Sirens and Scales

by Kellie McAllen

  I fell into the latter category, and my goals involved removing one more threat from society, ideally until no more remained. That would never happen, but with every murder, with every calculated revenge, I came a little closer to creating a safer world for everyone.

  Back in my room, I began where I always did, researching the local missing persons databases. The initial count wasn’t promising.

  Eight men and seven women were labeled as missing, one case was over fifty years old, and the rest had little in common. Most were human, which fell in line with missing persons databases in other parts of America. While magic could give humans an edge in a fight, the other species were a lot tougher. The pair of lion centaurs, missing for five years, intrigued me; lions were an intimidating force, and the brothers had disappeared together.

  Their file suggested they’d gone on a hike, never to be seen again.

  An unsolved mystery intrigued me. What could make two lions disappear? Why would anyone target lions? Had nature—or magic—caused their disappearance?

  The lure of the unknown had dumped me head first into my secret profession right along with my morbid curiosity.

  According to the database, the lions had operated a successful business, moving money around to make the already wealthy even wealthier. My interest in investing began and ended with meeting the financial needs of an entire species.

  The instant I’d learned how to count, my mother had begun teaching me, taking advantage of my inability to leave land to develop her wealth. One day, she would take over a nation with the powers of her wallet alone, and I dreaded that day.

  If she discovered she could assimilate nations through the power of money, her goal would be to rule the entire world. I’d have to stop her, we’d have a fight, she’d probably win and take over the world anyway. Then, angry I’d attempted to defy her, she’d make me manage her new holdings so she could find something else to conquer.

  I prayed for good fortune and hoped my father could keep her distracted for more than ten consecutive minutes. With her fear of snakes, my father might even keep her on the run for years before he tired her out and caught her.

  Or she hid under the waves where he couldn’t go.

  With my mother, it could go either way. As long as the chase amused her, she’d keep him nipping at her heels. With some clever encouragements, I could stir up some trouble.

  My mother hated losing, and it’d only take a few words to rile her up. Manipulating my father would take more work; I didn’t know enough about him to know which buttons to press to get him to do what I wanted.

  I’d figure him out soon enough.

  I stared at the picture of the brothers, both centaurs smiling for the camera. Before my father had crashed into my life, before my mother had taken over Madagascar, I would’ve viewed the missing men as my next goal without hesitation.

  Finding a serial killer was about solving little mysteries and finding bodies people didn’t want found, then from the remains of the dead, piecing together the truth. When I finished with my job of killing the killers, I notified the police so families could get closure.

  One day, my search for justice would lead to my demise. I’d make a mistake, and when I did, I’d fall prey to someone as my victims had fallen prey to me. The circle would go on. Someone else would eventually take my place, hunting the hunters until they, too, were hunted.

  I supposed my interest in Justin stemmed from wanting to one day retire and become an unsolved mystery, unknown by most and soon forgotten by the few. Reality was a brutal thing. When I’d killed my first killer, I had no way of knowing how much of a toll death would claim.

  Killers like me never retired. Until the day I died, I’d have to keep running and hiding. There was always someone out there who wanted to solve an unsolved mystery.

  Serial killers stirred the imagination while stoking fear. Until someone found me, I would be hunted.

  Not even a professional bodyguard like Justin could protect me from that, and neither could my mother or my father. No one could. Justice came for everyone. I worked to make it happen sooner than later for those who preyed on the weak and innocent.

  Above all, I wanted to play at being normal, leading the sort of life good women did when they could ignore the dark shadows of the world. I couldn’t. Those shadows ate away at me, too, but I meant to use mine for some good.

  It was too late to turn back, but when I didn’t allow anticipation to rule, I doubted everything, especially myself. I needed a purpose.

  Until I could find something better, solving the mystery of two missing lions would do.

  12

  Everything had a beginning, and everything had an end. That was the one truth I could rely on. To discover what had happened to the pair of lions, I would need to learn their secrets, which meant research, and a lot of it. The beginning of their end would lead me to their final moments—if they were dead.

  Some disappeared because they didn’t want to be found, running from something they couldn’t face. I’d met a few like that, and when I found them, not the victims I’d believed them to be, I’d turned away and pretended I’d never located them.

  Some had been abused.

  Some had faced tragedy and emerged broken and beaten but alive.

  Some had wanted a better life but believed they couldn’t rise from the ashes of their lost hopes and dreams like a phoenix.

  Some I had tried to help, leaving them gifts to find. I checked on those from time to time. Life had many lessons, and one stung more than the others.

  Some people didn’t want to be helped.

  Endless possibilities stretched out before me, and I hoped the challenge would keep me busy for a while. My work began with the names of the two missing centaurs, Luis and Theodore Shaw. As I did with victims of serial killers, I researched the circumstances of their birth; too often for my liking, killers targeted the children of someone they hated, tormenting their true target through the deaths of loved ones.

