City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set

by Clara Coulson

  But I do it anyway. Because I never listen. Especially not to myself.

  I turn on my toes in time to see Mac’s mutilated body slam into the top of the car, bounce off, roll down the back windshield, slip over the edge of the trunk, and come to a bloody, squelching stop at my feet.

  His face is gone, torn away. His stomach is an empty cavern. All his limbs are broken, twisted, and his neck is bent at an awkward angle.

  I don’t know which injury killed him. I don’t know which came first. What I do know is that the thing standing on the top level of the fire escape turned Mac from a man to a meat puppet in the same span of time it takes the average person to unlock their front door. And he did it, every deadly blow, every rip and break and tear, without making a sound audible to me, standing four stories below.

  My gaze ascends from the body of the man who was my only friend to the form leaning casually over the railing of the fire escape, peering down at me with mild interest. I cannot see his face clearly in the night, but I know from the gleam of his fangs in the yellow dimness of the streetlights, the reflective shimmer of fresh blood on his chin and cheeks, that he is smiling brighter than the sun could ever shine.

  He chuckles, shakes his head, and says to me, “Better luck next time, kid.”

  And before my finger pulls the trigger of a shot that would have nailed him right between the eyes, he jumps twenty feet in a single bound, to the roof, and strolls away.

  Whistling a hymn on high.

  Two Years Later

  Chapter One

  Few parents send their kids to college to get murdered by a monster. So I figure that Mr. and Mrs. Franks, the parents of Jason Franks, freshman at Waverly College, will be pretty surprised to find out their son got killed in his dorm room last night by an as-yet-unknown murderer. Thankfully, death notices aren’t my job, so I won’t have to watch them swim in grief.

  No, my job is to find the monster. And maybe kill it back.

  I pull the little black hybrid car into an available street-side parking space, cut the engine, and sit there for a minute, eyes on the surrounding college grounds. I was at Waverly for two years before I transferred to Stanford, and the campus hasn’t changed all that much. There’s a new addition to the library visible through the thinning autumn foliage, and someone finally put in an actual brick sidewalk to replace the dirt paths behind the line of aging dorm buildings. But other than those few minor adjustments—oh, and the dead body on the third floor of the Hague dorm—Waverly College still looks like a snotty prep school from the mid-nineteenth century.

  Popping the car door open, I step out into the cool, humid day. Leaves heavy with recent rainwater intermittently flop down onto the sidewalk, and frequent foot traffic has covered the concrete with a fine film of red-orange bits. Now, however, this side of the road is all but deserted. The morning commuter crowd has gathered outside the Hague dorm, thirty or so people with similar suits and matching black umbrellas, morbid curiosity held back only by the yellow police tape marking the perimeter.

  I shut the car door and hit the lock button on the key, then take inventory of my person. I’m wearing the official combat-slash-investigation uniform for the department, a black, leather-like getup complete with knives, two guns, and a utility belt filled with neat knickknacks, most of which can be lethal if used the right way. I double-check that my beggar rings are in place and intact on my fingers, one simple silver band for each digit. Two weeks ago, I accidentally broke a set during my academy finals, and my new ones just arrived in my office cubbyhole yesterday.

  Satisfied that I look imposing enough not to be laughed away from the front door—because let’s face it, no one takes a Matrix cosplayer seriously unless he looks ready to snap your neck—I cross the damp, two-lane road and head toward the Hague dorm. Several news vans are parked along the street, the reporters and cameramen near the front of the crowd as they wait for an officer or detective to make an announcement about Jason. On the eight o’clock news tonight, there’ll be a segment that blathers on about Jason’s mundane life and posits the question of why anyone would murder a dull, average boy.

  Was it drugs? A jealous ex? Or was poor Jason in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  The answer will likely be one of those three. It always is.

  The truth of the matter isn’t for public consumption.

