Page 127 of Cold Curses

We all looked in the direction of the car at the curb, and the silence was ominous.

“So much has happened here,” I said quietly. “If they saw anything, they’d have reported it.”

“Yeah,” Connor said. “So Black made sure they didn’t see it or couldn’t report it.”

“We’ll take a look,” I told Roger. “And you might want to have emergency units on standby.”

We ended the call, walked in silence toward the vehicle, where Swift joined us. The windows and windshield were tinted, so I knocked on the window with a knuckle. Waited. Knocked again. And knew what I’d find when I opened the door.

“Stay alert,” I said quietly, and used the hem of my shirt to grab the door handle so I would not leave extra fingerprints. I opened the car door carefully, and knew immediately nothing in the vehicle posed a threat to us.

There were two cops in the front seats of the vehicle. And they were dead.

Both stared straight ahead. There were no obvious wounds, no sign of a struggle. Their seat belts were still fastened. There was magic in the vehicle, but not a type I immediately recognized.

I touched the neck of the man in the driver’s seat. No pulse, but his skin hadn’t completely lost its warmth. Carefully, I leaned over and checked the other.

“Both dead,” I said quietly. “Magic of some kind, and not very long ago. They aren’t cold yet.” I stepped back and looked at Lulu. “Would you be able to tell me what magic was used?”

“I can try,” she said, her expression grim. I didn’t like to ask her. She hadn’t used her magic for a long time in part because she wanted to avoid drama. I didn’t like the idea of laying two bodies at her feet now, but we needed information.

I moved out of the way and she took my place, then leaned down and looked in. I watched her face, saw a flash of horror and pity, followed by determination. She lifted her fingers toward thedriver, but didn’t touch him. Just let her fingers drift an inch above his body.

“A shot of magic,” she confirmed. “I think magic might have stopped his heart.”

“Who did it?” I asked.

“Not a demon,” she said. “This is sorcery, but with a margin of something else.” She stood up and looked back at me. “Do you remember those markers that made a gold or silver outline? Like the ink color would be pink, but when you wrote with them, the lines had metallic edges?”

I knew what she meant. I’d gone through an analog phase as a teenager—pens and stickers and paper planners. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used a marker. Probably to put my name on bottles of blood I kept in the loft refrigerator, even though there’d been no chance that Lulu would accidentally grab one.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“That’s the margin of demon here.”

“Black,” I said. “Using the magic he stripped from demons to power his broken sorcery.”

“That’s my thinking,” Lulu said. “But this is all new territory.”

For us and for Chicago. And I intended to put a stop to it.

Deceased, I messaged to Roger.Send the CPD in. We’ll wait with them.

Because they didn’t need to be alone anymore.

* * *

“If Jonathan Black wasn’t already public enemy number one,” Connor said when the deceased had been taken away and we’d climbed back into the SUV for the hop to the second Reed property, “he is now. The CPD doesn’t look warmly on cop killers.”

“What do you think they saw?” Swift wondered.

“Something Black didn’t want them to see,” I said, “or tell about.”

“Demon genocide?” Connor wondered, tone short, magic furious. Like me, he abhorred pointless violence.

“He wouldn’t have wanted them to see him at all,” Lulu pointed out. “There’s a pending arrest warrant. But he probably also wouldn’t have wanted them to see what he was doing magically. Because knowing would have made it easier to stop him.”

It didn’t take us long to reach the other Reed property, which was only a couple of miles away. And there wasn’t much to see: just a metal storage building on a scrap of land.