“There’s been another murder. Looks like the same guy. Somewhere called the Sutro Baths. Get me everything you can on it.”

  “Will do. That’s…pretty fast, isn’t it? I mean, if he killed your friend Faye yesterday, this is pretty quick if it’s a compulsion.”

  “Yeah, it is. If it’s a compulsion, it could be he’s unraveling and heading into the end stages of his nutjob-ness. Or if it’s a demon, maybe it just got loose yesterday and is killing as many people as it can before it gets sent back downstairs. The full moon was last week, so this isn’t a baby were going nuts, and Luke said there was too much blood left behind for it to be a vampire, even a fledgling.”

  “That makes sense,” Dennis said. “It’s probably a demon. Maybe it’s hunting the Spear, too.”

  “What Spear?” I asked.

  “Oh shit, that’s right,” Dennis said. “You got arrested before I could tell you. I think I figured out what you’re hunting.”

  I sat up in the seat. “I’m all ears.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re looking for Azrael’s Implement, which was the tip of his Spear.”

  “Azrael was the Angel of Death, right?” I tried to dredge up more than that on the Archangel, but I kept getting my theology and my Batman comics mixed up. After a while, I gave up and let Dennis explain it to me.

  “Yeah, he was basically God’s enforcer. Michael was the Sword of Heaven, the righteous avenger who smite down God’s enemies. Azrael was…more like an assassin. He took out the people God wanted taken out.”

  “Why didn’t God do His own dirty work? I mean, He’s God, right? Couldn’t He make people do what He wanted? Or make them not suck? Or whatever He needed to do to keep from feeling like He needed to kill them?”

  Dennis stared at me, his big blue horsey eyes looking out at me from the screen. “That’s some pretty advanced philosophical shit you’re posing to a guy who basically dresses up like a My Little Pony for kicks, Q. In short, I don’t know, and I don’t give a shit. Leave all that crap to the theologians. What I do know is that Azrael’s Implement was the head of his Spear, which has been used throughout history in some pretty famous murders, including one at Calvary.”

  “Wait, you’re saying…”

  “I’m saying that the Implement you’re looking for is the Spear of Destiny that pierced Christ’s side while he hung on the cross.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, not only is it powerful as shit, it’s got some serious mojo.”

  “And you think it’s in San Francisco?” I asked.

  “I kinda do. More and more now that I’m tracking similar murders over the past seventy years.”

  “Seventy…what the hell are you talking about, Dennis?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that. I’ve got some more shit I need to look at.”

  “You’re essentially a super-computer. You process information faster than any ten humans.”

  “True. That doesn’t mean that I make intuitive leaps any faster. My lizard brain might be digitized, but it still works the same way, Harker. It’s part of my soul, not part of the internet.”

  I don’t pretend to understand how Dennis works as part of the internet, and part of me likes it better that way. Less guilt. I changed the subject. “Tell me about the Spear and why you think it’s here.”

  “You remember that Hitler was obsessed with the occult, and with magic, right?”

  “Yeah. That was one of the things Luke was doing back then, making sure that items of power didn’t fall into Nazi hands, or if they did, recovering them.”

  “Well, he missed one. A big one.”

  “I remember there were talks about Hitler getting his hands on the Spear, and what a bad thing that would be, but I never heard why.”

  “Nobody knows why,” Dennis said. “The Spear has never done anything particularly impressive to its bearer, but Hitler may have had a ritual in mind for it. Whatever it was, it died when the Führer put a bullet in his head because there’s no record of him sharing that information with anyone.”

  “So Hitler had the Spear. How did it get to San Francisco? Why isn’t it still in Europe?”

  “Well, after Hitler and Eva Braun’s joint suicide, Braun’s kid sister Gretl survived. Like a lot of Nazis and sympathizers after the war, she fled to South America, where she lived out her days in comfort.”

  “With the Spear.”

  “Yup. She died in 2002, and pieces of her estate passed through a bunch of hands until finally the Spear was purchased early this year by a collector of obscure mystical objects.”

  “In San Francisco.”

  “Yup,” Dennis confirmed. “A Wyatt Earl Hunnicutt, age seventy-one, currently living in Pacific Heights, one of the swankier neighborhoods in the City by the Bay.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I go check out this crime scene, see what I can find out about what’s killing magical practitioners in what should be a haven for them, and tomorrow maybe I go see Mr. Hunnicutt and ask to see his new toy.”

  “Sounds like a plan. In the meantime, I’ll do some research and see if there’s a pattern to the deaths of practitioners and if there’s anything else I can dig up.” Dennis’s face vanished, and I leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes as I tried to process this new information. Maybe everything was connected. If Lucifer was marshaling his forces here on Earth to keep us from gathering the rest of the Archangels and reuniting them with their Implements, then maybe whoever was killing magic users here was connected to the Spear. Or maybe it was some random psycho, who happened to end up in San Francisco the same time as an angelic Implement.

  Yeah, because my life has always been prone to coincidence. No, the two things had to be related. We can assume that whatever murdered Faye was also sent by Lucifer to get its hands on the Spear, which meant a demon, and a strong one. That fit with the level of magic that had been thrown around at the scene of Faye’s murder and with something being able to overpower her with so much water at her disposal.

