“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Who the hell is she?” It was Captain Henderson. He’d spotted us. He came up the hillside in his dress shoes, sliding just a bit. But he was determined and knew how to walk in the leaves even in the wrong shoes. He was about five-eight, with short, blond hair. He had odd eyes that changed color as he moved through the dappled sunlight. One moment pale green, the next grey. He came up to stand between the two of us. He looked at Maiden. “Who is this, and why is she inside my perimeter?”
“Anita Blake, Captain Henderson,” Maiden said.
He looked straight at me, and his eyes were cool and grey with swirling flecks of green. He was handsome in a clean-cut, ordinary sort of way. He might have been more than that, but there was a harshness to his face, a sourness, that robbed him of something likeable and pleasant.
No matter how funky the eye color when he looked at me, the eyes were distant, judging, cop eyes. “So you’re Anita Blake?” His voice was almost angry.
I nodded. “Yes.” I didn’t let the anger get to me. He wasn’t angry at me. Something was wrong. Something beyond the crime itself. I wondered what.
He looked me up and down, not sexual, but as if he were taking my measure. I was used to that, though it was usually a little less blatant. “How strong’s your stomach, Blake?”
I raised eyebrows at that, then smiled.
“What in the hell is funny?” Henderson said.
“Look, I know it’s bad. I just left your sergeant at the top of the hill so spooked he wouldn’t come near it a second time. Maiden here’s already told me it’s awful. Just take me to the body.”
Henderson stepped up, invading the hell out of my personal space. “You that confident that you can take it, Blake?”
I sighed. “No.”
The no seemed to take some of the anger away. He blinked and took a step back. “No?” he said.
“I don’t know if I can take it, Captain Henderson. There’s always the chance that the next horror will be something so awful, I’ll never recover. Something that stains my mind and sends me screaming. But so far, so good. So, take me to see the grisly remains. The foreplay is getting tiresome.”
I watched the emotions play over his face: amusement, then anger, but finally, amusement won. Lucky me. “The grisly remains. Are you sure you’re not a reporter?”
That made me smile. “I’m guilty of a lot of sins, but that’s not one of them.”
That made him smile. When he smiled, he looked ten years younger and was more than just ordinarily handsome. “Okay, Ms. Blake, follow me. I’ll take you to see the grisly remains.” He laughed soft, low, and deeper than his speaking voice, as if when he sang he might be a bass. “I hope you’re as amusing after you’ve seen the show, Ms. Blake.”
“Me, too,” I said.
He gave me a strange look, then led the way down the hill. I followed because it was my job. An hour ago, I’d have said the day couldn’t get much worse. I had a sinking feeling it was about to get worse—much worse.
33
THE BODY LAY in a small clearing. I knew it was human because they told me it was. It wasn’t that the body didn’t look human, exactly. The shape was there enough that I could tell it was lying on its back. It was more that my mind refused to acknowledge that this could have been a human being. My eyes saw it, but my mind kept refusing to put the pieces together, so it was like looking at one of those pictures where you stare and stare until the hidden shapes spin out in 3-D relief. It looked as if there had been an explosion of blood and flesh, and the body had been at the center of it. Dried blood spread out from the body in every direction, as if when the body were moved there’d be a body-shaped clean spot, like an ink blot.
I could see all that, but still my eyes couldn’t make sense of it. My mind was trying to protect me. It had happened before—once or twice. The smart thing would be to turn and walk away. Let my mind have its confusion because the truth was going to be one of those mind-blasting moments. I’d jokingly told Henderson at the top of the hill that some things stain the mind. It wasn’t funny now.
I forced myself to look at it, forced myself not to look away, but the summer heat wavered around me in a sickening rush. I wanted to cover my eyes with my hands, but I settled for turning away. Covering my eyes would look silly and childish, like blotting out the worst of a horror movie.
Henderson turned when I did. If I wasn’t going to look at the body, then he wouldn’t, either. “You okay?”
