I stared down at the third body of the night. Her blood soaked the cold concrete around her. There was no way I wouldn’t be bringing a piece of her home with me. The sharp metallic scent of her blood hung in the air, mixing with the trash strewn about, making her body smell like the end of the day at the meat market. Death was never dignified, whether you were surrounded by your loved ones or tossed away like garbage. We all met our maker the same way, scared and alone.

Her wavy copper hair was styled in such a way as to reveal the startled look on her thin, tense face. It was the only part of her body that hadn’t been ruined by the slaughter. Her pale skin was already graying from the cruel hand that had been dealt to her. Speckles of blood mixed with her freckles, and I held back the urge to clean them off with my hand. Her wide green eyes had seen her attacker, her fear forever frozen and staring back at me. The sparkle in her eyes was long gone, leaving a dead and empty gaze. It chilled me to the bone. The clover pin—which hadn’t brought her any luck—attached to the collar of her once-white shirt, glinted under the flashes of police cruisers and unnecessary paramedics. She wasn’t taking a ride in the bus tonight. Her chauffeur would come with a full-length zipper and handles.

That was the face of Rowan Sage, an earth witch, and it would haunt me until something worse took up her place in my memories. Given my chosen lifestyle, it wouldn’t take long before I moved on from Rowan to something or someone new. Little by little, with each new scene I was called to, I created stains that hounded me while I slept and, at times, froze me during my waking hours. Some horrors never left, and until the sun swallowed the earth, there’d always be nights like this, reasons I slept with a gun and a Hellhound in training.

I crouched down, the movement wafting her last moments up to my nose. I swallowed my urge to gag and picked up her bag, standing and taking a few steps back, out of reach from the perfume of the dead. With gloved hands, I dug through her black bat-shaped purse. Nothing stood out as being reason enough to kill her in a dingy back alley. Handmade lip balm from the witches’ market, a wallet with three cards and her level-one Coven membership, fifty bucks, house keys, and an uninvoked hex bag.

“Why you, of all people?” I whispered, scanning the victim once again. I took another look at the alley and wondered if there was any significance to the location. Aside from a fresh body, nothing stood out. Was it a case of the wrong place, wrong time? Or was she the target?

Level-one witches, especially earth witches, weren’t high on hit lists these days. A couple decades ago, perhaps, but not today. I put her purse into a brown paper evidence bag, her identification in my hand, and jotted down her information for my report. I passed her driver’s license and the brown bag to a nearby officer, who would tag it. After two decades and some change, her life was snuffed out. What a waste.

Her body had been discovered while I was at the second crime scene. I’d been called in by Mannix after the first body. He had sensed hell but hadn’t been able to find traces of a demon or the energy left behind by another magic user. When I’d arrived, I hadn’t seen any hints of hell or magic, either. Hope had called me to the scene, but curiosity kept me there once I came up empty of answers. Hope that such carnage was the work of the pits and not man. It was easier to sleep at night, thinking hell was responsible for all of humanity’s problems. If we just kept the gates closed, all would be right in the world. As if things would ever be so simple. The truth was, mankind did worse to each other than any damned or cursed ever did. Demons didn’t rob grocery stores, kill for a wallet with twenty bucks in it, or shoot up schoolyards. People did. But it didn’t stop us from blaming the beasts, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Of every case I’d been called into, where the guilty claimed they were possessed, only one had ever been able to use that as a defense. The fact is, we’re more than capable of horror without hell needing to tinker with our morality. The best thing a demon could do to guarantee our demise was to sit back and watch us go to work on each other. We did all the heavy lifting for them.

Sure, hope had brought me to a dank alley, but I knew I’d leave without any of my own. Nights like these took it away and left me with the raw reality of the hell we all had created without the help of the pits. Some days, I really hated this world. But the alternative was a cage in hell, which wasn’t much better.

I stepped back from the body and blurred my vision, seeing through my aura, a witch’s sixth sense. Rowan’s soul was long gone, but imprints of the night, those who had come and gone, still lingered. Magic in the air prickled my arms and pulled my attention in circles. My eyes roamed the backstreet, picking up hints of emotion and stains so deep and evil they’d take another few decades to fade. I scanned for the strongest imprints, like picking through a trash can for a missing diamond. Bits of magic and old taint floated in the breeze. It snaked along the ground and held onto the walls like chipped paint. The alley was a popular walkthrough, leaving too much of one thing and not enough of why I had been called to the new scene. I frowned when I didn’t find what Mannix had been hoping for. I had come here for one reason and came up short. There were two reasons, if I was counting the memories I was making, that I didn’t want.

