Lupi 08 - Death Magic

that’s why you’re here. You’ve dealt with this crap before.” He looked past her. “Hannah, it’s all yours. I’ve got people to talk to. Let me know what you find. Doug, Agent Yu, with me.”
    He led her and the sandy-haired man into the foyer and from there through the door on the left. Turned out that wasn’t the coat closet, like she’d thought, but a small study. Lots of books, a single small window. Desk with the usual computer stuff and tidy stacks of files and papers.
    He stopped, turned, faced her. “I do not like having my direct orders ignored.”
    “Yeah? I don’t like being treated like an idiot.”
    “The difference here is that I’m in charge. You aren’t. This is Doug Mullins. He’s second-up as far as I’m concerned. You’ll take orders from him, too.”
    Mullins was a squat little man with pale skin, pale eyes, and a wide mouth that probably altered his face a lot when he smiled. If he ever smiled. Or spoke. So far she hadn’t heard one word from him. “Fine,” she said, and held out her hand. “Good to meet you, Agent Mullins.”
    He studied her outstretched hand about the way he’d examine a wad of gum stuck to his shoe.
    Drummond snorted. “Don’t be a pussy, Doug. Shake the nice agent’s hand so she knows you aren’t a big, bad witch.”
    Reluctantly he did. Damp palm, short fingers, no magic. Wedding ring on the left hand, plain gold. Lily looked at Drummond. “Do you ignore the expertise of everyone on your team? Or is it just the women you discount? Or the ones with a Gift?”
    Drummond rubbed his jaw again. After a moment he nodded. “Point. I should’ve asked what the hell you were doing before I told you to stop doing it. But from here on in, if I say hop on one foot, you start hopping and keep one damn foot off the damn floor. Or I’ll get someone else from the woo-woo side to handle that part of the investigation.”
    Lily didn’t buy the threat. Croft had assigned her to the case. Drummond couldn’t unassign her . . . but he could make it hard to do her job. “I’ll follow orders. Sir. But I’m not good at hopping for no damn reason.”
    “Tough. Tell me about death magic. Tell it like I don’t know a damn thing. You won’t be far off.”
    “It’s magic sourced through ritual killing.” He had to know that much. Every cop in the country knew that much. “The practitioners use the power of the transition—”
    “What do you mean, practitioners?”
    “It takes more than one person to perform the ritual. The only known exception is a wraith, which both creates and subsists on death magic, no ritual needed.”
    “Any chance we’ve got a wraith on our hands?”
    “How much detail do you want?”
    “Put the detail in your report. Give me a yes or no now.”
    “There’s a chance, but it’s extremely slim.” First because wraiths were really, really hard to make. Second because a wraith wouldn’t have left so much tasty death magic behind on that dagger. Wraiths ate the stuff.
    “We’ve got a human perp, then.”
    “Perps. Five is considered the minimum necessary for a death magic ritual. One for each of the four compass points, and one to direct the ritual and do the actual killing. In all of the known rituals, the killer uses a blade, usually to cut the victim’s throat. The ritual allows the person in charge to absorb or contain the power released when a soul transitions from life to whatever comes next.”
    Turned out Mullins did have a voice—a gravelly baritone at odds with his size. “Soul?” He loaded plenty of scorn into the word. “You believe in souls?”
    “You don’t like the word, pick another one. Something persists after the body dies. We don’t know how long it persists or what happens to it, not in any definitive way, but souls are fact, not belief.”
    Mullins’s chin jutted pugnaciously. “You can’t prove that.”
    “Death magic itself proves something other than the purely physical exists.”
    “All that crap about transitions! You sound like a TV psychic. Obviously death magic uses the life energy of the victims, not some holy-baloney transition.”
    “What’s life energy?”
    “The energy it takes to keep a body alive.”
    She snorted. “Talk about an undefinable term! If you stick to the purely physical, a subsistence diet consists of twelve hundred calories. That’s the equivalent of about five Btus. If all a death magic practitioner could access was the purely physical, he’d do a hell of