“This isn’t good,” said Jones. His face was pale, and his eyes glittered as if they were a hard mass of glistening rock. He was pissed. “We have a serial killer at hand.”
“Two kills don’t really mean a serial killer.”
Who was I kidding? Yes, it did mean that. There was a killer loose in our near vicinity and I’d done nothing to capture him or her in the past many days. The interaction with Aaron fuzzed my focus but this corpse reminded me that I needed answers.
And I needed them fast.
Not that I was scared. After all, as a mage, I was a bit more protected than normal human beings. There was no sense of superiority but rather an overconfidence that was rapidly taking a nosedive. If this person could kill a mage and a werewolf, we were apparently all sitting ducks. The thought galvanized me into action; the quicker we found this bastard, the safer we would all feel.
“What’s your first impression?” asked Jones.
“Same MO.” I noticed the cross. It was simply an ordinary white cross probably available in hundreds of stores across the country. Or perhaps it was made at home. This one was a little larger than the last one as the killer knew that his victim would require a bigger piece.
Custom made for the werewolf.
It was a sobering thought. Someone marked out this big guy as a victim, hunted him down, and brought him here apparently without a hitch.
“The person has some carpentry skills, perhaps. And yet, not much effort has been made to polish the cross.” The wood was left bare. From previous experience, I knew we wouldn’t find any fingerprints or clues on it, but the team would try to extract something important. “No signs of struggle. No fight. It appeared the werewolf simply surrendered. Or was assured that whatever was being done would help him in some way.”
Sitting in front of the werewolf, I pulled on my gloves and lifted his head. The man was handsome. His skin was unlined, his lips were full, and the blond hair smelt clean. In a room full of women, he wouldn’t have had to make any effort to snag a date. I opened one eye. “Eyes are blue. Caucasian. Victim appears to be no more than twenty-eight. Any identification papers on him?”
“None,” said one of the first agents who got on the scene.
Typically such a case would have been handled by the local police, but the moment FBI suspected that the first victim was a shape-shifter, they took over. The police, as yet, didn’t know anything about the existence of the weird, magical, powerful people who lived within their communities under a guise of innocence, and it was a deep level government conspiracy to keep them unaware. The less the public knew, the greater the chance that there would be no panic. None of us wanted to be hunted like devils or past witches of Salem.
“We’ll run him through the database.” Taking out my phone, I took a picture and sent it to Jeremy. He would figure out who this werewolf was. All magical creatures were listed in a database. It helped keep a count. I walked over to inspect the back of the victim.
Oh yes, the twin bites were there.
“Once again, I wonder what killed this werewolf. A normal drug wouldn’t have caused him to conk out and surrender,” I said. “Any other news on the previous autopsy? Are they still sure it was a heart failure?”
“Yes.”
“People don’t just die unless they are old and really sick.”
Jones crossed his arms. “Sara Field did. And I have a feeling that same results would show here.”
“What about the toxicology screen on the previous victim?”
“She was clean. There were no drugs in her system. They found alcohol but nothing significant.”
“What else they got?” I asked.
“They are still studying.”
I bared my teeth. Really! Likely the lab technicians were using this chance to study the mage. It wasn’t often they got a corpse. Now with this werewolf, it would even take longer. This was their chance to sequence the DNA, to study the organs, and whatnot. This is why our kind buried each person who died in great secrecy. We didn’t want government to dig out our bodies and conduct experiments.
And these dead people were fair game.
Pity waved through my heart. First their death was unnecessary, and now so was this humiliation. “Sara Field was young. Maybe the killer brought here against her will, but he couldn’t have done it with this person,” said agent Bryan. “The werewolf must have been drugged. We’ll find something and that will lead us to the killer.”
“You think?” I said.
“It wouldn’t be an ordinary drug that put down a man of this size,” said Bryan. “And drugs are often traceable.”
Good point.
“It’s still possible that this is the job of a vampire,” announced Jones.
“Dubey didn’t do it,” I snarled.
Although our resident vampire came back last night, he didn’t say much about his experience with the FBI team. Clearly, they didn’t get anywhere with him, but it couldn’t have been a pleasant experience.
“I’m sure he isn’t the one,” said Jones without looking at me. “But it could be another vampire, someone who hasn’t declared himself as yet.”
Vampires avoided another’s territory unless they were in a coven together.
I’d already told Jones about Aaron Fine. He was now number one on my suspect list. Had to be. He was new, he was powerful and dangerous, and we didn’t know anything about him.
“The bites point to a vampire, but…it just feels wrong. A vampire intent on drinking blood wouldn’t be so gentle.” I stood. There wasn’t much else to do. We would have to wait for autopsy, for lab results, and hopefully some clues. “Let me check the surroundings.”
While Jones got busy with his phone, Agent Bryan and I went over every inch of that clearing. At this point, anything could help; a scrap of paper, an indent of a shoe, threads from a coat, anything. And yet, much to our chagrin, the clearing was pristine. We didn’t even find as much as a thread that could give us some idea of who the person might be.
