Falin didn’t move. Behind him, a second, stronger circle snapped to life around Briar and Tiffany. Death’s gaze moved past Falin to the much stronger circle, and his scowl deepened.
He turned and looked at me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The line had been crossed. A trust betrayed.
He vanished.
No one moved. I held my breath, waiting for Death to pop back into the room. He didn’t. After a moment, Falin sheathed his daggers. I dragged myself over to Briar’s chair—mine was still on the floor—and sank into it. I wanted to draw my knees to my chest. To cry. I didn’t do either. I just put my hands on the table, palms up, and stared at my blistered fingers without seeing them.
Falin moved around the room. He picked up the fallen chair and sat down facing me. He took my burned hands in his and pressed cooling magic into my skin. John walked into the room, dropped a first-aid kit on the table, and then walked back out without a word. Falin didn’t question it. He opened the kit and examined the contents before choosing a tube and rubbing the ointment on my blistered flesh. Once I was a sticky mess, he bound my hands with gauze saturated in a healing spell.
As Falin worked, Briar continued to question Tiffany from inside the circle. I caught enough to know that the shaken corpse was cooperating. Death might not have worn black robes or carried a scythe, but Tiffany had clearly recognized him for what he was. An end. One we’d prevented, at least temporarily. I didn’t listen to most of what was said. Briar would fill me in later. I’d bought her time, and she’d use it.
I was stuck inside my own head, shaking from the adrenaline drop after escaping the spell, but dwelling on what had happened after. Had I done the right thing? The look in Death’s eyes . . . I wanted to explain, but what could I say that I hadn’t already? Tiffany sure as hell better give us the best lead in the world.
“Hey, Craft, think it’s okay if we come out of the circle now?”
I looked up. I had no idea how much time had passed. Falin had long ago finished binding my hands.
I nodded. “Yeah. But you should move Tiffany somewhere secure. She needs to be inside a circle if you don’t want another collector coming for her.” Or in a graveyard or behind the type of ward Gauhter could make, though I had no idea how he’d accomplished it.
“We could drop her body down at the morgue like we did Remy.”
I was too tired, emotionally and physically, to glare at her. I just shook my head warily. “If she doesn’t agree to leave the body, I’m not forcing her out.” I’d done too many things I wasn’t proud of recently. I wasn’t tacking on another.
Briar shrugged and unchained Tiffany’s cuffs from the floor. “I guess you get a cell with a circle. Let’s go.”
Chapter 26
Twenty minutes later we were sitting in the conference room that had been transformed into Briar’s temporary command center. Briar had updated the map with all the different locations Tiffany had provided. Officers had been dispatched to each, with orders to call if they found anything out of the ordinary. Falin’s agents had created a cursory list of driver’s license images to match the registrations from the cars in the rest stop lot. It was still incomplete, but we’d visually matched Tiffany’s body to one, and the ghost I’d seen in Rodger’s body to another. Past victims didn’t narrow down where Gauhter might be now, so the list was currently being put on the back burner to be examined when we didn’t have so many physical locations to search. Some FIB agents were also following up on the stolen bottle. The theft had been reported over two months ago—which fit with the age of some of the animals I’d seen in Gauhter’s clearing of experiments. Investigating the theft had apparently never been prioritized or followed up on before, so Falin had his agents reexamining the case with instructions to call if they found anything.
Now we were poring over the map evaluating which cemetery Gauhter might be using. Well, Briar, Falin, John, and Jenson were. I was sitting in a chair hugging my bandaged hands to my chest. It was only four, but I was so done with this day. The day wasn’t done with me, though. I had to find Gauhter before he realized his spell hadn’t killed me. Which meant narrowing down his most likely hideout.
Tiffany had provided us with the locations of safe houses she and the other corpses used, as well as a couple more ritual sites, but none were places Gauhter or the Saunderses did more than pass through. If the officers found more walking corpses, we’d question them. Or maybe they’d find a giant clue pointing us to Gauhter’s actual base of operations, but I wasn’t holding my breath. Right now, narrowing down which cemetery Rachael Saunders had planned to take the alchemy book to was our best lead.
“It can’t be one in the center of the city. They are too public. Someone would have noticed,” Falin said.
“True,” Briar agreed, moving to mark the inner-city cemeteries off her list.
“Remember the tree? And the shack? He’s excellent at illusion magic,” I said, my voice sounding oddly hollow even to my own ears. “Or, they, I guess.”
“Craft, we’re supposed to be eliminating possibilities. And what do you mean by ‘they’?”
I frowned, forcing my focus out of my head and onto Briar. “The magic. I’ve noticed since the first time I saw it that it is super dense and intricate. Almost amazingly so. I thought at first he was just that good, but when Rachael ran from the shack today, the magic she wrapped herself in was exactly the same shade. All the spells Remy carried were the same as well. As were both the fire spell that attacked me and the trap laid in my office. No matter how powerful the witch, that’s a lot of magic to move around and cast in a short amount of time. Some of it could have been pre-cast, waiting in charms, but not all of it. I think Gauhter and the Saunderses are joining their magics to do these castings.”
Briar’s brow bunched as she considered it. “That would be exceedingly rare. Most magic won’t meld.”
“That’s because most witches commune with only one or two colors of Aetheric energy. If a witch who uses one color releases it to someone who uses different strands”—I lifted my bandaged hands in a shrug—“they don’t meld. I mean, it still works, but the finished spellwork comes out patchy, weak. The merged magic is still bigger and can be cast faster, but the spells aren’t particularly good. But if you have a group of witches with harmonious magics, and they are capable of putting their egos aside and releasing it to one skilled witch . . .” I shook my head. “The spellwork I’ve seen is impressive.” And I’d seen more than most. Several electives on Aetheric theory in school guaranteed that. Unfortunately, they hadn’t improved my own poor spellcasting ability much.
“Are we sure Rue Saunders isn’t Gauhter? We know Gauhter is fond of aliases,” Falin said, frowning at the possibility I’d laid out.