she’d sorted out the Wild Talent and the Hunt, the remaining traces were easy to read. The lingering effects of very neatly done magic, all wrapped up with no loose ends, spelled Eric as plainly to her Second Sight as if it were a neon sign twelve feet high. He’d been throwing Bard-magic around as if he’d been trying to put out a fire, but even in the middle of a fight, his work was neat, disciplined, careful, the work of a fully trained Bard, confident in his skill. He hadn’t killed the Wild Talent—that wasn’t his style—so it had to have been the Unseleighe rade. But from what she’d seen before, the Wild Talent and the Unseleighe were allies of some kind.
She glanced over her shoulder. Both Toni and Logan were giving her a lot of elbow room.
Someone else wasn’t.
“You gonna do a spell, Blondie?” Greystone asked ­hopefully.
Ria shot him a deadly look. “I haven’t seen everything that’s here to see, yet—something else was here besides your Dark Lord and Eric, but it wasn’t magical, so it isn’t leaving traces.”
“Does this help?” On its stony palm, the gargoyle held out an expended shell casing. “I found it on the ground.”
Ria took it from him with a gratitude she was unwilling to show. “It might.” She held it in the palm of her hand, gazing intently down at the small piece of brass. :Speak to me, smith-wrought forging. Who has touched you? Where have you been?:
The shell casing was too small to retain much information, but Ria gained a blurry impression of men with guns—many guns—all holding shells like this one.
“There were soldiers here,” she said slowly for Greystone’s benefit. “Some kind of paramilitary group, anyway.” She handed the casing back to Greystone.
She a