by Mason Sabre
She wobbled on her feet, and Cade made a move to enter the room, but she put a hand up to ward him off and shook her head.
“Do you need to step outside a moment?” he asked quietly.
“It’s okay. It’s just—” She paused for a second as if to compose herself. “There’s a difference between knowing it’s Jessica and actually seeing her.” She took a breath and then said the name aloud again. “Jessica.” It was real, and she was there. But the name and the face just didn’t fit the body on the floor. No ... Jessica was that annoying little shit who was too damn lazy for her own good. The girl who Gemma’s father had insisted tag along with them to learn the ways of an heir.
She felt almost guilty thinking about the number of times she had ditched Jessica to avoid throttling her. She had once even offered to renounce her claim to his seat if it would get her out of babysitting the ungrateful fox. Of course, that had been met with lectures regarding responsibilities and other such things that he liked to inflict on Gemma. She recalled the moment with a mixture of amusement and now sadness. Her father had tossed in such words as ‘disownment’ and ‘exile’, and she hadn’t been quite certain if he had been serious or not. She hadn’t dared to find out, either.
Jessica, like Gemma, was heir to a Council seat and heir to the pack. Staring down at the girl before her, Gemma realised that being heir really did mean nothing.
It hadn’t saved Jessica.
She crouched down to get a better look, not wanting to kneel, angling herself so that Jessica’s face was cast in the shadows of her peripheral vision. The body had a gaping hole in the centre of its chest. Even the rib cage appeared as if something had been shot through it.
“There are organs missing?” she muttered, more to herself. She moved the fabric of the girl’s dress so that she could peer into the cavity. It went from the sternum to pelvic bone the same way an earthquake might cause cracks in the ground, and aside from the umbilical cord connecting mother and baby like a snake, there wasn’t any blood—or anything else. From the angle Gemma was at, it looked … empty.
To the left of the girl’s body lay her baby, small and dark pink, its skin transparent. Its face had formed and so had the hands and feet, but no fingers or toes yet.
“How far along is this?” she asked in a tight voice.
It was Avery who answered. “Jake said about nineteen weeks.” Jake was also DSA—medical side. He did everything from broken arms, to dealing with the dead, to funerals on their baker’s slab. Today, his role was coroner.
Gemma couldn’t get her mind or her legs to work and make her stand.
Nineteen weeks ...
Connor had been full-term. She never got to see him … to hold him.
“Gem?” Cade had crouched down next to her without her realising. “Do you need me to help you?” He didn’t normally ask her, but she was taking too long, she figured.
“I’m fine.” She waved him away without looking. What she really wanted to do was say yes. To tell him that she was sorry. This must have been hurting him just the same. She didn’t know how to be strong enough for him—for them both.
She cast her eyes back to Jessica. Aside from the area where she had been cut open, her clothes didn’t look too dishevelled. Her hair was straight; she even wore makeup—although there were black lines down her face. She had been crying at some point. Her hands were grazed, too. One hand, which was in good view, looked as though she had fought with someone. Gemma also noted the dirt and dust that covered the palm of her hand; her fingernails were black underneath as if she had been crawling in the dirt. Looking more closely, she discerned traces of blood under them, too.
Cade went back to stand at the door with Avery, just a little distance from Gemma. He kept throwing glances her way as he filled in forms, and she gave him a small smile that she was okay.
When she focused her attention back on Jessica, her eye caught something that she hadn’t noticed at first. Frowning, she shuffled around the body to get a better look. On the other side of the girl, opposite to the baby, lay her heart. It was clean and dry, as if someone had taken it from a meat counter and rested it on the dust covered mat beside her. There was no blood, no mess, nothing. Getting to her feet, she stepped back to take the whole scene in. The baby, Jessica, the heart ... they were all lined up perfectly.
Her brow furrowed in contemplation.
It meant something.
It had to.
“Her heart is here,” she said. “It all looks clean.”
“Yes,” Cade replied. “We noted that. There’s no blood anywhere.”
“Do you know what it could mean? Was there anything else?” Her eyes searched the area, looking for other body parts, thankful that she didn’t see any. “Is the rest of her still …?”
“Inside?” he finished for her. “We don’t know yet. We were waiting for you.”
She raised watery eyes to him, not caring that her emotions were present when they shouldn’t have been. “What kind of sick fuck does this? She was just a kid. She didn’t deserve this.”
“No one deserves this.”
“How am I going to tell Evie?” She hugged herself, creating a protective cocoon. Her mind was flitting from one heartache to another, and she didn’t know how to stop it. No matter how much she forced her mind to just see it as work, something inside her wouldn’t allow it.
“She doesn’t need to know everything.”
“But I will know.”
Just then, Jake knocked and popped his head around the already open door. “Are we ready to go?” he asked. “It’s getting late.”
Gemma quickly wiped her eyes and pulled on her metaphorical mask.
“I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “I know she was your friend.”
She gave a brusque nod. “I still need to sign off on everything. Can you give me ten?”
He looked down at his watch. “Okay. But the sooner we can get the body to the—”
“Bodies,” she corrected tersely.