  Either their mother had lied about the identity of their father, or the Shaws were an anomaly; their mother was a human, and their father was an incubus. The incubus likely had enemies; their tendency to cause infidelity among any female with functioning ovaries put them in the line of fire of jealous men.

  The women were forgiven for what they couldn’t control, but the incubus?

  A jealous man would sometimes don the hat of demon hunter and look for some revenge. Human nature never changed, and for those men, it usually ended poorly for them. Where incubi went, succubi surely followed, and they were the next to fall prey to a sex demon on a mission.

  How had a human woman given birth to two lion centaurs? They weren’t twins, either, and they shared the same father.

  Fishy, fishy, fishy.

  Incubi could reproduce with just about anything, but their offspring usually matched the species of the mother. Magic worked in mysterious ways. I could waste hours trying to figure out how a human mother had carried two lion centaurs to term and learn nothing.

  Investigating the mother first would be the easiest; incubi could be thousands of years old, going dormant when magic left the world. In reality, I doubted I’d do more than scratch the surface of the incubus’s history. That he’d stuck around long enough to have two children with the same woman interested me.

  Why would he stay so long? Two children with the same woman implied something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  Within ten minutes of beginning my search for Alexandria Shaw, I discovered her end. A car accident had claimed her life when her youngest son, Theodore, had been five years old, which led me to a different beginning.

  Alexandria was survived by her husband, who happened to be the incubus.

  I hadn’t known incubi ever married or committed to a single woman. The idea astounded me so much I went to the CDC’s online species database.

  Sure enough, less than one percent of incubi married. Succubi were more likely to tie the knot with a hum
an man, but the notes claimed such relationships were for breeding purposes only and often ended in divorce as soon as the youngest child reached sexual maturity. Few men managed to ensnare a succubus for life, but it happened, and it almost always involved having a lot of children.

  Some things would never cease to amaze me.

  With their mother dead long before they’d grown to adulthood, I doubted their disappearance had anything to do with her. It didn’t fit.

  While disappointed, I did my due diligence, spending several hours profiling Alexandria Shaw, her connections, and possible motivations for someone to target her sons. I saved the file, shut down my laptop, and stared at the darkened screen.

  Nothing in what I had read implied Alexandria Shaw was anything other than human, but the existence of her sons claimed otherwise. One lion centaur was a fluke.

  Two was a genetic consistency. She hadn’t been completely human, but her species remained as much of a mystery as her sons’ disappearance.

  Like my grandparents on my mother’s side of the family, my grandparents on my father’s side grew bored of me and returned to their home, trusting in the lack of a vehicle to deter me from leaving my father’s home. I liked the arrangement; my father kept a few men and women on staff, and when I left them alone, they left me alone.

  I had one disagreement with the cook, but we’d come to an understanding within the first twenty-four hours.

  He’d let me cook, or I’d twist him into a pretzel. I didn’t even need to demonstrate my skills on him, as he sighed, lifted his hands in surrender, and requested I leave his kitchen intact when I was finished with it. As intact gave me a lot of room for error, I figured as long as I cleaned up after myself and didn’t destroy any appliances, it counted. And if I did destroy something, I’d have the evidence I needed to prove I needed Justin’s bacon, else I’d be a risk to myself.

  My bacon wasn’t anywhere near as good as Justin’s, but I turned making breakfast for myself my morning ritual while I spent the first week of my stay at my father’s home learning about the area and researching the missing Shaw brothers. I spent a great deal of my time trying to pin down their mother’s species, but the circumstances of her birth were as mysterious as their disappearance.

  There were no records of her ever attending school.

  No hospital had records of her birth, nor was I able to find any evidence she had a birth certificate.

  She’d gotten her first driver’s license at thirty, a year before Luis’s birth. She didn’t exist on social media, the internet had little about her, and the one place I’d found where she’d worked hadn’t been receptive about my one phone call.

  I considered myself fortunate they could confirm Alexandria Shaw had existed and had worked for them for a period of six months.

  With more dead ends than leads, a week into my search, I suspected Alexandria truly was the beginning of the Shaw brothers’ tragedy, and I had no idea what had led to their end.

  Endless possibilities stretched out before me. The brothers could be alive, hiding of their own volition to escape the reality of their heritage. Most men enjoyed being able to claim they were the son of an incubus; such men enjoyed more than their fair share of attention from women until it came time to start a family.

  Women wanting a family wanted loyalty, and incubi had trouble in the loyalty department.

  Unlike their mother, the Shaw brothers did exist in the system, boasting average talents to go with their species rating. They’d never classify as human, but they had had the next best thing; they were the children of a confirmed human. The law would account for their mixed heritage if they were ever accused of a violent crime.

  In the case of wealthy businessmen disappearing, money often led to the killer, so after I built basic profiles of both centaurs, I investigated their business.

  It had died with them, liquidated and scattered in the months after their disappearance. One of their business partners had handled the transactions, distributing their workload to several different organizations, all direct competitors. If I wanted to kill someone and get their money, inheriting their profitable business dealings seemed like a good way to go about it.

