“He was an auctioneer. His exact title is Certified Estate Specialist. When a stranger dies in the city, Atlanta hires one of three firms to liquidate the estate. Rogers and Associates was one of them. The last sale he made was on Saturday, February nineteenth. He didn’t show up to work on Monday.”

“What was the last estate he sold?” I asked.

“Two families, which checked out, and a state case,” Nick said. “An unidentified man walked into traffic in Unnamed Square a week ago. He had a note on his body that suggested he arrived by boat into Savannah. The boat is now gone. The papers said it came from New York, but the New York ports have no documentation of it.”

“Smugglers.”

Nick nodded.

“If we assume that the earring passed from that man to Rogers, that means he had it in his possession for over a week,” I said. “He must’ve been remarkably strong-willed, because the djinn subverted Lago in forty-eight hours.”

“Rogers was a conscientious, principled man,” Nick said. “He did a lot of charitable work. He was a harder nut to crack than a merc.”

“The two of you are forgetting Samantha Binek,” Luther said. “The knight who is missing. The djinn broke through the Order conditioning in less than a day. He is getting stronger with each host.”

“Tell me about Binek,” I said.

Nick grimaced. “Thirteen years in, knight-archivarius. She wasn’t one of mine. She came down from Wolf’s Head specifically to determine if the earring can be moved to the HQ vault. She had a sterling reputation. She went into the Vault to examine it. A knight-defender escorted her. Three hours later Maxine went to check on them. Binek had activated one of the artifacts in the vault, incapacitated the knight, and taken off.”

“What did she use?” I asked.

“An iron mask. He spent two hours thinking he was trapped in a slave ship. He’d ripped half of his nails out trying to break through the walls.”

Knights-archivarius were specifically trained to handle dangerous magic objects. This woman would’ve had all of the training, she would’ve evaluated hundreds of artifacts over the years, and she would’ve taken every precaution. This wasn’t good. We had to get to the djinn before she made her wishes and transformed. The amount of destruction he could unleash with her body would be catastrophic.

“My turn,” Luther said. “I analyzed your glass sample. It’s sand that has been cooked by very high heat. The sand contains concrete dust, so it was likely part of a building, and magically charged algae. It doesn’t look like algae got into the concrete and sand naturally. It appears the algae has been deliberately mixed into it.”

“Algae?”

He nodded.