Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1 (27 page)

“You know what arrows
are good for,” Aradia said.

He smiled darkly, but
shook his head.

“Well, let’s go take a
look around.”

“Take a look around?”
her father asked somewhat incredulously.

“Yeah. See what I can
see. So to speak.”

Again he shook his
head. “No can do, firecracker. This crime’s too recent.”

“Dad,” she said, “you
know I can help.”

“The first scene’s
older. The police have given up on finding anything new there.
Let’s swing by.”

On their way to the
scene of the first Vampire Murder, it struck Aradia that she didn’t
even know which victim was Kaiser’s dad. She’d seen the victims’
names in the headlines, of course, but she only knew the feisty
werewolf as Kaiser. She had no idea to which victim he was
related.

She brought her concern
up to Ross. “His father was the second victim.”

So if I’d gotten
involved right from the start, he might still have a
dad.

“And Kaiser’s his real
name, alright.
Kaiser Wilhelm
Hitzig.”

“
Kaiser Wilhelm?”
Aradia
asked.

Ross shrugged. “Distant
family relationship. I didn’t make much of it. You, ah, think it
means something?”

“What?” Aradia replied.
“Oh! You mean something hocus pocusy? Like he’s a reincarnated
German leader?”

Ross didn’t reply
aloud, but he gave a meek nod.

She smiled weekly. “No,
I definitely don’t. Just curious.”

Aradia recognized the
hardware store from what she’d seen on the news. Ross parked around
back. It was a two story facility. The first floor was the retail
store, and the second was a storage area which had been converted
after the fact into a suite of adjoining apartments.

It had been cleared of
investigation equipment, and the crime scene tape had vanished as
well. It was still private property, so they had to be very careful
when they broke in. With his flashlight in one hand and his
daughter's hand in the other, he lead her up the stairs.

Aradia looked around.
It was obviously a bachelor pad. She was surprised to see that,
considering the grisly nature of what had happened, the apartment
was remarkably clean. It had been cleared of decorations like
pictures and rugs and the assorted chachkis which build up over
time, and Aradia found herself wondering who had taken those
things. The furniture remained. The place looked Spartan and
spotless.

"They’re planning on
renovating," Aradia's father explained.

"They want to renovate
a place where a guy got killed?" Aradia asked, sounding
shocked.

Ross chuckled darkly
and said, "The victim didn’t have any family nearby. His closest
relatives are cousins in Baltimore. They were the only ones named
in his will. They plan to sell the whole place, including the
hardware store. The renovation is to make it sellable after what
happened."

"Who could blame them?"
Aradia asked her father as she tiptoed around the apartment as
softly as possible.

Ross wasn’t quite as
supportive. "The first thing I ask when I look into a crime is who
benefits most.”

“You think these
Baltimore cousins did it?”

“Not by their own
hands,” Ross said. “Ironclad alibis. They were at some kind of
architecture convention at the time of the first murder. One was a
keynote speaker.”

“What about the second?
The Hitzig one?”

“That one’s a little
fuzzier, but the distance involved makes it unlikely.”

“Doesn’t mean they
weren’t involved somehow,” Aradia muttered. She hated having to be
suspicious of people who, for all she knew, were right that very
moment mourning the loss of their cousin.

“I hate to see them
sell it,” Ross said, surprising Aradia. “The victim probably
intended to have kids someday and pass it on to the next
generation. It was his legacy. The store has been in the Stanley
family for years.”

"Yeah, well," Aradia
said with a shrug, "Mr. Stanley was also part of the Stanley family
for years."

Ross became silent but
after staring at his daughter for a few seconds, he used his
flashlight to find the light switch to the apartment and flipped it
on.

"Power’s still on,”
Ross said, clicking off his Maglite.

“Don’t you think the
light might draw attention?”

Ross shrugged. “I doubt
it. The police have been in and out of here at all times of day and
night. We’re in a commercial area. No nosy busybodies around.
Besides, I don’t intend to stay long.”

Aradia got the message.
“Be thorough but quick," she translated.

He made a clicky noise
in the corner of his mouth.

Aradia shrugged and
looked a little deeper. She took a deep breath, then a few
more.
I guess it’s time to find the
truth
. Aradia closed her eyes and
cleared her mind completely.

Aradia wished the place
hadn’t been cleared out of personal belongings, and also that she’d
thought to sneak in sooner. The more the place changed and time
passed, the cloudier her vision would be.

She stood in the middle
of the room, spread her arms out, feet apart, and readied herself.
She extended herself into the essence of the building, rooted
herself in its foundation, spread her senses into its wires and
outlets. She probed back into the building’s memories. She knew
that buildings can’t remember events, of course. She had no better
way of wording what she was doing though. She’d found that if she
became one with a location, she could essentially remember things
that had happened there.

Aradia opened her eyes
and in a blurry blue-yellowish haze, she found herself on the night
of the murder.

A man stumbled through
the apartment from the kitchen to the couch. She immediately
recognized him as Mr. Stanley. He had a beer in his hand, and from
his unsteady gait, she assumed it was not his first. He half sat,
half collapsed onto the sofa. He gazed at the blank television.
Aradia assumed he had been watching something, but her vision did
not reveal what it had been. He leaned forward to the coffee table
and leafed through a stack of papers which, from Aradia’s
perspective, magically appeared from her vision’s yellow
mist.

Angrily, he threw the
stack across the room and returned to his beer.

