by Kim Harrison
“The first victims were at an abandoned school,” Nina said as she looked down at the page, her jaw tense at Ivy’s subtle refusal to accept her authority. “It had been built on property that had once been a cemetery. Like this,” she said, her gaze lifting to the surrounding bare trees as if seeing it in another time. “It’s one of the ties between the crimes. The second victim, who we found first, was in the driveway of a museum.”
“Let me guess,” Jenks said snidely. “It was built on an old grave site.”
Nina inclined her head, smiling with her teeth hidden. “Cincinnati is riddled with abandoned churchyards. Bodies were moved a lot, and not always back into the ground.”
Brow furrowed, I thought of our own graveyard, attached to the church. I didn’t want a body showing up there, especially not one with hooves and horns.
I didn’t even know this man’s name, and I carefully stepped over a blood-soaked cord holding his, ah, hoof so I could see his back, forcing myself to look closer to try and make sense of this. A hint of a tail made my stomach clench. I’d caught a glimpse of the school photo before Ivy turned away, and it made me even more uneasy. The pentagram surrounding the body here was the same they’d used at the school. It was fairly common in the higher charms, but drawing it in blood wasn’t. Someone was playing at being a demon.
“The victims at the school were decomposing badly when we found them,” Nina said, distracting me, “but they had clearly been restrained. The second victim had been kept sedated. We don’t know about this man. The tests haven’t been run yet, but he’s clearly been held against his will.”
Jenks took off from my shoulder, his wings clattering in anger. “Decomposed!” he exclaimed, clearly disgusted. “In this weather? Just how long had they been dead?”
Nina ignored his anger. “The three at the school had been dead somewhere between eight and ten days. We know they went missing on the fourth, but we aren’t sure how long they were dead before we found them Tuesday.”
Tuesday? Like three days ago Tuesday?
“Tink loves a duck!” Jenks exclaimed. “What have you been doing? Sitting on your thumb and spinning?”
“Jenks!” I exclaimed, and the undead vampire let some of his anger show, Nina’s eyes squinting. The anger wasn’t directed at us, telling me he wasn’t happy with how the investigation had been handled, either.
“The best we can tell, they probably died between the eighth and the tenth,” Nina said.
I really wanted off this bandstand, but I didn’t want to look squeamish.
“Magic killed them, not blood loss,” she added, holding her breath when the wind blew and the man’s blood-caked hair moved in the breeze. “That came afterward. Apart from the girl at the school, they died from a transforming spell that wasn’t done properly. We can’t be sure until the necropsy, but if this man follows the pattern, his insides will be as deformed as his outsides. They died because their bodies couldn’t function.”
Jenks was a tight hum at my ear, and he was slipping a green dust. “Hey, Rache, you mind if I check the sitch with the local pixies? They aren’t hibernating yet.”
Nina stiffened. It was a slight movement that probably would have escaped my detection if I hadn’t been looking for it. The dead vampire thought it was a waste of time, but not breaking our eye contact I nodded. “Good idea, Jenks.”
“Back in a sec,” he said, and in a flash, he was gone. I wished I could fly away, too.
“Whose blood made the spells that did this?” I asked, starting to get a bad feeling. Three teenagers killed, then a few days later, a second victim, then a few more days, and then Thomas.
“What an interesting question.” Nina backed up to lean against the railing. “We didn’t catch on that fast—Ms. Morgan.”
Her stance said I knew too much. Maybe she was right. Maybe it just took a demon to catch a demon. “Whose blood twisted the spells that killed them?” I asked again, jaw clenching.
“At the school, they died from their own. The second victim died from a spell kindled with blood from one of the teenagers. We don’t know yet whose blood this man died from.”
My shoulders slumped as I exhaled, and Ivy, who was looking from the bloody floor to one of the photos to compare the glyphs, met my eyes, reading my worry. Crap, they were leapfrogging. Taking the blood from the last victim to capture and experiment on the next. I put a hand to my middle and looked at the pentagram around me, wishing I had enough guts to take my charmed silver off and see where the nearest ley line was. Close, I bet. Graveyards were often built on them. If Jenks were here, I could ask him.
