Page 69 of A Subtle Scar

“Share with the class?” I said.

“Just a moment. I think…yes, here.” Charon had rounded the slab and pointed at the girl’s shoulder.

Dr. Kurtz nodded. “Yes. That’s a burn mark. It’s in my report. It was inflicted pre-mortem.”

The mark in question was an angry red, but whatever the source of the burn had been, Margo’s skin hadn’t been broken. The outline of it was a halfmoon about the size of a bottle cap. Compared to the cuts that marked her, it was minor.

Charon shook his head, and Hermes walked over to him. “I don’t think this is random,” Charon said and hunched over to get a better look. “There is some magic to this. Faint, but there.”

“You want me to turn her?” Kurtz asked.

“If you don’t mind,” Charon said. Hermes had a look of extreme focus on his face.

Kurtz and Florence moved the corpse to expose her back. I looked away briefly. What she had been through had been bad, and the signs of it were right there.

“Most of the wounds on her back are pre-mortem,” Kurtz said.

“They do not mean anything,” Charon said. “The Horus eye, the Isis throne. That there’s Arcadian, and that’s just the astrological sign for the Pleiades. But that—”

Hermes nodded. “Connects this body to the spell.”

“And ties it to the moon, I was going to say.” Charon was still pointing at the burn mark.

Everyone bent close to where Charon was pointing. The halfmoon-shaped burn mark was just so innocuous.

“What are you saying? Are you telling us it’s only this one mark that is relevant?” I asked.

Hermes shrugged. “It is the one that ties her to the spell, baby. Maybe the other things had other reasons for being there.”

I shook my head. “That makes no sense at all. Why use a marionette binding on them when you want to, what, sacrifice them to a spell?”

“There are old practices of magic that use human sacrifice,” Charon said. “This could have been one such spell.”

Deacon snorted. “We all know about that kind of magic. The evil magic user stealing children in order to use their blood isn’t a prejudice most people have let go of.”

Hermes gave him a surprised look. “There isn’t actually that much blood in children. Adults make much better sacrifices in most spells that need blood to function.”

Charon groaned. “Not that we endorse the practice.”

“No, but it’s true.” Hermes shrugged. “This one was definitely a sacrifice. Maybe she needed to do something, and that’s what the puppet spell was for.”

I was beginning to loathe this case. It made no sense. A spell Hermes had found at the scenes, a spell that our victims were connected to, this strange mutilation. Their unclear causes of death. “Let’s have a look at the other corpses.”

“They do all have the same burn mark, I can tell you that,” Kurtz said. “You still need us to get the victim from the Interstate out of the cooling unit?”

I looked at the two immortals. “Do we?”

Hermes shook his head. “Point me to that one so we can feel whether it’s connected to the spell.”

We all followed Kurtz to the cooling unit, and she opened the ones that held the second and third victims so that Hermes and Charon could go ahead and do whatever it was immortals did.

Florence stood next to me. “So this is all a big spell, and these women were used for it after whatever hell they went through. That’s how far I can follow. What I don’t understand is, what is the big spellfor? Is it what killed them?”

“She has a point,” Deacon said, standing on my other side.

Dr. Kurtz looked at me. “I would also be interested in the kind of magic used to end these lives, and without leaving a trace that I can detect, outside of the symbols.”

“It’s our job to find out all of that,” I said. “But…Charon?”