“Okay,” he said.

The door swung open. Runa stood in the doorway. Tears wet her face. “You need to see this.”

Bern and I followed her into the conference room. She reached toward the keyboard with trembling fingers and pressed enter. Sigourney Etterson filled the screen. She looked like an older copy of Runa: same wild red hair, same almost translucent skin, and same sharp green eyes.

“Hi sweetheart,” Sigourney said. “I’m afraid this isn’t a happy message, but I don’t want you to be sad. Sometimes bad things happen. I don’t regret my actions. I did what I felt was right. I love you so much. I’m so proud of you. You grew up to be a great person. You’re kind, and responsible, and so smart. I couldn’t wish for a better daughter.”

Her words were like claws scratching on my heart.

“If I don’t make it, you have to take care of your brother and sister. You have to be the Head of the House. It’s a lot, but you can do it, darling.”

A dark shadow moved behind Sigourney, approaching from the depths of the house, little more than a silhouette.

“I’ve named you as the executor of my estate. There will be a sharp learning curve. Dennis can answer some of your questions, but the primary burden will be on you. I don’t trust anyone else enough to put them in charge of your inheritance.”

The shadow glided forward.

“I’m sorry—” Sigourney fell silent in mid-sentence. Her gaze turned blank. Thick red drops slid from her eyes, ears, and mouth, painting crimson tracks down her pale face.

A gloved hand reached over Sigourney’s shoulder to the keyboard. The video stopped.

He’d killed her. I couldn’t explain how I knew it was a he, but I felt it deep in the pit of my stomach. He’d murdered Sigourney and he hadn’t bothered to delete the video. The brutality of it was shocking. He just erased her like she was never there. Without laying a finger on her.

If he came for my family and I wasn’t here, he would slaughter everyone.

Runa wiped her tears with her fingers. Her words came out sharp, as if they cut her mouth. “What kind of magic is that?”

“Probably a carnifex mage,” I said. The instant internal injury fit their MO. Carnifexes normally went for the heart, not the brain. Anything protected by bone presented difficulty to them. If he was a carnifex, he was experienced and powerful.

“What’s a carnifex?”

“A butcher,” Bern said. “They cause lesions in internal organs.”

She wiped her eyes again. The tears just kept running, and she kept flicking them away, her gaze locked on the screen.

A long, torturous minute slid by. I wished I could make it better. I wished so much that I could hug her, wave a magic wand, and undo all of this.

“What do we do now?” Runa asked.

“We go through your mother’s accounts and her forensic testimony files.”

“She kept meticulous records,” Bern said.

“That’s it?” Runa’s voice vibrated with anger. “We look at files?”

“Yes,” I told her.

“I just watched some prick murder my mother! We need to find him, so I can kill him. I’ll poison him and fix him and poison him again until he can’t take any more.”

I understood. I wanted to find him too and make him regret ever being born. And when I found him, I would make sure he would never do that to another person. But right now, Runa needed cold water, not more gas on the fire.

“Okay,” I said. “Where do we start looking?”

“I don’t know. You’re the investigator.”

I stepped to the laptop, rewinded the video, and restarted it just as the shadow entered the room. “What we have here is a human dressed in dark grey. His face is covered with a mask, his hands are gloved. We can’t even be certain it’s a he, although judging by the height, this is probably an adult male. It could be a very tall woman. We don’t know the exact nature of his magic, who he works for, or why he killed your mother.”

The killer reached over Sigourney. That gloved hand looked odd, misshapen somehow . . .

“Then we need to find out! Don’t you have someone? Like a snitch or an informant? Something!”

“This isn’t a TV show,” I said gently. Also, we were not hardened NY detectives who didn’t play by the rules. “Confidential informants typically report on neighborhood and gang crime, because the people involved in those crimes don’t know how to keep their mouths shut. This is a professional hit by a high-caliber magic user.”

Runa squeezed her eyes shut and exhaled. Her fists relaxed. She opened her eyes. A little bit of the crazy had gone out, and I jumped on the chance.

“Your mother said she had no regrets. She was aware that her actions carried consequences. She did something, Runa, something that led to this murder. The sooner we figure out what that something is, the sooner we can find her killer. The answer is probably somewhere in her files.”

“Okay,” she said.

The forensic review didn’t yield any results. After three hours, my eyes started to glaze over.

I turned down the sound and pulled up the video of Sigourney’s murder in video editing software. Bump up the contrast, sharpen, levels, zoom . . . I ran the clip again. The glove’s details came into focus.

It didn’t look like a glove, more like a hand with greenish skin mottled with brown and orange, like a carapace of some beetle or the tail of a raw lobster. The tapered fingernails resembled claws, sharp and black.

This made zero sense.

A century and a half ago, several labs across Europe synthesized the Osiris serum. The Spanish were the first, followed by the English, Russians, and Chinese. They came to the discovery almost simultaneously, following up on the same research trail, with Germans and Americans being only slightly behind. Those who failed to discover the serum bought it or stole it.

An injection of the Osiris serum brought about one of three equally likely results: you died, you became a monster and then died, or your latent magical powers awakened. Despite the horrific odds of success, the serum spread across the planet like wildfire. The World War loomed on the horizon, and the major powers scrambled to crank out mages in hopes of gaining the upper hand. They gave it to everyone: the soldiers, the fading aristocracy, the captains of industry, people who had everything and those who had nothing.

Then the World War hit, bringing nightmares and atrocities beyond anyone’s imagination, and it was quickly and unanimously decided that having people who could incinerate entire city blocks and spit poisonous gas into the trenches was a really bad idea. The Osiris serum was locked away, but by then it was too late. The magic proved to be hereditary.

The serum was inaccessible, but the experimentation into enhancing one’s powers never stopped. Countless families and labs kept trying to find a way to make their magic stronger, and the only way to do it was to experiment on human beings, preferably those with some magic and very little money. Sometimes that experimentation caused a cataclysmic response, twisting the bodies of the research volunteers into inhuman monstrosities. The majority died on the spot. The few who survived were no longer human, physically or mentally. They became warped.

According to the numerous articles and scientific papers I’d read, the transformation permanently altered the subject’s magic. Instead of their original powers, all their magic was now dedicated to keeping their warped bodies functioning. The constant magic drain killed them within two to three years.

No one magic-warped could have a magical talent by definition. Yet Sigourney’s killer clearly did.

Not only that, but a warped human couldn’t have pulled off this hit. It required critical thinking and performing a succession of tasks: break in, move quietly, kill the target, turn off the computer, stage the scene, set the house on fire. Nevada knew a warped woman, Cherry. Before Cherry died a couple of years ago, she’d spent her days swimming in the brackish water in a flooded part of Houston, eating fish and garbage. She couldn’t carry on a conversation for longer than a minute. If you somehow convinced, bribed, or forced Cherry into assaulting a House, she would probably crash through a window or bang on the door until she forgot what she was doing there.

Maybe it wasn’t a clawed hand. Maybe it was some sort of specialized glove. I peered at the screen.

My cell rang.

Across from me, Runa groaned. “Please answer it. My head hurts.”

I took the call.

“Greetings, Ms. Baylor,” Mr. Fullerton’s precise voice said.

I put the call on speaker. “Hello, Mr. Fullerton. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.” He had told me it would take at least twenty-four hours for the DNA results.

“The official results will be available tomorrow; however, under the circumstances, I felt urgency was in order. Is Ms. Etterson present?”

“Yes,” Runa said.

“Very well. I can confirm that one of the bodies is that of Sigourney Etterson.”

As expected.