He opened his mouth to argue, and Gemma knew what he was going to say— a foetus wasn’t a baby yet—but at the shake of Cade’s head, he promptly shut it again. “Okay … bodies,” he amended.
As soon as he had left, she got the file from Avery and set to work. Cade and Avery had to take note of everything, even if it appeared to be insignificant. She was supposed to sign off on everything—literally everything. Each mark had to be checked, signalling what they had or hadn’t done. And after signing each sheet, she needed to hand them over to her father and the Council, where they would be filed.
The building they were in was an old office block, the administrative parts for the chemical works. Gemma examined the sketch that either Avery or Cade had made for the basic layout of the building. They’d drawn squiggled lines for doors that were locked and not accessible to them that night. On the next form, Avery had stated that he and Cade had started at the door and worked their way around. He had also listed scratches around the handle ...
Gemma walked over to it and peered down.
“She tried to get out?” she asked. It was a small, single office; there was one door and solid walls—the kind of office that she imagined would be used by whomever was in charge. It was spacious enough, she thought. There wasn’t much by the way of furniture—a broken chair and filing cabinet, which had a couple of drawers missing. The layer of dust suggested that no one had been there in a long time.
Gemma traced her fingers over the marks. Just three of them.
“They’re fresh,” Cade remarked, coming to stand by her side. “You see here?” He pointed at some older scuffs in the paint; rust had taken residence in them, but in the three new ones, the metal beneath was clean and shiny.
Gemma examined the handle more closely. “There’s no lock?”
“No. Someone, or something, was stopping her from getting it open.”
“Someone not Human?”
“It might be,” said Avery. “Who knows what they us
ed to hold the door closed.”
She shook her head. “This has to be Other. No Human can keep a scared shifter locked away with only physical strength. There are no scents? Nothing you can detect?”
“Nothing,” said Cade.
Gemma found that worrying, more so than it appeared Cade and Avery did. But both men were wolves, and wolves had a great sense of smell.
She could tell from the notes, and doodles under some of them, that Cade had done the talking, and Avery had done the writing. She pictured Cade, the way he would have stood, piecing everything together—the facts as he saw them. He would have stared for a while, images running through his mind like snippets of a movie. Avery would have stayed out of his way, moving every time Cade did, scribbling as they went. The legibility of his handwriting mirrored the times where she knew Cade had sped up. At those times, it seemed as though he had clawed the words onto the paper.
She went through each point, checking and marking them off. Each piece had a corresponding photograph, and she glanced at those enough to see that they had matched them correctly. She went through the list, circling the body as she went, mindful not to step on or right through the evidence.
Point Seven: Blood by the window.
After checking where Avery had indicated in his notes, she promptly marked it off. She glanced at her phone for the time. Almost midnight.
“How long has Jessica been dead?” She flicked through the pages, looking for the estimates herself and distancing herself from her words. Gemma had seen her around five, when she had nipped to her parents’ house. Then Cade had collected Gemma just after ten. According to the notes, Jessica had been found at 19:37. Anonymous call, it stated.
“Jake thought it was within the hour of us finding her, sometime after 6:30,” said Cade.
“What is a nineteen-year-old girl doing alone at a disused chemical plant on a Friday night?” she mused. She let the question hang in the air as she turned around to gaze out of the window so that her thoughts could settle. Not only had Jessica come to the estate alone, but she had also come into the building and up to the third floor. And Gemma couldn’t find any reason why she might do that.
She let her eyes roam the darkness outside until they came to rest on the entrance of estate. Her heart tripped.
Her follower was back, and he was staring right at her.
Chapter 3
Gemma
There was a pecking order when it came to news and the Council. They had to know everything first. That was why Gemma and Cade were heading to her parents’ house having not informed Jessica’s mother, pack, or family of the young fox’s death. It was how it worked. If only Malcolm Davies, her father, wasn’t the head of the Council or the Society, she mused selfishly. She sighed. If only she was normal … She had wished it so many times, but then they were just times that would benefit her. If it had been different, though, their child might still be alive, and that was at the heart of it all.
Even now, her arms still ached for her son. Jessica and her baby were like a cruel joke—a reminder of what she had lost.
It didn’t matter what it was, everything had to go through the Council. Death, marriage proposals, moving, babies … the list was not exhaustive. If it was important, then the Council took priority. Even falling in love and wishing to get married came under their remit. It didn’t matter to them. It was political. Marriage needed a ninety percent majority vote to go ahead. Anything less, and that was just tough shit. Unlike Gemma, though, other Others had the choice to leave. They could remove themselves from the protection of their Society or the entire Council and do what it was their hearts desired. Gemma couldn’t. She knew that to remove herself meant exile. Exile for her or Cade would almost certainly lead to death. She had dreamt about it many times—a cruel dream where they left together. Where everything was as her heart desired …
But it could never be.
The real kick in the teeth, though, was that Others had to pay ten percent of their household’s net income to be part of their species’ Society and, thus, protected by the Council. It was something she hoped, when she replaced her father, she could change. She didn’t like making people pay to belong. It felt wrong to her. She didn’t have to pay. It was her birth right. Why couldn’t it be the birth right of everyone else, too?
