A Perfect Blood

glowing dust. “Rache,” he said, trying to get into my line of sight. “What more do you need? God to send a telegram? I know you think you’re safe, but you need to go into hiding, and you need to do it now !”
    “I’m fine,” I breathed, my eyes on the woman’s hand, the skin red and cracked, as if it was trying to turn into a hoof and she had held the change off by her will alone. “She has something in her grip.”
    Glenn hesitated, sighed at Nina’s gesture, then gave up on protocol and pried her hand open. Jenks flew down and darted back to me, something shiny in his arms. “Hey!” Glenn protested, but I wouldn’t let him land, and he finally dropped it right into the collection bag that Glenn had hastily opened.
    “It’s a piece of mirror!” he said as Glenn zipped the bag shut and wrote on the label.
    “Now you can see it,” he grumbled as he handed it over, and Jenks landed on my wrist as I took it. I’d seen evidence through a bag before, and together we peered down at the thumb-size piece of rose-tinted glass. My heart sank.
    “I think it’s a chunk of a scrying mirror,” I said, and Jenks hummed his wings.
    “No fairy-assed way!” he said, clearly not seeing what that meant.
    Demon magic, hidden bodies deformed into increasingly familiar shapes, blood slowly being changed into something else. The scattershot amulet I’d used was keyed to the man’s hair. Clearly he wasn’t under the floor, which meant the man’s structure had been changed right down to the genetic level enough to match the woman and to ping on a scattershot charm. They really were trying to make a demon. They were trying to make a demon out of a witch by using the questionable success of each previous victim and layering it on the next. And by the looks of this corpse, they might be getting close.
    “There’s blood on it,” I said, my fingers trembling as I handed it back. “If it’s not hers, it belongs to one of her captors. We can use it to make a locator charm and find them instead of an empty room.”
    Glenn shifted in excitement, but I felt awful as I looked down at the woman and silently thanked her. She’d been forcibly abducted, experimented on, and tortured. Yet she had given us a clue, hiding it with her body and hoping we were clever enough to find it, recognize it, and then use it.
    “Let me smell,” Nina said. “I can tell you what species it is.”
    There were voices in the hall, and, grimacing, Glenn quickly broke the seal and held it under her nose. Nina jumped as the scent hit her, and Jenks and I watched as the two consciousnesses fought for control, eyes closing and hands trembling. It was the elder vampire who looked out at us when Nina’s eyes opened again. “Human,” the undead vampire said through Nina, a ribbon of excitement in her voice. “It belongs to one of the captors. We have a chance. Finally we have a chance.”
    I looked at the ruined woman under our feet and silently thanked her again. A chance. That was all I needed.

Chapter Eleven

    T he kitchen was overly warm and smelling of chili, the black square of night past the blue-curtained window dark, clear, and frigid. The waning moon had a harsh crystal clarity to it that matched my mood, cold and hard. A waning moon wasn’t the best time to be making spells, but I didn’t have much choice. That I’d gotten them done before midnight made me feel better.
    Bis and Belle were on top of the fridge having an impromptu reading lesson, Jenks was in the garden, and Wayde was upstairs getting some wolfsbane to spike the chili with. With all that, I should’ve been in a good mood, but the memory of what we’d found under the floor of the museum kept my motions quick and my shoulders tense.
    I’d been in the kitchen since getting home from the museum. My feet hurt from being on them all day, but the new set of scattershot amulets was already at the FIB and I.S. Glenn, who had brought us home, had waited for them. I’d also made more batches of sleepy-time charms.
    The cookies I’d wanted to bake had turned into flicking the oven on and cracking it to warm the space. Not efficient, I know, but Jenks had been nearly blue with cold by the time we’d gotten back from the museum basement. I wasn’t going to risk him getting chilled and possibly slipping into a stupor he might not wake from until spring. His kids had enjoyed the updraft until their papa had warmed up enough to yell at them from the salt and pepper