“Pretty much.”
I’d run up against teleportation a couple of times. Teleporting a single human being took a staggering amount of power. The first time, a gathering of very powerful volhvs, Russian pagan priests, had done one, but it had taken a sacrifice to do it. The second time had been a djinn. Djinn were elder beings, extremely powerful and very rare. There simply wasn’t enough magic in the world to support the continuous existence of one. That particular djinn had been imprisoned inside a jewel. It was a sophisticated prison that sustained him between magic waves, when technology was at its highest. Even so, he’d required a human with a significant reservoir of magic whom he’d possessed in order to do his tricks, and then he’d hidden in Unicorn Lane, where some magic flowed even during the tech, for his final act.
How the hell did whoever this was disappear two hundred people?
I really didn’t want to deal with another djinn. I’d had a stroke, well, several small strokes simultaneously, and almost died the last time.
I turned to Derek. “Could you tell from the scents if all of the people disappeared at the same time?”
“Yes, and they did.”
“Two hundred people and whatever herded them,” I thought out loud. “Teleportation is right out. Too much magic. It has to be a pocket reality.”
Derek glanced at me.
“Remember during the last flare when Bran appeared? He spent most of his time in the mist outside of our reality.”
“I remember the rakshasas and their flying palace in a magical jungle.”
Of course he did. After what they’d done to his face, he would never forget them. “This is probably similar. Someone came out, grabbed a bunch of people, and took them somewhere.” Which would imply the presence of an elder power, which meant we were all screwed.
The elder powers—gods, djinn, dragons, the great, the powerful, the legendary—required too much magic to exist in our reality. They did exist somewhere, in the mists, in other realms or dimensions, loosely connected to us. Nobody quite knew how it all worked. Nobody knew what would happen if one of them manifested and was caught by a tech wave. Conventional wisdom said they would cease to exist, which was why the only time we saw any elder beings was during a flare, a magic tsunami that came every seven years. During the flare, the magic stayed for at least three days, sometimes longer.
This area wasn’t particularly saturated with magic. If we were dealing with an elder power, this one had balls. Normally, my knee-jerk response was to blame every odd, powerfully magical thing on my father, but it didn’t feel like him. I hadn’t sensed any familiar magic, and there was nothing elegant or refined about dumping the remains like that in some forgotten parking lot. My father’s magic shocked you with beauty before it killed you.
“It took two hundred people to its lair to boil them?” Derek asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they want the bones?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure if the bones were incidental to this. There are worse interpretations.”
Derek stopped and looked at me.
“They may have boiled them slowly while they were alive to torture them,” I said.
He turned to the shed.
“The world is a fucked-up place,” I told him. “That’s why I’m glad I have Conlan.”
He gave me a sharp look.
“The world needs more good people in it, and my son will be a good person.”
* * *
? ? ?
IT TOOK OVER two hours before the loud snarling of enchanted car engines announced Biohazard’s arrival. Two SUVs fought their way up the road, growling and spitting. Behind them a heavy armored truck brought in a cistern. Behind that came two more SUVs. The vehicles spat out people and containers of orange safety suits. They took one whiff of the air rising from the puddle fifty yards behind us and got masks on.
Luther strode toward us. Stocky and dark-haired, he was wearing boots, a pair of stained shorts, and a T-shirt that said KNIGHT IN THE STREETS, WIZARD IN THE SHEETS.
“I like the T-shirt,” I told him. “Very professional.”
He didn’t rise to the bait. He just stared at the jellied mass grave. We’d made a basic salt circle around it. The pavement was too broken for the chalk lines.
“I’ll need a statement,” he said. “From the werewolf and Thanatos, too. Where is he?”
I nodded. Teddy Jo had taken a spot on top of the warehouse roof, looking down at the grave. Black smoke curled from him, swirling around his body. If he’d had the power, he would’ve plucked the remains of a young couple from that grave and resurrected them. But he didn’t. None of us did. Only gods brought people back from the dead, and the results were usually mixed, to put it kindly.
“He’s grieving,” I told Luther. “One of his people is in that. He can’t shepherd his soul to the afterlife. To do that, he would have to perform rites over the body, and there is no way to separate it. He can’t bring the body back to the family. He is very angry, so I would be gentle in my questioning.”
Luther nodded.
I told him about the scent trail disappearing. The more I talked, the deeper his frown grew.
“An elder power?” he asked.
“I hope not.”
He stared at the grave again. “Whole families, even the children?”
“I think so.”
“Why?”
I wished I knew why. “The bones are missing.”
He grimaced. “The highest concentration of magic is in human bones. That’s why ghouls chew on them. Do we know for sure that they extracted the bones and kept them?”
“No, but statistically there should’ve been at least some bones in there. A skull, a femur, something. I only saw soft tissue.”
He sighed and for a moment he seemed older, his eyes haunted. “I’ll let you know after we excavate and go through it.”
We stood for a long moment, united by outrage and grief. We would both dig into that, he from his end and I from mine. Eventually we would find the one responsible. But it would do nothing for the families whose remains lay in the parking lot, dumped like garbage.
Finally, Luther nodded and went to get into his orange suit while I went to give my statement.
* * *
? ? ?
HELL WAS BEING stuck behind a teamster convoy driving across Magnolia Bridge. Normally I would’ve turned off onto the side street, but Magnolia was one of those new bridges that spanned the rubble of collapsed overpasses and fallen buildings and was the fastest way back to the office, and my head was still full of boiled people. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.
It cost us a solid half hour, and when we pulled up to Cutting Edge, the afternoon was in full swing. Derek got out, unlocked our parking lot chain, and I drove into my spot and parked.
The street was relatively quiet today, the heat having chased off most of the customers normally frequenting Bill Horn’s tinker shop and Nicole’s car repair place. Only Mr. Tucker lingered. Time and age had whittled his once broad-shouldered and probably muscular body to a thin, slightly frail frame. It had also stolen most of his hair, so he kept it so short, it looked like white fuzz floating over his dark-brown scalp. But the years hadn’t destroyed his spirit. He walked our street twice in the morning and at least once in the afternoon, carrying a large placard. The placard said, ATTENTION! THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE! OPEN YOUR EYES!
As I climbed out of the Jeep, Mr. Tucker delivered the same message at the top of his voice, just as he’d done countless times before. But, being Southern, Mr. Tucker also believed in politeness.
“Repent! The end is here! How you folks doing today?”
“Can’t complain,” I lied. “Would you like some iced tea? It’s hot out.”
Mr. Tucker raised a metal canteen at me. “Got some tea at Bill’s. Thank you. I’ll see you around.”
“Okay, Mr. Tucker.”