A Torment of Savages (The Reanimation Files Book 4)

by A. J. Locke

  “Yet couldn’t offer a key to the building.”

  “That would be pushing it, I think.” I looked around, making sure the hallway was still empty, then quickly unlocked the door. I eased out my rune gun and a vial of immobilizing powder, then carefully opened the door and peered in. I neither saw nor heard anyone, so I opened the door wider and stepped inside. Kyo came in behind me and softly closed the door.

  “I didn’t say you could come in,” I said irritably.

  “You also didn’t say I couldn’t not come in.”

  “What…Oh, whatever.” I rolled my eyes.

  Leena’s apartment was tiny and she probably paid too much rent for it. The door opened into a small entryway with a coat closet, then led to a living room big enough for one person to live comfortably, or two people if they didn’t mind being cozy every moment of the day. There was a two-seater sofa, one worn-looking armchair, a coffee table that sat on top of a rug, and a television mounted to the wall. There were a couple floor lamps and shelves with knick-knacks and photographs. There were also a few nature-esque decorations like sprigs of cotton in a glass jar, and a pile of smooth rocks sitting decoratively in the middle of the coffee table. It was on the sparse side of the usual way dead witches liked to decorate their spaces.

  To the right of the living room was a kitchen big enough to hold the basics, and on the other side of the living room was a short hallway with a couple doors. Bathroom and linen closet I assumed. At the end of the hall was the bedroom.

  The apartment was neither spick-and-span nor a total mess. It just looked as though Leena hadn’t gotten around to tidying up in a few days. Making all those tainted runes probably didn’t leave much time to clean her apartment. I did a careful search of all the rooms while instructing Kyo to wait by the door. When I came back over to him, I confirmed that the apartment was empty.

  “Now what? We ransack and pillage?”

  “Are you sure you didn’t come from the times of the Vikings or something?” I said as I fished out a pair of latex gloves from my bag. I put them on then wiggled my fingers at Kyo. “Now I search and see if I can uncover any evidence to use against Leena. She can’t be prosecuted under suspicion only.”

  “You truly are a top-notch detective,” Kyo said. “I shall assist you.”

  “Fine, but try not to make it look like there was anyone here.” I didn’t need to give him gloves because even though he was tangible, he wouldn’t leave fingerprints behind. Kyo nodded, then indicated that he would start with the bedroom. He headed off down the hallway, and I began with the coat closet. From personal knowledge I knew loose floorboards inside closets were good hiding places, so I felt around Leena’s dusty closet floor but didn’t undercover any hidey-holes. I took the time to search the pockets of all her coats, but only came away with a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. For a split second I was tempted to keep it, then I remembered that I was gainfully employed and didn’t need to resort to stealing. I put it back and moved on from the coat closet.

  The kitchen was smaller than the living room and would take less time to search, so I headed there next. I opened all the cupboards, looked inside bowls, pots and Tupperware, even sifted through the plastic container she’d filled with flour to see if there was anything hidden inside it. So far, nothing. I checked under the sink, on top of and behind the fridge, and inside the oven, but found nothing that would help me prove that Leena was creating tainted runes.

  As I was heading out of the kitchen, I stumbled, and when I looked down, I saw that one of the floorboards under the stove was slightly raised. I frowned as my gaze followed where the floorboard disappeared under the stove. Closets weren’t the only place for hidey-holes. Leena’s entire apartment had hardwood floors. She could have numerous hiding spots if she wanted.

  Wouldn’t hurt to check under the stove. It took some maneuvering because the space was so tight, but I was able to move the stove out of the way then peer down at the dust-caked floorboards beneath it. Here it was more noticeable that the boards were loose. I started to grow excited but tried not to get ahead of myself. Loose floorboards under the stove didn’t mean I was about to find tainted runes. I might just find a mouse family or a cluster of roaches.

  I crouched down and carefully began to pry up the floorboards. I only needed to move one before I saw that there actually was something to find here, and it wasn’t vermin. I spotted a box. After I had pried up a few more boards, I found myself looking down at four old, dusty shoeboxes.

