Free Made for Sin by Stacia Kane

nodded. “And about dicks.”
    “Oh, right. And about dicks.” Rigor mortis had definitely set in; when Speare lifted Mercer’s shoulder, his entire body rose off the ground—what was left of his body rose off the ground, anyway. “You have a light or something?”
    He didn’t need it. The second his hand touched Mercer’s body he felt the mark on him, the lingering darkness that meant his soul had been invaded by an object of evil. Or, rather, the beast felt it the second his hand touched Mercer’s body. But he couldn’t exactly tell Ardeth and Majowski that, so he held Mercer’s corpse up, cringing inwardly as the swirling black energy of brutal murder vibrated up his arm and through his torso, down his legs.
    That wasn’t the only thing swirling around and making the beast shiver with pleasure. Beneath the smell of death lurked another scent, a musky, scratchy sort of smell. Incense. Patchouli and…lobelia. He was pretty sure he detected devil’s shoestring in there, too. Powerful herbs, dangerous ones. “Majowski, can you smell that?”
    Majowski looked like he’d been asked to lick a maggot, but he leaned in close anyway and sniffed. “Theodore’s clothes. That’s the same smell, yeah.”
    “What does that mean?” Ardeth leaned in, too, holding her hair back so it didn’t touch Mercer’s body, exposing the graceful curve of her neck and the hollow where it met her collarbone. Her ears were pierced, he noticed, but she wasn’t wearing earrings.
    He also noticed that she looked away when she got close to it, her gaze focused off in the distance to her left, so she didn’t have to see the pale dead skin and open wounds in close-up. “Ugh, is that patchouli?”
    “Among other things.” He listed them. “Nobody uses those herbs to do love charms.”
    “No.” Ardeth stepped back. “Those are for summonings, demon rituals, that kind of thing. Control rituals, you know? Bindings.”
    He nodded. “Makes sense. Here, turn that light on, okay? I’d like to put him down.”
    “Oh, sorry.” She switched on her mini-flashlight. It took only a minute or so for the round beam to find the spot where the demon-sword had penetrated. Her voice broke through the beast’s growls and mutters in his head. “That’s it, right?”
    “Yeah.” He dropped Mercer. “That’s it. He was killed by a demon-sword, just like Theodore.”
    Majowski sighed. “So the cause of death won’t be clear to an ME?”
    “Right. Well, sort of.” The edges of the incisions where limbs had been removed looked like the ones he’d seen earlier in the photographs. Well, of course they did—it was the same killer. Had to be. The idea that two limb thieves with demon-swords were wandering around Vegas burning the same ritual incense stretched reality too far. “It’ll look like a heart attack, maybe a stroke. That’s how they work. Concentrated evil is powerful. Powerful enough to stop hearts or pop veins. Or both.”
    “It’s like the perfect murder weapon,” Majowski said.
    “Sure,” Speare said, “as long as you don’t go cutting up the bodies to make it really obvious they were murdered.”
    Ardeth shook her head. Her eyes stayed focused on Speare and Majowski, resolutely refusing to look at the body by their feet. “Whoever’s doing this, I don’t think they care about making it obvious. Maybe they even want to do that? Like, sending a message.”
    “Hell of a message,” Speare said. “Literally.”
    “Serial killers don’t usually worry about having their victims found.” Majowski paused for a moment, thinking. “You know, this could just be a random killer with a specific ritual—a specific pattern—that happens to involve occult items and limb removal. I’ll check some of the databases and see if I can find any similar unsolveds. Maybe we’re overthinking this.”
    He didn’t look like he believed it, though, and Speare definitely didn’t. “That’s kind of stretching, isn’t