Grim Rites (6 page)

“Nothing,” I mumbled, ducking my gaze in the hopes my not staring him in the eye would cause the feeling to abate.

It didn’t.

“Mia, look—if you change your mind, you can call me at any time, but you really need to call in that issue we were discussing. It can’t be left any longer….”

She nodded and stepped into the church after Father Matthew. Reaching out to her, I caught her arm, halting her movement.

“I really am sorry for everything,” I said, my words woefully inadequate in the face of everything that had happened in the past. Asking for her forgiveness was definitely asking for too much and I knew I wouldn’t be getting it, but I still needed to apologise.

Mia’s gaze fell to her shoes as she shook her head and when she lifted her face once more, her eyes were filled with tears. Terror lurked in her gaze and I tightened my grip on her arm.

“Mia, what is it?” I said, stepping closer.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them once more the tears were gone, her expression closed and cold as she stared at the place where my hand touched her skin in disgust.

“I know what you are, Amber; I can see it. You’re a monster, pure and simple, and I want you gone from my life.”

She turned on her heel and jerked her arm free of my grip before disappearing back into the gloom of the church. I let her go, my hand falling back to my side as I stared after her.

“Amber, are you all right?” Nic asked, moving up beside me, his hand on my shoulder, feather-light.

“There’s something going on here,” I said, without taking my gaze off the disappearing view of the inside of the church through the closing gap in the door.

“I think she was pretty clear. She doesn’t want your help….”

“Oh, come on—she clearly doesn’t know what she wants. You and I both know there’s something freaky at play here. Mia’s an empath and she has the dead body of a woman in her house. Are you really going to buy the story that that poor woman attacked Mia?”

Nic shook his head and I turned away from the door, starting down the steps that led towards the street. “No, I suppose you’re right. There’s something weird, but I have no idea what it is.”

“I might not know, but I’m going to find out. I owe her that, at least.”

“What really happened between you two? Are you sure that this need to figure out the truth isn’t some sort of guilt from whatever went on in the past?”

I flinched, Nic’s words hitting home. There was every chance that my desire to get to the bottom of what was going on stemmed from guilt, but it didn’t change the fact that there was something going on. Digging a little deeper was the right thing to do, and did it really matter if I was doing that out of guilt or a moral sense of right and wrong?

“What does it matter?”

“Well, what if this is what she really wants?”

“It’s not,” I said, but I couldn’t be sure anymore.

My cellphone buzzed and I scooped it out and stared down at the screen. Victoria’s message was filled with lots of angry emoticons and exclamation marks.

“If we don’t get over to the crime scene soon, I think Victoria is going to have kittens…” I said with a sigh as I slipped the phone back into my pocket.

Nic nodded and he didn’t push the Mia conversation; I was grateful. I didn’t need anyone to make me feel any worse. There was something wrong, something that Mia either couldn’t or wouldn’t share with me now, but I would get to the bottom of it all.

I’d deserted her once; I wouldn’t do it a second time.

D
ark rivulets ran
down between the cobbles in the alley and I moved to avoid them instinctively. The light was too poor to tell if it was blood, but the taste of old pennies, which coated the back of my tongue with each breath I took, told me everything I needed to know.

Pausing at the edge of the crime scene tape, I peered into the alley. The forensic guys had set up a decent perimeter, which at least meant the reporters wouldn’t be getting any sickening photos for the front page news with this case.

“Victoria,” I called to her as I watched her stalk around the side of a van parked in the mouth of the alley itself.

Lifting her head, she scanned the area and for a second I could have sworn her eyes flickered, the colour swallowed by the darkness I knew dwelled within. She caught my eye and smiled, crossing the distance between us. I shook my head in disgust. I’d never noticed her eyes to change until I saw her transform; I was probably just imagining it. Either that or seeing her without the glamour of her human form made it easier to see through the facade. It was something I would have to ask her when I had time.

“You took your time,” she said, lifting the tape for me to duck beneath.

“I told you, I had things to do. Lucky for you, Nic gave me a ride,” I said, jerking my thumb in his general direction. I’d left him securing his motorbike.

“You brought him to a crime scene. Is that such a good idea?” The disdain in her voice couldn’t be ignored.