“Inretio,” I whispered, using my aura to send a net out into the alley to trap demonic energy. It was a new spell taught to me by my grandfather, Samuel. As a retired guardian, he was a walking, talking book of spells that I’d find nowhere else. The spell was still new enough that it tingled to hold onto. It turned my hands cold and fingertips numb. I could feel every magic and emotion that had walked the alley for the last week, as though they were all here at once. As I suspected, I saw no hints of fresh black taint. The alley would look like spilled ink in water if a demon had been here recently. I would have been able to see his footsteps, as though his taint was burned into the ground. But I hadn’t picked up any hellish happenings at the other two sites, either. With a wave of my hand, I dropped the spell to the ground, refocused my eyes and pulled my shields back into place. My soul breathed a sigh of relief, cut off from the night’s carnage.

“I’m ready.” I motioned for Mannix, who had emptied the area of souls for me. I didn’t need everyone clear of me to do the job, but the combined emotions of onlookers and police made my skin crawl when I was using aura magic.

“Please tell me you’ve got something, Ailis.” He sounded as tired as I felt. Seven in the morning was a painful hour to be awake for those of us who hadn’t yet been to bed.

“Like the other two scenes, there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.” I pursed my lips, thinking. I glanced around the scene once more, trying to piece it together. “Zero witnesses at all three scenes. It’s not unusual in a city. It’s just odd that three scenes didn’t turn up a single set of eyes. None of us want to stumble into someone else’s business if that business is ending lives, but it was one hell of a busy night downtown for there to be not a single onlooker. Someone had to see or hear something.”

“We’re canvasing and checking out the neighboring security tapes. See who came and went, but this alley is a void, like most of them. There’s nothing down here of value, except the victim, to keep an eye on,” he answered. “What are you thinking?”

“Besides there being eyes out there who likely saw this go down but are too scared to open their mouths, I’m thinking about what is missing from this scene,” I replied.

“What do you mean, something is missing?”

“Whenever we’re dealing with hell, it’s common to feel hatred, pleasure, arousal, and absolute delight in the carnage they’re causing. But this isn’t hell, Mannix. I can feel the emotions I usually feel from a demon, but it’s missing the actual hell part. There’s no scent of the pits, no telltale demonic smells, no taint crawling over my skin, no fresh demonic energy. I can feel evil, but it wasn’t caused by the pits. The energy is similar, but it isn’t quite the same. There were souls attached to whoever did this.”

“But I can feel it. I can feel hell,” he replied. “I can smell hell. Why can’t you?”

“You can feel and smell Rowan, as can I,” I corrected him. “She’s a level-one earth witch. I’m guessing what you’re feeling and smelling is related to the circle she tried to set, and the lingering magic in the air as she pulled on the energy from hell.” I led Mannix back to the body and pointed at the blood splatters on the ground. “These drops of blood are inconsistent with her wounds and the rest of the blood patterns. She was stabbed multiple times, and it sprayed as though the stabs were one after the other. I’d be surprised if the medical examiner came back with only one weapon used.” I crouched down and lifted her left hand. “She has a fresh slice across her palm. It’s too clean and shallow for it to be a defensive wound. I’d bet my cauldron there’s a small blade kicking around somewhere, and it’ll be hers.” I stood and stepped back, walking in a circle around her. “I can feel the lingering power in the air. She set a circle, thinking it would help her. Whatever came for her, she thought her magic would save her. She had enough time to think she could protect herself. If this were a demon with her name on his list, a level-one wouldn’t have time to scream, let alone try to set a circle.”

“Unless she wasn’t his target. If she was a bystander, she may have had time to set her circle and caught his attention when she pulled on energy,” Mannix suggested. “We both know a powerful enough demon can take down a circle, especially one set by a level-one.”

