“The Soul Taker?” I asked, dusting off my rusty German. “Like in the children’s prayer?”
Zee looked blank, so Adam recited it for him. I joined him on the last line, remembering that Stefan had quoted that, too. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Zee stared at us. “And that is a prayer for children to recite?”
I nodded.
He grimaced. “Charming. Yes. The Soul Taker. Or possibly the Soul Stealer. Ja. I have been hunting this artifact for a long time. Four decades ago I was told that it might be here, and that possibility was the reason I came.” He gave Adam a savage smile. “That I followed orders.”
“I get you,” Adam said.
Zee nodded. “When I came to look, the killer was found dead and I was given a weapon that could have been the murder weapon. It is my shame that I did not look beyond my disappointment.” He frowned, and for a moment the whole garage smelled of his rage before he quenched it into something colder. “Someone played a game with me.”
“They had a second sickle that could have killed people the way Aubrey was killed?” I asked, because that part of the story didn’t make sense. “Something just sitting around for them to use when you appeared on the scene?”
“That is why I did not look further,” Zee said in an aggrieved tone. “Who would have such a thing? It was inferior to the Soul Taker, but still an artifact that had taken a great deal of time and effort to craft, for all that it was mortal made. A few centuries old, it was valuable in its own way. And, too, a sickle is not a usual weapon to be so crafted. It is far more useful as a farming implement.”
Adam grunted, then said, “Convenient that someone produced both a sickle that could have done the job and a dead body who could not be questioned. I presume you are sure that the body was the one who had been doing the killing?”
Zee nodded. “Yes. And I never found out who left them for Uncle Mike to find. I made assumptions, but I didn’t push it further because I wasn’t interested in how or why, just in acquiring the Soul Taker.”
“You came here to find it,” I said. “You thought that the sickle was the wrong one and destroyed it. And you stayed here. Why?”
He paused and his chair squeaked again as he rocked back. “I had been looking for the Soul Taker for a very long time, and creatures as old as I am eventually run out of things that make life interesting. I decided to settle here and wait.”
“You’ve been waiting for forty years to see if an artifact turned up?” I asked.
“It started that way,” he said. “Forty years is not a long time, Liebchen. I am patient.”
Adam pulled over one of our shop stools and bumped my leg with it. “Sit,” he said. “You make my feet hurt.”
I sat down with a thump.
Adam stepped behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “We have some unknowns to address,” he told us. “It is possible that forty-odd years ago an artifact was found by chance and some clueless kid—” He paused, and Zee nodded.
“He was no one special. An average human teenager before he was taken,” Zee said.
“But someone killed him and slipped you a ringer,” Adam continued.
I hadn’t realized that Zee had calmed down during our discussion until he got angry again.
“Yes,” Zee said.
“We don’t know who that is,” Adam said. “But I am going to assume, based on the evidence that the Soul Taker is active again, that the person who killed that teenager and gave you a replacement sickle is the one who saw to it that the Soul Taker is out killing people again.”
Zee nodded. “I agree. And possibly that person is responsible for the last time, too. Before that incident, the Soul Taker was last active three centuries ago in Eastern Europe. Someone brought it from there to here.”
“Second unknown person is our current killer,” Adam said. “This killer, we think, is not a mundane person.” He glanced at me.
“Teleported,” I told Zee, making a bouncing gesture with my hand and making pop-pop sounds. “I think it might be Stefan, but something is interfering with my ability to pick up a real scent.” I got that out as if it didn’t matter to me, but Zee gave me a sharp look and Adam’s hands tightened on my shoulders.
“It could be Marsilia,” Zee said. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew she could teleport, but I was. “Or any of their bloodline who got that gift.”
“That’s what I said,” Adam agreed. “But I just can’t see either of them giving their minds over to an artifact, no matter how powerful. Vampires have mind magic naturally, and Marsilia and Stefan are old and powerful.”
“Agreed,” Zee said thoughtfully. “There is the possibility that the Soul Taker is being used without taking over its wielder—but then it is even less likely, because the vampires, more than any of us, do not want bad publicity. They do not want any publicity.”
I thought about my dreams. “What about torture?” I asked.