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Yellow crime tape was too expensive to produce in the world that hated factories and plastics, and the cops rarely used it anymore. A single white sticker, slapped across the door and frame, barred entry to the house, and the shapeshifters had already cut it. The door stood wide open, and she went inside. He followed her.
Before the Shift, the processing of a murder scene could take days. Now it took three hours, because murders were plentiful and cops were stretched thin. It was all the time they could spare.
Julie walked straight to the built-in bookcase in the living room, took several books off the shelf, picking them up together, and set them on the floor. Behind the books, a single narrow slit indicated a hidden niche. She pried at it with her nails, and a small section of the wall fell forward, revealing a dark opening and a plastic box inside. Julie pulled it out and popped the lid.
They stared at the rock. A little larger than a softball, it resembled pyrite, fool’s gold, except it was bluish white and glowed gently with a cold, dispassionate light. Most of it was rounded, but on one side the stone ended sharply, as if a part had broken off. The hair on the back of his neck rose. He couldn’t explain why, but something about that rock made him wary. If he were in his wolf form, he would’ve circled it on careful paws and left it where it lay.
“Do you see anything?”
Julie frowned. Sensates like her saw the magic in an array of colors, something other people tried to duplicate by building m-scanners.
“Pale bluish silver glow.”
“Divine?” Divine objects and creatures glowed with silver.
“No, not divine. White and blue. Different kind of white.”
“What registers this kind of white?”
“Elemental magic.” She looked at him, her eyes bottomless. “They killed the Iveses for this?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and peered at the rock. “What are you?”
He half expected the rock to answer, but it stayed silent, glowing weakly.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Someone jumped Luther,” she said.
“Luther? The Biohazard wizard?”
“Yep. Kate is out with Curran, so I took the call. They didn’t kill him, probably because they knew he worked for Biohazard, and they didn’t want a whole gaggle of mages hunting them down, so they hit him over the head as he was stepping out of his car. He doesn’t remember it. He remembers parking and then waking up on the ground with a headache and a bloody head. That afternoon someone brought him a rock. They claimed it fell from the sky and glowed under moonlight, and they wanted a thousand dollars for it. The magic was down by the time the rock got to Luther, so he bargained them down to three hundred bucks. He tried to get a sample to analyze, but he couldn’t cut it at his lab—nothing worked—so he took it to the Mage College, where they managed to slice a small flake from it. He was bringing the rock back to Biohazard when he was attacked.”
She reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out a small plastic vial. Inside, a tiny crumb of the rock glowed. “Luther is down with a concussion, so he couldn’t go look for it.”
And he wouldn’t ask his colleagues for help, because they’d ask why the hell he’d taken a possibly magic rock out of the Biohazard building. She probably hadn’t told him she would be the one doing the job. Most likely Luther thought Kate was on it. He would’ve done the same in her place. Why worry the client? As long as the job gets done, it doesn’t matter who does it.
“So I went to the place where the rock was found, climbed the building, and waited for the magic to hit.” She tapped the contai
ner. “The rock’s magic shines like a tiny star. If you know what to look for, you can see it from miles away.”
Which meant that if Caleb could see it, he would know exactly where they were at all times. “Any way to hide it?”
She shook her head. “It’s magic, Derek. I saw it through the house. Your turn. Why are you here?”
He started with a call from Curran and coming to the house where Hope, Melissa Ives’ sister, frantically rocked herself, crying hysterically. Curran and Kate patronized that shop. It was a well-known fact, and when she found the bodies, she called 911 first and Curran second. Curran, in turn, had called him. His orders simple: Find the people responsible and make sure they never do it again. How exactly he went about it was up to him. He made sure to have Melissa Ives’ sister sign the contract hiring him and Kate and Curran’s firm to investigate the murder. Anything he did in the pursuit of the investigation gave him a blanket umbrella of self-defense. After speaking to the overworked detective at the scene, he doubted he’d need it, but Kate liked to keep things legal, and he respected her wishes.
He glossed over finding the bodies. He did tell her about Caleb Adams, the rock that broke in three parts, and the dead men in the bar. Her face got tighter and tighter as he spoke.
“I hate people,” she said when he finished.
He wasn’t a fan of people either.
“What does it do?” he asked, looking at the rock.
“I don’t know.”