“True. But if a demon, powerful enough to take down a circle, did this, then where are the rest of the bodies?” I asked. “Mannix, we’re downtown. Bealtaine festivals have been raging since noon. Between the festival and the after-parties, there are thousands of souls, ripe for the picking, all over the streets. People from all over the world are visiting for the celebrations. If this was a demon, we’d have found her sooner by simply following the trail of bodies he’d leave on the ground. Demons don’t cherry-pick. They don’t kill a few randoms and pack it in. They kill everything with a pulse until they’re stopped, or they have what they come here for.”

“Unless she owed a debt. Demons pop up all the time to collect souls and don’t go on a killing spree. This, what happened to her, may have been a message to her, nothing more. I’ve been to plenty of scenes where demons took their sweet-assed time, carving chunks off of their victims, spending hours tormenting them before killing them.”

“Three unrelated folks owing debts to the same demon in one night?” I asked. “The odds of that happening are astronomical. Demons don’t save up their collections for a one-night grocery shop. They come the moment the soul is due for the taking.”

“Fuck,” Mannix groaned. The hope for simple answers faded, replaced with the frustration of the unknown. “I’m sorry I called you away from May Day,” he said for the third time tonight. “I owe you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be issuing an invoice for my consult,” I replied. “I’m sorry I don’t have the answers you were looking for.”

“What are your thoughts?” He motioned at the body. “If you had to guess. I need to go back to my captain with something, anything. Empty-handed is not how I want to start my meeting with Holland. I don’t get paid the big bucks to be behind the Eightball.”

“Hate to say this, but you’re not hunting a demon or magic user. My money is on humans doing all three murders,” I answered. “A demon would have ravaged the soul completely. It would take days for that kind of torment to fade. Terrified souls stain the very air. We would have felt the residual energy like a slap across the face as soon as we stepped into this alley. But there’s nothing here. It doesn’t even smell like the pits. The only fresh odors are the trash cans, mossy earth magic, blood, and us. There are hints here and there from odors long past, but nothing recent enough to give me pause. Aside from the dead body, it feels like every other alley in the city.”

“I’m not picking up any other unnatural, either,” Mannix said, and I glared at the word he used. “What? That’s the official name of a magic user. It’s better than what some people call us.”

“Metaphysical or magic user are the PC terms. Get with the times, witch,” I replied. “But I agree. Every magic user I know would leave an imprint of their energy behind, and there’s nothing fresh here, just like the first two bodies you found. I can pick up a little of the emotion left behind—hate, anger, arousal, but it’s not strong enough to be hell. It’s no stronger than a customer service line the day after a Black Friday sale.”

Mannix opened his notepad and read his notes. “At the first scene, a young shifter, the only energy was the victim’s. He was attacked from behind and stabbed in the heart. The coup de grâce was removing his head. The second scene, an elemental witch still in training, throat slit and stabbed in the heart. No residual energies outside of the victim’s.”

Mannix had written down the same thing I had, almost verbatim. “My point exactly. What demon does that? They don’t stalk prey unless it is the one who called them, and the demon has no choice but to smoke them out, but they still leave a trail of bodies behind them while they are topside. Neither of the witches have knocked on hell’s door even once. There is no debt they’d have. We’d smell the taint if that were the case. And the shifter, even if he somehow figured out how to do it, he didn’t smell like he’s been ringing a demon’s doorbell.”

“Shit,” he groaned. “When I found nothing at the first scene, I hoped you would. I thought it may have been a demon I was unfamiliar with.”

“Trust me, Mannix, you’d have known it was a demon even if they were unknown to you. For this, you need a bloodhound, not a witch. Track the smells, not the magic. It’ll lead you to those responsible.”

“He’s not on shift for another week. His wife had twins a couple of weeks ago,” Mannix replied.

“Tell Arlow I said congratulations.” I smiled at the news. There were so few of Arlow’s kind out there. Bloodhounds were naturally born, not cursed or infected. It had been the luck of the Gods when he had found another and married her. “Twin bloodhounds? Mercy, he’s in for a fun few years. I went to high school with triplets. They were a nightmare for their parents until they outgrew puberty and could control their tracking impulses.”

“Maybe he’ll come out for a few hours,” Mannix said.

“Bribe him with chocolate tarts from the bakery near Samuel’s house. That’s how I convinced him to track a troll when no one else would help me. His wife doesn’t let him eat sugar,” I answered. “It works every time.”