by RJ Blain
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.
Slithering from my perch, I began my search.
Without climbing equipment, a human wouldn’t have been able to make it to the top without risking life and limb. Claw marks scarred the stone at the base of the formation, and I didn’t want to get into an argument with their owner—or owners. Lycanthropes could tear metal apart, and centaurs were often blessed with inhuman strength, making them the targets of the CDC and law enforcement when anything big, bad, and equipped with swords attached to their fingers caused trouble. Too many options existed for me to confirm or deny what had made the marks.
I only knew one thing for certain: whoever had made them had gone to the top, which meant I’d have to follow for a closer look.
Why hadn’t I been born a cat? Or anything other than the daughter of
a mermaid queen and a gorgon? Then again, with a saner heritage, I would’ve led a completely different life. A normal life seemed so nice, so calm.
Instead, I had grandparents who viewed me as a passing interest, a living toy capable of amusing them for five consecutive minutes; even my father’s parents had the same tendency, although they’d stuck around for an entire day. I considered it a record.
I wondered how long it would take someone to realize I had given everyone the slip. Hissing my amusement, I slithered up the stones, coiling my tail around rocks jutting from the formation so I wouldn’t splatter to the ground far below. I made it to the top to discover a disaster of abandoned equipment, most of it old. Someone had shoved the gear beneath an overhang, and upon closer inspection, I decided a helicopter search wouldn’t have revealed the cache, not without flying close to the formation. A pair of lions could bask on the peak, although it’d be a tight squeeze.
Brothers seeking a chance to escape civilization wouldn’t mind being crammed together, so I couldn’t eliminate the spire as a possibility.
That left me with the tedious job of sorting through the ruined equipment littering the stone. Decaying leather, rusting metal, and scraps of clothes hid a few coins, the newest of which was from five years ago, which matched the disappearance of the two lions. Despite the years, I doubted anyone other than some small animals—and me—had disturbed the remains.
The lack of bones implied the pair, if the pair had left the gear, hadn’t died on top of the formation. Had they fallen?
Anything was possible, but it’d be simple enough to burrow a few inches into the leaf-strewn soil in search of bones. I could work in a spiral pattern, nosing through the leaves and dirt, and find surface bones easily enough. If animals had gotten to the bodies, they could be a mile or more from where they’d fallen, although lion centaurs were large enough any predators and scavengers wouldn’t have moved them before eating.
If they’d died at the base of the formation, I’d find evidence of their bodies.
If they hadn’t, I’d have a mystery layered on top of a mystery, and I’d have to return as a human and gather the remnants to study and test. With my father’s meddling, I wouldn’t be able to make use of my normal resources. Finding new labs to get test samples from would be difficult, and if I wanted to have any DNA tests done, I’d be stuck with shipping samples to the deep south, making use of contacts that would put me at higher risk of discovery.
The last time I’d used those contacts, I’d drawn more attention than I liked.
Part of me hoped I’d find bones below, but the killer in me wanted a hunt that ended in the death, securing my place as the bigger, badder predator.
Chapter Thirteen
A good search covered as much ground as possible while also being thorough. Leaving no stone unturned meant I wouldn’t have to check over the same territory again unless I needed a metal detector, which I expected I would. Nosing through leaves and loose soil for humanoid remains wasn’t my favorite activity, but if someone had died beneath the stone formation, I’d find something. Most people wouldn’t recognize human remains unless they came across something distinctive, such as a skull or femur.
I’d studied enough to identify human remains, although I wasn’t all that good at judging the age of the bones once they’d been stripped of flesh and muscle. When I found bones I needed aged, I sent them to a black market lab for analysis, paying a small fortune for as much information on the deceased as possible. My favorite lab tech had access to CDC databases and could often identify the victim through DNA samples.
Knowing the identity of the victims made it much simpler to find the killer, as every murder had a story.
The trick was learning what bound murdered and murderer together. One day, someone would follow the trail of victims to their killers, and their deaths all told the same story: they died as they had lived, killed as they’d killed. The victims would lead the hunters to the hunter, to me, as I had patterns just like everyone else.
My patterns entangled me with the law, and the law would eventually crack the code, be it through the ties to the CDC entries, the payments to certain labs scattered across the United States and Europe, or the method I used to report the discovery of the bodies, which were always missing a few small bones. One day, someone would put together all the pieces I left in my wake and discover my contribution to the story.
Then it’d circle back to the reason why killers like me could never truly retire.
