Pepper / INK /

Bloody murder

The scene that had called him out was grisly. It was a well-to-do area of the Lunar Section, cutout four, a few blocks from where Claire lived. The whole block was taped off.

And the magic hit him almost as soon as he opened the car door. His back began to ache. It was the cold pain of blood magic. The early warning of magic and the types, had been an inadvertent gift of the Necromancer who had tried to kill him. The blade had snapped off against his spine leaving the tip, and that tip resonated magic every time it got near other types of magic.

Blood magic was the cold of death. That was the closest he could explain. It wasn’t cold like a cold night, it was that eerie, unearthly cold of a tomb. Solar magic was warm like a summer day, and Moon magic was-- that brisk numbing cold like a clear night.

This was the cold, empty of death. Even the magic felt--empty, as if everything it could be, it should be had been sucked out of it leaving it a cold corpse on the floor next to the others. The door was open, or rather, had never been closed. And the men standing outside looked green around the gills. He waited for the rest of the Taskforce before he went in.

The dwelling was small, the sort of flat that people retired to. It had once been neat, but the copper smell hit him along with the earthen smell he could never explain among the newly-raised. Even if they had never been in the ground, they had that sour, decay and earth smell that one associated with Artife, The Risen. He thought he knew what to expect, but when he came in he had to turn around and go back out for a moment. Steeling himself for what was inside he reentered.

One corpse lay on the bed, stripped, with bloody handprints all around. The other, kneeling next to the bed, was also dead. It was clear, whatever had started it, the kneeling man had eaten his wife as a Risen, a body reanimated by magic, they fed on human flesh and blood, gathering power for their masters.

"Eighty one year old, Hezkiri and Seventy-eight year old Kasib," He said. "He was struck with Shadow Plague four years ago, has been a functional zombie since." Jessica said softly beside him. Her voice cracked with the force of trying to keep her lunch in its place.

"I don’t need a revelation spell, we know it was the Necromancer." He said. "It’s pretty obvious that the man was made into a Risen, though, in this case, I’d say he was more like a Becomer, and attacked his wife. Then the Necromancer killed him and took the power from both of them." He frowned. "Make sure that their bodies are properly cared for, the last thing we need is her body being defiled too." He said quietly.

The room was bloody, Becomers were not neat, and burned into the wife’s wrist, was the hand-print that any of the cog-bound knew. It was a Becomer mark. Four bony fingers. His assessment had been correct.  The spell used to make a Becomer was so heavy it could physically burn or disfigure those it touched.  He rubbed at the twin mark on his own arm.  Fortunately the one on his own arm wasn’t to the bone like this was.

There were two sets of bloody footprints one, bare, belonged to the husband, the other, they presumed was the Necromancer, but the odds were good he’d already cleaned up, and when you used a spell, it was hard to find any trace.

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Next Chapter: Inkwalker