Henry was less talkative than usual; that was all the confirmation I needed to know he was upset. I shot Silas a look and jerked my head toward the door.
He furrowed his brows; then raised one before looking toward the door and then to me.
My eyes narrowed at him expectantly.
A rumble of protest in his throat before he silently agreed to stand in the hallway.
“Who is he?” Henry didn’t pull his attention from his task.
“Silas—”
“To you, I mean.”
“Hardly a friend.”
He nodded as if that answer revealed something that I wasn’t saying. I know he was hurt seeing someone else chaperoning me.
“Are you ready?” I put on a set of leather gloves as we inspected from either side of the corpse, covered by the modesty of a sheet.
He nodded, carefully peeling away the edge of the sheet to reveal the face, then the neck, then the chest. When the sheet reached the abdomen, there was nothing else to see.
It was only a torso.
There were large wounds on the abdomen, neck, and face. The skin around the wounds looked like they had been gnawed on by the likes of a dog, but the pattern of the bite marks were distinctly human, making messy horseshoe-shaped marks along the flesh.
Henry did not seem fazed, but he did not say anything. He was processing it calmly, rationalizing the sights before him.
The corrupted were who I suspected caused it, though there could have been others wreaking havoc. As destructive as the corrupted were, I did feel pity for them. Empathy, even. They did not choose to be turned into those repugnant shells of people. I cannot imagine being turned and having all the impulsive desires of a starved Vipera with no biological hardware to feed easily. While Hosts have dormant organs and teeth that develop after turning, typical humans had to make do with the standard. The frustration of the messy feeding process made them irate, causing them to tear at the flesh and ultimately kill those they fed on. Luckily for us, the corrupted did not have the ability to turn. Which means it was Vipera being careless and leaving it for us to clean up later.
“Coyotes? Wolves?” I asked Henry.
“It is hard to tell; a lot of the flesh is torn, and the bite marks are atypical of wild animals, but the pickiness is unusual.” He used forceps to lift the skin, then used a glass rod to poke around and count the organs left over.
“How so?”
“Animals usually aren’t picky about which organs they eat, especially if they are starved or rabid enough to try for a human.”
“Where was this body found?”
“In the wooded area north of the city.”
“Anywhere else?”
“Both bodies were in the same spot.”
I reached into the abdominal cavity to peel the skin away. I stuck my hand further upward into the ribs, feeling around.
“I feel a partial lung, and I have yet to feel the heart,” I mentioned.
“Whatever it was must have stuck its muzzle up into the cavity to try to pull out organs,” he mumbled, mainly to himself.
“What condition is the other body in?”
“More or less the same... no liver and is just as much of a mess as this one.”
“Ah, good to know. Which reminds me, I have to set more traps soon,” I removed my hands, the sound of moisture squishing as I removed my arms from the cavity.
“Discard those in the sink,” Henry instructed.