The world stopped spinning like a ball that had slid to a stop. “I will be.” My voice sounded breathy.
“Good,” he said.
We stood that way for a few seconds more, then I took a shallow breath. I knew better than to take a deep one this close to the body. I had to do this. Trolls didn’t do this. No natural animal did this. I turned slowly around to face the body. It hadn’t gotten any better.
Henderson turned with me. He was the man in charge. He could take it if I could. I wasn’t sure I could, but since I was out of other choices . . .
I’d borrowed surgical gloves. Someone had offered me heavier plastic gloves to go over. AIDS, you know. I declined. One, my hands would sweat. Two, if I had to feel the body for clues, I wouldn’t be able to feel shit. Three, with three vampire marks on me, I didn’t sweat AIDS anymore. I was free from blood-borne disease, so I’d been told. I believed Jean-Claude on this one because he wouldn’t want to lose me. I was a third of his triumvirate. He wanted me safe. In the back of my head a voice said, He loves you. The voice in the front of my head said, Yeah right.
“Can I track up the blood pattern?” I asked.
“You can’t get close to the body unless you step in the blood,” Henderson said.
I nodded. “True. So you’ve videotaped it, gotten all your pictures?”
“We know how to do our job, Ms. Blake.”
“I’m not questioning that, Captain. I need to know if I can move the body around, that’s all. I don’t want to fuck up the evidence.”
“When you’re done with it, we’ll be bagging it up.”
I nodded. “Okay.” I stared down at the body and suddenly could see it. All of it. I hugged my arms across my stomach to keep my hands from covering my eyes. The nose had been bitten off so that it was just a bloody hole. The lips were torn away until teeth and the bones of the jaw were visible under the drying blood. The muscles of the jaw were missing on the side facing me. Whatever had done this hadn’t just taken a quick bite. It had sat down and fed.
So many bites, so much missing flesh, but most of it too shallow to kill. I said a short prayer that most of the bites were postmortem. Even as I prayed, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a good answer; there was too much blood. She’d been alive through most of it. Intestines spilled out of the ripped jeans in a dried nest covered in thicker things than blood. The outhouse smell of her lower intestines being ripped would have faded by now. One smell dies, but there’s always another. Her body had started to ripen in the summer heat. It is a smell that is hard to describe, both overwhelmingly sweet and bitter enough to gag. I took shallow breaths and stepped onto the dried splatter.
Something moved through me like a phantom blow. The hair on the back of my neck tried to crawl down my spine. That part of my brain that had nothing to do with cars or indoor plumbing and everything to do with running and screaming and not thinking at all, was whispering now. It was whispering that something was wrong. Something evil had been here—not just dangerous, evil.
I waited to see if the feeling would grow stronger, but it faded. It faded like a bad memory, which probably meant I’d walked through the edge of some kind of spell—or rather, the remnants of one, a nasty one.
You didn’t call something this evil without a circle of protection either for the sorcerer to stand in or for the beastie to be put inside of. I searched the ground, but there was nothing but blood. The blood didn’t form a circle of protection. It was just splatter, mess, no pattern.<
br />
I should have known there wouldn’t be anything that obvious. The police aren’t practitioners of the arts, though that is beginning to change, but you can’t be a cop long and not look for signs of magic when the shit is this strange.
The scene looked undisturbed, but that didn’t mean it was undisturbed. If someone were really good at magic, they could make you not see something. Not true invisibility. Humans don’t do that. Physics is physics. Light hits a solid object and bounces. But they can make the eye reluctant to see, so that you keep looking past something and your mind doesn’t register it. Like looking for a set of car keys that is sitting in plain sight, lost for two days.
I squatted beside the body. I didn’t have the coveralls I usually wore at murder scenes and didn’t want the blood to soak into my jeans. I was still hugging myself. There were things here that someone didn’t want us to see. But what?
Henderson called, “We found the wallet. Do you want the ID?”
