Seeing Red

by Lyra Evans

  Niko’s actual magic and energy poured from him, filling the trade with support to ensure what manifested was lasting and visible for all of them. His head began to throb, a piercing pain shooting through the middle of his forehead. And soon, as he pulled on the threads of the memory, he felt it dislodging from his brain and yanking straight through his skull into the world beyond. Teeth gritted, no sound escaping him, Niko pushed as hard as he could, a final surge of speed at the end of a marathon, or the kick of desperation with burning lungs as the surface becomes visible from underwater.

  Niko cried out, a soft and breathless sound, as he stumbled forward from the power of the magic pulled from him. And before he opened his eyes, his hand struck something. It felt cold and rough, but also intangible and yielding as water.

  Eyes open, Niko saw the entrance to the warehouse in front of him. His hand had collided with the edge of the door. It felt right until he pushed, then the manifestation waivered beneath the pressure. It warped slightly against his hand, reshaping when he pulled back.

  “Shit,” Coral said, her voice smaller than before.

  “I’ll say,” Starla agreed.

  Niko turned, his head still pounding, to see them standing there staring in awe. They were in the doorway to the living room, their feet planted on the parquet flooring. But at the inner edge of the doorway, the parquet gave way to gravel and dirt, the lighting mottled and grey from the night Niko had drawn into the living room. When he turned back, he saw the warehouse before him, the night sky beyond it visible despite the distortion of sizes. The living room was too small to accommodate this, but it did anyway. The magic pressed at the edges of reality and understanding, existing in a space too small to be.

  “You did it,” Cobalt said, a proud smile on his face. His eyes shone with pleasure, as though he never doubted it, but Niko shied away anyway. “Show us through.”

  Niko turned back as they tentatively crossed the threshold into the pocket of memory he’d recreated for them. He shoved the door to the warehouse open without actually touching it much, the screeching playing as if it was the real thing. The throbbing in his skull softened somewhat with every passing second, but in its place, exhaustion crept in. The manifestation drained him by the minute.

  Stepping into the warehouse like he had that first time, he was immediately assaulted with the smells inside. It was as vivid as it had been that night, the dust and dank and rusting metal mixed with the choking scent of death. Niko steeled himself, looking around at everything he could see, both to check the authenticity of the manifestation and to see if there was anything new.

  The same rubble and discarded garbage littered the entryway, and as he progressed with small steps through the place, he found Sade hanging in precisely the same place he had been, meat hook and all.

  “Oak and Ash,” Starla exhaled. The revulsion was evident in her voice, but Niko thought he heard something else as well. Satisfaction. He couldn’t blame her. He had felt it too.

  “This place is disgusting,” Coral said. “Why’d he come here anyway?”

  Niko didn’t look at Starla, instead focusing on Sade’s hanging body. So she answered for him.

  “Because a piece of shit feels most at home in a dump,” she said. Then, more descriptively, she added, “He liked abandoned places like these to set up shop. Made it easier to hold people without anyone noticing. And the lack of neighbours meant no one to call the cops if someone screams.”

  Coral said nothing to that; none of them did. It was Sade’s M.O. Dark and dirty places, torture and mutilation—they were written into the lines of Sade’s DNA. Niko was certain of it.

  “There are no footprints except the ones from the entrance,” Cobalt said, focusing on the details without wasting time. “Boot prints, by the looks of it. These here seem to match Sade’s shoes.” He crouched to study the soles of Sade’s shoes to confirm. “Yes, I think so. And given they’re the most numerous, that would make sense. To whom do the other prints belong? The killer?”

  Niko shook his head, still staring straight at Sade’s hanging body. He was naked, his clothes torn from him. His arms were tied up above his head and attached to one of the meat hooks still remaining from the warehouse’s previous life. The bindings at his wrists were tight, apparently made of thick, rough rope. The unrefined fibers seemed to cut into his skin, given the redness and smears of blood along his forearms. His fingers had gone white and were blackened at the tips. No circulation. A slight reflective quality to the rope indicated it was Fae-made, though of poor quality.

