The detective waved us over. He had one of those weary faces that told me he was used to being woken up in the middle of the night to examine the bloody end of someone’s life. For the survivors, the murder of a loved one was the worst thing that ever happened to them. For him, it was early Tuesday morning. Veteran mercenaries and soldiers sometimes looked like that after decades of fighting, except he was barely in his thirties.

He gave us a quick look. “Badges.”

Stella and I held them out.

“What’s the Order’s interest in this case?”

“We believe it’s connected to an ongoing investigation,” I said.

“Which one?”

Telling him about Pastor Haywood would catapult this into high-profile territory. Two things could happen. First, they could hand this murder off to us, the way they gave us Pastor Haywood. Second, far more likely, the PAD would want to hold on to this murder and request any findings from us, because the two cases were connected. That would allow them to benefit from my investigation, while keeping an eye on the Order. There would be a lot of red tape, meetings, and, in the worst-case scenario, a joint task force, which I needed like a hole in the head.

“I’m not at liberty to say. Our findings are not conclusive at this time.”

The detective’s look communicated that he wasn’t born yesterday, that he knew I was dodging, and that he wasn’t impressed.

“I’ll allow you into my crime scene as a courtesy. Don’t cross the chalk line. Don’t touch anything. You have five minutes.”

“Before we go in and the countdown starts,” Stella said, “who found the body?”

“The cleaning crew,” the detective answered. “They work nights because of the heat. The custodian was taking out the trash around ten thirty, noticed the broken window, and came to check. He knocked, Professor Walton didn’t answer, he unlocked the office, and here we are.”

“Any witnesses?” Stella asked.

“No. Graduation was on May 11th, and the summer session doesn’t start until June 1st. The campus is deserted.”

“Thank you.” I stepped into the room. Stella came in right behind me.

The office was a rectangle, and if it were drawn on paper, the door would be in the right bottom corner, by the wall lined with bookcases brimming with volumes and binders. Next to them, a man in his early twenties waited with a bored expression. Bronze-skinned, with big brown eyes and short black hair, he wore the white Biohazard coveralls. A patch with stylized flames marked his left sleeve. A firebug, a pyromage, in case the body rose, grew fangs the size of steak knives, and expressed a desire to eat human faces.

The broken window was in the wall opposite the door, about mid-way, its frame scarred by deep claw gashes and stained with smudges of blood. Something had really dug into the wood, trying to squeeze inside, and then left the same way it came in, smearing the blood of its victim in its wake. Shards of glass from the window littered the floor and the imitation Moroccan rug. In the center of the rug, Alycia Walton’s corpse lay in a crumpled heap, staining the beige carpet fibers a gory burgundy.

Her head, a wet red mess, rested against her right shoulder. The killer had bitten through her neck from the left, nearly severing it in one bite and leaving the head attached only by a narrow strip of skin and flesh. Her white blouse and shreds of her bra hung off her body, blood-soaked and torn, and her chest cavity gaped open, the broken shards of ribs slick with dark blood. More blood colored her khaki capris.

Someone, probably Biohazard, had drawn a protective chalk circle around the rug and the body. Standard procedure. The chalk would delay the reanimated corpse long enough for the firebug to torch it.

I approached the circle to get a better look at the body. No heart. Only a puddle of dark blood pooling inside. The blood was still liquid. Once the heart stopped pumping, the blood settled within the lowest points of the body due to gravity, turning the skin an ugly mauve. The process was called livor mortis, and it started anywhere from thirty minutes to four hours after death, reaching its most pronounced stage in about twelve hours. Alycia’s body showed no signs of it.

She was killed a couple of hours ago, at most. The creature had come through the window and attacked her right there on the rug—all the blood was confined to it. It likely bit her neck first, knocking her down, then straddled her and broke open her chest to get at the heart.

Past the body, almost all the way at the other wall, a large desk waited, with an office chair pushed back from it, but still upright. Two smaller chairs lay overturned against the desk.

I blinked and the office blossomed into colors. Gossamer tendrils of the palest gold bordered the window, stretched in thin lines across the floor, then exploded over the body into a familiar cascade. No other strong magic signatures. Just assorted blue traces, old and faded, likely left by students or other visitors to the office days ago.

I blinked it off.

The same creature that killed Pastor Haywood murdered Alycia Walton. Both of them likely handled the same item. The “Christian” artifact had a guardian. It was an established practice in the ancient kingdoms. I’d come across it once before, and I had been taught how to do it in case I ever needed to protect something of significance. If you had enough power, you could bind a magical beast to an object you wanted guarded. Once bound, the object emitted magic that only the beast could feel, and anyone who touched it would be stained by it. The guardian would track that stain until it killed the thieves and retrieved the object or died trying.

The old myths were full of such stories. The dragon watching over the Golden Fleece, the spriggans guarding fae treasure, the Pixiu who craved the smell of gold and secured it in the homes of their masters. Both Pastor Haywood and Professor Walton had touched the artifact, and the guardian had punished them for it.

It probably couldn’t get to the artifact itself or the thief who owned it now. Whoever it was either knew about the curse or was very lucky.

Now the ma’avir’s confession made sense. He’d said that Moloch wanted Pastor Haywood’s killer. The artifact wasn’t important to Moloch. The divine beast guarding it was. Why?

If I got my hands on the artifact, the beast would come for me. I had to find this magical trinket.

Selling an artifact required three people, an expert to assess its magic, a historian to trace its provenance, and a broker to calculate its value and facilitate the sale. The magic expert and the historian were dead. I had to find the broker. As long as I had the broker, the guardian would come to find them, and the ma’avirim would follow.