The skin of each body stretched tight over bone like parchment, lips shriveled back from starkly white teeth. Their chests were carved open with surgical precision. Ribcages cracked like grotesque flower petals, as if someone had attempted a rushed heart extraction rather than delicatesurgery. The interior of their chests hollow, the insides scooped out, but there was no sign of them.
“What the fuck,” Wade grumbled from somewhere behind me.
Not the worst horror I’d seen in my years of reviewing bodies, catching killers, and solving mysteries, but in the top ten.
“Stay behind the lines,” Remi hissed at all of us as Victor’s crew gathered around the circle.
“What do the symbols mean?” I asked him, as he knew a shit-ton more about runes than my slow accrual of knowledge had gained me thus far.
“They’ve been dead a while.”
That much I could tell. The dark brown-black of the flaked blood, the fading stench of open bowels and curdled milk, meant weeks, not days. Unless something about crossing the Veil aged everything. I tried to ignore the fact that one had been barely a teen. A kid. Not unlike Ivan. Because it made my heart beat faster and worry gnaw at my gut over my little brother. Someone had killed a family in one of the nastiest ways I’d ever encountered.
“Is this one of those summoning things like in the lot?” I asked Remi.
He shook his head. “More a…” he paused as if struggling to understand it himself, “bargain? Life for power? The symbols aren’t exact.”
“Meaning?” Bobby prodded.
“Either the spell is beyond what I know, which is unlikely, or whoever did this was clumsy.”
“Nothing about this looks clumsy to me,” I pointed at the cuts, mirrored across all three bodies.
“Not the actual ritual, but the symbols.” Remi shook his head. “I don’t know a lot of the darkest stuff, but you can gift power without all this if that’s what they were looking for.This is more gruesome. As if it’s for shock and awe rather than necessity.”
“I’ve seen worse,” I said with a shrug. “Though the drained corpses are new. Usually, they don’t look like they’ve been sucked dry unless it’s been a few years since they were discovered.” Mummification had never been a regular occurrence in homicide. I could think of only once, and that was a grown son who’d kept his deceased mother in her bedroom for half a decade after she died. She hadn’t been discovered until he lost the house to foreclosure.
“Was that the point?” Wade wondered.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The only person in the SED with serial killer homicide experience is you,” Angel said.
“They’ve been dead for weeks,” I said. “Not everything is about me.” It rarely had anything to do with me at all.
“Which I’d usually agree with,” Angel offered. “If we weren’t in the apartment across the hall from your somewhat psycho ex.”
Everyone stared at me now.
“Uh… like what, this is some preschool way of getting my attention?”
“Maybe,” Bobby said, pulling out one of his gadgets to begin scanning.
“I think beating the shit out of me in a vacant lot killed the vibe,” I grumbled.
“Bad taste in men,” the mist-eyed wolf said.
“It’s improved,” Angel said, defending himself. The wolf snorted.
“The blood spatter suggests they were killed here,” Victor said. He pinned me with a pointedly narrow gaze. “Nothing left of them to talk to you?”
Maybe Angel’s presence quieted the ghosts? I tried to release his hand. He clung tighter. “I just want to see if I’m missing anything,” I assured him.
“My power clarifies yours, grounds it. It doesn’t mute it. I don’t want to try to drag you back again if we lose the connection.”
Drag me back? I blinked at him, wondering what he meant.
“In the hall back there, you went still as stone, eyes black, barely breathing.”
