This time, Nash wasn’t waiting for me. The receptionist reminded me which way to turn to get to his office. I headed back, my badge in plain view. Nash’s door was cracked open. I rapped on the frame.

  “Come in.”

  I pushed the door open. As clean as Nash’s desk had been last time, it was anything but that now. Piles of papers dominated the surface, leaving hardly enough room for his computer. “Should I ask?”

  “Hmm?” He signed a paper before looking up. “That was quick.” He tossed the file onto a stack to his right.

  My eyebrows crept up. “It was so clean last time.”

  He blinked at me before actually looking at the desk. A blush darkened his cheeks. “One of my colleagues was fired for reasons HR says we can’t talk about, but the result is a review of every case this colleague ever touched.”

  “Wowzers. Is that all the ones you have to do?” I had visions of reviewing cases from other agents, the thousands of reports I’d have to comb through if I ended up with a fraction of what a long-serving agent could generate.

  “No.” He stabbed his pen toward a stack of six file boxes lined up beside the filing cabinets. “That is half of the lot.”

  I blinked.

  “But that idiot’s mess isn’t why I called.” He shuffled through a stack of files until he found the right one. “I’ve isolated several blood samples. One for the werewolf who isn’t occupying the morgue and one for the fey. Would you like to use them for tracking spells?”

  “The purifying spell didn’t destroy everything useful? And they’re pure, only one person’s blood in the sample?” If so, that could be enough to crack this case.

  “Pure. They’ve been typed and tested for containment. Two test tubes for you to use.” Nash tugged a sheet out and handed it to me. “They’re a portion of the samples being used for DNA testing. I have some from the dead werewolf too, but I didn’t think you’d need that.”

  I skimmed the sheet to make sure everything was in order, snagged a pen off his desk, and signed it. To someone less familiar with magic, it might seem odd to want a blood sample unless blood magic was in the plan. What some people didn’t understand was the difference between using blood in a spell, as an identifying component or even a willing sacrifice, and using it as a way to steal energy, to steal a person’s life while causing them pain.

  Even as a necromancer, I had standards. Willing blood donations and using blood as a connection to a person were fine. No one was hurt, and no one was dying to give me power. With these blood samples, I could make tracking spells that would lead me right to the werewolf or fey.

  “Give me a minute.” Nash left the office. He returned with a small soft-sided cooler in hand. To make sure everyone was comfortable, it was stamped with bio-hazard symbols on each side.

  “That’s going to raise some eyebrows when I walk though work with it.” The whole office would speculate on what spells I’d concocted with biohazardous material.

  Nash glanced between the cooler and me. “And I keep finding sandwiches in the fridge the blood samples came from.”

  “Gross.”

  “Exactly.” He handed me the cooler. “When I get results back on those deer, I’ll let you know.” Nash took one step toward his desk and stopped. His shoulders rounded, and he seemed lost in the pile of cases on his desk.

  I knew it was a dismissal, but no one deserved to have that many files dumped on them. “Have you been to Walking Rug?”

  He twitched as if coming back to himself. “What?”

  “The bar. Walking Rug? Run by a few werebears?” I took pity on him. “Nash, I’m offering to buy you a drink. Come out, feel alive.” The irony of a necromancer asking someone to feel alive wasn’t lost on me.

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  “Umm.” He closed and then opened his mouth.

  “You have my number. Give me a call if you want to take me up on the offer.”

  ***

  Back at work, and at the small bench that was my section of the lab space, I carefully unpacked the blood. It wouldn’t be stable at room temperature very long, but I had all the components of this spell at hand. As long as nothing went wrong, it would only take a few minutes.

  Unlike the rest of the lab, which was set up for chemistry and the like, this area had been refitted for me. Mostly that meant stocking the cabinets under this workbench with all the things a witch would need.

  In a matter of moments, I’d lined up two charm bases, a thin pine disk with a tiny clear crystal stuck in the center, a few bottles of herbs, metal rune stamps, and a hammer.