  “Those are my boot prints,” Niko said, not turning his attention away. “I was the first person on scene. Didn’t even know it was a crime scene until I got here, so there was nothing to do about that. The forensics team shouldn’t have considered those.”

  “Except they’re the only ones here,” Coral said. “Only ones besides the victim’s, anyway.”

  Rankled, Niko tried to ignore her. He made his way down Sade’s body with his scrutiny. Sade’s lavender hair was rough cut and uneven with a jagged bald slice left by a scar that crossed his face. His cold eyes were empty, half-lidded, and his overconfident mouth was slack. There was blood staining around his lips and down his chin, along with indications of blood around his nostrils. He’d been bleeding internally for a while.

  “There’s a stun gun here,” Starla said, and Niko actually paused in his assessment of Sade. He looked back at what she’d found. A black stun gun, almost like a cellphone in shape but for the metal prongs on the end, sat abandoned on top of a crate. There seemed to be some blood splattered around the end of it. “No prints though,” she said, waving her hand over it. It was a standard police technique, and Niko was impressed. It made sense for a detective agency to teach those kinds of techniques as well, but Starla had picked up on everything so fast.

  Niko turned back to Sade’s body. Skipping over the deep bruising on his neck, Niko studied his torso. The deeply defined muscles of his chest and stomach were somewhat slack and softened, either by his experience in prison or death—Niko wasn’t sure. Beneath the layer of blood that stained him, Niko noticed a number of wounds. The tell-tale burn marks of a stun gun were present at strategic locations, over his chest, in the hollows of his underarms, near his neck, and particularly around the nipples. The smell of burnt flesh was weaker than the smell of blood, but it was there. Now Niko noticed it, he couldn’t shake it.

  Along with those burn marks were other types of injuries. Small, circular burns with rough, uneven texture made Niko think of cigarette burns. Knicks and cuts scattered over Sade’s chest, thick, red welts from what Niko could only guess was a whip wrapped around his sides, and blackened, bubbling skin rose occasionally along his form. He’d been intentionally burned in several different ways, but none of them seemed large enough to indicate the killer tried to ignite the body.

  “What is the cause of death?” Cobalt asked, moving around the area, his eyes still scanning the floor.

  Niko stared at Sade’s chest. “Can’t be certain, but I think the bullet hole right over his heart is likely a key player,” he said. The gaping hole had bled black and heavy down Sade’s body. The skin at the edges was torn and rough, but it also seemed slightly burnt. Contact burns? Was the killer shooting him point blank? Niko’s eyes travelled down, unwillingly focusing on Sade’s exposed and ruined groin. “Killer also shot him in the dick a number of times.”

  Niko made no effort to get closer to count out the number of shots. It was probably impossible to be certain at this vantage, anyway. Only Dr. Aspen would be able to confirm a number after autopsy. And she’d know exactly was had been done to Sade. Who knew what other torture he’d been submitted to beyond what Niko could see.

  “Found a leather whip,” Coral said. Niko moved over to see it. It was a cat-o-nine-tails style flogger, the tails soaked in blood not quite dried. Difficult to tell how wet it was without touching it, but given the black colour, Niko couldn’t discern much else from it. H
e swiped a hand over it like Starla had done, applying the necessary trades to pull fingerprints. Nothing.

  “No prints here either,” he said, growing frustrated. The flogger looked familiar to him, and when Starla approached to examine it, he remembered. The tiny graphic cat head logo on the base of the handle sparked the memory. It was Sade’s preferred brand of flogger. Said their tools were just a bit sharper than the competition. Did real damage where the usual floggers available on the fetish market were considerably safer. Sade didn’t like safe.

  “Fuck, this killer knew him, didn’t they?” Starla half asked, half said. She shook her head. “So that only narrows it down to anyone he’s ever victimized, played with, sold to, or worked with in any capacity. Not like he was shy about his interests.”

  She was right. It didn’t help much to know whoever had done this knew these intimate details about Sade. There were too many people to name who might want him dead and knew enough to do it this way. Niko went back to the body, moving around to examine Sade’s back.

