The sigil glowed with intense, electric lilac. Active.
A familiar rage stirred inside me. Moloch’s priests didn’t kill the pastor, but they defiled his sanctuary by leaving one of their own to watch it and taint it with Moloch’s power. This was his holy place, a refuge where Pastor Haywood ministered, and they desecrated it.
Why watch a crime scene? What did they want from it? I had to pull Moloch’s little helper out of its hidey hole and find out. Depending on who was hiding in the sigil, it could get messy.
The female knight would be here any minute. Anything she witnessed would be reported back to Nick, and I wasn’t ready to answer the kinds of questions it would raise. I could try to come back tonight, but if the thing hiding in the sigil killed someone before then, I’d never forgive myself. If I was going to break the seal, it had to be now.
Getting rid of Officer Jaded Veteran would be a problem.
“Can you give me some privacy, Officer Fleming?”
“Nope.”
Crap. “I need you to step back, please.”
Fleming took two deliberate steps back. His face told me that was as far as he was willing to go. Doing anything too flashy with him here was out of the question. Fine.
“I’ll be right back.”
I walked past him, going outside. On the left some bricks had come loose from a flower bed. That would do. I picked one up and headed back into the church.
Fleming was exactly where I had left him. He eyed the paver brick. “Don’t break any windows, Small Town.”
I walked up to the sigil, put the brick on the floor, reached into my cloak, and found the handle of my knife. It was a simple knife, reminiscent of a Bowie with a nine-inch tool steel blade, full tang, and a stacked leather handle, so my hand didn’t slip.
“Officer Fleming?”
“Yes?”
“Duck.”
I yanked my cloak off and dragged my foot across the sigil. A man-sized clump of darkness tore out of it, like a ghost in a mantle of smoke. His hands ended in three-inch-long black claws, their tips glowing with red-hot fire. A ma’avir, one of Moloch’s priests. A lesser one.
The phantom raked at me. I shied out of the way, letting the claws rend the air a hair from my throat, and stabbed the knife into the phantom’s chest, hammering a spike of my magic through it.
The knife sank into flesh. I jerked it free. Fire bled through the smoke.
The ma’avir screeched and spat a torrent of flames. I dodged and slashed again, slicing at the creature’s protective cloak, left to right and up. The smoke tore like an old tarp, betraying a glimpse of a charred body wrapped in flames.
The phantom flailed, trying to shred me with its claws. Fast, but not fast enough. I spun to the left, around it, bringing my arm in an arch from inside out and buried my blade in its back.
The creature shrieked.
I gripped the knife, feeding magic into it, and dragged it down, carving through gristle and bone, slicing through the sigils branded on its flesh, until I reached the main one in the small of its back. My blade bit into it. The sigil broke and vanished in a flash of lilac.
The smoke disappeared, like a length of black chiffon jerked out of sight. Fire burst out of the priest. For an instant, the ma’avir was engulfed in flames, a dark thing flailing within an inferno, like a blasphemous demonic candle. He burned and howled.
I swiped the brick from the floor.
The fire faltered, leaving behind a humanoid shape, desiccated, charred, bald, with his face covered in a metal mask. I kicked the creature’s spine. He went down with a dry crack. I flipped him on his back and smashed the brick into his face. The mask clanged.
I hit it again, again, and again, with controlled, methodical savagery. The mask cracked. Another hit. The metal split. Chunks of the mask fell apart, revealing a nightmarish face. His lips were gone, teeth bared in a grotesque grin. His nose was a hole in the leathery flesh of its skull. He should have been dead but somehow he was alive, an abomination wrapped in foul magic, staring at me with wide eyes, its irises full of fire.
A raspy sound broke through the priest’s teeth, a half-groan, half-snarl, so weak I had to strain to hear it. “Glory to the King of Fire…”
“Your god isn’t here,” I told him quietly. “He doesn’t care. He won’t save you.”
“He’ll come for you. You belong to him. The world belongs to him.”
“The world belongs to me and my kind, ma’avir.”
I plunged the knife into his chest and twisted. The priest convulsed, agony twisting his limbs.
“Tell me why you are here, and your death will be quick.”
The ma’avir rasped again, “Mercy…”
“You serve the god who feeds on children burned alive in his fire. There is no mercy in the world for you.”
I twisted the knife again. His shriek lashed my eardrums.
“Tell me.”
“The priest’s killer,” he whispered. “Moloch wants it.”
“Why?”
Fiery eyes stared past me at the piece of the sky through the ruined skylight. The magic that gave the ma’avir his perverse unlife was bleeding out. He was done.
Words of an ancient prayer in a language dead for thousands of years hissed out of the creature’s mouth. “The Great Moloch, God among kings, I come to you…”
No. I leaned close, so close I could feel the dying heat rising from the priest and whispered into his ear in the same tongue as his prayer. “There will be no death rites for you. Die and become nothing.”
I rose, set the brick on the creature’s face, and stomped down on it.
A fiery blast wave tore out of the corpse, roaring like an enraged animal. Every window in the church exploded. The building shook once, and then all was quiet. Smoke rose from the front pews, scorched by the heat.
The priest’s body melted into nothing. Only my knife and the brick remained, stained with soot and lilac magic. That was the problem with killing ma’avirim. When one of Moloch’s assassin-priests died, their magic sullied the weapon that killed them, and, worse, others of their kind could track it the way bloodhounds followed a scent. The stain lingered until the next tech wave. I didn’t want them to track me. Not yet.
I glanced at the lilac splashed on my hands and concentrated. Thin red vapor slid out of me, invisible to the naked eye, cleansing my skin. Didn’t work on weapons or clothes, unfortunately. I’d tried.
A small noise made me turn to the right. Something moved between the pews. Slowly, gingerly, Officer Fleming stood up. Two wide eyes stared at me from a face smudged with soot.
The door burst open, and the female knight tore into the church.
“You missed it.” I swiped my cloak off the floor, slipped it on, and walked off the platform.
She swore.
I walked past Fleming. “Sorry about the windows, Big Town.”
He gaped at me. I winked at him and headed to the door.
5
I brought Tulip to a halt on the corner of Jonesboro and Gammon Street, two blocks away from Pastor Haywood’s church. Around me black trees crowded the road, their sharp leaves unnaturally still despite a slight breeze. A small two-story building with boarded-up windows perched on the corner to the right, its grimy brown bricks stained with grey mold. Back when I ran the streets, this building served as a rallying point for the North Warren kid gangs.