Remiel smiled. “Sorry. I’m feeling a bit…puckish over the waste of that young life. She had such promise. I weep at the cruelty.”
“Yeah.” Luke wasn’t happy about it himself. It’d been a brutal murder that he was sure the poor kid hadn’t deserved.
But at least one thing was clear… “This wasn’t one of us.” There was nothing demonic about it. Well, other than the gore. But even that was over the top for his kind.
Unless they were really pissed off.
Sometimes if they wanted to make a point.
“It wasn’t human, either.”
“You sure?” he asked Remiel. “Humans can be far more vicious than any of our ilk. I can see a human doing it for some sick and twisted reason…like she didn’t compliment someone’s shoes. Their senseless cruelty is legendary.” Luke knelt by the girl’s side. Someone had shredded her horribly and then ripped out her throat. Her face was so badly battered that he couldn’t even tell what she’d looked like before her attack.
This had been ruthless. Savage.
Human.
“Where’s her soul?”
He looked up at Remi’s question. “What?”
“It’s not here, lingering as it should be. No psychopomp was dispatched to escort her to her final place, and I don’t detect her soul in any dimension. What happened to it?”
That made a good point. If no psychopomp had come here to gather it, then her soul should be wandering about the grounds with the ghosts.
And it wasn’t, which left him with an interesting list of possible culprits. “It was done during daylight.” That meant no vampires were involved. Sadly, though, the list of soul-eaters who could walk in daylight was a long one.
Rising to his feet, he sighed. “Any ideas?”
Remi smirked. “You’re the detective.”
“And you’re the asshole.”
Remi laughed.
But at least Remi had pointed him in the right direction. They were hunting someone who’d stolen the girl’s soul.
No, Luke realized as he glanced about and considered what Remi had said about it not existing in any dimension. They were looking for something that had eaten it.
Sorcha dried her face that she’d just washed. Six years on the New Orleans police force and she’d never once vomited.
Today, she made up for it.
Never in her life had she seen anything more gruesome than the crime scene in the graveyard. She doubted if Jack the Ripper had been worse.
“You okay?”
She caught sight of the captain in the mirror and blushed at having been seen like this. Like she was a rookie on her first crime scene. “Yeah.”
“It’s always hard when it’s a young person.”
True. The girl had been no more than eighteen or nineteen. Sorcha was just grateful she wasn’t the one who’d have the awful job of notifying the girl’s parents. The very thought made her want to vomit again. Those poor people.
“Do you see anything?” the captain asked.
Sorcha wiped at her face one last time and shook her head. “There’s nothing I’m picking up on. What about Luke?” She’d left him as soon as she’d seen the mangled body someone had placed near a marble statue of a dog named Prince.
Two seconds later, she’d emptied her stomach in the nearest bush and had made a trail to a local construction business and into the bathroom where she currently stood.