“Our working theory is once the perpetrators harvest sufficient blood to play with, they simply use the blood of the previous victim to experiment on and torture the next,” Nina said.
Play. That was a good word. It was what I’d already figured out, but hearing it made me more nauseated yet. At least there’d probably be no bodies older than the ones found at the school.
“Experiment?” Ivy looked up from her pages.
Nina drew herself up into a lecturing pose, and I wondered if the vampire inside her had been a professor. “In each case, the blood has been modified. To what end, we don’t yet know.”
I didn’t know, either, and I looked at the body so I wouldn’t have to look at Nina. This man’s death had been painful, his body spending several days twisted somewhere between a human and a goat as his captors played with his blood. But why? This was just nasty. Whoever had done this had dumped him to create a sensation and get noticed. A perverted warning against black magic . . . or a way to get my attention?
“How about the circle?” I said, my hands in my coat pockets. “Whose blood made it?”
Nina drifted closer to me, her posture having a relaxed tension as she passed the body with barely a flicker of acknowledgment. “We’re having difficulty finding that out. Our standard, magic-based tests are coming back inconclusive, and we’re having some trouble duplicating the FIB’s barely legal tissue-typing techniques. We think it’s from the second victim as well. He died only a week ago. A businessman in town for a convention.”
“Let me guess,” I said, doing the math in my head. “Thomas went missing exactly five days after the businessman died.”
“Exactly . . .” Nina whispered, her voice drawing through me to make me shiver and Ivy frown. Was she jealous? “How did you know?”
Knees wobbly, I sat down on the top step, my feet just shy of the word written in blood. The man’s cloven feet were at my eye level, and I turned away, breathing shallowly. “Because if you know how, and have the right equipment, you can keep witch blood active for that long. After five days, they’d need a new source of blood.” I looked up, my gaze flicking to Wayde, at the foot of the stairs. “Anyone file a claim for missing lab equipment?” I asked Nina, and her eyes narrowed.
“I’ll find out.”
“Good idea,” I said sarcastically. God, vampires were clueless sometimes, so secure in their superiority that they didn’t ask the right questions.
“So let me get this straight,” Ivy said, the papers hanging from her hand as she stood beside and above me, her hip cocked and clearly not impressed. “You found body number two before you found the earlier crime with the kids?”
Nina flushed. “The location of the first bodies was remote. Whoever did this was unhappy that we missed the first one and so left the next one in a more public space.”
The better to tease you with, my dear, I thought as I held my breath and looked at the floor. A drop of coagulated blood dangled at the tip of the man’s hoof, suspended forever. Why couldn’t I have just taken the blue pill and gone home? Taking a deep breath, I stood, gripping the railing until I was sure I wouldn’t fall over. Someone was torturing witches. Why? “Ivy, what do you think?”
She shrugged. “Lots of IV marks. He reeks of antiseptic. They tried to keep him alive.”
“They were successful for about a week,” Nina interrupted.
Seeing me again upright, Ivy slid herself up to sit on the railing and leaf through the packet of information. Her ankles were crossed, and she smiled at me as she saw me catch my mental balance. Shrugging, I turned back to the body hanging before us. Yes, it was ugly, but if I couldn’t get past it, I’d never find out who had done it so I could pound his or her head into the pavement.
“The businessman,” I said as I finished my circuit of the man and carefully stepped between the cords keeping his legs spread-eagled. I was at his face, and I dropped my eyes. His skull looked malformed, the brow heavy. “Was he contorted like this?”
“Fairly close, but he still had his hands. Obviously they’re working toward a specific body type. There was no sign of a fight from him. Stress levels recorded in the body say he was kept alive for several days under a sleep charm after he was subjected to the malfunctioning spell. They probably woke him only to try a new charm or feed him. The change in SOP was either to extend his life after the failed spell or because their new facility was somewhere public and they couldn’t risk someone hearing him. We’re not sure.”