  Ashy marks smeared across his back and shoulders. The bruising from his neck followed here, suggesting to Niko he’d been choked with something at length. And violently. The rope that bound his hands hung down along his arm and seemed plenty long enough to wrap around his neck from there. It also bore some red stains and blackened fibers, which Niko took to mean he’d been choking when the killer burned him.

  Searching for any sign of empathy in himself, Niko found he couldn’t summon it. The innumerable scars that littered his own body were left there by Sade, and Niko would never be rid of them. Or him. So seeing this torture done back to Sade was hard to feel bad about. Niko wondered if that made him a bad person. As bad a person as Sade.

  He hadn’t checked for a pulse. Hadn’t even considered it. It was standard protocol when an officer found a victim. Check the vitals. See to helping them if you can. Secure the scene. But Niko hadn’t even bothered. He could argue the blood and limpness of Sade’s body was enough to indicate it was much too late for that, but Niko hadn’t died of his bullet wound. He could have been alive—just barely hanging on—while Niko stood outside waiting for the Captain and other officers to show up. Maybe, in a way, Niko had killed him. Now no one would ever know for sure.

  “The relevant evidence seems to be contained to this small perimeter around the body,” Cobalt said, indicating a rough circle around Sade. The warehouse beyond stretched out empty and untouched. Heavy layers of dust and dirt left no imprint or sign of disturbance. Not even Sade had made his way over there. Had Sade even managed to do anything in the warehouse before he was assaulted? Or had he surprised his killer in here? Had the killer been lying in wait?

  Nothing left behind seemed to support that theory. No sleeping bag or food source implied someone squatting here. No prints left behind meant whoever had killed Sade hadn’t spent much time here. Only what it took to bind, torture, and kill him. But as Niko had been watching the entrance vigilantly, he also knew no one escaped that way. Which meant there had to be another way out of here.

  Before Niko could turn to search, however, he noticed something in a flash of his eyes over the body. There was a stream of blood dripping down Sade’s leg from behind. The injuries to his back couldn’t account for it, and it was too far back on his leg to be from the shot to his groin. Which meant only one thing Niko could think of.

  “Fucking hell,” Coral said, standing over something on the ground. Niko looked over and saw what she’d found. A broken piece of piping, dirty and rusting around the edges lay at her feet. One end of it was covered in blood and other things Niko recognized as bodily waste. Niko’s stomach sank, a vivid and vicious set of memories of his time at Sade’s mercy rising in his mind. He tried to swallow the bile in his throat. Coral, meanwhile, was looking at the body. “This psycho raped him?” she asked, clearly putting it together as Niko had. She shook her head and stepped back from the pipe. “This is right fucking sick.”

  Cobalt was at Niko’s side suddenly, and Starla was unusually quiet. Niko looked over to her. Her expression was tight but flat. He thought she likely had the same problem with compassion he was having.

  “Well, I guess that narrows it down a bit,” she said without emotion.

  Coral shot her a horrified look. “I’d say, yeah. Not every fucking killer is about to rape someone with a rusty pipe.” She pointed to a part of the wall with exposed piping. “Looks like they were so set on it they ripped it right off the wall.”

  She was right. The break on the piping still in the wall did suggest it was more recent than anything else. It also meant the pipe was a weapon of opportunity, whereas all the other weapons present had to have been brought to the scene. Niko considered this.

  “Don’t have to be that crazy to want to show him what it feels like,” Starla said in an undertone, but Coral heard it. They all had. It was quiet. At the look on Coral’s face, Starla blinked slowly. “He’s done worse to half the people in this room. And worse than that to some who’ll never get to know this was done to him.”

  Niko didn’t know what to say to that or do with the information. He didn’t feel bad for Sade before; this new information didn’t change that. But something about the pipe struck him as wrong.

  “Niko,” Cobalt said. He wasn’t next to Niko anymore. His voice came from what seemed like very far away. It echoed oddly in the empty warehouse. “Down to the left.”