In the meantime, I’d do what I did best, poking my scaly nose where it didn’t belong. I found a lot of little bones and evidence of predators dining on the local wildlife before my spiraling search uncovered a pair of underwear, unfortunately used and vile enough I wanted to murder the desecrator of the otherwise nice forest. The sun fell towards the horizon, and as the temperature dropped, I searched for a place to curl up and hide until morning.
I debated between climbing a tree and curling up or burrowing within the rotted remains of a fallen giant; either would meet my needs, out of reach of other predators who might want to try their luck. The only beasts I truly worried about were honey badgers and mongoose; neither were inclined to just fall over and die. I disliked mongoose more than honey badgers.
Mongoose went out of their way to annoy the hell out of me. Between their thick fur and resistance to venom, I classified them as a top threat. Honey badgers were dangerous, too, but mongoose enjoyed their attempts to kill me.
I left honey badgers alone, and they left me alone. I viewed it as an amicable relationship of avoidance. Despite their reputations, I found honey badgers rather reasonable—as long as they weren’t pissed off. Once angered, a honey badger stopped at nothing until it acquired revenge, supper, or both.
I liked America; it had a pleasantly low number of annoying predators.
After consideration, I coiled in the branches of a tall tree to wait out the night. If someone bothered me from below, I’d put every inch of my length to good use and teach them why black mambas were to be feared.
The day started colder than I liked, and it took me until noon to uncoil from my branch and return to the ground. Moving helped, although my movements remained sluggish. I cursed South Dakota and its weather, regretting my decision to leave the castle designed to keep gorgons toasty warm. The chill turned searching into a slow, miserable affair, although I dutifully nosed through the leaves and debris for any evidence a humanoid had died in the area.
I found nothing.
Night once again encroached on the forest, and instead of climbing a tree, I searched the trunks for a place to hide until the weather turned in my favor. I struck gold among the roots of an ancient giant. Age had killed the mighty tree. Although it still stood, its insides were hollowed so that even a human—or a pair of bored lion centaurs—could fit inside.
Some sentient had discovered the niche, too, carving through the trunk and into the ground. Packed dirt steps spiraled down. A dim glow promised something lurked below.
I considered my options for all of two seconds. The cold mystery I hunted could wait until my curiosity was satisfied. Who—or what—would create a dwelling beneath a long-dead tree? Careful to keep my movements slow and smooth, I descended, tasting the air with my tongue.
Death, in all its stages, had scents and tastes, and the stench of old decay teased my senses. The ground warmed beneath me the farther I ventured, and I basked long enough for the worst of the chill to ease.
The illumination steadily intensified and stained the worked earth with red, creating the illusion blood soaked everything. I nosed at the packed soil to discover it far drier than the moist loam above. The illusion annoyed me into hissing, and I slithered deeper into the ground. Why would anyone build such a place?
I could think of a few reasons, and they all circled to the type of men and women I hunted for sport and justice. If I wanted to terrify someone, I’d begin with a stairwell much like the one I explored. Gouges marred a fe
w steps, and I wondered what had created them. They were deep and long enough to make me believe a large predator had found the space.
The marks reinforced I didn’t know enough about the victims I sought; could the marks belong to a lion? Whatever owned the claws could probably cleave bone in half with ease.
No matter what, I couldn’t allow the owner of those claws to get a hold of me. I liked being in one piece.
The staircase ended at a tiled landing. More than dirt stained the floor, although I couldn’t tell the blood’s age. Small bones, shattered by powerful jaws, had been swept out of the way, lining the walls. The bones worried me; sentients tended to sweep the remains of their meals out of the way, not leave them lining a tunnel in a macabre display of lethality.
Some of the larger fragments could’ve come from a human, which decided me. After I scouted, I’d find somewhere to hide for the night, grab a mouthful of fragments, and head for my father’s home and send the bones away for analysis. Some species viewed humans and other sentients as prey, and while they didn’t classify as serial killers, I’d hunt them all the same.
If the bones belonged to sentients, I’d have my work cut out for me identifying the victims—and killing the killer without joining the collection of remains littering the hallway.
Had I been a little wiser or smarter, I would’ve turned tail, slithered up the steps, and found somewhere colder but safer to sleep. I’d plan to return as a human so I could collect as many bones as possible before retreating and making plans.
Scouting would give me a better idea of what to expect, as long as the being responsible for the broken bones remained unaware of my presence. My scales rasped on the tiles, and wary the sound would betray me, I waited and listened.
The quiet disturbed me more than anything else; forests weren’t supposed to be so eerily still. That mice and the local creepy crawlies avoided the place meant one thing alone: a predator lived nearby.