Whoever did this was insane, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t a demon. A demon curse would have worked, and this obviously hadn’t.
Ivy perked up as she found something she liked in her paperwork, her feet swinging as she sat balanced on the railing. “They kept moving their base?” she said, not looking from the pages. “Odd.”
“Agreed.” Nina rocked from her heels to her toes and back again, her hands clasped behind her in a decidedly masculine gesture. Behind her, the I.S. officers were getting impatient, wanting to cut the body down and get on with it. “Microscopic evidence from all the victims is different: dust samples, pollen, residual ley-line orientation at the time of death.”
Ley-line orientation at the time of death? I’d been out of the I.S. for a little over two years, and I’d already missed hearing about new technology.
“We’ll try to locate where they held this man, but they’ve probably moved already,” Nina said, glancing at the I.S. officers and the radio chatter below us. Two geeky living vampires at the bottom of the stairs with a gurney and a body bag fidgeted in the cold as they waited for us.
“We found enough evidence on the businessman’s body to sensitize an amulet. It led to an abandoned site, thoroughly cleaned, but they left the cage so we’d know it was them.”
Ivy slid from the railing with the papers securely bundled in her arms. I could tell she was not going to give them back. “They’re laughing at you,” she said mockingly as she started for the stairs, her motions slow and provocative. Crap on toast, she was intentionally goading the undead vampire, knowing he’d screwed up this run and rubbing his nose in his mistake. Either that or she just wanted to talk to the waiting techs.
“I know they’re laughing at us,” Nina almost growled, but she was watching Ivy’s ass as she took the stairs, and Ivy knew it. Jenks flew in to land on Ivy’s shoulder when she reached the sidewalk. He’d probably finished his investigation a while ago and simply hadn’t wanted to get near the body again. I could understand. It was probably like being next to the rotting carcass of a blue whale.
“Can we see the previous sites?” I asked just to get the undead vampire’s eyes off Ivy.
“If you like,” Nina said, annoyed as she brought her attention back to me. “All the information you need is in the reports. There’s evidence of at least four people involved in holding the victims.” She looked at the hanging man and frowned, her fingers twitching, grasping for something unseen—a nervous tic belonging to an undead vampire. Curious.
I exhaled as I took in what Nina was saying. If they’d moved and dumped the body, then we had five days to find the next victim. Damn it all to hell, this is ugly. Somewhere in the city a terrified man or woman was being experimented on, turned into this . . . halfway thing.
Jenks left Ivy to make irritating yo-yo motions in front of me, his color high. “One guy and two women dumped this guy,” he said proudly, and Nina’s expression showed stark amazement. “That is, if you trust pixies,” Jenks added snidely. “They came at four thirty-five in the morning, strung the guy up, finger-painted with blood from a bag, and left in a blue car. The local pixies didn’t pay much attention to them. A guy with a dog found him thirty-seven minutes later, and the I.S. flunky responding hit him with a forget charm and sent him on his way. He’s fine, but the dog is going to need massive amounts of therapy.”
Nina looked livid, but I was delighted. It was probably the best intel we’d get, and more than the I.S. had gotten in over two weeks—if they were being honest with us, that is. Forget charms. I hated them, and I made a mental note to see if I could find anything in my earth-magic spell books that would counter one. I didn’t want to take this run only to be charmed into forgetting everything when the I.S. had what it wanted.
“Nice going, Jenks,” I said, unable to resist the dig. “We’ll give you that for free, Nina.”
The two vampires with the gurney and the folded body bag had started forward, and feeling a little better, I asked, “How long until the new tracking amulets made from the evidence here are ready?” I wanted to nail this coffin shut like yesterday.
Head down, Nina rubbed her chin. “Twelve hours,” she said sourly, looking startled when she found her skin smooth and unstubbled. “I don’t expect to get a ping from any of them. Ms. Morgan, is there a curse that you can perform to track them down faster?”
