“Our enemies utilize technology, I would be a fool to not level the playing field.”
Sebastian chuckles next to me as we continue down the silent street. It’s as if the place has been abandoned, but not in a disorganized way. There are no open doors, no TVs blaring, and no forgotten bicycles on the lawns of the pretty houses. Wherever everyone went, it was planned.
The school is a complex series of buildings set back from the main road. They showed a passage through architectural time, as it clearly had been added to as the town grew. The smallest building declared itself as an elementary school, with a little white picket fence and some playground equipment. The biggest building, a two story glass-fronted affair, seemed to be the newest addition.
I nodded to the doors. “I think we need to find the sports hall.”
Dave slid his phone into his pocket and we entered the unlocked doors of the school. The honeysuckle smell hit us hard and made my stomach flip.
“What is that?” Dave grumbled as his nose twitched. Shifter noses were far more sensitive than mine, and I was already longing for clear air. The sign pinned to the wall had an arrow pointing to the left for the sports hall.
“I’m not sure,” I answered as we followed the arrows through the hallways to a set of double doors painted royal blue. Caleb appeared before us.
“You found me,” he whispered, making Harry jerk. Ha, it took someone special to scare a ghost.
“Prepare yourselves,” I instructed as my hands tightened at my sides.
Dave pushed on the metal bar and the doors gave way. Darkness awaited us. A deep, hidden, and ominous presence coated the air. It was stifling, it seized my lungs and wrung them tight in my chest. The menace paused inside the room and turned its attention to us.
Sebastian was frozen next to me. “You feel that?” he asked.
I swallowed the knot of fear lodged in my throat. “I do, but this scene isn’t going to investigate itself.” I forced my feet forward, it was like moving through mud. Once over the threshold of the hall, I felt around on the wall for a light switch. Things never seemed as bad in the light.
My fingers brushed a circular switch and I pushed it. The lights flickered on. Oh, how very wrong I was. This scene was most certainly better in the dark, it hid the atrocity that had taken place.
Lying in concentric circles were bodies stacked on top of one another. The youngest victims were in the center, working to the outside no more than a foot in front of us, was the eldest. Nobody had been spared, from babies to grandparents. Generations of Peach Tree residents had been torn from the world.
I squared my shoulders, sucked in another breath of the cloying honeysuckle scent, and started walking around the edge of the bodies. I spotted Caleb’s body in the third ring, his spirit hanging out next to me.
“What happened?” I asked Caleb. Perhaps now he had fulfilled his task of retrieving me, he would gain a little clarity. At least these people had retained their eyes. I could live an eternity and it would still be too soon to see that again.
Caleb shook his head. “It rained fire, swept us away in a violent wave, a tornado blew through, and then the ground shook violently.”
Okay, so he was still confused. Perhaps these bodies would talk to me. I knelt and placed my hand against the cheek of an elderly lady with tight silver curls. Nothing. It was like touching the living, they didn’t want to tell me their secrets. I tried a few more to be sure.
“Guess we are working this the old-fashioned way,” Dave muttered.
“What’s the old-fashioned way?” Sebastian asked.
“The basics of a crime, motivation, means, and opportunity.”
“On the surface, this looks exactly like a Kool-Aid situation.”
I rolled my eyes. “Give up, this is not a Kool-Aid situation.”
“Should we take a body for further observation?” Dave asked.
When the authorities arrived, they would be matching the deceased with a town census. It would take time, perhaps days, to figure out everyone’s identity. We could slip the body back before anyone noticed. But I couldn’t hide the autopsy marks, and that would confuse the humans.
“No, it’s too risky, we get what we can tonight, then if we need to look at a body further, it will need to be after the coroner has examined it.”
“I can stay with the bodies and report back to you with what the authorities are leaning toward,” Harry suggested.
“That’s really helpful, thank you.” I relayed Harry’s message to Sebastian and Dave.
Dave jerked his head and we started scouring the room. Inch by inch we searched for clues, Caleb mumbled nonsense in my ear about flames. I ignored him the best I could while I tried to make sense of why these folks were dead. They seemed to have simply laid down in perfect circles and died. Unlikely.
Indigo pushed against my senses. She heightened my smell and crystallized my vision. Dave’s eyes narrowed on me from across the room, like he could sense my deadly alter ego pushing to break free, but there was no danger and there were certainly no souls to eat. She nudged me to focus on the third circle. I carefully stepped over the first few circles and stopped in front of a twenty-something woman with a swollen stomach. Damn. No one was safe from what happened here.
