Dirty Magic Read Free Page A

taken a week earlier.
    “Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?”
    “Positive. I’ve just come from IDing the body.”
    Usually potions took several months—sometimes years—of heavy use to transform normal people into freaks and monsters. “You expect me to believe a potion turned this guy”—I held up the picture—“into the beast I shot in less than a week?”
    She removed her cell from her briefcase and flashed another picture. This one was taken at the morgue. There wasn’t enough face left to compare so it was impossible to use that to verify whether the identity matched the first shot. But then Gardner tapped the image to indicate a tattoo of a skull with the words
Et in Arcadia ego
underneath on the dead man’s left wrist.
    Frowning, I lifted the old picture again. Sure enough, the same tattoo was on Ferris Harkins’s “before” picture. “The tattoo’s the same. But that’s hardly conclusive.”
    “True. However, as you’ll see in the file, the identity was also confirmed through fingerprints.”
    I blew out a deep sigh. “Okay, so how did this guy”—I held up the first shot—“end up like this?” I held up a screen shot from the file that had been taken from my vest cam. In it Harkins looked like something from hell: a wild-eyed hellhound with bloodstained teeth.
    “Four days ago, we sent Harkins to do a buy,” explained Gardner. “He was supposed to meet up with one of my agents an hour later but never showed. We’ve been looking for him since. At first we figured he ran off with the buy money, but then this.” She motioned vaguely at me as if I was the
this
in question.
    My mouth fell open. “You gave a CI cash and then set him loose in the Cauldron? What the fuck did you think was going to happen?”
    “Prospero,” Eldritch warned.
    “Sorry,” I grumbled. “But what was the MEA doing setting up a buy in the Cauldron to begin with? And why didn’t we know about it?”
    “Forgive me, Officer,” Gardner said, laughing. “I wasn’t aware the federal government had to ask your permission to run investigations in Babylon.”
    I crossed my arms and sucked at my teeth to prevent more expletives from escaping. Eldritch wouldn’t meet my eyes at all—so much for support from that quarter.
    “Your actions tonight have complicated the shit out of my case,” Gardner continued.
    “Seems like you complicated it yourself when you lost your snitch, Special Agent.”
    Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t rise to the bait. “A few weeks ago, one of our agents working undercover in Canada reported that an illegal shipment of antimony was being sent to Babylon.”
    Antimony is a common metalloid used in everything from cosmetics to the treatment of constipation to the manufacturing of ceramics. Gardner’s mention of a shipment was notable, however, because the element was also used in a lot of potions. In fact, it was so commonly used in alchemy that the government had started regulating its sale a decade earlier to try to limit street wizes’ access to it.
    “I don’t suppose they gave you a delivery address?” I asked in a dry tone.
    Gardner’s lips pressed together. Guess she wasn’t a fan of sarcasm. “No, but we got our team in place shortly after and have been watching things since. About a week ago, Captain Eldritch called to tell us there had been a couple of unusual assaults.”
    “Nothing like what happened tonight, but pretty violent,” Eldritch said. “The victims had each been bitten multiple times.”
    “Why didn’t you put it in the debriefing reports?” I demanded.
    His face hardened at my challenge. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily.”
    I swallowed my retort. If I had to bet, Eldritch hadn’t made the report official because then his precinct would have gotten some unwanted attention from the chief and the mayor, who was up for reelection. “So you told the MEA instead?”
    “Ever since Abraxas went to Crowley, the MEA has been