Chapter 40
Hunter
“This is not how I expected to spend my Christmas vacation.”
Unlike me, DK isn’t content to spend hours in the King’s library, combing through old books and looking for a needle in a haystack. Honestly, this is one of those places where everything feels right.
My focus is on the open volume in front of me, one of the lighter ones from the restricted shelves. They seem to be divided into two types of tomes. The ones that are antiques, too old and brittle to be placed on the shelves, and the ones that delve into the darker aspects of pagan rituals.
This one has thick, uneven pages that smell faintly of mildew.
It’s bound in cracked brown leather, the title embossed in faded gold: Ritus Elementorum et Temporum.
Four chapters, one for each element: earth, air, fire, and water, then four more for the seasons.
Simple offerings: salt and rosemary buried at the new moon, candles lit at solstice, ash scattered at equinox.
Rituals meant to keep balance, to remind the land who it belongs to.
Harmless, almost pastoral. The kind of thing people romanticize when they talk about “the old religion.”
The one I pulled from the locked cabinet earlier, Umbrae et Sacrificia, is heavier, the leather black and greasy-feeling, the pages brittle and stained in places that look suspiciously like old blood.
No pretty illustrations here. Just dense Latin, hand-drawn sigils that twist the eye, and diagrams of bodies arranged in precise, unnatural angles.
Instructions for calling things that were never meant to answer.
Bargains sealed with more than blood, flesh, bone and will.
Crossings of lines most people don’t even know exist. The natural order of things, the text calls it.
As though there is anything natural about carving runes into living skin or leaving a child’s heart under an oak at midnight to ensure next year’s harvest.
DK glances over from the armchair where he’s sprawled, one leg kicked over the armrest, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Maybe I should have gone back to the Stacks for the holiday,” he adds, absently flipping through one of the antique books that came from the back cabinet. “Hustled a few drunk assholes with my mom over the pool table.”
The King and Arianette left for the Mercer party an hour ago.
The blood-red dress clung to every curve like it was poured over her skin, making the nipple piercings press faintly against the fabric with her every move.
The tiara sat perfectly in her dark hair, catching the chandelier light like tiny stars.
Timothy’s hand rested low on her back the whole time he ushered her out the door.
Things looked positive, but as everyone knows, looks can be deceiving.
I flip a page and make a note in the journal I’m keeping. “You’re just anxious about the party.”
“Fuck yeah, I’m anxious!” He tugs on the ring in his lip with his teeth. “I stuck my neck out for Ari, and if she loses her shit the King will have my ass.”
I understand his concern. Not because she can’t handle a room full of rich assholes in tuxedos. She’s tougher than any of them give her credit for, but because the ascension is still fresh. One wrong word, one sideways glance, and that fragile calm she’s been wearing could crack.
“She seemed excited to go,” I tell him, glancing around the maps and blueprints that are still spread across the big oak table, red ink bleeding into yellowed paper.
“It’s a snobby Christmas party. The worst case is someone gets trashed and embarrasses themselves.
I have a feeling the King isn’t going to let her out of his sight. ”
I rub my eyes. I’ve been at it for hours, honestly, I didn’t even go to bed last night, just napped on the leather couch near the fireplace.
I’m like this when I get focused on something.
I want to match all the pieces of the puzzle, get everything in place: numbers, formulas, lines on a page.
My mind and body aren’t going to rest until everything makes sense, until I can see the entire picture.
Right now, there are too many disparate pieces: the bodies. The bugs. The positioning of the body. The tunnels. The DNA…
DK? He’d rather be anywhere else, most obviously, between Arianette’s thighs, but I’ll give it to him. He hasn’t left my side.
The clear plastic box sits in the middle of the table, the small black beetle we pulled from the tunnel crawling along the bottom. There are holes in the top for air, and I sprayed water inside.
“You keep looking at that thing like he’s going to tell you something,” DK says, leaning over and squinting at the bug. The memento mori tattoo over his eyebrow looks warped through the plastic.
