Page 27 of Petrified

Lev stops the instant the trail disappears against the limestone. Gray is already spreading over his hands as Rowan and I give him the room he needs, and this time he settles into the stillness without fighting it.

Less than a minute later, he shifts sideways toward a narrow service door and crouches. “Here. He went inside.”

Rowan and I move closer when he waves us in. Dust along the base of the building has been pushed outward in a shallow line toward the threshold, and higher up, the reflected light breaks briefly across the limestone before settling back into its normal pattern.

“Fresh?” I ask.

Lev nods. “Fresher than the quarry. He hasn’t had enough time to erase it.”

“He was against the wall,” Rowan says.

Lev nods. “And then he moved toward the door.” Satisfaction finally slips into his expression as he straightens. “Which means, for once, we’re not staring at something he abandoned days ago.”

That changes the weight of the moment.

We are still behind him, but not by much.

Lev reaches for the service-door handle and pauses long enough to listen. When nothing moves inside, he pulls it open and steps back instead of crossing the threshold immediately.

The door swings inward, revealing the darkened interior of the old shop. Lev watches the opening for a few seconds while the stone texture begins fading from his fingers.

“That feels substantially better than sniffing a wall for twenty minutes and then losing him,” he says.

Rowan steps past him and looks into the darkened building. “How recent?”

“Recent enough that I can still smell him inside.” Lev’s expression changes as soon as he takes another breath. “And something else.”

I smell it a second later.

Medusa.

Not her exactly. The signature is thinner and more unstable, threaded through the mineral weight of the gargoyle’s magic. We have smelled that combination at every petrification scene since the case began.

Rowan goes rigid beside me.

Lev turns his head toward him. “Yeah. I know.”

The last time we followed that particular magic, Rowan ended up on the floor with stone climbing across his chest. I feel the memory tighten something low in my stomach even though he is standing beside me now, breathing easily enough that the healer would probably stop glaring at all three of us.

We enter carefully, Lev first because he can still track the freshest edges of the gargoyle’s signature, Rowan close behind him, and me bringing up the rear. The shop has been abandoned long enough that most of the original equipment is more rust than machinery. Old cutting tables fill the center of the room, broken stone slabs lean against one wall, and a narrow staircase rises toward what was probably once an office.

Someone has been living here recently, though. Food sits open on one counter beside two water bottles, and a blanket has been folded near an old portable heater instead of shoved into a bag. A row of tools rests along one cutting table, cleaned and arranged with enough care that they look completely out of place against everything else covered in dust.

“He wasn’t planning to leave yet,” I say as I move closer to the counter. There is still half a sandwich wrapped beside one of the bottles, and the heater is warm enough that someone used it recently.

Lev glances over the room again, his nose wrinkling as he pulls in another breath. “No. We pushed him out before he was ready.” There is satisfaction in that for about half a second before his attention shifts back toward the mixed magic deeper inside the room.

Rowan moves toward the cutting tables but keeps his hands firmly to himself. I notice because the last piece of evidence he picked up nearly petrified his lungs, and apparently almost dying has finally taught him the investigative value of looking before touching.

Lev circles the nearest table, following the stronger thread of Medusa’s stolen magic, then stops so abruptly that I nearly walk into his back. His entire body goes rigid before he takes one quick step away from whatever he has found.

“Oh, fuck no.” He points toward the floor beneath the table without getting any closer. “I would like it officially noted that I'm not touching that.”

I look past his shoulder.

A metal storage container sits half-hidden beneath the cutting table, its lid shoved far enough aside to expose something green coiled inside. For several seconds it doesn't move, and then the body twitches hard enough to scrape scales against metal.

Rowan catches the back of Lev’s jacket the second Lev leans forward.