  As I near the crowd, one reporter notices me. A young, blond woman wearing too much lipstick. She jams her elbow into her cameraman’s gut, and he swivels his camera around to get me in frame. The reporter then breaks from the crowd and approaches me, holding out her microphone like she’s ready to beat me with it if I don’t answer her inappropriate questions. “Sir,” she says, “are you a DSI agent?”

  “That’s what it says on my badge.” I lift the right side of my coat up an inch to reveal the shiny gold badge clipped to my belt. There’s a symbol in the middle, golden laurels split by a broad sword, and ringed around the symbol, in a decorative sans-serif font, are the words Department of Supernatural Investigations. Underneath all the fancy stuff is a plain stamp that reads Detective, 3rd Class.

  The reporter stares at the badge for a moment, then collects herself and shoves the microphone even closer to my face. “Detective, do the Aurora Police believe the killing of this student is related to satanic rituals? Is that why they called in Supernatural Investigations?”

  You know, it’s funny how many people hear there’s an official government agency called “Supernatural Investigations” and ignore the obvious implications, like ghosts, in favor of satanic cults and ritual killings and other things that don’t exist in the strangest parts of the world, much less Michigan. Sure, I can’t blame them entirely, since our case files are sealed to the public, but supernatural does not mean devil worshippers. Come on!

  I throw up my most dazzling grin and reply, “I’m afraid I don’t know the exact nature of the crime, ma’am, as I haven’t yet had the opportunity to view the scene. The police contact DSI whenever they find anything odd or unexplainable.” I slowly side-step her and add, “Now, if you’ll let me enter the dormitory in peace and take a gander at the scene, I might be able to come up with an answer more interesting than the standard bullshit line.”

  She lets the microphone fall to her side and sputters out nonsensical syllables that indicate she’s offended. I imagine her cheeks turn bright pink under all her makeup, especially when her cameraman fails to stifle a laugh. She jabs him in the stomach with the hard end of the microphone, turns on her high heels, and storms off back to her original position. The still-chuckling cameraman shuffles off after her. Before they push their way back through the crowd to the boundary tape, I call out, “If I meet Satan in there, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  The reporter throws me a glare that could burn a hole through steel.

  I wave back in a friendly manner.

  Rounding the crowd, I reach the edge of the police perimeter, where a middle-aged uniformed officer is waiting, arms crossed, bored. Judging by the bags under his eyes and the barely subdued yawns, he’s been here since the crime scene was established early this morning. When I near the tape, he breaks his distant gaze on the crowd and gives me a onceover. The moment he recognizes what my getup signifies, he frowns.

  “Oh, great. They called in the Kooks?”

  Kooks. The Aurora PD’s favorite word for describing DSI agents.

  I shrug. “Seems so, Officer. Got instructions to swing by and check out your scene for any, you know, weird stuff.”

  He takes off his hat and wipes away a line of sweat on his forehead. “Poor kid gets murdered, and they send in the nuts. Disrespectful. We should be out looking for a violent person, not a poltergeist.”

  I almost blurt out a quip about how smart he must be for remembering the word poltergeist, but I do have to get him to let me past the perimeter, so I say instead, “You’d be surprised how violent poltergeists can get, Officer, when you make them angry.” True story. Saw a
bunch of videos on the subject in my academy class on ghost activity.

  Officer Ringer, according to his nametag, shakes his head and rolls his eyes. But he lifts the tape up for me anyway and jerks his thumb in the direction of the dorm entrance. “Whatever, Kook. Just make it quick, and don’t mess up the scene. The homicide detectives haven’t even gotten here yet. Don’t want a weirdo ruining this case before it’s off the ground.”

  I duck under the tape and pass him by. “Of course not, Officer. I’d never damage a case for the fine boys and girls in blue.”

  He waves me off with a dismissive gesture that I swear is the middle finger for half a second. “Get going, will you?”

  “You have a nice day, too.” Officer Asshole.

  Chapter Two

  When I finally reach the third floor of the Hague dorm, I’m greeted by a flurry of police activity. Men and women from a crime scene unit are crawling all over the hallway, searching for fibers and fingerprints and blood spatters and many other things that you would expect to find in abundance in a college dorm. Public places are always the most difficult scenes for pinning down important evidence. There’s too much noise.

