The seeds could be baked easily into some kind of red fruit pie.
Curious. The arils of the English yew were edible, but surrounded a seed that contained the highest concentration of poison. It made them a dangerous snack, and it was possible that if a baked good had been made from yew arils by an inexperienced forager it could have had a deadly consequence.
She reached for the bin once more and sniffed cautiously. If any remnant of the yew arils remained in the bin, the piercingly sweet scent was overpowered by the grassy tea leaf odor. Still, it might be worth investigating further. She put the lid back on the bin and set it on the table. “I’ll be more thorough with this later.”
Riddle grumbled like he didn’t believe her.
Possible poisoning was not an avenue to be ignored, yet it did not explain the presence of magic. She needed more data.
Avery appraised the now cold tea. It was likely that this was where the woman had collapsed, but even with the buzzing in the air, it did not seem like the original source of the magic, merely where it went off, which presented an intriguing notion: a time-delayed spell.
The air was even stronger upstairs, thick as smoke and frigid. Something truly nasty had been unleashed on the occupant of this home. Something aimed and brutal. It felt like it had ripped through the protections of the home from the inside out, leaving the former comforts eviscerated and useless. Finding the source was akin to following a blood trail, which led her to the primary bedroom.
Divination had its obstacles. But divining the use of magic while the footprint was still so palpable was akin to dusting glass for fingerprints.
A bay leaf produced, a moment to focus the spell and channel the energy, and with one snap the fire ignited between her fingers. Sparks off the flame took the shape of ansuz, kenaz, and raidho.30 As before, the smoke twisted up from the burning leaf toward the ceiling, where it pooled and twisted above her like a storm cloud. It drew the haze in the air up toward it, along with every hint of darkness in the room, and as it gathered everything together, Avery noted it was easier to breathe.
The smoke dropped into shadow as it had before, but this time with far clearer outlines. The circle was the same, the shape of where the candles had been was the same; the ritual held in this space was undeniably identical to the one they’d seen remnants of in the first victim’s house. They could only have happened a few days apart. She could see the figure on the bed and identify her. An older woman lying flat on her back, asleep. The features were not a perfect copy, still constructed from umbra, but unlikebefore they were more shape than shadow. The most glaring difference was the pale hollowed-out crater in place of the heart.
These deathswererelated.
Avery cursed.
Riddle growled.
She didn’t understand it, but there wasn’t time to puzzle over it now. Unfortunately now was the time for damage control. She wasn’t winded when she opened the door to the outside, but there was a breathless quality to her voice. “Do you have any way of contacting Detective Lahiri?”
Saga jumped at her reappearance. “I-I can call him?”
“Good,” Avery said decisively. “Do that. It’s imperative no one but one of our own looks at the body.”
The woman blinked at her. Hard. “Why?”
“Our case and your grandmother’s death are connected.”
“How?”
Avery hesitated. There was no delicate way to answer that question and so she didn’t try to soften it. “Your grandmother’s heart was taken.”
“W-what?” Saga managed to push to her feet without tripping over the blanket that she still clung to. “No…that… Her heart? Why?”
“Please, Saga,” said Avery. “We haven’t much time.”
“I-I’ll call,” Saga fumbled for the phone in her pocket.