  Lucrative contracts ripe for the picking led many a man to murder.

  With motive aplenty, a pair of lion centaurs known for their enjoyment of hunting, and an unforgiving landscape, making them disappear would’ve been simple. Before I could make sense of the clues and build a digital version of a murder board, I wanted to see where they’d gone and explore the possibilities.

  If I could find the scene of the crime, I might be able to find the truth. I smiled.

  Others had looked for them, but the others weren’t me, and there were many places a snake could go a human couldn’t. If evidence of their demise lingered in South Dakota, it was in the national park to the west of Rapid City.

  I planned my escape from my father’s home at three in the morning, which I loathed, as I’d freeze my ass off until dawn. I’d have to make the first part of the trip on foot, another check mark on my con list. I’d explored my father’s home enough to determine he’d deliberately cut off easy methods of escape, and his employees were careful to check their vehicles for stowaways before leaving for the night.

  They underestimated my stubbornness.

  A normal human could make it twenty miles a day on foot with the right conditioning. Thanks to my inhuman heritage, I could do closer to forty, and I took off at a jog, dodging civilization with my waterproof duffel bag slung over my shoulder. I had expected barren crags and got forests with outcroppings of stone rising between the trees, and the contrast amused me.

  I could understand why someone would want to explore one of the few wild places left in the world. Challenging nature had its risks, and the farther I ran from my father’s home, the less mysterious the lions’ disappearance became. It was easy to get lost in a forest and fall prey to the predators within. The deepest reaches of the national park made an ideal place to hide a body, and I’d done just enough research to understand a million and a quarter acres of protected land made for a difficult search.

  When I slithered back to my father’s home, I’d have to learn more about the Black Hills National Forest and its secrets.

  As woman or snake, I wouldn’t let something like the wilderness defeat me.

  I stripped, packed my clothing in my bag, and secured it. Then I shifted, resuming my journey across South Dakota to solve a mystery some believed would remain unsolved for all eternity.

  For a while, I’d live to prove them wrong.

  In retrospect, slithering across the state wasn’t one of my brighter ideas. More prairie dogs than I cared to think about crossed my path, and the little bastards squeaked up a storm when they spotted me. To add insult to injury, many of them were too big for me to comfortably eat.

  I made it my mission to find an edible one, and I took sick pleasure in silencing the damned thing. Dragging my prey to the sunniest stone I could find jutting from the dark forest, I swallowed it whole, curled up, and took a nap.

  Little beat basking on a sun-warmed rock far from civilization. Lions liked to bask, too, which made it easy to understand why the brothers would seek out the barren stones rising from the forest. A regular human would have trouble climbing them, but I had no doubts a determined lion centaur could reach the top. I could, too, and once I finished sleeping off my meal of delicious, noisy rodent, I began my search for a promising stone column a pair of bored lions might want to climb to escape the world for a while.

  I abandoned the first few I found as options; they had foot trails worn into the sides, easy for even children to climb, which made them dangerous but otherwise uninteresting for my purposes. No, if I were a wealthy lion seeking solitude, I wouldn’t pick an easy rock. Only the largest one that posed a challenge would do.

  Climbing to the top of one gave me an excellent vantage point, as the stones rose over the forest’s canopy. Similar rocks littered the
park, although one, with jagged, steep sides, looked promising. It was tall enough I couldn’t tell if there was space for a pair of lions on its peak, but it was close enough it wouldn’t cost me much time checking.

  Scouting rarely found me anything concrete, but the effort gave me a foundation for where to begin searching in earnest. If the rock formations didn’t yield anything, I’d look into the deeper, darker places the forest had to offer. It would cost me a few days, but I’d explore the places lions might like to go first, then I’d head back to my father’s home, toy with him over my disappearance, and acquire the equipment I’d need to begin the real work of finding lost bodies.

  I’d begin with a metal detector, which would help me find coins, watches, or other metal things a pair of lion businessmen might’ve taken with them on a hike. It would take weeks—maybe months—to search the probable places. If luck abandoned me, it might even take years to find the right bodies. The last time I’d used the method, I’d found six bodies—all the wrong ones—before I’d found who I’d been looking for. Of the serial killers I’d hunted, Randolph Aston had been one of the lazier ones; once he finished with a body, he dug a hole, dumped it in, and left it. He took nothing, he did little to cover his tracks, and the only reason he’d escaped the law for so long was thanks to his talent, which let him dig deep holes in a hurry.

  Ten minutes of work, and he had himself a proper grave, six feet deep, ten feet long, three feet wide. Filling it in cost him an extra fifteen, as the bastard had enjoyed covering where he’d disturbed the soil. If he hadn’t left metal on the bodies or if I’d used a cheaper metal detector, I never would’ve found his victims.

  A good metal detector made all the difference in the world when it came to hunting bodies in the forest. With the right machine, I could find a zipper at ten feet. If there were people buried in the Black Hills, I’d find them.