I hit it again, again, and again, with controlled, methodical savagery. The mask cracked. Another hit. The metal split. Chunks of the mask fell apart, revealing a nightmarish face. His lips were gone, teeth bared in a grotesque grin. His nose was a hole in the leathery flesh of its skull. He should have been dead but somehow he was alive, an abomination wrapped in foul magic, staring at me with wide eyes, its irises full of fire.

A raspy sound broke through the priest’s teeth, a half-groan, half-snarl, so weak I had to strain to hear it. “Glory to the King of Fire…”

“Your god isn’t here,” I told him quietly. “He doesn’t care. He won’t save you.”

“He’ll come for you. You belong to him. The world belongs to him.”

“The world belongs to me and my kind, ma’avir.”

I plunged the knife into his chest and twisted. The priest convulsed, agony twisting his limbs.

“Tell me why you are here, and your death will be quick.”

The ma’avir rasped again, “Mercy…”

“You serve the god who feeds on children burned alive in his fire. There is no mercy in the world for you.”

I twisted the knife again. His shriek lashed my eardrums.

“Tell me.”

“The priest’s killer,” he whispered. “Moloch wants it.”

“Why?”

Fiery eyes stared past me at the piece of the sky through the ruined skylight. The magic that gave the ma’avir his perverse unlife was bleeding out. He was done.

Words of an ancient prayer in a language dead for thousands of years hissed out of the creature’s mouth. “The Great Moloch, God among kings, I come to you…”

No. I leaned close, so close I could feel the dying heat rising from the priest and whispered into his ear in the same tongue as his prayer. “There will be no death rites for you. Die and become nothing.”

I rose, set the brick on the creature’s face, and stomped down on it.

A fiery blast wave tore out of the corpse, roaring like an enraged animal. Every window in the church exploded. The building shook once, and then all was quiet. Smoke rose from the front pews, scorched by the heat.

The priest’s body melted into nothing. Only my knife and the brick remained, stained with soot and lilac magic. That was the problem with killing ma’avirim. When one of Moloch’s assassin-priests died, their magic sullied the weapon that killed them, and, worse, others of their kind could track it the way bloodhounds followed a scent. The stain lingered until the next tech wave. I didn’t want them to track me. Not yet.

I glanced at the lilac splashed on my hands and concentrated. Thin red vapor slid out of me, invisible to the naked eye, cleansing my skin. Didn’t work on weapons or clothes, unfortunately. I’d tried.

A small noise made me turn to the right. Something moved between the pews. Slowly, gingerly, Officer Fleming stood up. Two wide eyes stared at me from a face smudged with soot.

The door burst open, and the female knight tore into the church.

“You missed it.” I swiped my cloak off the floor, slipped it on, and walked off the platform.

She swore.

I walked past Fleming. “Sorry about the windows, Big Town.”

He gaped at me. I winked at him and headed to the door.

5

I brought Tulip to a halt on the corner of Jonesboro and Gammon Street, two blocks away from Pastor Haywood’s church. Around me black trees crowded the road, their sharp leaves unnaturally still despite a slight breeze. A small two-story building with boarded-up windows perched on the corner to the right, its grimy brown bricks stained with grey mold. Back when I ran the streets, this building served as a rallying point for the North Warren kid gangs.

Street kids knew Pastor Haywood. He fed them, he healed them, and he probably had hidden them when the occasion required.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out an ounce of silver, and held it up. Silver was the go-to metal for most magic-related work. It was easy to shape, took enchantment better than any other metal, even gold, and was poisonous to a wide variety of magical creatures, all of which made it hellishly expensive. It could be bought in several forms: dust, rod, bar, and wire. I was holding a one-ounce bar, five centimeters long, three centimeters wide, and about as thin as ten pieces of paper stacked together. On the street, it was worth roughly fifty bucks.

I tossed the bar into the air and caught it in my fist. “Silver.”

No answer.

They knew all the cops in the area, so they realized I wasn’t one. I was a stranger, and therefore scary, but I also offered silver. Paper money could be ripped or burned. Some of the older pre-Shift notes contained plastic and sometimes fell apart in the magic waves. But silver always held value, and it was easy to hide and sell.

“Pastor Haywood.” I held the bar up. “Hurry up. I have things to do.”

The boarded-up window on the first floor quaked. The entire section swung out, and a figure squirmed out and landed on the grass. A boy ran up to me. Ten, maybe twelve, skinny, filthy, smelly, his hair a brown mess on his head. A rat’s tail hung from a loop on his pants. When I’d left, the Rat Tails were a small gang on the east side of the Warren. They must have expanded.

Light blue eyes looked at me from a grimy face. “What do you want to know, lady?”

I studied the silver in my hand. “Did anything strange happen with Pastor Haywood in the last couple of weeks?”

“Silver first.”

I sneered at him and tensed slightly. Tulip started walking.

“Wait, wait!” The kid jumped in front of my horse.

Tulip bared her teeth.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” I told him. “She bites.”

He stepped to the side. “A guy came to see him. We know everybody who comes but we hadn’t seen him before. We’d remember him.”

“Why? Tell me about him.” I dropped the bar.

He snatched it out of the air with a catlike quickness and let out a squeak. Shutters banged, bushes rustled, and five kids closed in, all under twelve years old, all equally filthy. They kept their distance in a ragged semicircle.

I took another silver bar out. “Tell me about the stranger. Where were you when you saw him?”

The leader stared at a small child, maybe about seven or eight, with twigs and beads in her dark hair. “Tell her.”