  Clearly Leena had something to hide. I’d hit the jackpot. I reached down and carefully lifted out one of the boxes. I could hear objects shifting as I moved the box. As I opened up the lid, I wondered just how many tainted runes this woman had made and what the point of it was.

  Except I didn’t find runes. What I did find sent shock slamming into me so hard I nearly dropped the box. But I remained kneeling there with the box held tightly in my hands, staring down at the contents.

  Inside the box were bones. But not just any bones. They were the kind that could have only belonged to a human baby.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Hey, Selene…”

  I whipped my head up and stared at Kyo. I had forgotten he was even here. Whatever expression he saw on my face made him quickly come over and kneel down beside me.

  “Hey, what’s wrong—”

  But I didn’t need to explain what was wrong, because he was now looking at it. His mouth fell open and his eyes widened. He glanced at me.

  “What…what…”

  “My thoughts exactly.” I slowly lowered the box and its grisly contents and sat back on my heels. I closed my eyes and took a slow, calming breath, then opened my eyes and turned to Kyo.

  “I was expecting to find tainted runes, not…not bones. Baby bones.”

  “Hmm…” Kyo leaned past me and took the lid off another box. I already knew what I would see. More bones. He opened the other two boxes and I now had four boxes of bones before me. The tiny skulls were perfectly whole, sitting amid the rest of their jumbled up skeletons. Despite my best efforts, my eyes kept picking out and identifying certain bones: femur, finger bone, rib, hip bone…

  “Selene. Selene!”

  I looked at Kyo again. His expression was as serious as I’d ever seen it. “Do you understand what you’ve just uncovered here?”

  “What? Uh…um…bones…” The left turn this investigation had taken had thrown me for an insane loop.

  “Selene. Remember what I am, well, what I was. Remember what we theorized about why there aren’t more dead warlocks around.”

  “Oh, God,” I breathed. “You think these are the skeletons of dead warlocks who were killed at birth.”

  “Don’t you? Or does everyone keep the bones of infants hidden under their floorboards in this modern age?”

  “Okay, okay, I need to try and get a handle on this.” I stood up because my legs were beginning to cramp and started pacing in the tiny kitchen to stretch them out. “It’s damning evidence, that’s for sure, but we haven’t been able to say with a hundred percent certainty that the dead witches have been killing any males they gave birth to. It was just a theory.”

  Kyo stood as well. “Do you have any other explanation? It’s not like they kept playing the gender lotto and came out with female ninety-five percent of the time. The fact remains that dead witches are plentiful throughout the world, and dead warlocks are not. So obviously they’ve been reproducing these past couple decades. They just keep the girls.”

  “It makes sense, I know it does.” I stopped pacing and faced him. “It’s just too terrible a thought to bear.” I glanced down at the bones. “To take a baby right after you gave birth to him and…” I shook my head. “It’s horrifying and despicable of the dead witches to do that.”

  “Leena killed her sons,” Kyo said.

  I frowned. “You think these were all her children?”

  “Who else’s could they be?”

  “I don’t know, but it doe
sn’t seem as though one woman could be visibly pregnant four times throughout her life, never be seen with any kids, and no questions would be asked.”

  “I think I’ve already enlightened you to the fact that dead witches are damn good at covering their tracks. If they don’t want you to know something, you will have a really hard time trying to figure it out.”

  “We need to get to the bottom of this,” I said. “We need answers. We need these bones analyzed.”

  “You want to take them?” Kyo sounded surprised. “Where would you even take them? And what happens when Leena realizes they’re gone? She will know someone is on to her, and it won’t be long before the entire dead witch community knows someone has stumbled onto their darkest secret. They will do anything to make sure this doesn’t get out, and you could be in danger. I’m already a ghost, but you can be harmed.”

  “Can’t die, remember?”

