“This is true?” Zee turned to me.
I shrugged, glad of the warmth of Adam’s coat. “Yes.”
“That is not good.”
“Agreed,” Adam said with a growl. He held up a second finger and said, “At the grocery store, Mercy could tell that that intelligence was tied to the killing of the young man—which means presumably also the witch earlier this week. She thinks this intelligence is feeding off the deaths—and using them.”
Zee nodded.
Adam held up a third finger. “The ghost of the boy from last night is following Mercy around, unable to move on because he is being held by that intelligence. I think from your reactions to the bodies in the morgue and because we visited the cemetery afterward that the magic the intelligence is working is also tied to the bodies of its victims.”
He held up another finger without waiting for a reaction from either Zee or me. “Fourth.” Adam stopped speaking and shook his head. “You have no idea how much this disturbs me. And if I weren’t living with Mercy’s walking stick, I wouldn’t be able to conceive it was possible. Fourth, the intelligence Mercy found is the artifact that you, Zee, told us about, the one that killed people forty years ago. The cemetery we stopped at dates back to well before the time when those people were killed. I presume that some of the victims were buried there and you both were checking out their graves. I’d guess you found that those bodies were still bound to souls that should have gone on decades ago. Prisoners, in fact.”
He tilted his head and examined Zee’s face. “Some damned thing controls people, picks out victims, works magic to bind them, and defends that binding. And now it’s attached itself to Mercy.” Adam’s voice roughened with anger on the last bit, but his focus stayed on Zee.
“Ja,” said Zee. “To be fair, it is a very old thing.” He shrugged, the motion making his stool squeak. “And magic applied over time is a strange and powerful force.”
“Finally,” Adam said, “you’re mad as a wet hen because someone pulled the wool over your eyes all those decades ago by slipping you a sloppy ringer when you were hunting a powerful artifact.”
“Perceptive for someone who has no feel for magic,” said Zee sourly. He considered Adam a moment, then said, “I believe that the intelligence that Mercy is sensing is an artifact known as the Seelennehmer.”
“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.”