  I slip into the hallway from the stairwell, announcing my presence with a loud screech as the door closes behind me on its rusty hinges. So much for being subtle. A few heads turn my way, and some of them do a double take upon realizing what foreign element has invaded their precious crime scene. Then the awkward stares and whispers begin—they don’t even try to be discreet. They don’t care to be. Kooks aren’t worth much more than open ridicule.

  Fortunately, none of them try to stop me from advancing toward room 348, Jason Franks’ double dorm room. A few uniforms and crime scene guys are huddled in the doorway, peering inside. The younger cops look a little green in the face, eyes wide with horror, and I know the scene will be grisly at best before I even get close enough to smell the blood. Tangy. Strong. Copper in the air.

  The most senior investigator in the group frowns when he spots me approaching. “You must be the DSI guy the lieutenant called in.” His gaze flicks down to my guns, one strapped to each leg. “You got about five minutes before the detectives, the real detectives, get here.”

  “Real detectives?” I tap my badge with a gloved finger. “Didn’t know they made fake ones. That like artificial flavoring versus all natural? Nothing but a bunch of bunk claims about digestive health?”

  The man bites his tongue to stop himself from barking back, while the other cops around him turn their heads to hide their smirks. After a moment of fury passes, the man sighs and says, “Just get in there and finish your business, kid. We got a murder to solve.”

  I raise my hands, palms out. A peace offering. “As you wish, sir. I—”

  “Hey, is that Cal Kinsey?” says a voice somewhere behind me, loud enough to hear without an ounce of effort. Intentionally loud. I don’t recognize the voice, but then, I don’t remember many colleagues from my brief time as a cop. I’ve done my best to forget every face.

  Not that I’ll ever forget Mac’s.

  “Yeah, that is him, isn’t it?” another voice adds in, just as loud and obnoxious. “A buddy of mine told me the kid went loopy, joined the Kooks after Macintyre died in the Square, but I thought he was kidding.”

  “Damn shame,” says the first voice again. “Smart kid. Sad to see him throw his talent away in the oddball brigade.”

  The second voice chimes in one last time. “Still don’t understand why we waste tax dollars on those freaks.”

  I resist the temptation to spin around and blast the assholes out the nearest window with my force rings. Instead, mouth set in a painful fixed smile, I push my way past the small group at the door, into Jason Franks’ room, moving from the faded, cream-colored halls of the average college dorm...

  Into a red-painted torture chamber from the darkest pits of hell.

  I almost stumble over my own two feet in the tiny foyer area. I have to grab the doorknob to right myself before I fall and give the cops even more fuel for their bullying fire. My eyes blink again and again, trying to process the reality of the room I’m standing in. I haven’t seen so much blood in one place since…Mac.

  My chest constricts, as if someone jammed a foot into my ribs. My throat dries out like desert sand. Air won’t pass into my lungs, and my vision blacks out at the corners, blinding my periphery. My hands begin to shake, and I feel it—a flashback. Edging its way toward the forefront of my mind. And before I can force it back into the cage where it belongs, it grips me tight and drags me to the one place I can’t stand to go.

  Mac. The Square. The dead of night. The monster that comes from the shadows. The vampire that tears Mac to pieces and drops his body on the car like a twisted present for little Cal, who stands there, staring at the bloody wreck left of his partner, who kneels there, screaming at the top of his lungs, who sits there, stunned and silent, tears streaming down his cheeks, until the other officers arrive and realize—

  “You all right, kid?” says the crime scene man behind me.

  Reality drags me back into my body, and I remember where I am. What I’m looking at.

  It’s not Mac. It has nothing to do with Mac. Get your head in the game, Kinsey.

  I release my death grip on the doorknob, set my shoulders tight, steel my face, and crane my neck to look at the crime scene guy again. “Fine. Just fine.” And before he can contradict me, I step all the way into the room, whirl around, and kick the door shut in his face.

