The man’s eyes goggled as he searched each of our faces. His mouth pulsed close and open, gawping like a fish, his body struggling to remember how to breathe. He turned his head sharply, left, right, left, eyes still wildly scanning the surrounding clearing.
“Where is it?” Asher said. “The thing that attacked you. Where did it go? What was it?”
A low whine started from the back of the corpse’s throat, a smaller version of his terrified scream. His eyes focused on something several feet away. He lifted his head, huffing and panting as he stared on in terror. I grimaced. I could have said that his eyes went wide with fear, but that no longer applies when someone’s eyelids are totally gone.
“The sign,” he murmured. “The sign, the sign.” He threw his head back, screaming, kicking at the earth.
“No,” Asher said, urgency flowing into his voice. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t let it hurt you.”
Sweet lies. There were things out there that could still hurt you after you were dead. But what thing had killed this man that it frightened him so badly? And what sign was he talking about?
“The sign,” the man burbled, raising his head out of the muck formed in the earth by his pooling blood. He lifted his hand, pointing at something between his feet. There was nothing there. The discomfort crawling up my spine was turning into dread. “Sign. Sign.”
He shuddered, the green light of his eyeballs fading as his spirit left him once more. The man went limp, his second death, this time for good. Asher lowered his head and shut his eyes, offering a quiet prayer.
“What was he talking about?” Gil muttered.
“I have no idea,” Asher said. “The sign. What sign? I was seeing through his eyes, but – no, nothing. That’s just a tree.”
I strode over to where Asher was pointing. It couldn’t have been easy for him to see from where he knelt, but there it was, nestled among the roots and fallen leaves. A bizarre little bundle of twigs rested there, like a weird wooden sculpture.
“What the hell is this thing, then?”
“Don’t touch it,” Asher called out. “Whatever it is, don’t touch it.”
He rushed across the clearing, bending down next to me to examine it. “Is this the sign? It’s like a fetish. Could be used for a hex, could be for protection. Why was he so afraid of it?”
Gil’s shoes crunched in the leaves behind us. I glanced up at him, my forehead creased. “Do your werewolf buddies up here use fetish magic? Is that a thing?”
He grimaced, ready with an answer, but hesitating. “It’s – yes, it’s not unheard of. Some among us have enough arcane potential to use magic. But that’s – it’s just so improbable. It’s far more likely that your vampire friend was involved.”
I rose to my full height, brushing wet leaves off my jeans. “Oh, here we go pointing fingers. I hate Vilmas as much as the next guy, but he didn’t do this.”
“Let’s not talk about pointing fingers, Sterling, because you started it. And how do you know this Vilmas wasn’t responsible? Some of you vampires do blood magic. The strong ones can transform, too.”
Gil folded his arms, raising his nose at me in defiance, a smug grin barely hidden behind his beard. Damn it. That was the problem with Gil. You’d think a werewolf would be all about feral bloodlust and flaring tempers, but the guy had more than enough brains to match the brawn.
“It wasn’t Vilmas,” I said, with no conviction whatsoever. “I just know it isn’t. He can’t be that well-versed at controlling the blood.” Unless, that is, he’d picked up one or two new tricks at court.
“You guys need to quit the pissing contest already,” Asher said, reaching into his pocket. “Sterling, step away from the tree. I need to take a picture of the fetish.”
I threw my hands up in anger. “Oh, why didn’t you just ask me to take a selfie with it? For fuck’s sake, we should just take it back with us.”
Asher snapped a couple of photos, then shook his head. “Hell no. First off, I don’t want to be the new guy in town who’s caught tampering with evidence. And then suddenly I’m the new guy in town who’s also a murder suspect. Second – we don’t know what that thing is or what it does. No way it goes in the house.”
I rolled my eyes. “How did we skip all the way to evidence and tampering? Who said we were going to call the cops?”
“Me,” Asher said, holding up his phone. “Watch me go.”
I lunged at him, aiming a swipe at his phone, but Gil pushed back against my chest, restraining me.
“Sterling,” he said, leveling me with his gaze and frowning. “I hate the idea of this, too, but Asher’s right. We should wait for them to show up. They’ll want to take a statement. It looks far worse for us if we just fuck off. New guys in town, and a dead body just happens to be found basically in their backyard? Yeah. Not a great look.”
I backed off, brushing at my jacket were Gil had touched me and giving him one last scowl. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction, but they weren’t wrong. I ruffled my hair with one hand, then gestured at the fetish.
“What if they find this thing?”
Asher shook his head. “I couldn’t spot it myself. Blends in too well. If they find it, then they find it. It’s very likely that it’s discharged and served its purpose, but it’s safer for all of us if it stays