“Nothing,” Agent Bryan declared after an hour of intensive search.
Grr.
This was so annoying.
“I’ll go to the office to check some old cases,” I said.
While I could have done it in the farmhouse too, there was another reason. Perhaps Jones guessed it, but he didn’t say anything. Good. I wasn’t in the mood to answer uncomfortable questions.
“I’ll join you later,” said Bryan. “I’ll deliver him to the FBI paranormal lab.”
After I made my way to the car, I called up Jeremy to give him the update on the case. “So should I look for vampires who have been known to dispatch their victims with some flair and drama?”
Leaning back, I considered. Something didn’t quite fit in. “It’s not a vampire. Check for some old, similar cases, and while you are it…see if you can get evidence of some drug that can make the victim hallucinate but it shouldn’t have any effect on someone who drinks their blood.”
Jeremy snorted. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“What if it’s a drug that can’t be traced easily? Those people just didn’t sit down and die. Someone tied them to a cross. Someone did it to them.”
“But if there was a drug in their system, wouldn’t the person who drank their blood would have been affected too?”
“And that’s why you are doing the research.” I sighed. “Sure, it’s a wild goose chase, but we have to look somewhere. Check out the drugs available in market, and do some digging on vampires and other creatures that bite. For all we know, it could be a werewolf too.”
“They don’t kill their own kind like this.”
Yeah, he was right. “We don’t have anything else to dig into.”
He sighed. “Great. It’s like looking for a needle in a field of haystack, but I’ll work my magic and find something. What are you up to?”
I didn’t want to tell him the truth. Yes, they all knew, but it wasn’t something I advertised. “G
oing to file in some paperwork.”
Maybe he sensed that I didn’t want to talk about it because he didn’t question. “See you later.”
After parking my car, I went inside. Rather than move towards Cynthia, the person in charge of receiving all paperwork, I moved to the database room. It was deserted. Great. Just what I wanted. After typing in my command and the password, I waited for the file to appear. When the images popped up, my heart contracted with pain. For a moment, I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
My parents.
My brother.
My sister.
All gone. They were killed when I was young. And yet the killers ran free even now. They were nameless, faceless, but I refused to give up. Someone, someday would give me a clue, and I would hunt down the bastards who ripped apart my life.
There was nothing new in their file.
Damn it.
“Cleo,” said a familiar voice.
Quickly, I closed the file. Swiveling my chair around, I faced Graham, my ex-boyfriend. A mistake I planned not to repeat. It wasn’t good to date people you worked with, because well…when a relationship went down the drain, you were still forced to see them from time to time. “Yes?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Researching.”
“You’ve a better database at home.”
Yep! But that didn’t contain old files. I’d thought to ask Jeremy to hack it for me many times, but it wasn’t fair to get him in trouble, not when I could come here and check this on my own. I stood. “Did you want something?” I asked. The only way to avoid his questions was to turn aggressive. “Or are you simply without a case.”
“I’ve got enough on my plate.”
He blocked the door, almost as if he sensed my intention to escape. The bastard. Graham was good-looking, no doubt. Dark hair and eyes, fair skin, and that fit, athletic build; no wonder I was attracted to him. Added to that was the zingy intelligence that lured me in. But once I discovered his need to control every aspect of my life, the downfall of our romance was inevitable.
No one controlled Cleo Mathews.
Striding forward, I moved past him. “I’ll leave you to it then.”
“There have been no updates on your family’s case for a long time. It’s time to give up on that, Cleo.”
Even though I didn’t turn around to face him, my fists clutched. Asshole. Jerk. Why did he bring it up? Rather than respond, I chose to move out.
Focus on the case.
Focus on the case.
And yet, without any leads, I was powerless to do much. After coming back to the commune, I stomped upstairs. A quick shower might wash off the smell of death that still invaded my nostrils. Someone did quite a number on that werewolf. And yet there were no signs of trouble. The werewolf simply sat and allowed the killer to finish him off.
Who was this creature we hunted?
What was he or she capable of?
Who would be the next victim?
I walked home. Something, somewhere needed to happen to give us the break we needed. I couldn’t let another person die.
Shelley stood in front of my room, holding the baby. The sight of the tiny infant never failed to amaze me. She appeared in the middle of our driveway, lying in her bassinet, uninjured and cute as a button a few weeks ago. I’d my theories regarding her appearance but so far we didn’t have any evidence.
“Good, you’re here.” Shelley handed me the envelope she held in her hand. “This just came in today.”
“What is it?”
“The baby’s DNA analysis.”
I stared at the child. She was already a couple of months old. Barely a few weeks when she arrived, she was now a robust, playful infant. Augusta had managed to register her and get all the paperwork done. Legally, Augusta and Shelley were her foster parents but unofficially, we all got dragged down for child rearing services as and when the need arose.
“What is it?” When she shrugged, I opened the envelope and took out the report. Interesting. I stared at the baby but she offered no clues. Her smile was gorgeous and never failed to melt my icy heart. “She is…unknown.”
