Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
LAYDEN
“Why is Vlad calling you about a murder anyway?” I ask. “Doesn’t he own the police?”
But Phoenix is already sprinting back toward the car.
I follow her and wonder if this is my life now, chasing after the beautiful backside of my wife as she runs away from me.
The thought makes me blink hard. No, I need to shake that word out of my head.
She’s not my wife, not in any meaningful way.
I’ll just torture myself thinking like that.
Then again, a little torture can be fun sometimes. After enough time, there’s nothing else to do but give in and enjoy the pain. I could enjoy the torture of being near Phoenix even if it means never touching her the way I want to.
She only stops once we’re back at her car, slightly breathless from the sprint across campus.
“Vlad owns the police in the city.” She’s already pulling out her keys.
“Well, he owns the entire city, actually. And the only murders that are allowed here are the ones he orders. He didn’t order this one. ”
“Still, why call you specifically?”
“He doesn’t usually. But this one’s different.” She pulls her phone back out and swipes through something. “He sent in some forensic photos.”
She tosses me her phone before turning the car on.
“What the fuck?” I say, almost dropping the phone as I look down at the bloody images on the screen. “How many bodies is that?”
“Just one,” she says, and I turn the phone around to look at it from different angles. There are just so many pieces scattered across the frame. Blood is all over the place, covering nearly every surface.
“It’s on campus, so we don’t have to go far.”
“On campus?” I ask, looking up from the gruesome images.
“It’s a student. That’s one of the dorm rooms.” Her voice is tight, controlled in a way that tells me she’s working hard to keep her emotions in check.
Grimacing, I flip through the images on the phone.
Over the past ten years, I made it my mission to not only become familiar with all things involving human technology but to master it.
Still, I find their ability to capture moments with a picture or video impressive in a disturbing way right now.
I zoom in on various parts of the image as I look around the room in the photos.
You can barely see the outline of the furniture because of all the blood pooling on every surface.
It’s not that I haven’t seen gruesome things before. After some battles, the bodies were piled three feet deep on the battlefield and stunk in a way that took years to wash out of your hair. But this feels different somehow.
I set the phone back down between us and swallow hard as some of my breakfast threatens to come back up. Phoenix parks the car again near a different building. It’s just been a while for me since I’ve seen carnage like this.
It was easy to pretend after I first woke in the woods that this civilization had gotten things right and left all the bloodshed behind.
Then I did a little traveling and realized they’d mostly just outsourced the suffering to other parts of the world or pushed it into neighborhoods they didn’t live in.
And here it is, right in Vlad’s tidy little kingdom. Blood not spilled by him and his kin for once.
Police are putting up perimeter tape as students gather outside the six-story concrete dormitory. Chatter goes through the crowd as people wonder what’s wrong. Phoenix strides confidently forward, and I stay at her side. Her shoulders are set with determination.
When we get up to the perimeter tape, a policeman holds up his hand to stop us. “No one gets through.”
But Phoenix just smiles at him, and she’s never looked more beautiful or alluring as she says in a voice like honey, “But you want to let me and my friend through.”
The police officer’s face immediately transforms into one of absolute adoration as he pulls back the cone holding the tape. “Yes, Mistress, anything for you.”
It’s unsettling as hell to witness. Phoenix strides through as if nothing is amiss, and I follow her quickly.
I mean, I knew about her compulsion power in theory, but seeing it in action is another thing entirely.
It makes me even more determined never to fawn over her or let her see my hunger for her.
I feel ashamed of the naive fool I once was, following her around like a puppy.
Police are interviewing students in various pockets in the lobby, but we head straight past them. We jog up the stairs since the elevator has been shut down. The scene is on the fifth floor, apparently.
Again, people try to stop us as we reach the upper floors. Again, Phoenix does her compulsion thing. We gain easy passage onto the floor and into the room.
The stink of spilled blood hits me halfway down the hallway. It’s a thick, coppery smell that coats the back of my throat. I can tell it affects Phoenix even more than me by the way her steps falter slightly. Of course it does. She’s a being of blood magic, even if she’s not a vampire herself.
