“Agreed.” The word rumbled from my chest.
He set his sandwich on the coffee table and grabbed a manila envelope. Opening it up, he carefully set the contents of it down.
They were pictures of a crime scene. That was for sure. I inched toward them, while trying not to take my eye off of him for too long.
When he was done, he picked up his sandwich again. “Someone didn’t want this ghost talking.”
I gaped at the photos. There was a body in the center of the floor and symbols all around it. Organs had been placed at different areas near the symbols, and an antique goblet near his head seemed to contain blood… and a couple eyes.
In my time on the force, handling supernatural crimes, I’d seen some grisly scenes. Most of the time, I could recognize the spell almost instantly. But… I’d never seen anything like this before.
“Who or what could have performed such a spell?” I asked.
This looked so deliberate, like all spells. But the carving up of the body and organs took it from a simple spell, to something darker and more dangerous. Something I’d only ever read about. Doing a spell like this would take someone powerful, and twisted.
“Few people are capable of this. So it had to be someone dangerous. Dangerous enough that more than shifters and witches should be scared,” the goblin said around a mouth full of ham, lettuce, and tomato. “Which isn’t good.”
He wasn’t wrong. This wasn’t good, not at all.
Chapter Sixteen
Emma
The man was going on and on. No matter what we did, he wouldn’t stop. We were supposed to be rapidly going through the names on our list to figure out our suspects, but we’d realized this man wasn’t a bad guy within a minute. We couldn’t keep wasting time with him, but I was starting to think the only way out was to scream and run for it.
We have to get out of here, good grief!I exchanged another frustrated glance with Carol. She and I had decided to tag team part of our list, while Beth and Deva hit their part of the list.
We’d made it to our second-to-last name on the list, but he was a dud. And now as we kept trying to get into the car, he wouldn’t stop talking to us. “Yeah, I was about two years below you in school,” he said. “What a good time we always had.”
“Yeah,” I said, even though all I remembered about him was that he was tiny, talkative, and odd then too. I’d always been polite, but he’d drive me a bit crazy then too.
I guess that hadn’t changed.
“Well, we should—” Carol tried to say we should leave, but he interrupted her.
“You know, a lot of my crew had a crush on you, Emma,” he stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked the ground a little. “But you had to go and marry an out of towner. You broke a lot of hearts.”
Me?I hadn’t been popular at all! What was this guy talking about? “Um, I didn’t know that.” I shouldn't have said that. I should’ve said goodbye.
“Well, you were human,” he said. “And off limits. Though some of the guys seriously considered breaking the rules for you. We even had a conversation back then about telling you about our world.”
Man, I tried to picture them telling me about all this as a teenager. I probably would have just thought they were on drugs. Still, if I said that now, I had a feeling he’d launch into a discussion about drugs.
“Well,” I said brightly. “It was nice to see you.”
He tried to say something else but I looked away and talked right over him, hoping that he wouldn’t take the snub too harshly. We really were in a hurry though. “Hope to run into you soon, but we’ve got to go!”
Carol and I dove into the car before he could push us to talk about something else. He was still talking as we drove away, waving, with plastered smiles on our faces. He followed us for a few steps before he seemed to relent and just wave back. He seemed lonely, as though we were the first people he’d talked to in days, even though I doubted that was the case. Still if you never had any meaningful conversations then sometimes it felt like you could make up for it with the quantity instead.
“Geez,” Carol said when we pulled out of the neighborhood. “Jackson is a good guy, but the brownie part of him overwhelms his mouth and he talks incessantly.”
“Ohhh,” I said. “I wondered what he was, but I wasn’t sure how much it would matter since he didn’t strike me as the murdering type.”
Carol snorted. “No, he definitely isn’t. He’s annoying but Jackson is harmless. I mean, I wasn’t 100% sure until we came into his house and saw his collection of porcelain cows, and his pile of unfinished novels. I figured avoiding the talkative guy at the store wasn’t the complete picture of who he was, but.. It was.”
I laughed. “Yeah, he’s sweet. A little annoying, but it wouldn’t matter if we weren’t in a hurry.”
“I actually have a friend who might be a good match for him...” Carol said, voice trailing off.