  Niko moved away from Sade’s body and peered around a stack of old skids and broken lumber that stood next to the left wall. There was a narrow path between the skids and the wall, and at the end of it, Cobalt stood in a tiny sliver of light. The outer wall of the warehouse did have some kind of opening.

  Moving down the awkward path, Niko came to stand next to Cobalt in front of a kind of pocket door. It was metal like the entrance, but the outer surface seemed to be covered in concrete and painted the same colour as the surrounding walls. It sat very slightly open, letting in only a slice of light from the night beyond. Niko reached out to scan the surface for prints, but even before it came back negative, he knew there would be none.

  Pushing it inward, he expected a screeching whine, like the other door. Instead, it moved silently, as though it had been recently oiled. With a glance at one another, Niko and Cobalt stepped out into the darkness.

  The ground out back behind the warehouse was far less gravelled than the interior, giving way instead to dirt softened by the rain. Looking back at the door, Niko pulled it behind him until it was as open as it had been when they found it. The opening lined up perfectly with an exterior pipe that climbed up the entire building, and the concrete exterior of the door blended so well with the wall there was no way Niko would have noticed it on his quick search of the property. He’d been looking for a killer—which meant movement, noise, panic, blood trails, and the like—not evidence. If only he’d noticed that then. The police surely had to have found this door, though. Surely.

  “There are no prints out here either,” Cobalt said, walking along in arcs toward the fencing at the back of the building. "With the rain and mud, you would expect any footprints to be difficult to cover.”

  Niko nodded, unsure of why they were finding nothing. The killer had to have been extremely skilled in forensic counter-measures to rid the scene of all this evidence. And yet they left behind the stun gun, the flogger, and the pipe. Why?

  Niko moved along the chain link fence, still unclear on how this person escaped this way. The fence was unbro—

  “Fuck,” Niko said, noting the strange edging to one panel of the chain link. The links didn’t line up perfectly from one side of a post to the other. Leaning in close, Niko found tiny runemarks along the metal. His heart pounding, his stomach tied in knots, Niko pushed at the fencing. It gave way easily, the runes doing their job. “Fucking shit. They got out this way.”

  He pushed through the opening, cursing a blue streak in his mind. He should have checked more thoroughly. He should have known. But he
’d never seen runes used this way until Starla had shown him her exit plan. And if he didn’t know, Uri and the other officers likely didn’t either. He needed to get this to them somehow.

  Niko stepped out onto the unpaved stretch of road just behind the warehouse. The road showed signs of wear from tires, but nothing seemed particularly new enough to make a difference here. He tried a few scanning methods, but all the results were inconclusive. Nothing helpful. The killer could have escaped into a waiting car or disappeared on foot somewhere. Either down the road or into the woods that rose up along the edge of the unpaved road. Staring out at the road, the rain-wet smell of earth reaching his nose again, Niko briefly caught sight of an indentation in the soil. Moving closer to the edge of the grass, he crouched down to study it.

  “What is it?” Cobalt asked, joining him.

  Niko pulled a magical copy of the indentation out of the ground and onto the air. It hovered before him in a soft purple cloud. “A paw print,” he said. Searching through the grass, he saw another and another. A set of them disappeared into the line of trees. He lifted the others like the first, noting the distance between them.

  “A wild animal? Or a suspect?” Cobalt asked, perhaps thinking as Niko did. The prints and stride distance was too great for a dog, but a Werewolf could manage it.

  “Maybe,” Niko said, taking a closer look at one of the prints. It was unique from the others, and Niko couldn’t decide if it was important or not. The print was missing one toe and the central pad mark was bisected by a scar down the middle of the two lobes. “I don’t know if Sade has any connection to a Werewolf. And a Werewolf using a gun is very uncommon.” He got to his feet, capturing the paw prints in a magical kind of evidence container with a swipe of his hand. The cloud prints flattened and laid themselves out on a thin sheet that appeared on the air. Niko took the sheet and swiped his palm over it, curling it to a tiny roll he slipped into a sleeve and sealed with his fingertips.