“Where are we?” Deven asked.

“Tepito barrio. Beatriz Rodriguez’s house is a few blocks away.”

The buildings looked impoverished, with rusted metal awnings and chipped plaster corners. Power lines drooped down nearly at street level and formed webs across the skyline. Piles of shiny litter clustered over the broken pavement. Dark blue corrugated garage doors shuttered closed blocks of shops.

Deven concentrated on a building corner, finally realizing he was staring at peeling, colorful posters layered upon each other. Deven felt triumph at finally comprehending what he saw, and then confusion. Why would anyone want to look at that mess?

They turned onto Republica de Paraguay. Agent Klakow maneuvered the car to a stop along the sidewalk in front of a two-story, persimmon-colored plaster building. There was little outward sign that a murder investigation was underway—no police tape, no crowds of onlookers as Deven had come to expect based on the television shows he watched. The street appeared nearly vacant.

But as Deven glanced around, he saw other things. Two men in suits down at the end of an alleyway. A dog that watched closely as they got out of the car. There was a smell here too, barely detectable above the overwhelming odor of roasting pork. The sizzling odor of the supernatural world, a smell of sulfur and ozone, pervaded the air like a nearly forgotten memory. It burned Deven’s nostrils.

It made him homesick.

Klakow led them to a crooked red wooden door, held open by a man in a suit and sunglasses. Following Klakow, Deven climbed a narrow set of stairs up to the second floor.

 “The good news is, you have a great magical forensics team working with you,” Klakow said, breathing harder as he climbed the steep staircase.

“You aren’t leading this investigation?” Deven asked.

Klakow turned and smirked. “No, though you’re going to wish I was.”

“Why?”

“Because the bad news is, you’re working with Agent Silas August.”

“Bad news? Why?”

“August is a complete prick. The only agent who could ever stand working with him was Rodriguez. He was August’s partner for the last six years, so needless to say Rodriguez’s murder hasn’t sunnied August’s disposition.” Klakow pushed the door open.

Inside the small room were half a dozen people, some in business suits, others in personal protection gear, collecting evidence. Klakow stepped carefully over the chalked outlines of two bodies and pointed Deven toward a tall man standing near the window, speaking on a cell phone.

He was thin and handsome and dressed as if planning to attend an awards ceremony. He wore a tailored charcoal suit and a fitted white dress shirt with the collar open. His black, wavy hair accentuated the distinct angles of his pale face—sharp cheekbones, long nose, and piercing blue eyes.

The man turned and gave Deven a cold, cursory glance without bothering to interrupt his telephone conversation. Deven found himself looking away from the intensity of the man’s stare and that’s when he noticed the stains on the floor.

Bloodstains formed sprayed haloes around the heads of the body outlines. Dark, serpent-like soot stains marred the floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall. Deven noted the cracked glass in the framed photographs; the burned paper, matches, and a copper bowl dented inward with great force; and shattered pieces of jade ground into the carpet, glinting in the low apartment light.

And covering every surface, hundreds of them, the tiny, broken bodies of dead quail.

Deven’s heart began to race.

The sharp clap of a phone snapping shut startled Deven’s attention back to the agent.

“I’m Agent Silas August. You the Aztaw expert?” August asked.

Deven felt nervous under such scrutiny. “Yes. I’m Deven—”

“About goddamn time you got here.”

“No spell on earth can make the traffic in this city any better,” Klakow said. He patted Deven on the back. Deven tensed at the contact. “He’s all yours.”

August fixed Deven once more with his steely glare. “First impression?”

For a second, Deven thought the agent meant himself. Deven caught up quickly. “This isn’t a murder,” he said.

“The hell it isn’t.”

“This isn’t just a murder,” Deven amended. “It’s a message.”

Chapter Two

Agent August pocketed his cell phone and stared. His glance traveled up Deven’s body, eyes locking with his. “The report I got said your eyesight is shit.”

“It’s better.”

“Well then, why don’t you use those pretty green eyes and take a look around?”

“I don’t need to. I already know most of what I need.”

August’s mouth formed a hard line. “Explain.”

Deven felt inexplicably nervous. He picked up a leather cord threaded with thorns that had fallen near a body outline and held it out to the agent. “Do you know what this is?”

“You’re the Aztaw expert. You tell me.”

“It’s a ritual bloodletting cord. It means someone here performed an Aztaw spell.”

“No shit. The question is, what for?”

“The smoke patterns on the walls make me think someone summoned a vision serpent.” Deven started moving around the room and August followed him. “You see these snake-shaped scorch marks? The vision serpent isn’t really a conscious organism, more a force, and it burns its will into everything—surfaces and beings. The ritual bloodletting with the cord could be for numerous spells, but these markings are the clue that they wanted to see something hidden.” He crouched and picked up a shard of jade. Turning it in the faint apartment light, Deven was able to make out the broken image of a serpent glyph. “And this was a token to break the spell and send the serpent back into hiding.” He handed this to August as well.

Deven felt self-conscious because he’d spent so much time in the last year being told how things worked. It was rare for him to be the expert in anything. He had to remind himself that this was what he was being paid to do—advise the Irregulars on a culture and magical system they knew next to nothing about.

“Are there ways to end the spell other than breaking this token?” August asked.

Deven nodded. “The spell itself can run its course. The duration of the vision is dependent on the amount of blood used to conjure it. They initiated the curse by pouring their blood in here—” He bent down and retrieved the dented copper bowl. “—and then soaked a paper offering, which they burned to send to the underworld.”

August frowned at the jade in his hand but didn’t respond. He looked at the other pieces of jade on the carpet.

The silence stretched. Deven felt he needed to continue. “The quail worry me,” he admitted. “Quail are watchbirds for certain lords of the Aztaw. Common Aztaw citizens, the soldiers, they don’t have magical powers of their own, and they don’t control watchbirds. The quail suggest the perpetrator was watched by a lord. And the fact that the birds are dead means the murderer doesn’t want his actions carried back to the Aztaw lord who dispatched them.”

“Who would the message go to?” August asked. He still stared intently at the shards on the carpet.

Deven shrugged. “I can’t say. There used to be nearly a hundred lords of Aztaw. But now most of them are dead. The few remaining lords have had their house powers broken and live in hiding.”

Deven realized he’d just summarized over five years of complex Aztaw political history in three sentences, but August seemed not to notice.

He picked up another shard of jade. “Do you know which lords use quail as watchbirds?”

“Not anymore. I’ve been away from Aztaw for nearly a year. It might help, though, if we took a look to see what happened here,” Deven suggested.

August’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

Deven shrugged. “I brought my mirror. We could see the last few seconds of their lives, at least.”