by M. P. Taylor
Lost Lamb
M. P. Taylor
Copyright © M.P. Taylor
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, digital or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except for brief quotations in reviews, general discussion, and other uses permitted under copyright law.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter One
Humans weren't all bad. They had a certain confidence about them that was utterly unshakable to the point of insanity. I've seen police officers try to gun down werewolves with a 9mm pistol, and professors casually attempt to summon gods that were best left forgotten. The whole of humanity wouldn't stop until they were devoured by the things in the dark. It was almost beautiful that something so utterly insignificant as a mortal would try and confront the unknown with reckless abandon. At least until those things in the dark turned their eyes upon the man.
That's what had happened here a few minutes ago.
Helen and James Roberts. Those were the names of the two bloody corpses that laid about the home.
It was a sad sight to be sure. James' body had been torn in two and his wife's head was twisted about, nearly severed. There was a shotgun on the ground. It had fired at least once as there was a rather large hole in the nearby wall. No blood though, James had missed his mark. It was a shame really. Had he simply hit it would have been much easier to locate the creature. Not that he or his wife would care much.
Sirens rang in the distance, I didn't have much time.
The wounds were the first things I examined. They showed a great deal about the creature, mainly that it was incredibly strong. It had snapped Helen's neck around in a single motion. With a bit more force, it likely could have torn the head straight off. There were also a number of bleeding wounds from were the creature had grabbed the woman's head and neck. They'd punctured deeply and likely would have been lethal themselves meaning that it was both strong and had claws.
Not really helpful, that only narrowed it down to nearly all supernatural creatures in existence.
My instincts leaned towards werewolves. They fit the bill in terms of strength and size. Seattle also had a good werewolf population. One of the major tribes had come to the city with settlers back in the day. A full enclave existed with alphas and the such, but they tended to be well behaved. Killings by them were subtle, no bodies, and it wasn't as if they killed that often – werewolves didn't need to feed on humans. Even if they did, this looked more like a hit than a snack. A quick entrance, a few broken humans and a whole lot of questions.
The main one being, 'Why were humans being hunted in my city?'
Mind you, I didn't care so much about the humans themselves.
Mortals breed like rabbits and most of them deserved to be torn to shreds. My issue had more to do with rules. One of which was that we, by which I meant all persons in the known, don't go around killing people. It brought up too many questions, and no one liked questions. Modern video technology was already giving the elders more than enough trouble. A serial killing caused by something supernatural always had a chance to alert the mortals – the cattle. An obvious problem.
The killer needed to be found and put down.
To that end, I employed my limited deductive reasoning to mull over the facts.
Three previous victims, all connected by a common employer according to the press release. A bit more poking around had shown me that they were also in correspondence – members of the same team. It would have been logical to assume, given the supernatural nature of the killer, that they weren't quite what they'd appeared to be.
That initial thought had proven wrong. All the victims were human. I knew because I had tested the blood myself.
That meant only one thing. Their work had to be the reason for their being killed. Some sort of research into a forbidden field or maybe just some loose ends to an illegal operation that needed to be tied up. Such things were common, but normally one would go through official channels. Killing mortals was easy but sloppy. Wiping their memories or driving them mad often proved to be a much more subtle method to maintain the illusion that we were myths.
I knelt down next to the corpse of the human woman. She might have been pretty once, before her head was twisted around. Her cold eyes looked up at me and I could only scold the head, “What did you get yourself into?”
Corpses didn't talk, not normally anyway.
I reached into the folds of my jacket and pulled out a small vial of red liquid. Popping the cork, I downed the goo. It had a fruity tint to it, like some kind of kid's drink mixed with sewage. The aftertaste tested my stomach but, as alchemy was something of a primary hobby of mine, my stomach was iron enough to resist the urge to vomit. I merely stood as the potion did its effect and widened my senses to encompass Azrael's domain – that of death and spirits.
Two souls could be sensed, those of Helen and James. Faint, unnoticeable, typically mortal. I couldn't tell one from another and so I grabbed the most vivid and embraced that which the soul could tell me.
My wife had just come home.
She was terribly upset about something, I thought she might have found out about Susan. I followed her back to her office as she rushed past me, I noticed tears in her eyes. She had to known about Susan, I'd never seen her cry before.
My heart began to pound faster and faster as I waited for her to say the words. 'I hate you' or maybe 'I know about her'. Those words never came. Instead she began to sob and tell me that another of her work friends had been killed.
I told her she'd be safe. She shook her head and just let me hold her.