They drove the two miles to the Other community, where her father lived, in silence, but Gemma’s mind was anything but silent. She kept her hands in her lap, her jaw locked down tight, and her eyes focused on the houses they passed. Cade muttered the occasional, “Are you okay?” Gemma would respond with an automatic “I’m fine” —a lie.
Inside, her mind betrayed her. Her tiger pleaded with her. She wanted comfort from the wolf who was hers. She wanted that one thing in the world that made sense to her, when everything else was turning to shit. She jammed her hands down between her thighs and kept them there for fear of reaching over just to hold his hand, because it wouldn’t stop there.
The village where her father lived was small. It was made up of a collection of sections within the Human towns. Humans called it integrated. Her brother, Stephen, used to call it ‘big brother watching’. As she stared out into the darkness now, she was inclined to agree with him.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Cade said as he pulled the car to a stop. “Talk to me, Gem.”
She could see his reflection in the window of her door. She could feel his eyes watching her, and she knew that he had turned to face her. “I’m fine,” she repeated for what felt like the hundredth time. She stared out into the darkness beyond Cade, trying not to think so much about everything. She just wanted to go home. If it wasn’t Cade on her mind, it was Evie. She didn’t want to tell her sister about Jessica. She didn’t want to hear her cry. Again.
She thought back to when they had lost Stephen and how no one had noticed Evie—no one except Jessica, that was. Her younger sister had almost starved to death, and they had almost lost her at one point. Gemma couldn’t go through that again. It made her stomach hurt just thinking about it.
Cade’s voice echoed in the confines of the car, her mind so far into her own thoughts that her name sounded like it came from a mile away.
“We need to go in,” she heard him say when she was finally able to focus.
She glanced at her parents’ home—usually, it felt like where she fitted, but tonight she stared at it with deep-seated dread in the pit of her stomach. Her parents lived in a house that had once been a farmhouse. They had purchased it from the Humans. It had been a working farm, but like everything else, once it became unusable or unliveable, the Humans sold it off. Her father had bought it and rebuilt it, and now, it was where the Council was run from.
Only the lights in the downstairs rooms were on. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to tell Evie tonight. Perhaps she could give her younger sister another few hours of peace. Jessica would still be dead in the morning.
“Can we walk quietly?” she asked Cade. “I don’t want to wake Evie.”
Deep blue eyes bored into hers. “We can try, but she has to know sometime.”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight. She can have a few more hours.”
He gave a small nod and pulled the handle on his door to get out … then hesitated. Gemma sat frozen, waiting expectantly.
His gaze found hers once again. “Please talk to me.”
She wanted to. More than anything. She wanted to go back in time and save their son. She wanted to save her brother, but most of all, she wanted to climb across the seat and curl up in Cade’s lap, where she could stay forever.
Gemma glanced down at her hands instead, twisting her fingers in nervous agitation. “I’m about to break Evie’s heart,” she whispered solemnly. “How do I do that?”
Cade hooked his finger under her chin and tilted her head enough to look into her eyes. “She’ll be okay.”
“Like last time?” She searched his face for answers and reassurance, but found none. “What if this time s
he isn’t okay?”
“It’s different.” A tick started to work along his strong jaw. “This isn’t her brother.”
“I can't lose her over this. What if it’s too much? Jessica was her best friend. You lost yours. You know that it’s going to devastate her.”
He slid a hand around to the back of her neck and pulled her towards him so that their foreheads were touching. Cade was wolf, and he needed touch. It soothed him inside and created a connection that couldn’t be explained. Tigers, however, weren’t so much pack animals in that way, but Gemma never stopped him. When it came to Cade, she needed the touch, too.
“We should go in,” she sighed.
Without waiting for a reply, she got out of the car and started towards the house. Cade was right behind her as she reached the door, and they went straight in and to her father’s office. He was rarely anywhere else. Council business took a lot of time, and when someone is the head of the Council, it takes even longer.
He was facing the wall when they entered, his desk positioned that way. Gemma always found it rather odd to be set out like that. She thought it was like making his back a target. Of course, it would be a fool to try to sneak in on a tiger in such a way. His hearing was impeccable, but Gemma couldn’t help but think that she would still want to see the door.
Malcolm didn’t stop writing as they entered his office, but she had no doubt that he knew they were there. Her mother, Emily, was sleeping on one of the recliners just in the bay window. She had a pen in her hand, and whatever book she had been writing in before she fell asleep was open in her lap. She stirred and opened her eyes as Gemma closed the door behind her and Cade.
Yawning, she set her book down on the vacant chair beside her and rubbed at her eyes. She didn’t ask any questions, either, other than, “Coffee?” Emily was well-trained in the Council business. She had been married to Malcolm for a long time. Late night visitors weren’t ever surprises.
“Coffee would be great,” Cade replied with a smile and then went over to the seat next to Malcolm’s desk to sit and patiently wait.
