Page 1 of Petrified

Chapter 1

LEVIATHAN

There are several things I would rather be doing at eight in the morning than staring at a man who has been turned into a decorative lawn ornament. Sleeping ranks pretty high. Coffee comes in a close second, preferably while wedged between two warm Basilisks who have finally stopped pretending they don’t enjoy me stealing every blanket in the bed.

Instead, I’m standing in the middle of some stranger’s living room with half a cup of gas station coffee in my hand while Medusa studies the petrified wolf a few feet away.

Her green eyes narrow, the snakes covering her head shifting with her irritation as I take another drink and immediately regret it. “Well, your ex figured out how to use your snake.” She gives me a look that says my commentary isn’t helping, which is fair. “Not the update I wanted before breakfast, but here we are.”

The victim is frozen halfway between the couch and the front door, one bare foot lifted as if he had been running when the magic caught him. His skin, hair, and clothes have all taken on the same dull gray stone, but his eyes are open beneath the petrification.

They move slowly enough that I almost miss them shifting toward me. There is something uniquely horrifying about being completely aware while your own body refuses to work.

Amand’s hand settles along the back of my neck while I crouch beside the man. His fingers brush beneath my unruly brown curls, and I automatically tip my head before remembering there is a victim less than a foot away. His eyes flash blue-green when I glance up at him, amusement softening his expression because he knows exactly what his touch does to me.

I push his hand away and return to the case before my body can decide this is an appropriate place to start melting into him. Which is only one of the billion problems I’ve been dealing with, but one that’s become increasingly more annoying.

The haze from my mates never completely disappears anymore. Sometimes it settles deep enough that I can almost forget Basilisk venom is running through me, but one touch from Amand or Rowan and suddenly my brain remembers every filthy thing the three of us have done together. It’s wildly inconvenient when I’m trying to look professional, especially with Rowan standing across the room in a fitted black shirt, his tattoos disappearing beneath the sleeves while his deep brown eyes sweep over every possible entrance.

He catches me looking and one corner of his mouth lifts. I immediately look back at the victim because I refuse to give him the satisfaction. My dick, unfortunately, has no such principles.

The victim’s mate is in the kitchen with one of the local officers, crying hard enough that I can hear every shaky breath from here. According to the report, the couple went to bed around midnight. The wolf woke sometime after three after hearing something outside, came downstairs to investigate, and never made it back upstairs.

His mate found him like this shortly after six. No forced entry. Nothing missing. No witness who caught so much as a shadow moving through the house.

I lean closer and inhale slowly, separating the magical signatures from everything else around me. Wolf magic comes first, followed by coffee, detergent, and the faint floral residue from whatever cleaner they use on the floors. Beneath all of that sits something sharper, ancient enough that it prickles at the inside of my nose. Medusa’s magic is easy to recognize after meeting her yesterday.

The problem is that she’s not the only thing I smell.

I shift around the victim, following the strongest concentration toward his shoulder. The second signature is difficult to isolate because it’s tangled through Medusa’s rather than sitting beside it. Wet stone and something old and heavy enough that my magic seems unsure whether it belongs to a creature or the ground beneath my feet.

“Come closer,” I tell Medusa, waving her over without looking away from the victim. She hesitates and a few of the snakes on her head lift, agitated enough that I decide not to comment on them. “I’m getting something mixed into your signature. I want to know if this feels normal for whatever the hell your ex did when he took the snake.”

She steps beside me, careful to keep her snakes angled away from everyone in the room. “He couldn’t use its petrification when he took it. Keeping one of my snakes alive is one thing. Controlling its magic is another.”

“That was days ago.” I straighten and look at the stone man again. “Which means either he learns very fucking fast or he’s been practicing since the second he got away from you.”

Medusa’s expression tightens enough to tell me I hit something she had already been worrying about. She doesn’t know the victim, which makes the most obvious explanation the worst one. Her ex chose him because he needed someone to test the snake on.

Amand looks toward the front door, his jaw tightening. “If this was practice, he already got what he wanted from it.”

Exactly. This poor bastard is proof of concept.

I rise and hand Amand my coffee without asking. “I’m checking the trail.”

The strongest scent leads toward the front door. Rowan falls in behind me while Amand keeps close enough that his magic brushes my back as we head outside. I rub my hands over my arms while following the magical residue across the front lawn, trying not to think about how anyone voluntarily lives in weather below seventy-five degrees.

Amand notices and a few seconds later his jacket lands over my shoulders, still warm from his body and carrying the ocean-cool edge of his magic. I shove my arms into it without arguing, Rowan making a quiet sound behind us that might be laughter.

The gargoyle’s signature angles toward the side of the house before crossing a narrow strip of grass, reaching a stone retaining wall separating this property from the next, and then disappears.

I stop and inhale again, slower this time. There is a dog two houses down, a human somewhere nearby, and enough latent magic in somebody’s garden to make every plant obnoxiously healthy. Medusa’s residue still lingers faintly behind us but the gargoyle’s magic is simply gone.

“That’s not right.” I crouch beside the retaining wall and drag my fingertips over the rough stone, finding nothing except cold rock beneath my palm. “He came this way. There should still be something. Flying doesn’t erase a magical signature, and neither does shifting.”

Rowan scans the neighboring roofs and yards while Amand watches me. They know better than to interrupt when I’m trying to separate scents, which means the only thing I hear for several seconds is the rustle of leaves and my own increasingly annoyed breathing.

My magic flickers beneath my skin as the backs of my hands briefly take on the gray texture of the retaining wall before I force them solid again.