  I carefully hammered the runes around the edge of the disk before mixing herbs together and heaping them in a pile in the center of the charm directly on top of the small crystal. Cupping my hands around it, I fed it my magic and stabilized the spell until it settled into the charm. When I took my hands away, a smoothly domed stone had replaced the crystal and pile of herbs. The second charm went as quickly as the first.

  With the generic part of the spell complete, I retrieved the evidence bags. It only took a moment to make sure the correct blood sample was sitting next to the correctly labeled charm. I carefully pipetted a single drop of blood onto each one.

  The charms flared, and then a tiny green dot settled at the edge of the stone. At the moment, both charms were indicating the same direction, but Nashville was hardly a small town. They could be miles apart, and right now any movement toward that area was good enough.

  I tucked each charm into its bag and cleaned up. The blood went into the freezer. When everything was ready, I took the bagged charms down to my desk and sent both Mitchell and Smith a note about the tracking charms. While I waited for a response, I microwaved a cup of noodles and ate a late lunch. If one could call heavily salted noodles from a cup lunch.

  My phone rang as I slurped down the last forkful of noodles. It rang twice more before I could get to it. “Agent Pine.”

  “I’ll meet you at your car in five. Let’s find them.” Mitchell hung up.

  A little more warning would’ve been nice. Even so, I managed to fit in a trip to the bathroom on my way outside. She was leaning against my department vehicle, and I walked the rest of the way over holding up the bags with the charms.

  A big grin spread across her face. “I love having a witch in the department. Come on.”

  I settled into the driver’s seat. “Werewolf or fey?”

  “Werewolf?”

  I stashed the charm attuned to the fey in the glove box and handed her the one for the werewolf. “You know how these work?”

  “I’ve used them before.” She eyed it as I headed toward the exit. “North and a bit east.”

  I flipped on a turn signal as we waited to leave.

  “Thomas’s family is going to come in and give DNA samples. If we don’t catch the missing werewolf tonight, we’ll know who we’re dealing with in a day or two.” Her hands tightened on the charm.

  We both knew that might be too late, both to save the werewolf and to save anyone who might cross its path. “I hope we catch it today.”

  “Me too.”

  For the next twenty minutes, the only conversation revolved around directions. The tracking charm guided us out of Nashville and toward Hendersonville. When we left the interstate, things got more interesting. The dot on the charm was larger, but the roads didn’t have much of a pattern. We’d turn onto a street and end up going the wrong way. Even with a map, it wasn’t easy to figure out where the charm thought we should go and plot a course there.

  After more than an hour, and no few rude words said by both of us, we stopped at a house only a few hundred feet from Cumberland River. The green covered half the tracking charm, but from the street, nothing stood out about the brick, single-story ranch. The curtains were drawn on the windows, and the attached garage made it impossible to tell if someone was home.

  I don’t know what I’d hoped for, but blood or an open car door or some graffiti proclaiming a crazy werewolf was in residence would’ve been nice. I put the car in park.

  Mitchell got out of the car. “Time to knock on some doors.”

  As I followed her to the door, I transferred the charm to my left hand and drew my wand. If the werewolf came through the door, I wanted to have a chance of containing the situation.

  Mitchell pushed the doorbell.

  My hand tightened around my wand.

  Not so much as a creak of wood settling came from the house.

  Mitchell poked the doorbell again and rapped on the door.

  Seconds passed, and I looked down and exhaled, trying to relax. The doormat’s pink and blue flowers would’ve been cheerful, but a dark stain at the top of the mat covered part of the flowers.

  The breeze died down, and I caught a stale metallic note. Ignoring Mitchell’s pounding, I knelt down. A thin sheet of red coated the bottom of the door and had flowed into the doormat. I wasn’t a blood expert, but this dark and dull stain was drying blood.

  “Mitchell, we need to try a different door.” This one was evidence, and we’d needed every shred we could get.

  She looked down and swore.

  An odor of decay reached my nose. My stomach clenched. If we were about to find a mutilated body, let it be fresh. Death wasn’t a smell that improved with a few days’ time.