His head jerked sharply
toward the door. Aradia assumed he’d heard knocking. She could not
hear it herself, for her ability only revealed surroundings and
events. She could see people and move in her visions, but she could
not hear the words or sounds.

The soon-to-be victim
kept his eyes glued to the ground gloomily as he shuffled to the
door. When he opened the door and saw who stood there, he issued a
weak smile and extended his arm, waving the newcomer at the door to
enter.

The moment the person
at the door crossed the threshold, the atmosphere in the room
changed entirely. The yellow faded and the blue disappeared
entirely, being replaced by a heavy and ominous and almost opaque
glare of red. The colors of Aradia’s memories were often very
indicative of the emotions she was witnessing, and Dax, damn him,
had been right when he’d said red was the color of
passion.

Aradia felt slightly
gratified. She had been apparently correct in her hunch that the
victim knew the killer. She angled herself to get a clean look at
the killer’s face. What she saw made her feel as if she were the
one who had been exsanguinated.

Although the killer was
walking right towards her, his face was blank. He or she showed no
eyes, ears, mouth, or distinguishing characteristics of any kind.
His face was a complete blank canvas. Even his or her form was so
shrouded in cloudiness that Aradia could not tell whether she was
seeing a man or a woman. She jumped back as the killer strode
confidently past her.

She was shocked and
bewildered by what she was seeing. Aradia could not understand it.
Her place-memory was shaky at best, as far as her powers went, but
until then it had always either worked or it hadn’t. It had never
given her a half measure like this. Why should this time, which
mattered so much more than any other effort, be any
different?

The only detail she was
able to make out clearly about the killer was that the person wore
loose-fitting clothes and had a sack slung over his or her
shoulder. Aradia had a bad feeling about that bag.

Victim and killer began
arguing.
Or not,
Aradia realized. The victim was arguing, heatedly it seemed.
The killer was mostly just ignoring him, though, stalking through
the apartment.
Oh God,
Aradia realized,
he’s
planning his kill
.

The faceless person’s
body tensed up. Aradia tensed up too, sensing that this was the
part where the killer finally became the killer.

What happened next came
in a blur. Mr. Stanley was bent over gathering the papers he’d
strewn about. The killer pulled a heavy cloth from his jacket
pocket and methodically soaked it from a vial. He stealthily
advanced from behind upon the unsuspecting, drunk man. When Mr.
Stanley stood, the killer pressed the cloth against his nose and
mouth.

“No!” Aradia cried
out.

She knew she couldn’t
change the past, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t protest the
brutality of it.

The victim did not go
down without a fight. He struggled against his assailant, and she
saw his body grow tense. His skin rippled. She recognized the
effect. She realized he was shifting into his werewolf form. Or he
was trying to, at least. When Roy had changed, it had been fast.
Mr. Stanley wasn’t changing, though.

What’s more, though she
could make out few details, she saw similar skin tightening and
rippling in the killer.

Then the scene changed.
She had the impression that some time had passed and that she had
missed some possibly crucial details. A wispy trail of red memory
streamers led to the bathroom. She followed them there in a
hurry.

Aradia clasped her hand
to her mouth to stifle her scream. In the shower of the guest
bathroom, the killer had strung Mr. Stanley up by his feet and was
bleeding him dry like a kosher cow. Blood pulsed from two small
holes in his throat. His heart was still pumping.

What truly shocked her
most was the cold viciousness of the killer. He had removed
Stanley’s shirt and folded it in a neat bundle at the sink. Calmly
he adjusted the showerhead and turned on the water, rinsing it over
the victim’s neck and head and helping the blood flow down the
drain. He passed an ice pick through the water, rinsing the blood
from it, then scrubbed it with a Brillo pad before drying it and
putting it away in his sack.

The way he moved he
seemed more like a painter cleaning the paint from his brush than a
bloodthirsty psycho committing a grisly crime.

Thankfully, it was over
soon.

The scene jumped again,
and Aradia rushed back out into the main living area. Mr. Stanley,
or his corpse rather, was laid on the ground where the police had
found him. His shirt was back on and he was dry. He was very
pale.

The killer stepped into
the scene and surveyed his or her handiwork. Apparently satisfied,
the faceless monster rushed out the front door, running right
through Aradia in the process.

That was all she saw.
The memories faded back into the past, and Aradia was standing in
the here-and-now again, with her father.

She could not help but
feel the faint hot pricks of tears in her eyes.

Aradia awoke in her
bed. She had no idea what time it was. Her tongue was dry, and
there was an awful chalky taste at the back of her throat. She
swung her legs out of bed and staggered to her feet. She saw she
was wearing the same clothes she’d had on at the crime scene. She
changed into her PJs, splashed some cold water on her face, then
carefully made her way downstairs. She found her parents sitting in
the kitchen as if they had been expecting her. Her father had a cup
of steaming coffee. Her mother just looked relieved to see
her.

“We called in sick for
you at school,” her father said.

Her mother rushed
forward and hugged her. Aradia felt too weak to return the
embrace.

“Twice,” Liza added.
“We called you in sick twice. I did too.”

She did some slow
mental math. “So it’s Friday?” she croaked, realizing she’d been
asleep over twenty-four hours.

“Saturday, actually,”
her father said.

“Huh,” she replied,
still not quite grasping the situation.

“I gave you water and
juice,” her mom said, “while you slept. You took some.”

“Like after the house
fire,” her father added.

“Huh,” Aradia repeated.
She looked at Liza and hopefully asked, “Mom? Maybe you could make
me some toast please?”