Chapter 23

There were no witnesses.

I shook my head sharply. Survivors .

Call them what you want , Cherry said, but move your ass .

Chandra hadn’t reverted to a shedim form when she was murdered, so she was human. It didn’t matter why she’d chosen to work for demons, any rewards she’d reaped were irrelevant now.

I grabbed the dead receptionist’s long puffy coat from the coat stand in the break room, grateful that my own jacket was short and would be covered by this one, then I tucked my hair under the large hood and adjusted my gait to be more like a man’s.

There was nothing I could do about my size, but hopefully any security cameras outside would mistake my two jackets for a man’s bulk. No wonder the shedim hadn’t even bothered with gloves to hide his fingerprints, if authorities caught him on any security camera, they’d be hunting a glamor. One that would never be used again.

I tossed the puffy coat into a dumpster in an alley a few blocks away, smoothed my once-more brown hair down with my fingers, and checked on my camera that none of the blood I’d gotten on my scales showed on my face. My bloodstained gloves went into my pocket to be burned later.

No one gave me a second glance on the walk back to my car.

Out of shock, self-preservation, or both, I stuck with the mandated program, and kept moving. I put on a talk radio program about the state of potholes in the Lower Mainland to keep me company for the drive. Every time my brain veered off that topic and onto dangerous ground, I simply turned the radio up.

By the time I got home, I was partially deaf, but I’d made it back undetected and in one piece.

The second I stepped into my bedroom, my emotional defenses shattered, the lie of their brittleness revealed. I screamed and hurled my car keys across the room. I was shaking, my fists tightly clenched. I’d been so blinded by my suspicions of Maccabees that I’d missed a lethal threat and, as a result, failed to spot any danger to Chandra or those around her. The female employee and her client must have gone before the assassin showed up, but the receptionist was still dead.

Some poor soul would come into work later, or worse, not until the day after tomorrow on Monday, and find those corpses. It made me sick to my stomach to be complicit in that.

After a very hot shower where I scrubbed my skin raw, I threw on sweats and sank onto my bed, narrowing my eyes at the ceiling, upon which I visualized a timeline.

Based on when the warded gold lock was purchased, roughly two weeks ago, Jasmine got word from Chandra that a shedim with the special skills of creating a secretion to take Crackle to another level was available.

I tabled the question of where Bratwurst came from for the moment. Jasmine had been waiting a while for a suitable demon. Hopefully all the transactions that Chandra facilitated involved long wait times and a scarcity of “employees.”

Jasmine had a cage and a warded lock ready to imprison the shedim, who wasn’t strong enough to get free.

Two weeks went by. The shedim got stronger, and the drug manufacturers produced that batch of Crackle we found. Then came the night of the bust. Handling the shedim’s urine hadn’t been an issue before, but that evening even drops of it on their skin had deadly consequences.

Either the Eishei Kodesh manufacturers got sloppy or the secretion was more potent than expected and hit them with the subtlety of a wrecking ball.

That shit show ended with the demon refusing to go back somewhere and killing herself.

I’d found two locks in evidence: one gold and warded, the other a silver love lock with no magic on it.

Finally, a male shedim silenced Chandra. A Maccabee showing up to question her didn’t cause her assassination. I wasn’t in there long enough for my attacker to be alerted and arrive with a glamor on and a gun at the ready.

This had already been in motion long before I’d entered that room. But what set it off?

The encroaching darkness outside broke into my thoughts. I hauled myself up off my bed and lit the Hanukkah candles, the dancing flames steadying my emotions enough to come up with my next step in this case.

Jasmine believed the gold lock would hold Bratwurst, so was there more to it than an Eishei Kodesh ward? Had the shedim at the employment agency murdered Chandra to cover up his involvement?

I threw my closet door open, tossing all my purses out until the keypad on the safe was exposed. If using my blood on Sire’s Spark led me to Maud the night of the Maccabee party, could it lead me to some discovery about the demon assassin?

Quickly punching in the code to the safe, I pulled out the crystal and carried it and the gold lock I’d retrieved from my purse into my bathroom.

I shut the door and sliced my finger on a claw. A single bead of blood dotted my skin, and while I was hit with a faint tinge of nausea, it was nothing like the night of the party when I’d sensed Maud.

That was strange, though, because there was still nausea. Shouldn’t I have had an all-or-nothing reaction? I scanned the gold lock with my synesthete vision, but my magic didn’t reveal a damn thing. Normally, that would make sense since I illuminated weaknesses only in humans, not inanimate objects, but something was affecting me.

Leaving the crystal on the bathroom counter for the moment, I opened my door, intending to put the lock back in the evidence bag while I searched for the culprit. The moment I left the bathroom—as soon as I passed by the mezuzah ward on the doorframe—I was drenched in sweat, shivering icy cold and fever hot at the same time.

I swallowed twice against the nausea that surged up my throat and grabbed my dresser for balance.

Time spun out under the insane idea that Sachie was a half shedim and her scent and personal possessions all over the apartment was making me want to claw off my own skin. I dismissed the impossibility and ridiculousness of it even as I lurched closer to my bedroom door.