“He’s a registered hunter. He has more right to be here than I do, at the moment.”

Victoria studied me for a second longer before shrugging, her dark hair falling back over her shoulder to drape down her back. “Fine, but if he gets in the way, he’s your responsibility,” she said.

“I’m not deaf, you know,” Nic said, slipping beneath the tape and closing the gap between us.

“Good to know,” Victoria said curtly. She paused, her lips stripping back from her teeth as she stared into his eyes. “He knows…” she said, anger causing her eyes to flip black.

“I’m not going to tell anyone. Amber told me in confidence….”

“It was not her secret to share,” Victoria said, taking a threatening step forward.

Moving between them, I grabbed Victoria’s arm, forcing her to stare down at me. “He knows my secret, too. He won’t tell anyone; you can trust him.”

“You tell everyone your secret, Amber? Your recklessness will get you killed. I haven’t survived two centuries by telling every handsome man that catches my eye what I truly am.”

“That’s not true,” I said. But she had a point, everyone close to me knew what I was. Graham had guessed, Nic had seen it, and, well, Victoria herself seemed to just know. It was probably a Changeling thing—maybe it was a gift they all had.

“If my secret gets out, I will know who to look to for retribution.” Her threat wasn’t veiled; it couldn’t have been clearer, and the look she gave Nic as she said it sent a shiver down my spine.

I’d seen what she’d done to Zeck. Part of me was beginning to wonder if she’d allowed Zeck to capture her, just so she could get close to him. But if that were true, why wait until I got there to strike? It just didn’t make sense. Just something else to add to my list of questions for her.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to share your secret, but I really do trust him, Victoria; you can too.”

She glared down at me, her lips thinned down until they were barely visible. Finally, she nodded, the anger slowly ebbing from her eyes, and her shoulders dropped as she began to relax.

“Fine, let’s get this over with. I don’t know about you but the smell is really beginning to bother me,” she said, the weariness in her voice surprising me.

I didn’t disagree with her. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but knowing what caused it made the smell denser, more cloying. Following her up into the alley, we moved around the van and the scene became instantly apparent.

The body lay on the ground at the end of the alley—well, what was left of the body. It looked more like a mangled heap of raw meat. The last time I’d seen something even close to it had been during my Elite training, and we’d been on assignment with one of the trainers. He’d taken us to a fake scene, one where the victim had been pushed from the 40th floor of a skyscraper. It wasn’t something I would ever forget, and staring at the human remains at the end of the alley, I knew this would go with all the other carnage I’d witnessed.

“This is going to give me nightmares for weeks…” I said, locking my shoulders to prevent the inevitable shudder that threatened to roll through me.

Victoria shot me a curious glance. “Considering the things you can do, why would this give you nightmares?”

Her question caught me off guard and I stared at her, my mouth simply opening and closing as I struggled for an answer. It was a fair question. I’d raised demons; one of them had even murdered my father, ripped him limb from limb. I was still new to the job, but the cases I’d worked had been some of the most gruesome King City had to offer.

“Because only a few hours ago, this was a living breathing human being and now he is so much raw meat,” Nic said. And he was right. Whatever had done this to him was still out there. He’d been a person with hopes and dreams, and now all of that was gone, simply wasted as his blood continued to run in little trails down the alley.

She turned and gave the scene laid out before us a contemplative look before nodding. “I suppose I see your point.”

“Do things like this not bother you?” I asked, unable to keep my curiosity under wraps.

“Physically, yes, the smell and—well, visually, it’s disturbing, but ultimately, it’s a life lost like so many others. I’m more concerned with what happened and catching the one responsible.”

There was something clinical in her statement that made me uncomfortable. She wasn’t wrong; it was another life lost like so many others and really I needed to get my head in the game and focus on catching the guilty party. But it didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t separate the body with the person who, up to a few hours ago, had a future until it was violently ripped away.

“So why did you think this was in my wheelhouse anyway?” I asked, moving carefully across the blood-soaked ground. The closer I got to the body, the more apparent it became that the dark trails were in fact blood tracks.

“A few things,” she said, walking up to the body and crouching down next to it.

