The body wasn't supposed to be there.
Nikko Skive stood in the mouth of a narrow alley, half-hidden in the steam wafting from a drainpipe. The corpse had been dumped in a pile of broken crates and fly-buzzed rags behind The Wyrmbone Tap, a bar that catered to warlocks and other magic-warped bastards. Nikko wasn't one for dramatics, but something about this one made his tail twitch.
Ash ringed the corpse like the burn of a summoning circle gone wrong—only this one wasn't chalk or blood. It was finer. Greyer. It clung to the air like smoke that had forgotten how to move.
Nikko exhaled slowly, adjusting the collar of his coat. The alley's shadows hid his horns, his too-yellow eyes, and the flicker of emberlight that traced beneath his skin when he was nervous. He was a half-imp, after all. Born of bad decisions and infernal bargains. Hiding was second nature.
He knelt beside the body, careful not to step inside the ash ring.
Whoever this was—had been—they were in pieces. Ribs shattered outward like something had burst from the chest. Face half-melted, eyes gone. No heat damage on the walls. No scorch on the ground.
Just... ash.
Nikko's mind reeled through his mental Rolodex of weird shit. Demon attacks left scorch marks and sulfur. Hellbeasts were messier. Ghosts didn't do this kind of bodywork. And no way in any pit did witches manage this quietly.
Something new had come through.
He reached into his coat, pulling out a brass-and-glass capsule the size of a thumb and uncorked it. The air around the body shimmered as the capsule hissed, pulling in residual magical traces. The liquid inside darkened to a silvery black.
Infernal. Definitely. But not demonic.
"What the hell did this?" he muttered.
"I was hoping you'd tell me," came a voice from behind him.
Nikko's hand shot to his coat—where a blade, a hex charm, and something a lot more illegal waited—but relaxed when he saw the speaker.
Laz. Tall. Tired. Looked like he hadn't slept since last month. Wore a burnt-orange vest over a dark tunic, the unofficial uniform of a freelance enforcer. He lit a cigarette with a snap of his fingers.
"Nikko Skive," Laz drawled. "Still making messes?"
"Still chasing me to clean them up?"
"I'm not cleaning anything. Just noticed a half-imp nosing around where there's a body and thought I'd say hi."
"Hi," Nikko said. "Now bye."
Laz blew a stream of smoke toward the corpse. "You find it like this?"
Nikko frowned. "Yeah."
"You touch anything?"
"No."
Laz stared at him long enough for Nikko's skin to start smoldering again.
"I mean it," Nikko said. "This was supposed to be a simple drop. Info-for-coin. Client never showed. Found this instead."
Laz ground his cigarette under his heel. "You're not the only one hunting names in the ash, you know. Something's moving under the streets. Four disappearances this week. All supernatural."
"Disappearances or deaths?"
Laz shrugged. "No bodies. Until now."
Nikko's tail flicked. "You think this is the same thing?"
"I think," Laz said, turning to leave, "that if you keep poking your nose into this, you'll end up next. And I won't be cleaning it up."
---
By the time Nikko got back to his bolt-hole apartment above a pawnshop that only traded in cursed items, the capsule was hot in his pocket.
He locked three deadbolts, tapped out a ward with a flick of his claws, and threw himself into his desk chair. The capsule pulsed faintly as he set it into a reader—half tech, half magic, all illegal. Gears spun. Needles jittered. Runes sizzled into visibility.
The reading made his blood go cold.
Residual: Infernal magic, unregistered. Traces of name-binding. Circle signature: Unknown.
Name-binding?
That was old magic. Forbidden magic. Shit that dragged the attention of Hell's accountants and Heaven's hit squads.
He pulled out a notepad and started sketching what he remembered of the ash circle. It hadn't been a perfect ring. More like—
A glyph. Incomplete. Interrupted by the crate pile.
He flipped through a tome bound in salamander leather until he found a match: a binding circle, but bastardized. Modified.
Used not to summon, but to open something.
Nikko swore and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His horns sparked.
He needed more data. Needed answers. And he only knew one person who could interpret a binding circle like this without alerting every magical enforcement agency in the district.
He groaned aloud.
He had to call Pree.
---
Pree lived in an apartment stitched together from pocket dimensions and raw sarcasm. She was a gnome. A genius. And an unrepentant chaos gremlin who knew more about hell-coded symbology than most full demons.
She opened the door before he knocked.
"I smelled ash. And desperation. And thought—Nikko."
"Nice to see you too," he said.
She stepped aside. "Come in. Don't touch anything. Or do. Just tell me first so I can laugh when it explodes."
Nikko showed her the sketch, the capsule, and the reading. She whistled low.
"Someone really wanted to reach deep. This ain't entry-level blood magic. This is... deeper layer. Maybe Fourth Circle. Maybe deeper."
"I didn't think names could bind anymore."
"Not in this world," she said, "but if someone wrote a name into the ash, and it stayed, then whatever answered it didn't come through a proper gate. It bled in."
"That's not possible."
"Neither is your survival rate, and yet," she said, gesturing to him broadly, "here you are."
Nikko grimaced. "You recognize the glyph?"
"Not exactly. But it smells old. Like something that was sealed and forgotten. You ever hear of the Ashmother?"
His breath caught. "That's a myth."
"Not to some," she said. "You want a thread to pull? Find her priest. The last one in the city."
"There's no priest."
"There is now," Pree said, and handed him a business card she shouldn't have had. It was blank on one side. On the other: a sigil in soot-black ink that made his skin crawl.
"Where did you—"
"It was left under my pillow," she said with a wink. "And I sleep with a blade warded to eat souls, so whoever dropped it had balls."
Nikko turned the card over again. "This just got worse."
"You're welcome," she chirped.
---
Outside, the city pressed in around him. Magic drifted from shopfront wards and neon runes pulsed along sky-rail conduits. The city had always been strange. But this... this felt wrong.
The name in the ash. The body with no soul. The glyph written like a memory.
And now, the Ashmother.
Nikko tucked the card into his coat and started walking.
Somewhere, something had come through. And it knew his name.