The body was in a basement under a derelict tannery in Bermondsey, three streets back from the river, the kind of building that had been condemned so long ago the condemnation notice had faded past legibility.
Vanir smelled it before he saw it.
Not decay, exactly. Something stranger. The copper-and-ozone tang of corrupted mana left to sit and curdle, layered over something organic that had stopped being entirely organic a while ago.
"Here," the officer said. She'd found the trapdoor under a collapsed section of flooring, and the basement below it was small, low-ceilinged, lit only by the chemical-green glow of some kind of containment ward etched directly into the stone.
Austin Astor was inside the ward.
Or what was left of him.