  “Does that mean you’re willing to open yourself to torture? Or blackmail? Or perhaps when they see you can’t be killed they will turn elsewhere, like to Micah and Ethan.”

  That made me feel as though my heart had momentarily frozen. “No, of course I wouldn’t want any of that.”

  “We have to stay under the radar with this as much as possible.”

  “But we also need a direction to go in,” I said. “We can’t just take guesses as to where your body is and how to get it back from the witches who have been siphoning your magic for three centuries. If we’re on to something here, we need to be sure of it.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Kyo said warily.

  “I’ll take the bones to Dr. Lane, but I won’t tell him more than he needs to know and I will ensure his silence. If we can verify who these babies belonged to, we will have a trail to start following. Eventually that trail will lead us to your body.”

  “Okay,” Kyo said, though not without some reluctance. “But what about the part where Leena realizes they’re gone and sounds the alarm?”

  “The floorboards under the stove were covered in years of dust, as were these boxes. Which should have been my first clue that they didn’t contain tainted runes. I’m willing to bet Leena isn’t in the habit of having an occasional look at these bones. And there’s no space for any more…should there be more to add. Plus, she’s under investigation. Once we find her, she will be spending time behind bars, not at her apartment. It would be great if I had evidence to pin on her though.”

  “Oh, that’s actually why I came out here to find you. I found a pouch of runes stuffed inside a tube underneath the sink in her bathroom. Doesn’t seem like the usual place you’d keep your runes, right?”

  “Definitely not. Show me.” We left the shoeboxes and headed to the bathroom where Kyo showed me the pouch of runes he’d uncovered. I took one out.

  “It’s active,” I said. “She must be getting ready to unload this set. She likely charged them up today.” I opened my necromancer magic up enough to get a feel of the energy inside the rune. I recoiled when I felt the wrongness of the energy and called my necromancer magic back.

  “Yeah, it’s tainted.” I dropped the rune back into the pouch.

  “So what’s our move?” Kyo asked.

  I chewed my lip as I thought it over. “If I take the runes, I’ll have evidence, but Leena can deny that they’re hers, and I wouldn’t have much to make it stick. It would be better to catch her while she’s in the act.” I handed Kyo the pouch. “Put it back exactly the way you found it. We’ll stake her out and follow her when she goes to distribute them. Then we’ll round her up.”

  “Sounds like a plan, partner.”

  “We aren’t partners.” I headed back into the kitchen. After giving it some thought, I decided it was better to take one bone from each box than take all of them. I got out a packet of tissues from my purse and wrapped up one femur bone from each box. I then carefully tucked them away in my bag. Afterwards, I replaced the floorboards and pushed the stove back. Once I was done, Kyo and I made sure the apartment looked just the way we’d found it, then I stripped my gloves off, put them back into my bag for the time being, and we left. We took the stairs down instead of the elevator and only came across a couple people who paid us no mind. Back at my car, Kyo moved to open the passenger side door, but I stopped him.

  “I want you to stay here and stake the place out,” I said.

  “Sounds like something I’d do if I was your partner, but I’m not.”

  “So I guess you’re not interested in finding a trail to follow?”

  “Hmm…”

  “Look, if we want to question Leena about what we found and what she might know about where your and all the other dead warlock bodies are, we actually have to have her in our grasp. So stay here, stay hidden, and if she comes back, call me.” I accessed the photo gallery on my phone then held it up for Kyo to have a look. “This is Leena.” She was middle-aged, on the plump side, and had medium-length, auburn hair that was beginning to gray. I then dug into my purse and fished out a flip phone that by today’s cell phone standards would have been called a phone from the Stone Age. I’d gotten it for Kyo to use when he had energy runes on and was wandering around, in case he encountered trouble. It was hard enough teaching him how to use a simple flip phone; I didn’t want to attempt a smart phone. Plus there really was no reason for a ghost to have an expensive phone. If he got his body back, he could get a job and hook himself up. So far he’d only called to tell me how insane he thought Times Square was and to ask why he kept encountering men who dressed up like women. That had been when he was traversing the West Village.