“No,” I said. “No.” I wasn’t being clever. I just didn’t want a name, an identity for the thing at my feet. I’d done the trick of turning the body into an it. It wasn’t real. It was just something to be studied, examined. It had never been real. To think anything else at that moment would have had me vomiting all over the evidence. I’d done that only once, years ago. Dolph and the gang had never let me live it down.
The eyes had been clawed out and left to dry into blackened lumps on the cheeks. Long hair was plastered along the side of the face, stuck to one shoulder. Maybe blond hair from the color. But it was hard to tell with all the soaked blood. The long hair made me think female. My eyes traveled down and found the remains of clothing. The blouse had been reduced to a lump of cloth under one arm. The chest was bare. One breast torn completely off. The other deflated like a balloon as if something had eaten the flesh out of the middle, like a kid sucking the jelly out of a donut.
It was an unfortunate choice of metaphors, even in my own head. I had to stand up. I had to walk away, blowing air out very fast and too shallow. I went to stand beside one of the trees that edged the clearing. I had to take deep breaths, but that meant the odor went down strong. That sweet, sweet smell slid along my tongue and coated the back of my throat until I couldn’t stand the thought of swallowing but didn’t know what else to do. I swallowed, and the smell slid down, and my morning coffee inched up.
I had two comforts. One, I’d managed to get outside the blood pattern to vomit. Two, I didn’t have much in my stomach to come up. Maybe this was one reason that I’ve stopped eating breakfast. I get a lot of early-morning body viewing.
I knelt in the dry leaves and felt better. I hadn’t thrown up at a crime scene in a long time. At least Zerbrowski wasn’t here to rib me about it. I wasn’t even embarrassed. Was that a sign of maturity?
Male voices behind me. Sheriff Wilkes saying, almost yelling, “She’s just a civvie. She shouldn’t be here. She isn’t even licensed for this state.”
“I’m in charge here, Sheriff. I say who stays and who goes.” Henderson wasn’t yelling, but his voice carried.
I grabbed the tree trunk to help me stand, and my arm tingled so hard it almost went numb. I stood, pushing away from the tree, nearly falling, but I kept my feet. I looked up the smooth trunk. About eight feet up was a pentagram carved into the bark of the tree. The cut had been darkened with blood. With the dried blood rubbed into it, it was almost invisible against the dark grey bark, but there was also a spell of reluctance on it. So that no one had looked, not even me. Only when I touched the tree did I sense it. Like all illusion, once you see it, you know it’s there.
I looked at the other trees and found a bloody pentagram carved into each one. It was a circle of power, of protection. A circle formed of blood and the land itself. Wiccans—witches—can use their power for evil if they’re willing to pay the price in karma. Whatever you do, good or ill, comes back to you threefold. But even a wiccan gone bad wouldn’t carve up a tree. Had the trees, the land, themselves, been invoked? That might mean an elemental. They could be nasty. But they didn’t feel evil. They felt angry if you messed with their land, but they weren’t evil, more angry-neutral. I’d gotten that whiff of evil as I passed through the circle. Evil with a capital E. There just aren’t that many preternatural critters that trip that particular wire.
“Captain Henderson,” I said. I had to say it twice before they stopped arguing and looked at me.
They both looked at me. Neither looked friendly, but at least I knew who they were mad at: each other. Local cops don’t like anybody horning in on their turf. It was normal for the local police to resent outsiders. But I knew that Wilkes had more to protect than his turf. He must be frantic having real cops here now. But now wasn’t the time to spill the beans. I had no proof. Accusing a policeman of corruption tends to upset the other cops.
“Did you see the pentagrams on the trees?”
The question was strange enough that they both stopped being angry and paid attention. I pointed the pentagrams out, and like all good illusion, once I showed them, they could see it. The emperor has no clothes.
“So?” Wilkes said.
“So, this was a circle of protection, of power. Something was called here to kill her.”
“The marks on the trees could have been here for days,” Wilkes said.
“Test the blood on the pentagrams,” I said. “It won’t be hers, but it will be fresh.”
“Why isn’t it the victim’s?” Henderson asked.