I reached for the knob, but my body twisted, hunched and bent under the force of a dark abomination pulsing out toward me.

Even Cherry flinched away from it, whimpering softly in my head like a scared dog curled in a ball, hoping not to be struck.

Through my blurred vision, I scanned every item within arm’s reach. My perfume bottle or that lone unused tampon wasn’t the culprit, but a corner of the evidence bag with the silver love lock poked out of my open purse on top of my dresser.

I shook the lock free of the clear bag and gasped. The initials engraved into the heart were almost obscured by indigo and black runes scarring every inch of it, which I instinctively knew had been created with shedim magic and their blood.

A thick black scorch mark—again caused by magic, not fire—ran diagonally through the heart.

My hands shook so violently that I couldn’t unseal the bag. I finally punctured it with my claw and was blasted to my knees by a wave of pure evil.

Using the drawer handles to pull myself up, I flipped the bag over, not daring to touch the lock directly. A meaningless string of numbers and letters glowed on the bottom of the lock next to the keyhole.

Repeating them under my breath, I grabbed my phone and wobbled into the bathroom, where I slammed the door and collapsed into the bathtub. My heart was racing, thumping against my chest like it was trying to escape, buy a plane ticket, and get to a safer place far, far away.

Same, heart, same.

I fell back against the cold enamel, my phone falling into my lap, trying to survive the stormy swells threatening to pull me under. They were subsiding now that I was once more protected by the mezuzah ward for my bathroom but not fast enough.

An eternity later, I’d recovered enough to plug the characters on the bottom of the lock into a search bar: 84XR7WH8+RF. I blinked at the result. What the fuck was a plus code?

The answer was simple but it didn’t clear anything up. Plus codes were based on latitude and longitude, providing an address for people or places who didn’t have one. This allowed for deliveries or to help others find those locations.

Runes on a lock was one thing, but I couldn’t think of a single reason for that location here in town to be magically etched into the metal—and with demon magic no less. Luckily, I had a car and could drive over there myself to check it out.

I brought Sire’s Spark with me in case I needed to reactivate my demon-sensing abilities, though using it was on my to-do list somewhere below “be swarmed by fire ants.” I also brought the silver lock, tossing it in my trunk. The effects of using my blood on Sire’s Spark had worn off and the silver lock appeared normal once more, with no visible signs of the runes or scorch mark and no sense of a foul abomination. However, my abhorrence of it wasn’t easily shaken off.

The plus code took me to the east side in Strathcona, a historically lower-class neighborhood with pockets of gentrification in the remodeled heritage homes and cute little restaurants that had sprung up.

I parked at the plus code’s specific location: a long pedestrian overpass encased with chain-link fence. Walking its length of shadows between the streetlights, I found two other locks attached to the fence. One was another padlock with initials, and the second was a partially rusted bike lock.

Bleeding on Sire’s Spark didn’t reveal shedim magic on either of them. I returned to my car and leaned against the hood, staring at the overpass and running through the facts.

The silver love lock didn’t have an Eishei Kodesh ward on it, but the plus code etched in demon magic pointed to this location. Had it been hanging on this fence? Why? And why was it in Jasmine’s possession? Or in Bratwurst Demon’s, since I wouldn’t make assumptions.

I rubbed my cold hands together, then proceeded to inform myself about love locks.

There was some contention over where the tradition of placing these engraved locks on bridges started from, but many attributed the origin to Ljubavi, over a century ago. A Serbian couple, Nada and Relja, were separated during WWI, and when Relja fell for another woman, Nada died of a broken heart.

I rolled my eyes.

When other Serbian women heard about this, instead of threatening any other cheating partners with a broom, they inscribed their own initials and that of their lovers on a padlock and atttached them to the railing of the bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet.

You know what story I hated studying most in school? Romeo and Juliet. Yes, they were dumb teens and their actions were understandable through the lens of hormone-driven questionable ideas, but generations of adults had turned this into the be-all and end-all love story.

Shame on them.

And shame on the people who’d conveniently forgotten the cheating and Nada’s death and decided the takeaway was to fetishize padlocks.

Grasping at straws, I did another search on “Unchained Melody,” the love song that Jasmine had hummed at me, a snippet in one result catching my eye.

“Unchained Melody” was written for a film about a man in prison contemplating whether to go on the run or wait out his sentence and return to his family.

One thing that I hated more than Romeo and Juliet ? Coincidences.

What if this song was Jasmine’s way of answering my question. Not the “who” of her connection to Bratwurst, but the bigger picture of “how”?

When Bratwurst said that she wasn’t going back, I’d taken that to mean to the demon realm, but I’d been dissuaded from that line of thinking. However, take one silver lock with demon magic on it, a song about jail, and Chandra—infrastructure? This wasn’t a coincidence.

It was a mindfuck of a hypothesis.

I walked around and around my car, but when I couldn’t disabuse myself of this idea, I picked up my phone to call the only person I, ironically, trusted to work through this with me, because for all her bluster and anger, she’d keep an open mind.

I hit a button in my contacts. “Michael? We need to talk.”