Standing there, seeing her crying...it made me feel so very angry. My fling with Susan would hurt her just as bad were it come to life. It would make her cry and shake with a terrible sadness. I needed to break it off with her. I never wanted to see Helen like that again.
We stood in the office for a time, I holding her and telling that all would be well. She seemed terrified about the killings. I understood. They were her friends and coworkers and now they were the victims of a serial killer. We had a gun in the house and a state of the art security system to boot, but still I felt nervous. I hoped it didn't show when I told her those same facts.
There was a noise, a shattering of glass from the floor below.
Helen raced into her study, not running to hide but searching for something. I told her to follow me. She didn't listen. I sighed, ran to the end of the hallway, to a cabinet, and readied an old shotgun that my father had given me. I kept it level towards the stairs as I walked back to the study.
Helen was within, looking through papers and seeking something. I told her to come now and she ignored me. Only after I grabbed hold of her hand and began to pull did we manage to leave the room.
We exited with my shotgun leading the way. It was silent in the hallway, I could hear creaking from every co
rner of the room.
A quick sweep of my view showed nothing and so we began to slip backwards towards the bedroom. There was a fire escape there and we'd be able to sneak out. There was also only a single doorway so nothing would be able to get the drop on me once we were in.
Helen nearly tripped over the hallway table as we backpedaled, I grabbed her, steadied her and then looked into her eyes.
They were widened in terror, looking past me and down to the end of the hallway. I wheeled about with my weapon, trying to steady it as I went. A roar came from somewhere behind me, followed by rapid footsteps. I fired.
It was too soon, my buckshot managed to only take out a bit of wood from the nearby wall.
There was enough time to fire again, but then I saw the creature. Its eyes bore down on me and I froze. It took only a second or two for it to close the distance. I tried to tell Helen to run but it was too late. Only blood came from my mouth as my chest was ripped into by a massive claw. It lifted and disemboweled me. Gods the pain was blinding. I don't want to die.
My legs trembled before I collapsed.
Death was always a strong thing, even when it was expected. I had known that the couple was dead, but the sensation of pain and fear was still a surprise. I hadn't prepared for that, or rather it was impossible to prepare for the total fear of final moments. The potion had done more than simply let me see his death, it had made those memories my own. I remembered his sense of love for Helen, his fear for them, but the desperation of dying most of all.
“Catherine Vane...my name is Catherine Vane...” I repeated the words to myself a few more times. It was the one trick that always worked.
Names were powerful things and each time I said my own, my memories became much more clear. My task, my training and even the sirens of police. It was all coming back to me, slowly but surely. I wasn't James. I was Catherine, even if most days I wished to be someone else.
I took in my surroundings once more, trying to recall my goals for being in such a place.
It was a mistake. Helen's dead face look at me and I at it. Moments ago, it had meant nothing to me. Now there was a trace of love. Love that had been born by James and aimed at the woman who was his wife. His sadness was now my own, and so were his memories. In them I hoped to find a led and end whatever supernatural beast was stalking the homes of Seattle. It had been a simple, professional matter.
It felt personal now, and I even found myself swearing to slay it by Helen's name. I hated using Oracle, the potion of spirits, but it got results.
Those results came in a few fleeting moments of memory. Helen had been desperately looking for something in her final moments. Even after that thing had broken into her home, she had continued her search.
The study's door was wide open. It was a comfy sort of place, no doubt Helen had spent many hours here with her work. Shelves with paperback novels covered the walls, and a single table was along the far wall with a desktop computer on it. I would have liked to examine its contents but the emergency vehicles were getting closer with each second. There simply wasn't the time to deal with passwords, I just looked for whatever Helen had been trying to find.
Behind the desk there were a number of papers that had fallen to the ground. A fragment of James' memory flickered through my mind. In it, I could recall the sounds of papers hitting the ground as he took his wife's hand and began to flee. If Helen had been so dedicated as to look for some paperwork during a home invasion, it had to be important. It was a long shot but somewhere in these papers was something that might help put a motive to the killing.
That fact alone didn't help me with the massive amount of sheets that lay spilled out at my feet. Bundling them together proved to be an easy enough feat but making heads or tails of it would be a different matter. My eyes glanced across the pages, searching for something that might be immediately apparent but it was all beyond me.
Arcane powers, particularly cryomancy, were my area of expertise. The medical jargon that was thrown about in these papers was well beyond anything I could even begin to understand.
Still, it was better than nothing and there was a consistent element in the paperwork that drew my eye. Printed in a sort of modernist font were the words 'Incrementum Pharmaceuticals'.
“Business then,” I muttered as I tried to piece together why Helen would be so desperate to find these papers.