  But where was Azrael? There was no chance that he was far from his Implement, but so far we hadn’t found any Archangels that knew what they were, except for Raguel, and apparently they were just an asshole who knew exactly what they were, didn’t want to go back to work and didn’t give a single solitary fuck what happened to the world and all the humans in it.

  Sometimes I fucking hate angels. Not Glory, of course, because even though she nags me and kicks my ass, she’s also saved my ass more times than I can count, and she did give up her wings to save my life. Glory’s cool. But the rest of The Host? Nah, fuck those guys.

  “We’re here,” Pravesh said, rolling down her window. “Homeland Security,” she said to a uniform outside. We got out of the SUV at a parking lot looking down over the ruins of what was, at one time, the largest indoor swimming pool in the United States. Nowadays it was a national park and tourist spot, where people wandered around taking pictures of the few rocks still standing and the admittedly impressive view of the Pacific Ocean.

  It was a long hike down to the beach, and I felt a little pity for the crime scene techs who had to haul all the battery-powered lights around. This made two remote crime scenes in as many days, a lot for a city police department. There was a uniform standing at the bottom of the trail to head off any onlookers, since there was no way to string crime scene tape across the hundreds of yards of open space.

  He held up a hand at us, but Parvesh flashed her badge at the young officer and strode right by, never slowing down. Lena and I followed suit, but Captain Chou stopped to clue the poor guy in on what was going on.

  What was going on was a goddamn mess. I’ve seen some horrible crime scenes, and some even more horrible things that the police never knew about, but this was like something out of my nightmares. The only way I figured out there were four people strewn around the beach was by counting legs, and even then, it took me a couple of times because I got confused and lost count, the limbs were scattered in so many different directions.

  The last scene had been cleared by SFPD before we got there, so the only hint I had at the savagery this guy had unleashed was by looking in the magical spectrum and the blood spatter. This was a lot more gruesome, and it was evident by the fact that the sand was turned to rust-colored mud by the carnage exactly how much blood had been shed here.

  “Holy…” Pravesh stood stock-still for a few seconds, then spun around, her hand clapped over her mouth. She pushed past me back to the trailhead and dropped to her knees in the grass, sending her stomach contents back to nature.

  Lena looked worse, but not nauseous. She looked like she’d been punched in the gut, and I realized that she was replacing every one of these victims with a mental image of her wife. She didn’t see the remains of a coven of witches, their white robes shredded and torn to ribbons, she saw the woman she loved with her entrails strung across the sand like Christmas garland.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t,” she said.

  I moved my hand. She didn’t look at me. Didn’t look anywhere but at the dead bodies before us. “Don’t comfort me. Don’t tell me I don’t have to be here. Don’t tell me I should be at home. I know all that. But I can’t. I have to do this. I have to find the son of a bitch and bring him in, then I have to watch him go to prison. Then if I’m ‘lucky,’ someday I’ll get to watch a prison doctor put a needle in his arm and watch him die. So whatever comfort you want to offer, save it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “You’re a grown-ass woman, Detective. You know what you need better than I do. Besides, I suck at comfort. I’m way better at hunting and killing, and this looks like it’s got my name written all over it.”

  “Then get to hunting, Harker. You hunt this motherfucker down, and if it’s human, we arrest it. If it’s not, we get to kill it.”

  If we can, I thought. I wasn’t going to say it to Lena, but whatever did this was incredibly strong, and judging by what I saw up on the mountain earlier, had an immense amount of magical power. I had every faith that we could find the demon that did this, and after looking at what it did to those witches on the coast, there was no doubt in my mind that it was a demon.

  I knew we could find it. I just didn’t know what the hell we were going to do with it when we did.

  6

  I looked around the scene. It didn’t get any better. There were four people, or rather, the component parts of four people, strewn around the beach like discarded Legos covered in ketchup. Lena stepped up to my side, pale but with her jaw set.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “You’re the expert, why are you asking me?”

  “I’m a sorcerer, Detective. You’re a cop. We look at things a little differently. I want to know what you see.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. I see rage. Incredible rage. I don’t know what could motivate somebody to do this to other human beings. It was also fast. There were four people killed here, and no matter how peaceable you are, you’re not going to stand still and let someone get butchered in front of you.”

  “How can you tell that’s what happened here? How do you know they didn’t fight back?”

  “They almost certainly did, but not in any effective way. They also didn’t make a serious effort to run, which means this guy took them all out before they could react. Look at the footprints.” She pointed to the sand, but all I saw was a jumbled mess, and I said as much.

  “Come closer.” We walked closer, to where the forensics team had managed to put up knee-high stakes with yellow tape strung between them. It looked like a morbid archeological dig site. “Now look at the footprints inside the circle of tape. See the four sets of bare feet?”

  I nodded, then looked back to the end of the trail where four pairs of shoes were surrounded by another tape circle. “Those are the victims’ shoes.” She pointed over to a calf with a foot still attached that lay in the sand about three feet to my left. “They’re all barefoot, and those tracks move from the trailhead, where they left their shoes, in a nice, neat line down here, then they branch out and take their places around the circle.”