  For a second, I have the urge to hunch over and vomit on the floor. But I manage to abstain. I stare at the chipped wooden door for a few more seconds, until my stomach settles and that nasty flashback is once more sealed away in the depths of my mind. Then I lick my lips, turn around again, and face the chamber of horrors.

  Whoever first said poor Jason Franks was right on the money.

  The walls and the ceiling are splattered with what must be a gallon of blood, much of it still fresh and runny. It drips and dribbles onto the cheap beige carpet either Jason or his vacationing roommate bought to make their dorm room seem more like a home than a box with a bunk bed in it. On the carpet is Jason’s broken body, splayed out atop a puddle of red so dark and thick that there can’t be much cooling blood left in his veins.

  His head is gone. Pulverized. Chunks of brain and skull fragments are scattered all over the room. Grayish globs are stuck to the desks and the TV and Jason’s running laptop, littered across the white tiles around the carpet, staining the unmade bed sheets and comforter. Jason’s body ends at the neck, a stump, and the lower half of his jaw lies off to the left of it, complete with his tongue and all the other fleshy bits of his mouth still attached.

  The rest of his body is in slightly better shape than his obliterated head. One arm suffered a compound fracture, the broken bone jutting through torn skin. One knee is twisted at an impossible angle, and the ankle on the opposite leg is bent sideways. His torso appears intact at first glance, but I have a funny feeling that if I lift up his T-shirt, I’ll find several broken ribs and extensive signs of internal bleeding.

  Whoever—or whatever—killed Jason Franks wanted him so dead that not even his ghost would dare come calling back to Earth. What the hell could a freshman college student have done to invoke the wrath of a being so violent?

  This is a serious case, even by DSI’s standards.

  The police lieutenant who tipped us off despite the stigma must have realized Jason’s death was far beyond mortal murder territory. If not for the condition of Jason’s body, then for the writing on the walls. In blood.

  There are two lines of smudged, red symbols, written by a large, bloated finger. A hurried, emotional scrawl the killer left behind right before he ran off into the pre-dawn morning. Maybe as a warning to others to avoid whatever Jason did to stoke the ire of such a powerful creature. Maybe as a closing statement of some kind.

  The message isn’t written in a language I recognize, though I studied sev
eral at the academy (including two that aren’t even spoken on Earth). I slip my phone from its clip on my belt and turn on the camera, snapping pictures of the writing, along with a few of Jason’s body and the state of the room, in case the police are reluctant to send over the official crime scene photos.

  As I’m turning on my toes to get a good panorama shot before I go, I notice that a piece of the wall, near Jason’s desk, is missing a chunk. Like someone slammed a heavy blunt object into it. The hole is somewhat circular, suggesting…a hammer, perhaps?

  I take another look at Jason’s body. Yep. A big hammer wielded by something with superhuman strength could certainly deal damage like that.

  I zoom in and snap a pic of the hole in the wall.

  Finally, I turn to the window. Well, what’s left of the window. It’s obvious from the shattered glass—shattered outward—and the damaged frame that whatever murdered Jason took the quick way out of his dorm room. I step carefully over Jason’s body and peer out the window for a moment, scanning the ground three stories below. The grass is littered with glass, and there are a few wide, deep indentations in the damp soil. Like something of considerable size and weight landed there after a three-story drop. Then it got up, unscathed, and stalked off into the nearby woods, if the fading footprints heading that way are any clue. I stick my phone through the empty windowpane and snap a couple more shots.

  This wasn’t the work of vampires or werewolves, the two most common supernatural creatures. Vampires are much lighter on their feet and prefer to drink blood, not spill it. Wolves are too bulky to do any business in a dorm room and not completely trash the place. It also couldn’t have been a ghost, the third most common problem, since the culprit was obviously corporeal.

  So that eliminates three possibilities. Great.

  If only there weren’t about a hundred thousand more options.