There was obviously a link between them and the creature that had been picking off doctors but it wasn't immediately apparent to me.
Supernatural beings tended to shy away from science as a rule. It was true that there was some rudimentary physics involved with most magic. Energy couldn't be created from nothing, entropy cannot be reversed and the classic Newtonian laws tended to apply, but there were other forces at work. It was hard to quantify things such as souls with science, and souls were very much real. Nor could science explain how vampires were sustained without anything but blood or how werewolves could rapidly expand upon their mass. Simply put, magic made exceptions to the rules when it wished.
Most scientific data gained by studying the supernatural was utterly pointless, though that didn't stop many from trying to do just that. My instinct told me that Helen was somehow involved in such a study. Human scientist didn't start disappearing by way of monster unless they pushed a button.
I shook my head, “Stupid humans.”
A distant echo of car doors being closed, along with the blaring of police sirens, signaled that it was time for me to be on my way.
I'd left behind plenty of evidence that I was here, fingerprints and the such. For moment I considered burning the place down to hide my presence but shrugged the thought off. My prints weren't on record and even if they did somehow link me, I wasn't very concerned. It wasn't worth the risk of setting the densely packed urban center alight.
Worse case I'd have to disappear if a detective came knocking, but I suspected that it wouldn't be an issue – my masters had a habit of making things disappear.
The front door to the building was breached just as I began to run down the fire escape, the one the couple had intended to use. A quick jot down the stairway and I was home free, walking down the back alleys of sweet Seattle.
That was to say covered in snow as winter well in swing. There was no choice but to climb my way through a small mountain of fluff that had filled the alley. By the time I'd gotten out, the streets were filled with curious people – stupid humans, running into the darkness of night at the first sign of trouble.
On my way I saw a mother and her child, both dressed in their night clothing. The child was rubbing her eyes clearly having been awoken by the sirens just outside their home. She leaned upon her mother's waist, “Why are the police there?”
“I don't know honey,” the mother reached down and placed her hand upon the child's shoulder.
“Back inside,” I told them in a voice that was not to be argued.
The woman blinked, looked me over and then nodded before grabbing her child and moving back into the doorway of her home.
Sirens were going off, police swarmed the area and yet she had no trouble walking out onto her lawn, child in tow no less. Her curiosity had gotten the better of her, the better of both of them.
They weren't alone either. Everyone had come out of their homes and were peering over at the commotion across the street. The only sane folk in the entire block seemed to be the officers themselves who began to urge people back into their homes. Most ignored the suggestion.
Typical. Danger to a human was the ultimate lure, I shook my head at the insanity.
My car was on the third story of a nearby parking complex. A long walk.
I took the time to decompress and to try and suppress the lingering sensations from the Oracle potion. Closing my eyes, I breathed deeply. I was alive, my name was Catherine, and I was a wizard and not some foolish mortal man. The fight to suppress the fear of death was slowly being won. More and more idle memories that weren't my own were wip
ed away. Each moment longer I lived, the more alien the notion of being dead became.
By the time I made it up to the final stairwell I felt much more myself. No more emotional drive for revenge, just the pragmatic hunter's mind.
That same mind became keenly aware of a form resting against the hood of my car. A woman. Dark hair and wearing a leather coat dyed a deep red. Her eyes were covered by a pair of tinted glasses and her hand was within the fold of her jacket, holding something.
My first thought was to summon my staff and destroy the woman. I began the first part, activating the rune that was etched into my glove. From seemingly nothingness, a long silver staff appeared in my hand. It was a proper tool, a wizards weapon that would make any supernatural creature think twice before throwing down.
“I don't like it when people lean on my car,” I stopped walking and took a defensive stance.
The woman tilted her head to the side slightly, it reminded me of a dog trying to understand its human, “My apologies.”
Her voice was soft, elegant but there was something else in there as well. A hint of playfulness, “Not needed.”
I waited for her to leave. She didn't.
Instead she stood there, reading my posture and no doubt examining it for any weaknesses. I've been eyed up by supernatural predators before and that was exactly how I was feeling now. A sense of unease that made the hairs on my back stand up. Her head shifted slightly, I saw her looking at the stack of papers I held under my free arm. That was what she wanted.
Seeing that I was making no progress with a starring contest, I slammed the end of my staff on the ground.
An aura of chilled air whipped about me. My power began to crackle through the air, manifesting a ward. A supernatural shield that would match most inhuman things in a contest of strength – a wall and cold and frost that would freeze all whom dared to enter.
A smile came to her lips, “It has been a long time since I've fought a wizard.”
“Try it,” I said with as much confidence as could be mustered, “It will be the last time, I assure you.”