Ty shook his head.
“So, there was a gap of four years since my parents were killed. Whoever it was—if it was the same person—stopped and started up again.”
“Is there anything that links all these people?” Julian asked. “Diana said some of the bodies were fey.”
“Well, this is all mundane news,” said Livvy. “They wouldn’t know, would they? They’d think the bodies were human, if they were gentry fey. As for anything linking them, none of them have been identified.”
“That’s weird,” said Dru. “What about blood? In movies they can identify people using blood and DTR.”
“DNA,” corrected Ty. “Well, according to the newspapers none of the bodies were identified. It could have been that whatever spells were done on them altered their blood. Or they could have decayed fast, like Emma’s parents did. That would have limited what the coroners could have found out.”
“There is something else, though,” Livvy said. “The stories all reported where the bodies were found, and we mapped them. They have one thing in common.”
Ty had taken one of his hand toys out of his pocket, a mass of intermingled pipe cleaners, and was untangling it. Ty had one of the fastest-working minds of anyone Emma knew, and it calmed him to have a way to use his hands to diffuse some of that quickness and intensity. “The bodies have all been dumped at ley lines. All of them,” he said, and Emma could hear the excitement in his voice.
“Ley lines?” Dru furrowed her brow.
“There’s a network, circling the world, of ancient magical pathways,” said Malcolm. “They amplify magic, so for centuries Downworlders have used them to create entrances into Faerie, that sort of thing. Alicante is built on a convergence of ley lines. They’re invisible, but some can train themselves to sense them.” He frowned, staring at the computer screen, where one of the images Cristina had taken of the dead body at the Sepulchre was displayed. “Can you do that thing?” he said. “You know, where you make the picture bigger?”
“You mean zoom in?” said Ty.
Before Malcolm could answer, the doorbell of the Institute rang. It was no ordinary, shrilling doorbell. It sounded like a gong being struck through the building, shivering the glass and stone and plaster.
Emma was up and on her feet in a second. “I’ll get it,” she said, and hurried downstairs, even as Julian half-rose from his seat to follow her.
But she wanted to be alone, just for a second. Wanted to process the fact that these killings dated back to the year of her parents’ death. They had started then. Her father and mother had been the first.
These murders were connected. She could see the threads coming together, forming a pattern she could only begin to glimpse but knew was real. Someone had done these things. Someone had tortured and killed her parents, had carved evil markings on their skin and dumped them in the ocean to rot. Someone had taken Emma’s childhood, torn away the roof and walls of the house of her life, leaving her cold and exposed.
And that someone would pay. Revenge is a cold bedfellow, Diana had said, but Emma didn’t believe that. Revenge would give her the air back in her lungs. Revenge would let her think about her parents without a cold knot forming in her stomach. She would be able to dream without seeing their drowned faces and hearing their voices cry out for her help.
She reached the front door of the Institute and threw it open. The sun had just set. A glum vampire stood in the doorway, carrying several stacked boxes. He looked like a teenager with short brown hair and freckled skin, but that didn’t mean much. “Pizza delivery,” he said in a tone that suggested that most of his closest relatives had just died.
“Seriously?” Emma said. “Malcolm wasn’t making that up? You really deliver pizza?”
He looked at her blankly. “Why wouldn’t I deliver pizza?”
Emma fumbled at the small table near the door for the cash they usually kept there. “I don’t know. You’re a vampire. I figured you’d have something better to do with your life. Your unlife. Whatever.”
The vampire looked aggrieved. “You know how hard it is to get a job when your ID says you’re a hundred and fifty years old and you can only go out at night?”
“No,” Emma admitted, taking the boxes. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“Nephilim never do.” As he tucked a fifty into his jeans, Emma noticed that he was wearing a gray T-shirt that said TMI across the front. “Too much information?” she said.
He brightened. “The Mortal Instruments. They’re a band. From Brooklyn. You heard of them?”