Chapter 17
We filed in, the NHVs keeping ahead of us to create a physical barrier, though I wasn’t certain they could do much if some shadow popped out of the floor to grab me or something equally horrific.
Angel’s grip on my hand helped, and the weight of the Taser in my other one gave me something to focus on.
The dead had always been my forte. Their secrets were my job to reveal. I could handle this.
The scent of blood and spoiled milk hung in the air, heavy and sickly sweet.
Bowls were set out on the far kitchen table like the group had been about to sit down for breakfast when the nightmare struck.
The wide-open floor plan gave room for a nasty display of what I could only imagine was ritual magic.
Three bodies were arranged in a triangle, a chalk outline around them, candle wax creating points of what looked like a three-pointed star.
The skin of each body stretched tight over bone like parchment, lips shriveled back from starkly white teeth.
Their chests were carved open with surgical precision.
Ribcages cracked like grotesque flower petals, as if someone had attempted a rushed heart extraction rather than delicate surgery.
The interior of their chests hollow, the insides scooped out, but there was no sign of them.
“What the fuck,” Wade grumbled from somewhere behind me.
Not the worst horror I’d seen in my years of reviewing bodies, catching killers, and solving mysteries, but in the top ten.
“Stay behind the lines,” Remi hissed at all of us as Victor’s crew gathered around the circle.
“What do the symbols mean?” I asked him, as he knew a shit-ton more about runes than my slow accrual of knowledge had gained me thus far.
“They’ve been dead a while.”
That much I could tell. The dark brown-black of the flaked blood, the fading stench of open bowels and curdled milk, meant weeks, not days.
Unless something about crossing the Veil aged everything.
I tried to ignore the fact that one had been barely a teen.
A kid. Not unlike Ivan. Because it made my heart beat faster and worry gnaw at my gut over my little brother.
Someone had killed a family in one of the nastiest ways I’d ever encountered.
“Is this one of those summoning things like in the lot?” I asked Remi.
He shook his head. “More a…” he paused as if struggling to understand it himself, “bargain? Life for power? The symbols aren’t exact.”
“Meaning?” Bobby prodded.
“Either the spell is beyond what I know, which is unlikely, or whoever did this was clumsy.”
“Nothing about this looks clumsy to me,” I pointed at the cuts, mirrored across all three bodies.
“Not the actual ritual, but the symbols.” Remi shook his head. “I don’t know a lot of the darkest stuff, but you can gift power without all this if that’s what they were looking for. This is more gruesome. As if it’s for shock and awe rather than necessity.”
“I’ve seen worse,” I said with a shrug. “Though the drained corpses are new. Usually, they don’t look like they’ve been sucked dry unless it’s been a few years since they were discovered.
” Mummification had never been a regular occurrence in homicide.
I could think of only once, and that was a grown son who’d kept his deceased mother in her bedroom for half a decade after she died.
She hadn’t been discovered until he lost the house to foreclosure.
“Was that the point?” Wade wondered.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The only person in the SED with serial killer homicide experience is you,” Angel said.
“They’ve been dead for weeks,” I said. “Not everything is about me.” It rarely had anything to do with me at all.
“Which I’d usually agree with,” Angel offered. “If we weren’t in the apartment across the hall from your somewhat psycho ex.”
Everyone stared at me now.
“Uh… like what, this is some preschool way of getting my attention?”
“Maybe,” Bobby said, pulling out one of his gadgets to begin scanning.
“I think beating the shit out of me in a vacant lot killed the vibe,” I grumbled.
“Bad taste in men,” the mist-eyed wolf said.
“It’s improved,” Angel said, defending himself. The wolf snorted.
“The blood spatter suggests they were killed here,” Victor said. He pinned me with a pointedly narrow gaze. “Nothing left of them to talk to you?”
Maybe Angel’s presence quieted the ghosts? I tried to release his hand. He clung tighter. “I just want to see if I’m missing anything,” I assured him.
“My power clarifies yours, grounds it. It doesn’t mute it. I don’t want to try to drag you back again if we lose the connection.”
Drag me back? I blinked at him, wondering what he meant.
“In the hall back there, you went still as stone, eyes black, barely breathing.”
