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The usual suspects were stuck to the broken and stained concrete Discarded paper, gum, eed into slots only an automotive savant could squeeze into Bikes were locked onto a forest green rack bolted into the ground, and the sered above the insistent smell of death

The railroad trestles rested on square concrete pedestals The bealance, I’d thought was a graffiti tag But there seemed to be

I stopped and swung the light back again

The entire pedestal, probably two-and-a-half-feet tall and just as wide, was covered by lines of characters drawn in black Row after row of theles and squares with lines and h them, half circles, arrows and squares Soon here, a tiny skeleton there, draith a surprisingly careful hand

They buzzed with a faint and tinny nize the flavor of the ic; it was sharper and more metallic than any I’d run across before, and a sharp contrast to the earthier scent of shifters

Magic symbols twenty feet away from a shifter’s death That couldn’t have been a coincidence

I knelt down, shone light across the pedestal I knehat these were They were alchemy symbols, marks used by practitioners who’d believed they could transold, or create a philosopher’s stone that would allow theraduate school I hadn’t studied ical texts per se, but they’d occasionally appear in a inalia of a carefully copied text

Still, while I recognized thee to decipher thee about e She was a sorcerer, forirlfriend of the Cadogan House Librarian

I scanned the rest of the pedestal, and the bearound--drops of blood Blood had been shed here, and plenty of it But why? Because of the va, I told Ethan, and waited until he and Mallory gathered beside ht trained on the pedestal so they could review the ht to the blood on the ground below

"Part of the attack took place here," Ethan said "And the syaze tracked back and forth across the lines "Agreed Symbols of alchemical elements, built into an equation That’s why they’re in rows"

"Wait," Ethan said "You old?"

"That’s the most well-known transmutation," Mallory said, hands on her hips as she leaned over beside hiic "But folks try to do all sorts of things with the practice Healing, co the ele down to its true essence"

Ethan frowned, looked down at the pedestal again "So what’s the purpose of this?"

"I had to study alcheh I didn’t use them" She added that quickly, as if to reical Keys in existence to create her black h of them "I also watched a lot of Fullmetal Alchemist Quality show Quality"