I lingered at the top of the stairs, the body hanging, ugly, behind me, the forbidding walls of the music hall peeping through the bare trees. Ivy was with one of the techs on the sidewalk, their heads close as they talked shop. Between us, radio chatter and the dull murmur of anxious cops filled the air. I’d had my look. I’d seen enough to get sick, scared, and now angry.
“Curse? No,” I said, feeling cold as I gripped my shoulder bag tighter and took the stairs. I couldn’t do a curse to save my life while wearing this band of charmed silver. “But if they’re using this man’s blood to stir spells to torture the next, you can find them with that using any old earth or ley-line charm.”
I started down, and Wayde edged toward me, that same uneasy expression on his face. “It’s a big city,” Nina said, almost under her breath as she followed me down the stairs, her steps silent in her scratched knock-off heels. “Profilers think there are at least five people involved. Witches.”
Witches killing witches? Not impossible, but something felt wrong to me. Jenks was dripping an angry red. “You can’t find five psychotic witches?” he said caustically.
“It’s a big city,” Nina said again tightly. “Do you realize how many witches are in Cincinnati?”
Wayde glanced up at the body as he joined us, sliding close as the gurney vamps brushed past. “Uh, witches didn’t do this,” he said.
I turned to him as the gurney vamps stood before the body, discussing the best way to get the body down as they put on their protective gear. “But it is witch magic that did this,” I said, and the pixy bobbed up and down.
“Witches did this,” Nina said, her voice iron hard. “End of story.”
Wayde’s weight landed solidly on his front foot. “Witches would not use HAPA hate knots to tie him up.”
What?
Nina spun to him, and Wayde jumped back at the snarl she wore, her pretty features drawing up into what was almost a hiss. Hunched, she glared at the nearby techs, who were suddenly white faced and apologetic, as if they were supposed to have removed the knots. Ivy was a blur between us, taking the steps two at a time to see for herself, Jenks right beside her, dropping swear words like red sparkles. I stayed where I was on the lowest step, suddenly a lot more scared as I looked at the cords and paled. Damn, he was right. I hadn’t even noticed, but the ropes holding him up and spread-eagled were tied with the complex knots that HAPA had been known for, used for hanging witches, tying dead vampires in the sun, and quartering Weres in the nightmare four years of the Turn.
Slowly I sat on the lowest stair again, my back to the body. HAPA: Humans Against Paranormals Association. It was the fear of being dragged out into the street and burned by your neighbors made real, an extremist hate group that had gained a brief foothold during the Turn and advocated genocide for the very same people they’d lived next to and who’d taken great personal risks to keep them alive. It was believed HAPA had vanished years ago, but perhaps that’s only what the I.S. had wanted everyone to think. By Nina’s pissed attitude, I had the ugly feeling that the I.S. not only knew HAPA was alive and well but had been covering up its activity so they could take care of them the old-fashioned way.
Sickened, I wrapped my arms around my middle. I didn’t know which was uglier: the body hanging behind me, or the I.S. hiding the crime so they could quietly murder those responsible for it. “It’s coincidence,” Nina said, but though the knot had been around for centuries, the knowledge that HAPA exclusively used it was not. After that little display of temper, I doubted very much that it was a coincidence here.
Beside me, Wayde was clearly not buying it, either. “Before I got my security license, I worked large crowds. That’s a HAPA knot. We kick two or three haters out of every show. Why are you hiding this?”
Ivy looked up from her crouch where she had been examining the knot. “Maybe it’s a copycat organization trying to blame HAPA.”
“HAPA would never use magic,” I said, agreeing with her. “Not in a million years.” Witches had suffered the most from HAPA. Weres were naturally reticent, and vampires were better at hiding. Witches, though, were easy to spot if you knew what to look for.
Jenks hovered between Ivy and me as if torn. “What better way to get rid of a group of people than to use their individual magic to sow distrust among them?”
I stood up, frustrated. “HAPA doesn’t use magic!”
Ivy’s brow furrowed. “They used to, until they decided that even magic-using humans were tainted. What has me scared is why now? Why start using magic again?”