“Some changes in her genes, yes. We all have them, of course.”
Humans had 23 pairs of chromosomes. Chimpanzees, the closet species, had 24 pairs. Werewolves had 22, while vampires had 21. It was clear enough to see that werewolves and vampires were altogether another species. Where did they come from? Were they from earth? No one knew. Despite advances in our magical abilities, we couldn’t open a portal into another world or universe because that act alone might have the potential to destroy this world. Last month, Agent Bryan and I had risked our lives and jobs to contain a lunatic mage who was intent on doing that. While we couldn’t open a portal, such portals opened on their own, as part of a natural occurrence, and people and creatures slipped from one world to another.
I thought the child came from such a world. “She has 23 chromosomes but has genetic mutations that are vastly different from mages.”
Mages were technically humans with genetic mutations. It was thought that humans at some point went through the evolutionary process or else mutated to become mages. The child was technically a mage, but no one had seen mutations like her.
What magic would she possess?
And where had she come from?
We might never find the answer to the latter question but we would eventually discover her magic as she grew.
“The mutations are extraordinary. She is not a mage of air, fire, earth, water, or metal.”
There were only five elements. Each mage excelled in one, his or her active field, and the others could be a passive field. It took years of study, practicing spells, and learning how to amplify power in order to become good at magic.
If she wasn’t one of the mages, what was she?
I handed Shelley the papers after putting them back in the envelope. “We can’t do much. We can only hope that someone shows up to claim her or else…”
We would have to continue raising her. It was a tremendous job; even Augusta had not raised a child this small. And yet, we didn’t have much of a choice. We couldn’t hand over a non-human child to a regular orphanage, even if we had the heart to do so. As much of a hard ass was I, even I couldn’t do it.
“I’ll hand the papers to Augusta to keep safe,” said Shelley. “For obvious reasons, we can’t put in her official file.”
Yeah. Oh well. With luck, the child would disappear back into her universe but then I’d never heard of anything like that ever before. People came, but in all cases, the move was permanent.
The child was stuck here.
And we would have to raise her.
I couldn’t deal with that for now. After taking a shower, I opened the laptop. It was time to go and take a hard look at the case. Perhaps Jeremy managed to get some new data that could shed some light on the baffling circumstances of these two cases.
If not, we were screwed well and good.
Chapter Seven
I sat in Jones’s office. It was small and cramped, and yet terribly organized. Files stood with precision on their shelves. If I opened a cupboard, I was sure I would find neat rows of more files. There was a sheaf of paper on his desk, but that was all there was.
“What are you guys up to?”
Lying was useless, pointless.
“We have nothing. No data. No clue. Not even a guess.”
He ran a hand through his hair. I could see dark circles under his eyes. Anxiety simmered in their depths. While I was sorry for the way he felt, I hadn’t as yet forgiven him for his role in Dubey’s questioning. Dubey never complained, but I knew that he was upset.
Hell.
I was upset.
The way they treated him was disgraceful, and yet there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Feeling helpless was a bitch.
“Maybe I should form another team,” said Jones.
“Like hell.”
; “You have something on this case?” he questioned.
“I’ve got nothing.” It rankled to admit it, but I didn’t have a choice. “Nothing at all. Zip. Nada. But I’m not handing it over to someone.”
I may have had doubts a few days ago, but I didn’t give up.
Never.
He sighed. If he took the case away from me, I would be pissed off. “You’re my best paranormal agent, Cleo.” His statement should have made me ecstatic, but instead it depressed me. “And I trust that you will get a breakthrough soon.”
“I don’t…”
“I’ve faith in you.”
Damn it. I was ready to fight to hold on the case, but now when he said all this, I got cold feet. What if I failed?
No way.
Of course I could do it.
There were no open files in my record. When I took on a case, I closed it.
And this time would be no different.
“Sure, sir.”
He sighed, steepling his fingers together. “Cleo. I…have regrets about what happened with Dubey, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t, in good conscience, leave that possibility unexplored.”
I couldn’t forgive him. He knew us. He knew Dubey. But as I stared into his eyes, I could see the weight of responsibility that bogged him. Maybe he felt it was necessary. “Yes, sir.”
“Now go and get that bastard.”
“I will, sir.”
As I walked out, I was already working on new angles. There must be something we overlooked; perhaps we could trowel through the database of the dead mages. We could see if any of them committed such a crime. Perhaps this was a copycat who was simply doing something that was done a couple of centuries ago. Maybe we could start interviewing all the mages in the city if any of them heard such a thing. Of course, the knowledge that someone was committing crimes against those who possessed magic would spark a panic, and Jones would kill me.
But it was better to do something than to just wait for the next murder.
“So?” Bryan joined me as I strode down the corridor. “Who is on the case now?”
“We are.”
He gaped, looking as befuddled as I felt. “But I thought…man, I really thought he would take us off it.”
01 Serial Killer (FBI Paranormal Casefiles) Page 6