“Because they used the blood to seal the circle. They had to have the blood before the death.”
“It was a human sacrifice then,” Henderson said.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“This was a troll kill,” Wilkes said. He didn’t sound sure; he sounded desperate.
Henderson turned to him. “You keep saying that, Wilkes. You keep saying it was trolls.”
“That biologist herself said it looked like primates. It sure as hell wasn’t a person. There aren’t that many primates running around the Tennessee hills.”
“She said humanoid,” I said.
They both looked at me again.
“Dr. Onslow said humanoid. A lot of people assume humanoid means primate, but there are other options.”
“Like what?” Wilkes said. His beeper went off. He checked the number, then looked at me. “Excuse me, Captain Henderson.”
Henderson looked at me. “Do you and the sheriff have some sort of history, Ms. Blake?”
I frowned. “History? How?”
“He was very certain that you shouldn’t be anywhere near this body. He was also very certain that this was a troll kill. Very certain.”
“Who called you guys then?”
“An anonymous tip.”
We looked at each other. “Who suggested I get to join the fun?”
“One of the EMS crew. The man’s usual partner met you last night.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know him.”
“His regular partner is a girl. Lucy something.”
That explained Lucy’s medical knowledge, and why she wasn’t working on the day of the full moon. Don’t want to be around fresh blood with the moon almost full. Too tempting. Too chancy.
“I remember her vaguely, I guess.” I remembered her more than vaguely, but the last time I’d seen her was just after I’d murdered someone, so I was going to be fuzzy on the details. For one awful moment, I wondered if Henderson had been trying to trick me and the body was really Lucy. But the height was wrong. The woman had been tall, not my size. Most of the women that Richard dated were short. I guess if you’ve got a body type you like, you stick to it. My choice of victims seemed to be a lot wider.
“Why did they need a power circle, Ms. Blake?” Henderson asked.
“To keep in what they called.”
He frowned at me. “Like you said before, the foreplay is getting tiresome. Just tell me what the fuck you think it was.”
“I think they call
ed a demon.”
His eyes widened. “A what?”
“A demon,” I said.
Henderson just looked at me. “Why?”
“When I crossed the circle, I got that feeling of evil. No matter how monstrous the critter, it doesn’t feel the same as something dedicated to evil and no other purpose.”
“You see many demons while you’re out slaying vampires, Ms. Blake?”
“Once, Captain, just once. It was . . .” I stepped out of the circle of power, and I felt better. They’d done their best to hide the traces, but things like this have a tendency to cling. “I was called into a case that they thought was a vampire, but it was demonic possession. The woman . . .” I stopped again because I didn’t have words for it, or no words that wouldn’t seem silly, melodramatic. I tried to tell the story by sticking to the facts. Me and Sergeant Friday.
“The woman had been an ordinary housewife, mother of two. She’d been a diagnosed schizophrenic, Captain. Her particular brand of craziness was almost a multiple personality disorder, but not that clear-cut. She was like the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good. A model churchgoer, teacher of Sunday school. She canned her own vegetables, sewed doll clothes for her girls. But when she was bad, she slept around, abused the kids, hung the family dog from a tree.”
Henderson raised an eyebrow at that. For a cop, it was pure shock. “Why wasn’t she in a hospital?”
“Because when she took her medicine, she was the good mother, the good wife. I talked to her when she was ‘well,’ and she was a very nice person. I saw why the husband tried to hold on to her. It was tragic in the true sense of the word that her own brain chemistry was destroying her life.”
“It’s sad, but it’s not demonic,” Henderson said.
“Neighborhood pets were vanishing, showing up drained of blood. I traced it to the woman. Her history of mental illness had raised flags with the cops. So far, just sad, right.” I stared off up the hill at the cops and the techs and everyone. They were not looking down the hill. No one wanted to hang around this one. Even if you aren’t truly sensitive to the psychic, we all have survival instincts that work better than we do. Everyone would be reluctant on this one, and they wouldn’t know why.
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