  “To the cardinal points,” I said.

  “Probably,” Lena agreed. “I don’t have a compass with me, but I know from living with Faye for a decade that a lot of rituals use that as grounding points. Now look at the prints with shoes.” She pointed to a single set of footprints. “You can see from the trail that these prints were at a run, judging by the distance. Unless this guy was over ten feet tall.”

  “None of the monsters I know that are that tall wear shoes, and certainly nothing that small, so let’s assume at least humanoid, and running.”

  Her head snapped around at me, and I could almost see the anger in her eyes as she readied a retort. She relaxed as she saw the absolute sincerity on my face. “You’re not fucking with me, are you?”

  “I wish I was. I’ve fought several things that were more than ten feet tall, and they’ve never worn shoes.”

  “I’m going to focus on my piece of the world, and you take care of the supernatural shit.”

  “Don’t know how well that’s gonna work out for you, but we’ll give it a shot.” I waved at the tracks. “What else can you tell me about the attacker?”

  “It was one guy, unless he had somebody who could step exactly in his footprints, and not only is that impossible at a dead run, it also shows up in the details of the print. This was one person. One really fast, really strong, insanely rage-filled person.”

  “I think you got most of that right,” I said. “Except the ‘person’ part. No human could do this. Look at the bodies. What do you notice about the limbs?”

  “You mean aside from the fact that they’ve been ripped from the bodies and flung around the beach?”

  “No, I mean exactly that. They were ripped off. Do you have any idea how much strength that takes? I can’t do it, and I’m stronger than any human I’ve ever met.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re human, just…magic. Like Faye.”

  “Yeah…not exactly.” I explained about Uncle Luke, and who he really is, and his relationship with my parents, and how being the firstborn son of two people who were bitten by a vampire and almost turned did something to my DNA. She didn’t take a step back, but she did look a little spooked.

  “That’s…new information.”

  “It’s not listed on my Facebook page, no.”

  “You have a Facebook page?”

  “Well, no. I mean, I’ve got an excuse. I’m really old. I get a pass on not being up on the latest tech.”

  “If you think Facebook is the latest tech, you are old.” She shook her head. “Whatever. I’m a Latina lesbian cop who was married to a witch. I don’t get to be all judgy. The killer isn’t human. Where does that put us?”

  “That puts this right back where we started, with the ball firmly in my court. Can you make sure nobody disturbs me for a couple of minutes? I need to try a few things.” I settled down in the sand cross-legged and breathed deeply to center myself. When my mind was relatively clear, I opened up my third eye and peered around the beach, examining my surroundings in the magical spectrum. Like the clearing in the woods earlier, this place was covered in magical trace energy. It looked like a Jackson Pollack painting, only with mystical energy in reds, oranges, and purples splattered all over the place. I focused on the killer’s tracks where I could see them, trying to get an energy signature from any residue he may have left.

  Once I was able to isolate his trail from the investigators coming down from the parking lot above, I noticed something strange—he never went back up the hill. His tracks led off down the beach, past the Cliff House and disappearing into the water. I stood up and ran down the beach, ignoring the shouts from Meneses and Pravesh as I poured on the speed. I ran parallel to the killer’s trail, then clambered over rocks at the base of the cliffs until I saw the trail turn left up the hill to the highway and disappear.

  I let my vision slip back into the normal and sat down on the rocks, all the energy of the hunt disappearing in a rush.

  “Goddammit, Harker, these were decent shoes,” Pravesh called from behind me. “Do you know what saltwater does to leather?”

  “Don’t give a shit, Agent P.,” I shouted back. “I had a trail, so I followed it. You weren’t part of that process.” I didn’t mind using her to get through the local cops, but damned if I wanted her to start thinking we were partners. We weren’t partners. I had a partner. She was a continent away, but I could feel her presence through the mental bond we shared. It was faint. But she was still there, sleeping quietly back in Charlotte.

  “I’m not climbing that shit,” the angry fed yelled to me. “But I’ve got a lead, so if you’re done chasing ghosts, maybe we can go hunt vampires for a little while.”

  I stood up fast, almost toppling over into the sea. “What did you say?” I bounded down the rocky cliffside and stood in front of Pravesh a few seconds later.

  “I said that there were reports in my system of this coven’s leader having issues with a local vampire nest. I’m heading over to check it out, and I thought you might want to come with me.”

  “You might want me there,” I said. “Walking into a vampire den this close to sunrise could be viewed as a threat, an attempt to catch them when they’re weakened.”

  “Is that a thing? The whole sleeping during the daytime bit?”

  “They sleep, but not like humans. And since they can’t go outside, they do usually sleep during daytime hours, but they don’t all slip into a coma the second the sun comes up. They can feel it, no matter how far inside they are, but I don’t know if that’s a magical thing or a subconscious survival instinct.”

  “What did you see?” she asked as we walked back to where Lena was talking with the crime scene photographer.

  “There was a trail. The killer’s essence was still faint on the sand and rocks, but I lost him when he climbed the hill. I don’t know if he had a car up there or if he ran off, but smart money is on a car or van.”

 

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