PROLOGUE
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The smell of smokeburned my nostrils as I stood on the edge of the compound, staring at the tower of flames that had erupted from the long structure that we called the meeting house. I’d only left the house for what seemed like fifteen minutes to chase one of the kittens who’d gotten out of its mother’s nest. The kitten in question was squirming against my chest but I held onto it silently as I tried to figure out what was happening.
I could hear screaming coming from the inside of the meeting house, with the crunch of the gravel beneath my feet, I hurried over to see if someone needed my help. I couldn’t understand why everyone was awake right now, it was just after three in the morning and—usually— everyone was in bed at this time since Father Hezekiah kept us on a strict curfew. I wasn’t even supposed to be outside but I didn’t want the kitten to get hurt or eaten by an animal, so I followed her outside in my nightgown. I’d been careful not to bring a lantern with me as I knew that would alert prying eyes and get me in trouble. I must have followed the kitten about half a mile out of the fence before I was finally able to scoop it up and return back to the compound. My feet were sore and scratched as I had neglected to pull on my boots before leaving the house, but I was happy that the little, gray kitten was safe and sound.
But now, as I stared at the column of flames and smoke I wondered if I had missed something important. Hezekiah had been going on more and more about how our ‘judgment day’ was fast approaching. Could this be it?
I finally made myself move and my feet brought me towards the meeting house, my heart pounding. Right before I reached the gate to go into the garden that surrounded the meeting house the door burst open and a flaming figure emerged, screaming as they fell through the doorway.
Fear filled my throat, choking me as I turned to run but bumped into a solid wall of something. I looked up at the figure in front of me, clad in black and looking every bit like death itself, and screamed.
CHAPTER 1
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The smell of smolderingflesh filled my nostrils as I stared up at the body that was tied to a wooden post. It was still smoking as it had only been extinguished for a little over an hour now, and I grimly stared at it as the implication of what I was looking at fully sank in.
“This is the third one in six months.” The medical examiner, a portly, older, beta in his late fifties or early sixties, stood next to me as his assistant took photos of the charred body in front of us. “First one in this county though,” he observed. “The last two were found in Sonoma County.”
Victim number one had been found under similar circumstances to this one, in the middle of a field tied to a thick wooden post and set aflame while the victim was still alive. That body was female but had no fingertips or teeth to identify her. When we ran her DNA through the FBI systems we had no hits, not even a familial match. It had drawn yet another blank for us in this strange case and we’d been banging our heads against a wall for six months trying to figure it out. Even now, we knew very little about her, except that she was a beta woman, between the ages twenty-five and thirty-five. She stood at around five foot seven and weighed approximately one hundred and thirty pounds. She also had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist which had, somehow, remained unburned when the rest of her body had been charred. We’d run the image through our database of gang, and other affiliated tattoos but had come up empty-handed because the tattoo was too blurry to get an accurate match with anything in our records. One of the analysts had theorized that maybe she had tried to remove the tattoo prior to her death, but either hadn’t gone through normal means or had burned herself prior to death to get rid of it. That is why, instead of fading with laser treatment, the ink had ballooned and left a blurry outline of the tattoo.
Victim number two was found in a heavily wooded area, and the fire had caused a minor wildfire to erupt in the surrounding forest burning almost 100 acres of woodland. By the time that the body was found there had been almost nothing left except for some bones and the chains that had been used to bind them to the post. We’d been able to recover some DNA from his bones and it told us that the victim was a male in his late forties and was another beta. We’d run his DNA through the system, same as the first victim, but had yet again drawn blanks when it came to identifying him.
This was the first victim to be found quickly after the fire that had killed them was set. The victim was tied up just inside the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The normally bustling tourist spot was ominously quiet at 3:30 in the morning, especially since agents had cleared the area of all of the homeless and other night owls. We had spoken to all potential witnesses, a handful of homeless men and women, and a few people who were either walking to work or home from it. No one had seen anything, no one had heard anything. Not that I expected them to tell if they had seen anything since most of the people that we had asked normally avoided law enforcement like the plague.
“Are there any teeth?” I asked and watched as the medical examiner opened his case and began pulling out tools in order to take samples from the victim.
“Some,” Was all he replied with as he scooped up some viscous fluid that had dripped from the feet of the victim onto the soft earth below the post. One of the police officers behind us audibly gagged, and I could hear him stumble away to lose whatever meal he’d eaten last.
“Okay, well keep me updated.” I knew that I wasn’t going to get much more from the medical examiner until he’d had more time to look at the body. The man just nodded absentmindedly, already completely wrapped up in his job as he stared down at the body with his glasses perched on the end of his nose. I stepped away and scribbled everything that I had learned so far into the leather notebook I always kept with me.
“Collins!” One of the other field agents that were also on the scene called from the edge of the partition we’d erected to protect the body from prying eyes. “We’ve got something over here.”