“Everything was dark. Layered in smoke or whatever,” I said.
Angel squeezed my hand. “The point is made.”
Okay then. “I’m not seeing any shades, ghosts, or anything lingering on them at all. They are a void.”
“Like the bodies from the lot? The ones you couldn’t raise?” Bobby clarified.
“Yeah.”
Around the bodies, someone had drawn an elaborate rune in what looked like charcoal, except the edges shimmered when I squinted, reacting to the rune-light still pulsing between mine and Angel’s hands. The magic remained active. Strange.
“Does it look like it’s glowing to anyone else, or just me?”
“It’s still active,” Remi agreed.
A chill crawled down my spine. “Feeding something power? There’s nothing left of them. Do you know how to break it?”
“Personally, I’d crack it, but it might bring the whole building down on our heads.”
“Let’s not do that,” Angel said.
“We’ll have to document what we can,” Wade added as he took another piece of equipment from Bobby. “Maybe form a shield out in the hall when we break it or something?” His gaze met Remi’s. “Is there a way to limit blowback?”
Remi shook his head, frowning at the display as he crouched a few feet from the bodies. “We’ll have to interrupt the line. But anyone who crosses it without it being broken risks becoming the next battery to this nastiness.”
“Let’s move then. Audio, video, scans. Document everything you can without touching the rune,” Angel directed.
“Get body bags ready and hope we have something left to identify them.” He ushered half the team out into the hall on guard, a handful to head down, escorted by the wolves, and gather evidence bags.
“Remi, Jude, see anything else glowing we should avoid?”
I slowly searched the apartment, trying to think of myself in a video game, highlights glowing for quest puzzle pieces, but found nothing. The family seemed ordinary enough. Young, lots of pictures.
“Clear in here,” I said, scanning the last of the family photos—vacations, birthdays, perfectly ordinary moments now made grotesque by the horror in their living room.
“No other runes.” Or signs that this family had any other involvement in this strange cult magic behavior.
The mundanity of it made my stomach twist. These people lived everyday normal lives, likely thinking they were safer than most because their next-door neighbor was a cop. “Fucking Cassidy,” I grumbled.
“We’ve got pictures and video documentation of everything,” Bobby said.
“I’ve got their IDs and as much information as I can find to share with family,” Wade offered.
I returned to the living area, Angel at my back, his gaze as thorough as mine. We’d have extensive details about the scene, as unremarkable as the apartment was outside the ritual space.
“You ready?” I asked Remi.
“Yeah.” He glanced at the rest of the team. “Maybe set up a barrier in case it blows?”
Kerry and Victor ushered everyone into the hall, setting up the clear portable shields as a barrier. “This going to be enough?” Victor asked. “Or do we need to clear the building?”
“Maybe we wait until we finish the rest of the building?” Bobby asked.
“I think it’s more contained than that,” Remi said. “I’ll add a shield over it, just in case.” His gaze found me. “Behind the physical barrier and keep your shield up.”
I made my way out, crouching behind the shield, Angel’s grip on me firm, and it took a lot to focus on keeping the shield rune glowing on his skin as my magic wanted to caress the remains of the ritual spell for any residual magic.
Remi crafted a few of his own runes, the lines glowing in the air for a few seconds as he carefully reached out with the tip of his foot and smudged the edge of the chalk line.
The world shrieked. I dropped to my knees with a gasp, Angel catching me as a vibration struck a chord of energy deep within. Holy fuck. I could hardly breathe as the magic snapped, light flaring bright as a flash bomb for half a second. Then the bodies disintegrated.
Not burned, decayed, or even collapsed. One second they were there, and the next they were dust.
The rune’s power vanished, leaving a scorched stain on the hardwood and a silence that made my ears pop.
“Holy fuck,” I said out loud, voice feeling muffled.
“Well,” Wade grumbled. “That’s one way to destroy evidence.”
I stared at the piles of ash, the power’s absence leaving a throbbing pressure behind my eyes.
The victims had been erased. Not even a flickering shade of who they had once been remained.
I shook my head to clear out the rest of my hearing.
Spots decorated my vision as I peered behind the wall of our people to Brandon’s door across the hall, which now stood wide open.
Well, fuck.