Phoenix enters first and makes all the policemen and forensic evidence-gathering folks inside file out of the room.
Several of them glance back at her with longing, worshipful gazes as they leave.
If I think it’s uncomfortable to witness, what must it be like for her?
I feel doubly determined not to be another fucker longing after her when she’s just trying to live her life.
She didn’t ask for any of this power or the way people react to her.
I enter the room once it’s clear and immediately lift a hand to cover my nose and mouth.
Because even though I’ve looked at the pictures on her phone, I assumed I was prepared for what I’d see when we got into the actual room.
But if I thought it was hard to hold back my gag reflex in the car, this is infinitely worse.
The thing is, back in the day, I wasn’t as useful in the thick of battle as my brothers were. I was the guy they sent ahead to weaken the enemy by ruining the crops and starving everyone out. I was great in a siege situation. It was the others who had to get up close and knee-deep in the gore.
But this scene is straight-up carnage worthy of any medieval battle.
My eyes narrow as I look around and try to take in everything at once.
Yes, there’s blood everywhere. There’s viscera scattered across surfaces.
There are internal organs I can’t even identify.
But it’s also so unnaturally orderly in its arrangement.
“Did they use some sort of machine?” I ask, studying the patterns.
“Something that chopped him up all at once and spread him around so systematically?” It feels like the wrong word to use considering the horrific mess, but at the same time, the chopped-up body parts look very deliberately placed.
There’s a calf on the left side of the room and a matching calf on the right.
Same with his lungs, chopped cleanly in half and laid out like a puzzle ready to be put back together.
“Not a machine,” Phoenix says as she bends down in the center of the room to examine everything more closely.
“Someone would have heard a buzzsaw if that had been used. More like an ax or surgical tools of some kind.” She pauses, crouching lower.
“Although these bone fragments don’t show any tool marks that I can see. ”
She’s parting the entrails with a pen she either pulled from her pocket or got off a policeman, examining something more closely.
“What do they show then?” I ask while still keeping my distance at the edge of the room.
I don’t know what help I’ll be here, but I’m glad that Phoenix isn’t alone in facing such a gory tableau.
She’s cold and stoic as she works. If she feels anything as she pokes and prods through the remains of what was once a person, she doesn’t show it on her face.
The carpet is drenched in blood so thick that her boots squelch with every step she takes.
She crouches down again and prods another bone fragment, making a disconcerted noise in the back of her throat.
“What?” I ask, taking a step closer despite myself.
“No, no machine marks at all. It’s almost as if the bones have been...” She trails off while studying the fragment more closely.
“What?” I press when she doesn’t continue.
She looks up at me with a line forming between her brows. “Sliced with something that burned as it cut through the bone.”
“What could do that?” I feel my own frown deepening.
She stands up and drops the pen on the floor. She wipes her hands back and forth across each other even though she wasn’t touching anything directly. “I don’t know.”
“Is that a good idea?” I point at the dropped pen. “Could it be used as evidence?”
She waves away my concern with one bloodstained hand. “Like you said, Vlad owns the police force. And it’s not as if they’d be of any use in this investigation anyway. No human could have done this.”
The words land heavy in the room. That was what I was afraid of hearing. “Because of the bones?”
She points at the center of the room where the worst of the carnage is concentrated.
“The body’s been laid out like a ritual sacrifice, and the heart’s missing entirely.
It’s not any of my family trying to fuck with Vlad because the blood’s all still here.
Vlad’s sons wouldn’t have been able to help themselves from at least having a little taste if they’d been the ones to do this.
And the timing’s too coincidental with everything else going on. ”
I shake my head because I’m not following her logic. “What do you mean?”
Her face is pale as she looks down at the floor, at the arranged body parts. “I was afraid of this. Last month with the circle, everything got out of control when things got so supercharged with all that nuclear energy.”
“What does that have to do with any of this—”