Page 70 of A Subtle Scar
“Hmm?” he said. He gave me that stupid, shy smile when he turned to meet my eyes. It made me feel all fluttery on the inside.
“Yesterday, at the evidence unit. You agreed that the marionette binding—the puppet spell—wasn’t well crafted?”
He nodded. “Yes. Why?”
“Because that makes no sense,” I said.
Hermes turned, gave a satisfied nod, put his hands on his hips, and struck a pose made for lush timeline pics. “Does it help you knowing that this one connects to the spell as well? Let me check the minced meat one.”
“O-oh,” Florence mumbled.
The door to the cooling unit fell shut with a loud bang. “What did you just call our guest?” Kurtz said. The woman was small, competent, and all business from what I had seen, but now, she seemed to have grown to about twice her size. “They are all people, loved by other people, young man, and we treat them as such. Is your immortal head advanced enough to compute that?”
“Erm. I’m actually not that young—ow! Ronny! My toes!”
Charon pulled his heel off Hermes’s toe. “You forbid me a pocket phone and criticize my wardrobe yet fail to show minimal courtesy in this space of bearing witness to human cruelty. It makes me look bad, seeing as I share a boyfriend with you. Apologize.”
The last was an order, delivered with airs fit for a king of the underworld. It was very hot. And confusing. Being so close to the two of them was confusing most of the time.
“I…am very, very sorry, madam mortician. I just meant to say the lady is pieces of herself,” Hermes said.
Kurtz crossed her arms. “Better. And I am not a mortician but a forensic pathologist by training.” She looked at me while Hermes headed for the one whose jaw was too damaged for Deacon to even get her name. “I didn’t find that same burn mark on her,” Kurtz told me. “But to be frank, we were focused on what could be done about her head so that she could talk.”
“That is very understandable,” Charon said. “I read in the files she had no name.”
“She does. We just don’t know it,” Deacon said.
“Hah!” Hermes said from next to the subway victim’s slab. “Also part of the spell. Ronny?”
“What?” Charon said, but came over to Hermes, who was pointing at the arm that was still connected to the torso. “What, a quartered circle?”
“Yes, that has been on all the victims,” Kurtz said and joined them too.
“A quartered moon isn’t actually anything,” I said. “It’s nothing that’s relevant to magic or spellwork, not on its own at least.”
Hermes looked at each of us, and then brightened. “None of you see it.” He crossed his arms, and that wide smile looked borderline painful. “Seriously, none of you? Not even you, Ronny?”
“I just see graffiti carved into this poor human’s skin. And I don’t see the halfmoon on her at all, although she does seem to have that tenuous binding to the spell.”
Hermes snorted. “Yes, that too.”
“Spit it out. Gloating makes you look desperate,” I said, and boy did that ever hit home. Hermes even blushed a little.
“It’s that signature thing. Like they used to do? Johannes talked about it all the time, about how his symbols were like his name, moon symbol, sun symbol, birth symbol, yada yada. I only paid so much attention, but the gist of it was, he thought putting a symbol to mark his work would add his personal strength to the magic he was doing.”
Charon tilted his head. “That’s not anything that should work. The spell itself, crafted by the human, is a reflection of that human.”
Hermes shrugged. “I know. But Johannes was fun, you know?”
I was glad Johannes was dead, something Kurtz might’ve slapped me for if I’d said it out loud.
“You’re saying some of the other nonsense symbols might be from the other perpetrators,” Deacon said, and he looked over to the first victim, then to the one from the field lying on a far slab, the one he still had to raise. “They marked them.”
“They marked their work, meaning they consider murder and torment their work,” I said.
“That is very dark,” Charon said.
“Many of our guests have dark tales to tell. Speaking of which, there was one more raising before I can move onward to the autopsy?” Kurtz said.
