A bright trail of green, a familiar shade, led to the platform. Shapeshifters, too recent to have been involved in the murder. I crouched, getting a closer look. One particular ribbon of grass-green stood out. Ugh. Just my luck.

“Have any shapeshifters been here recently?”

“No.”

Right. They didn’t come through the skylight. The trail started at the door. Someone let them in, which meant either the cops owed them a favor, or some money had exchanged hands. Probably both.

I moved closer, into the space between the front row of pews and the platform. A second shapeshifter trail. These guys did come through the skylight and left only a couple of hours ago. Strange. Two separate crews? Why?

A single thread of green in that second trail caught the light, glowing with magic. It was the most beautiful mint green, translucent and pure. The other shapeshifter trails, grass-green or hunter, had degraded slightly, fading a little into the environment. But that mint green stayed, still bright and vibrant. If the other traces were watercolor, this was a metallic acrylic. It drew the eye. I had never seen anything like it.

As beautiful and strange as it was, the thread was too recent to be connected to the murder.

I stepped onto the platform and knelt down, trying to parse the explosion of silver. So much power expended so quickly. Death wasn’t instant. Pastor Haywood had come face-to-face with his attacker, and he’d fought back. The struggle hadn’t lasted long, but it was savage and brutal.

The magic was too dense. I needed a better point of view.

I lay down on my back and looked up into the funnel of silver stretching to the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” Fleming asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

Some of the silver was tinted with gold. It spiraled down, feathery and gossamer, mixing with Pastor Haywood’s silver blue. Yellow usually meant animal magic, but not always. When Nick went undercover with my grandfather’s people, they had forced his body to absorb an alien power, which is why his signature had a yellow streak to it. Still, such light gold… A divine beast?

“Remember how I said not to mess with the scene? I don’t know how to break this to you, but you’re contaminating things all over the place.”

“Since Pastor Haywood died, seventeen people have been at this scene. They walked all around the church, and a couple of them tasted the blood over there. If you’re worried about contamination, that cat is out of the bag.”

I crossed the platform to the right, taking care to avoid the blood, and saw a slight shimmer of purple in the corner. Hello.

I walked over. A sigil was burned into the wooden floorboards. A distorted stick figure with a circle where the head would be and a crescent moon instead of feet. Its right arm pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle. The left arm continued down, forming an H, while its right simply ended.

The sigil glowed with intense, electric lilac. Active.

A familiar rage stirred inside me. Moloch’s priests didn’t kill the pastor, but they defiled his sanctuary by leaving one of their own to watch it and taint it with Moloch’s power. This was his holy place, a refuge where Pastor Haywood ministered, and they desecrated it.

Why watch a crime scene? What did they want from it? I had to pull Moloch’s little helper out of its hidey hole and find out. Depending on who was hiding in the sigil, it could get messy.

The female knight would be here any minute. Anything she witnessed would be reported back to Nick, and I wasn’t ready to answer the kinds of questions it would raise. I could try to come back tonight, but if the thing hiding in the sigil killed someone before then, I’d never forgive myself. If I was going to break the seal, it had to be now.

Getting rid of Officer Jaded Veteran would be a problem.

“Can you give me some privacy, Officer Fleming?”

“Nope.”

Crap. “I need you to step back, please.”

Fleming took two deliberate steps back. His face told me that was as far as he was willing to go. Doing anything too flashy with him here was out of the question. Fine.

“I’ll be right back.”

I walked past him, going outside. On the left some bricks had come loose from a flower bed. That would do. I picked one up and headed back into the church.

Fleming was exactly where I had left him. He eyed the paver brick. “Don’t break any windows, Small Town.”

I walked up to the sigil, put the brick on the floor, reached into my cloak, and found the handle of my knife. It was a simple knife, reminiscent of a Bowie with a nine-inch tool steel blade, full tang, and a stacked leather handle, so my hand didn’t slip.

“Officer Fleming?”

“Yes?”

“Duck.”

I yanked my cloak off and dragged my foot across the sigil. A man-sized clump of darkness tore out of it, like a ghost in a mantle of smoke. His hands ended in three-inch-long black claws, their tips glowing with red-hot fire. A ma’avir, one of Moloch’s priests. A lesser one.

The phantom raked at me. I shied out of the way, letting the claws rend the air a hair from my throat, and stabbed the knife into the phantom’s chest, hammering a spike of my magic through it.

The knife sank into flesh. I jerked it free. Fire bled through the smoke.

The ma’avir screeched and spat a torrent of flames. I dodged and slashed again, slicing at the creature’s protective cloak, left to right and up. The smoke tore like an old tarp, betraying a glimpse of a charred body wrapped in flames.

The phantom flailed, trying to shred me with its claws. Fast, but not fast enough. I spun to the left, around it, bringing my arm in an arch from inside out and buried my blade in its back.

The creature shrieked.

I gripped the knife, feeding magic into it, and dragged it down, carving through gristle and bone, slicing through the sigils branded on its flesh, until I reached the main one in the small of its back. My blade bit into it. The sigil broke and vanished in a flash of lilac.

The smoke disappeared, like a length of black chiffon jerked out of sight. Fire burst out of the priest. For an instant, the ma’avir was engulfed in flames, a dark thing flailing within an inferno, like a blasphemous demonic candle. He burned and howled.

I swiped the brick from the floor.

The fire faltered, leaving behind a humanoid shape, desiccated, charred, bald, with his face covered in a metal mask. I kicked the creature’s spine. He went down with a dry crack. I flipped him on his back and smashed the brick into his face. The mask clanged.