It took close to half an hour of us working together to unwind and temporarily neutralize protections, but finally Eilahn and I squeezed through and into the back of the house without causing an explosion or major blood spillage.

“You will acquire his library?” she asked as we gazed at the books and scrolls and papers.

“Yes. I’m claiming it under Article Five, subsection three, paragraph A of the Multidimensional and Interplanar My Goddamn Property Now statute, namely the section titled Right to Have All The Shit of The Guy Who Shot You and Tried to Fuck Me Up.” I nodded firmly. “This is all mine now.”

Her mouth twitched. “I do not argue your right to ownership,” she said. “But I wonder how you will acquire it.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “You recall our difficulty entering this dwelling? It will be similar on the egress.”

My mood took a nose dive. “Well, shit.” Double shit. Because of the complexity of the protections, we hadn’t dismantled most of them, simply eased by. “Mzatal would be able to rip through them like a wet dog through tissue paper, right?”

“The analogy, while odd, seems apt.”

“Fine,” I said, scowling at being thwarted, even if only temporarily. “Then for now, we’ll gather up as much as we can carry of stuff that looks personal to Tracy. Journals, notes, letters, whatever. That man was up to some weird-ass shit, and I don’t think he came up with it on his own.”

“Nor do I,” she replied, expression grave. “Then let us begin.”

Together, we moved toward the bookcases.

We managed to remove two foot-high stacks of spiral notebooks, loose papers, a few beaten up leather journals, and one raggedy Trapper Keeper without getting badly zapped by any of the wards as we left. Though we ended up leaving the majority of the library behind, what remained looked to be older volumes and reference materials, and I mollified myself with the reminder that the stuff was as safe there as it would be darn near anywhere else.

Both of the Impalas were gone when we returned home. An early morning for the two agents, I noted. Eilahn and I dumped our piles of plunder on the coffee table and then settled in for some nice light reading.

I picked up a battered red leather journal at random, flipped through it casually to see if anything stood out. Annoyingly, there didn’t seem to be any sort of central theme. Accounts of specific summonings jumbled together with diagram sketches, miscellaneous notes, and mundane to-do lists. A dozen or so names filled the margin next to a halfway decent sketch of a zrila. I read through them one by one, murmuring each name to myself. Sara Fillmore. Bryce Thatcher. Robert Finch. Henrietta Sloan. Jose Luis Hernandez. Carla Billings. There were more, but none sparked even a sliver of familiarity. Eilahn denied knowledge of them as well, so I marked the page for future investigation and moved on. One folder, with a picture of a kitten on the cover, held several pages from a sketch book—all with odd drawings of leaf-less trees. Or at least I thought they were trees. In all of the drawings the tree-thing had a weirdly short central trunk with branches above that divided and spread and divided some more. Yet it also reminded me of pictures I’d seen of arteries and veins and capillaries, the way they all divided into smaller and smaller vessels.

A few of the sketches had snatches of alliterative phrases penciled along the outer edges of the pages, but with no meaning or central theme that I could grasp. Boss-boy begets better brains. Masters make misery manually. Cancer clutched Claire’s comfort. Good games give great gifts. And many others just as bizarre.

I read through the odd phrases several times, turning the papers around as I did so to see if anything clicked from different angles, but finally admitted defeat, replaced all of the sketches in the folder, and moved on to the next item.

We pored through for another hour or so and found lots of interesting factoids and tidbits, such as how to determine the gender of a savik, and that a mature faas has seventy-two teeth, but nothing directly relevant. At around eight thirty a.m. we took a break, Eilahn to the roof for some morning sun, and me to scrounge breakfast and make another pot of coffee. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last one I made this morning.

My phone buzzed with Zack’s number as the pot began its gurgling. “Hey, Zack, what’s up?”

“Beaulac PD just called Ryan and me out to a scene,” he said. “Since you’re a special consultant, it would be righteous if you could make it.”

Special consultant. That still cracked me up. “I can do that,” I said. “Text me the address. What kind of scene?”

His voice turned grim. “Murder.”

“A murder that your team gets called out on,” I said. Shit.

“We haven’t seen pics yet, but they’re saying Symbol Man.”

My eyes narrowed even as a chill crept through me. “The real Symbol Man is long dead. Let’s hope this is just a mundane copycat.”

“I don’t know. I’m not holding my breath on that one.”

“I’m leaving in two minutes.” Shit. The Symbol Man was a serial killer who’d terrorized the Beaulac area for four years around the time I became a cop. He was dubbed thus for the convoluted mark he’d carved into each tortured and murdered victim. After thirteen victims he stopped, and when three years went by with no sign of more victims, most people concluded he’d either died or left the area.

And then a little over a year ago, the marked and mutilated bodies started showing up again.

The Symbol Man case was the first one I worked with Ryan and Zack as part of a serial killer task force. It was also how I first encountered Rhyzkahl. The Symbol Man turned out to be a summoner who sought to call and bind the demonic lord to his will, and during the first attempt Rhyzkahl managed to escape by hijacking a completely unrelated summoning I was performing at the same time. Instead of a fourth-level luhrek, the beautiful and powerful lord appeared instead. And, well, from there events progressed that I still kicked myself over.

I slipped on a dress shirt and khaki trousers, pulled on a shoulder holster and tugged a jacket over it. I exited the front door, then looked up at the roof. “Eilahn,” I called up. “The task force has been called to a murder. Supposedly looks like a Symbol Man victim.”

She dropped to the ground with a leap graceful enough to make an Olympic gymnast weep in envy. Her face lit with exuberance. “A murder scene! This is exciting!” Then she quickly sobered, chagrined. “Perhaps not the choicest response.”

I tried not to laugh, with only partial success. “Perhaps not.” After giving her the details and location I climbed into the Camry and headed out with her following on the motorcycle. I really needed to learn how to ride one of the damn things. A woman on a motorcycle automatically got something like fifty “hot chick” points. Then again, there was no way in hell Eilahn would ever let me risk myself like that. Hmmf.

The Walmart parking lot appeared to be business as usual when we arrived, with no sign of a crime scene. It wasn’t until I continued around to the back that I found the swarm of cops. The majority of the activity appeared to be centered around a parked eighteen-wheeler with an open back. Crime scene tape had been strung between cars to form a sizeable perimeter.

I found a convenient place to park, got out, and adjusted my jacket. Eilahn pulled up behind me and dismounted, removed her helmet, then went into scan-for-threats mode.

I walked up to the deputy who stood with a clipboard by the crime scene tape. “I’m a special consultant for the FBI,” I told him, taking great pleasure in showing my pretty ID. To my annoyance, the deputy barely even glanced at it and failed to show even the slightest bit of awe at my status. Vaguely disgruntled, I signed the crime scene log then headed toward the open back end of the truck and the knot of law enforcement types there. I automatically looked for the familiar sight of Jill among the cops before remembering that the snarky-yet-awesome crime scene tech was eight months pregnant and working in the lab instead of the field.