She turned her attention to the spooky stuff—the mess of chalks and candles, parchments and books—on the coffee table. She fished out that day’s Tribune, folded open to the comics, then the various soda cans, grimacing as some of them sloshed and splashed. Slob, she judged, but sat down before the low table and the space she’d cleared.
Sitting down was a mistake. Weariness swept over her, turning the cheap futon at her back into near-impossible-to-resist comfort. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes.
Erinya broke a lamp in the bedroom, and Sylvie jerked awake. “Later,” she said. “Finish this case, and I can either sleep for a week, or I’ll be dead.” Her body didn’t want to listen. She raised herself to her feet and hit the kitchenette again. Eating a dead man’s food was wrong somehow; fine, she could accept that, but surely the taboo didn’t extend to his caffeine. She draped herself over the fridge door and selected a Mountain Dew. Good for that little jolt. Crap for taste. She drank it anyway, gulping it on the way back to the living room and dropping the empty on the floor. One more wouldn’t matter.
As for fingerprints, well, it wasn’t like his body was ever going to be found, no criminal investigation spurred by the bullet wound and broken bones. He might be listed as missing after some time, but even if someone reported his absence, the odds were good that he’d simply be presumed another feckless young man, drifting out of town. Safest murder she’d ever committed. Sylvie shuddered a little. It shouldn’t have been so easy. It should disturb her more than it did.
She began sorting papers. A lot of them had scraps and sections of the oubliette spell written on them, different colors, different tilts to the Greek.
These were his practice runs, she thought, touching a shaky rendering of the Greek letters that read “love,” and spelled nothing but pain for Brandon Wolf. Another sheet revealed row after row of paint stripes, some rough, some globbed, some runny. Getting the medium just right. Nothing was uglier than a spell going all to hell because the paint dripped and obscured a vital symbol.
Sylvie leaned against the futon again, twisting herself and curling into it, resting her head for just one more moment. Her unfocused gaze picked up something shining on the floor near the end of the table. She reached out and collected it. A pendant on a long, heavy chain, meant to disappear beneath clothing. The pendant slithered down the chain, snagging at the clasp. Sylvie raised it closer, frowning. She’d seen that half bat wing before in South Beach, back when she and Val had thought the Maudits might be allies instead of enemies.
It was an apprentice’s badge.
“A goddamned apprentice,” Sylvie said. In the other room, Erinya stirred. “A talented runaway with something to prove.” Easy prey for the first charismatic leader to come along with a grand plan and an eye for talent. Even if that leader was a woman. Of course, Sylvie wasn’t any closer to finding out who the woman was, but she was beginning to get a tentative feel for her. A woman who used the Maudit instead of being used by them. Sylvie could admire that.
Another piece of paper, sorted through, revealed not the stiff formal writing of the trained Maudits, but a new hand. Stark, confident, elegant, in a language Sylvie recognized but couldn’t read; the bastard mix of Latin and archaic French that filled the Maudits grimoires. So his lady boss knew his language in more ways than one. But if she had helped him compose the oubliette spell—why bother with him at all?
The simplest answer was, like so many of those who hired sorcerers, the lady lacked talent herself. Strange, though, to find that kind of detailed knowledge in a non-Talent. What kind of person went to the effort to learn something she could never use herself?
She sifted through papers faster, looking for that strange, elegant handwriting, and found only one more scrap. A single sentence in English that could be construed as threat, support, or reminder, depending on their relationship.
“You know I’ll be watching.”
Sylvie wasn’t sure which one it had been to the Maudit, but to her it meant nothing but threat. If she truly was watching the Maudit, then she had seen Sylvie kill him. While Sylvie hadn’t felt the creepy certainty that came of being the object of unwanted attention, that lack didn’t rule out less mundane means of watching.
Sylvie glanced again at the snowy TV and grimaced. The odds were good she had blundered into two “I spys” tonight, the Maudit’s station spell and one focused on him. The fact that there had been no attempted intervention in her brief struggle with the Maudit argued for remote viewing.
The question was, had the Maudit’s death woken the woman to outrage?
Ripping fabric in the bedroom caught her attention. Erinya lay sprawled on the bed, tearing a T-shirt into thirds with her teeth and talons. When she felt Sylvie’s eyes on her, Erinya re-formed her muzzle to human lips, and muttered, “I’m bored. I liked you better earlier.”
Covered in blood, gun drawn, with a dead man at her feet. Sylvie thought a scathing reply but was halted by recognition of the shirt—the one she’d used in the kitchen.
It made her skin crawl; she crossed the room in two adrenaline-filled strides and yanked it from Erinya’s talons. No way in hell was Erinya going to be tasting her sweat along with the sorcerer’s blood. That kind of thing could lead to a friendly fire she didn’t even want to consider. But the shirt felt different in her hands; the cloth stiffer, newer, thicker, even dampened with Erinya’s saliva.
Sylvie shook it out. NDNM, the shirt said. A newer twin to the one in the kitchen. Sylvie threw it back to Erinya, who shrugged and dropped it. Sylvie went down on her knees, rooting through the mess Erinya had made, pulling black cloth free from jeans, from colored tees and khakis, from the finger-nipping bits of broken lamp bulb.
Two of the same shirts, Sylvie thought, almost meant something. One shirt was nothing, a freebie, a promo, an impulse buy or gift. Sylvie dug up another matching shirt, tossed it toward Erinya, and found one more. Further excavations revealed a fifth, inside out and tangled with dirty socks.
Sylvie sat back on her haunches and grinned, looking at the charcoal script stretched between her fingers. NDNM, and beneath it, in nearly invisible, black-on-black script, a local address. NDNM was a place.
While one shirt meant nothing . . . five shirts . . . five shirts meant their sorcerer had worked there. A workplace meant coworkers who might very well know the Maudit’s lady-boss. If she were really lucky, lady-boss was also his real-world employer, and she’d find her new guide to Bran’s recovery at NDNM. Of course, there was the chance that the woman was waiting for her, ready to retaliate for the death of her lackey.
Sylvie knee-walked through the clutter, winced as a shard of glass bit through her jeans, and ignored the small pain in favor of reaching for the bedside table. Phone book? Yes. She dived into it and found a number. She dialed, got a blast of music and raised voices before a man said, “NDNM.”
Sylvie disconnected. Only one type of place had that kind of background noise, and would still be open at this late hour. She grinned. Eager to get moving, Erinya crawled over the bed and, in a half crouch, stared down at her.
Sylvie rose, exhaustion pushed back. “C’mon, Erinya, we’re going clubbing.”