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Ed felt sick to his stomach. They'd reacted as fast as they could, but still it wasn't fast enough. No matter how many years they'd been doing this, no matter how much death they'd seen – it was never easy. He covered his mouth and nose with one hand to keep himself from gagging.
Somehow, Al didn't seem as bothered by the stench of decay. He was crouched by what was left of the victim, more concerned with the dirt floor of the basement and the tracks he found there. "Definitely the work of the coinn iotair," he said, looking up at his brother.
He refused to let himself go pale, flat-out refused. "Irish hellhounds," he said, his voice still managing to shake and out his discomfort. "Why now?"
"They're not hellhounds, not in the same sense," Al said. "It's not the same as-" Al glanced at Ed, almost guiltily, then back to the body. "It doesn't matter."
Yes, it did matter, but they both had prime real estate on the Egyptian riverbank at this point, so Ed let it slide. He instead watched Al nudge all that remained of the poor bastard's body with the handle of a shovel, not wanting to get his prints on the corpse. "Someone's using the coinn iotair as their clean-up crew," his little brother said grimly.
"Great," Ed said. "We can't kill these things, can we?"
"No," Al said, standing up. "You should read up on your folklore, brother, you'd know that too." The expression that Al was wearing unsettled Ed in ways he couldn't quite pinpoint. "But we can stop the person who is summoning them."
"And I suppose you know who that is, just from looking at the body?" Ed asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yeah," Al said quietly. "I do."