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“All right. Just remember you asked for it,” Rick warned him, putting a small, carved stone in front of Zeke.

“Tread carefully. This was found at a crime scene. A violent one where people died. The investigators thought the perpetrator lost it during the action. Likely, it fell out of a piece of jewelry, since it’s flat on one side and shows signs of having been set in a bezel around the domed side.

The engraving has been identified as a Latin inscription summoning something evil, though Commander Kinkaid didn’t tell me any more than that.

He left it up to me to determine if you were ready to try this.

They’ve lost the trail and are hoping you might be able to point them in the right direction.

It’s a long shot, but if you want to give it a try… ”

“Of course I do,” Zeke replied immediately.

He figured the worst that could happen was that he could pass out again.

He’d already been humiliated like that once.

If it happened again, so be it. If not, he might actually be able to help catch some bad guys.

He missed making a contribution to the unit.

He missed being out in the world, doing important things.

Fighting the good fight. If this was all he could do now, by golly, he’d try his best.

“Go slow,” was Rick’s last bit of advice.

Bracing himself, Zeke reached out and lightly touched just the tip of his finger to the object.

His eyes closed, and he saw Liam Kinkaid picking up the stone from a bloody floor.

Two people lay dead nearby—a man and a woman.

A mated pair, Zeke somehow thought. He reported what he saw to those watching.

The scene shifted to earlier. The stone was set in a silver bracelet that singed the flesh of the male who fought against the person wearing the bracelet.

From the arm he saw wearing the bracelet, Zeke surmised the person was female.

Dark-skinned. The skin wasn’t wrinkly, so possibly a youngish woman.

With claw-like fingernails painted blood-red and hands coated in actual blood.

“The female of the pair of victims was already dead. The male was still fighting and was burned by the bracelet as he wrenched it off the woman’s arm and threw it against the wall.

That’s when the stone popped out. The woman killed him with some kind of magic strike that I can’t quite make out, and then she had to flee because others were arriving.

She didn’t have time to retrieve the stone, but she scooped up the silver part of the bracelet on her way out.

The stone had skittered under the couch, and it would’ve taken a lot of time to find and retrieve, which she didn’t have.

The bracelet itself was in her path, so she just took that and ran. ”

“Can you see anything else about the woman?” Rick asked. Zeke lifted his finger from the stone and blinked his eyes open to see that everyone in the room was taking notes.

“Tight black curls. Long hair. It brushed the upper part of her arm and swung in front of her. It had blood in it too, and she seemed to enjoy that.” Zeke shook his head.

“That gal is one sick puppy. She reveled in her kills. I think she’s a serial killer, though I understand female serial killers are rare. ”

“Not among magic folk,” Lynn spoke up from next to Rick.

She was the unit’s authority on magic, as well as being a medical researcher of some repute.

Lynn had been raised with magic, and her grandmother was a powerful mage.

“There’s an old saying among magic users.

The female of the species is more deadly than the male .

Some of the most vicious and prolific of murderers in magical history have been women.

Case in point: the sorceress Elspeth, known as the Destroyer of Worlds.

She didn’t get that nickname for no reason. ”

Zeke nodded to Lynn. “Understood. Don’t ever underestimate a woman with magic.”

“Can you tell anything more about the stone itself?” Lynn asked.

Zeke nodded, closing his eyes and trying again, reaching out to touch the stone once more.

“The bracelet was given to the dark-haired woman by her mentor. I can’t see the mentor’s face, but it was another woman.

She had a matching bracelet, and there’s another one, just like it, that the mentor gave to someone else.

Another female student, I think. She made them especially for the three of them.

They were supposed to link up somehow and maybe amplify their power in some way.

” Zeke turned his head, his eyes still closed, trying to figure out what he was seeing and feeling.

“Who made them? Can you see that?” Lynn’s voice came to Zeke as he refocused his inner eye. “And how long ago were they made?”

“Not long,” he answered promptly. He could tell that just by how quickly he’d gotten to the manufacturing part of the item’s history.

“I see a workshop in a…castle?” Zeke tried to look closer.

“Yeah, it’s a castle. An old one. I think it’s in Europe.

There’s nothing in that style on this side of the world with that much age to it.

The woman who made the bracelets also carved the stones and she did so while muttering.

No, chanting. She was chanting something…

It sounds really foul. Unintelligible language to me, but it sounds kind of evil. ”

“Can you repeat any of the words?” Rick asked, but Lynn interjected immediately.

“Don’t say them in order. Just give us a few highlights here and there, and maybe mix them up a bit. We don’t want to accidentally summon something,” she cautioned.

This was getting weirder and weirder. Zeke listened hard and picked out a few of the strange sounding words, saying them out of order, just in case.

“That’s enough,” Lynn almost shouted, then her tone subsided. “I think I know what this is. I recognize the names of several demonic powers, though I don’t know all the words.”

“No worries. Carter knows every language. He can probably fill in the blanks later,” Rick said while Zeke scrunched up his eyes, trying to note more details about the surroundings, looking for any clue that might help them narrow down the location.

Then he saw something he recognized. A silhouette out the window of the workshop that looked a lot like a place he had been. Bingo.