  Kyo took the phone and I fished out another energy rune and activated it for him.

  “You’ll stay?” I asked.

  “I’m invested in seeing where this leads; I just like to bother you.” He winked at me and moved away from my car. “I’ll let you know when the offending witch comes home. Taking the bones to Lane?”

  “Yup, hopefully he can help. Discreetly.” I walked around to the driver’s side. “You’ve got about four hours with that energy rune, I’ll check in with you after I’m done at Lane’s.”

  “Got it, partner.” He grinned at me then strolled away to start staking out Leena’s building. I started up my car and headed out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Selene…uh, hi. How…what are you doing here?”

  Dr. Heath Lane lived in a large, well-furnished condo that had a great view of Central Park. I’d been here once a few years ago when he’d had a birthday party and invited some of the staff from Affairs of the Dead.

  “Hey Dr. Lane, I was wondering if you could help me with something.” I had intended to go see him at Affairs, but when I’d called I’d been told he had the day off, so I headed to his apartment instead. I probably should have called ahead. Ah well, at least he was home and I avoided a trip to Affairs and a possible encounter with Jacob.

  “Uh, sure come on in.” He stepped aside and let me in. “You don’t have another bloody shirt for me to examine do you?” He was trying to make a joke, but I could tell part of him thought that was exactly why I was here. When he saw what I wanted, he’d probably wish it was another bloody shirt.

  “Have a seat.”

  I sat down on one of the comfortable leather sofas in the living room. His place had a very bachelor feel in terms of décor. A lot of dark leather furniture and wood or metal accent pieces. Dr. Lane wasn’t married as far as I knew. He was in his late fifties, and I didn’t know if he was divorced of if he’d dodged the marriage bullet altogether. His hair was mostly gray and he could give his facial hair a cut, but his blue eyes were still sharp. What was it they called attractive older men? Silver fox? Yeah, he’d fall into that category. I was completely over my affinity for older men though.

  “So…what can I help you with? Usually you come to see me at the morgue…”

  “I called but they said you were off today.” I was hesitant about drawing Dr. Lane into this whole dead witch/warlock business, especi
ally since Kyo cautioned secrecy for the time being, but we weren’t going to get anywhere if we didn’t reach out for help when we needed it. Dr. Lane was trustworthy, or else I would not have come here. As far as I knew, he was still mum on the conclusion he came to after examining my bloody shirt.

  I reached into my purse and pulled out the tissue that I had wrapped the bones in. I laid it down on the glass coffee table. Dr. Lane, who was sitting in an adjacent armchair, looked at the bones, then up at me in surprise.

  “You brought me…bones?”

  “Yes…it would appear so.” I cleared my throat. “I would like you to analyze these bones and tell me whatever you can find out about them,” I said. “From the size, I already know that they belonged to infants, but I’m interested in knowing if they were all related, what gender they were, and how old they are.”

  “Selene.” Dr. Lane took his glasses off and set them down on the coffee table. The look he gave me seemed as though he was trying to analyze the hell out of my sanity. “Do you realize how bizarre it looks that you show up here in the middle of the afternoon with some tiny bones wrapped in tissue that you want me to analyze for you? What the hell is going on? What are you mixed up in?”

  “Well…I kind of hoped you would help me without asking too many questions because the less you know as a whole, the better.”

  “That’s not going to work,” he said firmly. “I don’t know what kind of risk I am taking by helping you with these requests. This is out of the scope of what’s normal; you do understand that, right? First the shirt, now the bones of infants?”

  “Dr. Lane…

  “What am I supposed to think about you, Selene?” he asked. “I’m well aware of what the majority of the past year has been like for you, so I know you have credibility when it comes to getting difficult situations resolved, but that doesn’t mean I can continue to help you off the books and keep secrets I know nothing about. The conclusion I came to after examining the blood on your shirt was shocking enough. If I examine these bones am I going to find out they’re your siblings?”