“Maybe he will,” I murmur, standing. I cross the library to the tall cabinet in the back corner and fish the key out of my pocket.
The lock opens with a click and the doors creak open.
I’ve been back and forth to this cabinet a dozen times.
Read and flipped through almost every book.
This time I pull out a slim, ancient volume bound in dark green calfskin, title embossed in faded gold: Ritus Obscurorum–Sacra Noctis et Umbrae.
I drop into the chair across from DK and open the book carefully, the old leather creaking under my hands.
He leans forward. “You got something?”
“Maybe,” I say, distracted, eyes already scanning the marginalia crawling along the page edges. My thumb traces a line of cramped Latin then the inked shape beside it, a scarab, stylised but unmistakable.
“Did you know,” I say, eyes still focused on the text, “in a lot of pagan and funerary rites, the beetle’s a rebirth symbol?”
DK shifts, boot heel hooking the chair rung. “Like reincarnation?”
“Closer to transformation.” I turn a page. “The scarab in Egyptian lore pushes the sun across the sky, a cycle of death and return. In later European rites, it shows up in grave charms. Body decay, soul renewal. The idea that something new crawls out of what died.”
DK’s mouth tightens. He glances, involuntarily, at the specimen box.
“And the stag beetle,” I go on, tapping another illustration, mandibles exaggerated into crescent horns, “was tied to masculine force. Virility. Dominance. Sometimes storm gods. Sometimes underworld guardians.”
“Huh,” DK says. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well,” I murmur, eyes drifting to the photo clipped to one of the folders the King gave us: Kelsey’s face, mottled and gray, lips forced open, dark shapes visible behind her teeth. “It does.”
Silence drops between us, thick as ash.
“The way they packed those beetles into Kelsey’s mouth,” I say, voice low, “that’s not disposal. That’s placement.”
DK’s fingers go to his eyebrow ring, twisting it back and forth. “What are you trying to say?”
My fingers move again, following the diagram lines, limbs angled, torso orientation, marked by tiny sigils. Insects inked at the throat, the womb, the mouth.
“We knew this wasn’t random,” I say. “It’s ritual staging. Mouth as entry point. Breath. Voice. Identity.” I swallow. “If you choke someone on rebirth symbols, you’re not cleansing them.” I flip another page. “You’re remaking them.”
DK stills.
I turn the book around and gently shove it across the table. “There.”
He leans in.
The illustration shows a circle of six bodies, five splayed outward like spokes, and one at the center, folded on her knees, spine bowed and jaw wrenched open. Beetles spill from her mouth in a dark cascade.
Above it, in ink faded to brown:
Baronum Sigillum–Custodes Noctis.
“Seal of the Barons,” I translate, tapping each word. “Guardians of the Night.”
DK exhales hard through his nose. “Fuck.”
I nod once. “You know what this means?”
“There’s a Baron connection,” he says quietly.
We stare at each other across the firelit table, the truth unspoken between us: we aren’t just chasing a killer of women. We’re chasing one of us.
A Shadow. A Baron. A member of the House of Night.
The logs snap in the hearth. Outside, winter wind claws at the windows like something trying to get in.
“We have to let the King know,” I say.
“Now?” DK glances at the clock. “They’re at the Mercer party. Black tie. Champagne. Security crawling everywhere.”
I close the book with a soft, final thud. “Do you want to wait?”
I don’t even have to think about it.
“No.”
I’m already standing, grabbing my coat from the chair and pulling out my keys. DK moves with me, shrugging into his jacket.
At the threshold, I pause.
I look back at the table, at the pinned beetle in its glass coffin, at the open maps of Forsyth’s underbelly, and at the ritual diagram bleeding through my mind like an afterimage.
The city suddenly feels smaller.
Tighter.
Like fingers wrapped around my throat, cutting off air.
“Come on,” DK says, already opening the door, cold air slicing in. “Let’s go crash a party.”