I followed suit, and watched as she used one gloved hand to lift the victim’s arm. It flopped awkwardly and I knew without needing to read a forensic report that the bones were broken. The skin shifted as though it wasn’t connected to anything within and I felt my stomach roll.

Victoria turned the arm over and I caught sight of the mark through the bruising around the wrist. The body had clearly belonged to a man, and despite the blood and viscera surrounding him, he’d obviously been tall and well-built but that wasn’t what interested me.

Leaning closer, Victoria held a pair of gloves out to me and I took them without a word, sliding my hands into them before taking the arm in my hands. Focusing on the mark, I ignored the feel of the bones as they slipped around beneath the skin, lending the arm a jelly-like consistency that made the hairs on the back my neck stand to attention.

My heart lurched in my chest and my breath caught in the back of my throat as I stared down at the tattoo. I’d seen it before. In fact, I’d seen it a few hours before, scored into the wall of Nic’s bathroom.

Dropping the arm, I jerked backwards and barely kept my balance as my booted foot slipped on one of the many bloody trails leading away from the body.

“What’s wrong?” Nic asked, peering over my shoulder at the body.

“So it’s true, then?” Victoria asked, and from the expression in her eyes, I could tell she knew exactly what the tattoo meant.

“You’ve seen it before?” I said, my breaths coming hard and fast, making it sound as though I’d just run a marathon.

“Yes, but not in a very long time…” she said, and turned her gaze from me, but I’d seen the sorrowful look in her eyes before she’d gotten the chance to look away.

“What’s wrong,” Nic repeated, a little more impatiently.

“It’s a witch hunter,” I said, dropping my voice to stop the other Elite officers and forensic guys from picking up on what I was saying.

“You said they were all gone, wiped out,” Nic said, moving around me to get a closer look at the body.

“Yeah, I thought that right up until I found the mark in your bathroom.”

Victoria raised an eyebrow in my direction and I shook my head. Now was not the time to go explaining the complication that was Nic’s murdered older brother who happened to be a witch hunter.

“So what does this mean, then?” Nic said, studying the mark on the body.

“I don’t know … beyond the obvious,” I said, my stomach sinking into my boots.

“They know you’re here,” Victoria said, voicing the words I was too afraid to speak aloud myself. “The Saga Venatione have come to King City.”

I nodded and Nic shot me a look filled with fear. “Have they come for you?”

I shrugged, “Me or Lily; either way, having them here is really bad news….”

As though today couldn’t possibly get any worse.

“
D
o
they know what happened yet, what could have caused something like this?” I asked.

If the witch hunters were in King City, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t exactly make them leave. In fact, the best I could hope for was the ability to fly beneath their radar so they didn’t ever find out I was here in the first place.

So far, I was doing a wonderful job, if the pile of dead shifters outside my apartment was anything to go by. The demon mark stung me and I cringed, rubbing my hand across it almost instinctively.

“At first they thought it was a jumper, but as you can see, there aren’t exactly any buildings in this part of town tall enough to create this kind of mess,” Victoria said, gesturing to the surrounding shop fronts.

She was right; the only body I’d ever seen that looked vaguely similar had come off a forty-storey drop. There was nothing in this part of town that even remotely resembled that. Downtown maybe, but here, definitely not.

“The body wasn’t moved. Where we found him is where he died,” she continued.

“Yeah, way too much blood for him to have been moved. I don’t suppose they’ll know actual cause of death until they do the autopsy?”

She shook her head and turned back towards the scene as the forensic guys slipped the victim into the black body bag. Every time I thought of him as a victim, I felt an overwhelming swell of pity. Even now, knowing he was a witch hunter, knowing that given the opportunity he would do this and perhaps worse to me, I still couldn’t help but feel it was a cruel way to die.

“It’s possible Lily caught up to him,” I said, the words aloud without thinking about it.

“What makes you think that?” Victoria asked.

“Because of the way he died. It had to have been painful; he went out in agony. Lily is the only witch I know with that kind of power and temperament.”

“Could it have been a shifter, or a vamp?” Nic suggested.

I shook my head. Of course, I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but it didn’t stop me from having a hunch, and a hunch wasn’t something I was going to ignore.

“Shouldn’t you walk the scene?” Victoria interjected, the look in her eyes unreadable.

