“You too, dude,” Florian said.
I frowned, looking down at myself, at the glyphs on my torso that were starting to glow out of my own aggravation. “I don’t know what’s going on with the three of you, but this is getting weird.” I gestured at Samyaza, at the glyphs tattooed on his torso, so similar to mine, except that his glowed in electric blue. “Like father, like son, right? What’s the problem?”
Asher swallowed thickly. “You’re not gonna like this, Mace. These victims? They’ve got the same tattoos.”
3
I hugged my arms closer to myself, cupping my elbows, wishing I’d brought a jacket. You don’t expect to need one in or around Valero most times of year, but something about being in a cemetery made things a little chillier, anyway. Latham’s Cross was quiet, but even the idea of being there was not my favorite.
“Surely we had other options,” I said, my body giving a little shiver despite the warmth of the sun.
Asher, sitting cross-legged in the grass, frowned up at me, then back down at his work. His eyes were glowing sickly green, the way they did when he engaged his necromantic abilities. “It’s the nearest graveyard to Valero, and the best nexus for my power, unless you wanted to drive thirty miles out to a cemetery in a different county.”
I pressed my lips together and said nothing. I could have flown, too, probably, on my own wings and all, but angelic flight isn’t truly as convenient as it sounds, especially not during the day. You have to take, like, the entire human population into consideration. Sightings of actual people with huge bird wings flying through the air would be dismissed pretty quickly at first, but then it’d eventually reach the media, and worse, the Lorica. I shivered again.
But whatever. I wasn’t going to fly, anyway. Just a hypothetical. What, were me and Samyaza supposed to take one passenger each? I eyed Florian carefully, his palms planted in the grass as he, too, sat cross-legged and focused on his magic. If we had to take passengers, I’d probably carry Asher. Florian was too solidly built. He was more of the kind of option you’d consider if you were trapped on a desert island, to answer the question “Which of your friends would you eat first?” Lots of meat on that boy.
I frowned, remembering what Sterling and Asher, but especially Artemis had suggested at breakfast. Whoever was murdering people and stealing their organs had a reason for doing so, and I hated the idea that said reason might actually have been consumption. The problem there was that it linked the killings directly to Beelzebub. Prince of Gluttony, right? And the other issue, the one I didn’t want to confront so directly, was the horrific possibility that these victims were nephilim.
Some of them, at least. I regretted looking at the pictures that Asher and Sterling had pulled up from the weirdest, darkest corners of the internet, but there they were, both crime scene and forensics photos of young men and women with their bellies slit, some with their skulls cracked open. I was right to suspect that they had something in common. These people looked to be about the same age as me, and again, many had faded tattoos along their chests, arms, and shoulders that were too similar to mine and Samyaza’s. Too similar, and too many instances to be coincidental.
“I got nothing,” Florian declared, shaking his head and dusting bits of grass and dirt from his hands. “It’s freaking me out that it’s going on everywhere, but I can’t pick up anything from the root network.”
“It’s like a coordinated attack, almost,” Samyaza said, scratching the outside of his forearm, kind of like how I did when I was nervous or uncertain. “But on a global scale? It’s like some crime syndicate just up and decided that forcibly harvesting organs was suddenly super profitable.”
My nose wrinkled. “Don’t even say that. Makes me sick that all these people are getting killed for – oh God, can’t even say it. For profit.”
I couldn’t even say the word “nephilim,” and neither could Samyaza. It was as if both of us were still waiting for some kind of confirmation that the tattoos were all just some huge coincidence, that maybe some influencer copied a nephilim’s glyphs and it all took off somehow. And yet it didn’t make sense.
Asher groaned as he removed his hands from the earth. He shook his head, blinking, clearing his eyes of the eerie green light. “Frustrating. The other side is buzzing with talk about the recent deaths, but no one has anything useful to offer us. It’s like the victims died, but their spirits never went anywhere, so there’s nobody to talk to.” He wiped his hands off on his jeans, then rubbed his chin. “Maybe if I could get close to one of the corpses, try to talk to it that way – could that work?”
I tried not to look so repulsed, but I knew that I was grimacing even harder. This wouldn’t be the first time Asher would have to reanimate a corpse to speak to it. I’d never experienced it up close myself, and I secretly hoped that I would never have to. Our recent encounter with the hordes of zombies in Latham’s Cross had totally surpassed my limit for interactions with the walking and sometimes talking dead.
A shaft of sunlight began misbehaving nearby, striking the grass and forming an odd puddle of gold. I say “misbehaving” because sunbeams generally don’t swivel around like spotlights in a theater. I pursed my lips, watching the clouds and waiting for our visitor’s imminent arrival.
Raziel materialized within the sunbeam, for once dressed in a sensible jacket and jeans combo. I wanted to ask to borrow the jacket, but knew he wouldn’t hand it over, anyway. It was part of the outfit. The angel of mysteries loved to keep