“Uh, I’ve been suspended, remember? Anything you find won’t be admissible in court.”

“Is that the only reason you don’t want to do it?” she needled, and I clenched my fists at my sides.

It wasn’t the only reason—it was a damn good one, but I certainly had a better one. Of course, that one made me look like a giant wimp, but it was bound to when I was discussing it with two people who didn’t understand it from my point of view.

“No, and if you’ve met a witch hunter before, you should have a pretty clear idea of why I don’t want to,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“Well, I can’t do it,” Victoria said, the matter-of-factness of her statement catching me by surprise. She may as well have declared that she enjoyed ice cream, or long walks on the beach.

“What do you mean, you can’t do it? You’re an Elite officer, it’s your job,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

“Amber, I’m a Changeling. The dead aren’t our thing—we cling to the living. Put us that close to death and it tends to get fatal….”

“Why?” I asked, unable to stop the word before it erupted from my mouth.

She sighed and shook her head. “Considering you work for the Elite—and who you are, the
gifts
you possess—you’re unbelievably innocent of the world you live in.”

I opened my mouth to answer her but she held her hand up in a gesture of silence, and I found myself unable to speak. The smile that crept across her lips told me she was the cause of my sudden loss of words.

“Look, faeries are immortal. Death doesn’t concern them, and why should it? However, just because they can live forever doesn’t mean they can’t be killed. Changelings, on the other hand—when we are born, our very existence hangs in the balance. If we are we not given the chance to thrive, we wither and die.”

“And if you thrive?” Nic chipped in.

Victoria’s smile broadened and she did a small spin on the spot. “If we thrive, then you end up with something like me. What will kill a faerie won’t even hurt me; our life spans run a thousand years, and if we spend too much time around death, it rubs off on us…. Banshees are definitely not on the friends list.”

“If you can’t walk the scene, then you’ll need someone else down here to do it for you,” I said, my voice coming back with a squeak.

“Not if you want the whole world knowing what happened to that guy up there and what he was. Do you really want to take that risk?”

Her words made sense and I hated her a little for it. I didn’t want the world finding out about me. And if the threat of the witch hunters and their existence could be kept under wraps, then the better it would be for everyone involved. The second the Elite found out he was a witch hunter, it wouldn’t take them long to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

“Fine, but like I said, it’s not going to be admissible in court,” I said from between gritted teeth.

Victoria shrugged and the urge to punch her washed over me. Why was she so cold about everything? What was the point of working for the Elite if she simply didn’t care about those who died? I’d seen her form of justice and it wasn’t my kind, or at least I’d been certain it wasn’t. After what I’d done to the shifters, I wasn’t certain about anything anymore.

“I’ll walk the scene but I’m not sure it’s a good idea with so many others milling around. I’m not sure how I’m going to react to him and it could get nasty,” I said.

The thought of what I was going to do made me nauseous. I’d simply touched the mark in Nic’s bathroom and it had been enough to blister my finger, plus the visions had been the kind of things that would give me nightmares for months to come. Actually getting up close and personal with a witch hunter … well, it didn’t bear thinking about, but I was going to do a hell of a lot more than just think about it.

“I’ll have the guys clear out of here, give us some space so you can do your thing…” she said, turning on her heel and making her way back up the alley to the small huddle that made up the forensics crew.

Nic caught my arm, and the touch of his fingers against my bare skin sent a shiver of electricity racing over my skin. I bit back a sigh.

“Amber, you don’t need to do this, there are other ways. She could get someone else in here to do it—hell, if you teach me, I’ll do it.”

I shook my head. “Victoria’s right, we don’t have time for that. We need to find out if it was Lily or not, and if it was, then we need to be prepared to deal with the consequences.”

“Which are?” Nic asked.

What was I supposed to tell him? I didn’t have the answers any more than he did; it was going to be one of those situations where you were forced to fly by the seat of your pants until something turned up or went right. Not that things ever worked out like that—life had this awful habit of screwing things up irreparably.

“It’s clear,” Victoria called to us, and I sucked in a deep breath before squaring my shoulders.

“Well, we’re going to find out about the consequences now, aren’t we?” I said, with a small smile that I hoped made me look braver than I actually felt.