Under a Blood Moon

by Rachel Graves

  I turned to Phoebe and mouthed “Ahb-so-loo-mon?”

  “An adventure, Mal, think of it as an adventure,” she said between giggles. Bridgette left the room taking the card with her. I was out of the jacket and the blouse when I noticed Anna’s eyes fixed on me in the glass. I had the strangest sensation that they lingered on my breasts.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t think that bra fits. That’s it, we’re going lingerie shopping,” she announced. For a minute, I had thought her look was something else, but I brushed the thoughts aside and finished getting dressed.

  “Phoebe, do you want to go lingerie shopping?” I asked, hopeful that she would rescue me.

  “Ahb-so-loo-mon,” she responded. We all collapsed into laughter.

  We went through another three shops before lunch. Anna decided my palette was cocoa brown, cream, and black with turquoise accents. I already owned enough black, but I bought bags and bags of other three colors. I managed to talk Anna out of having me buy a chunky turquoise necklace with Jakob’s credit card. It felt like I was being greedy. She frowned at me and steered us toward a shop for something cheap.

  It looked a lot like a warehouse with a bare concrete floor and Swedish pop songs blaring. She gave me a handful of loud graphic t-shirts with swirls of color and crazy prints. They were cute, but I wondered about the price, they weren’t really cheap.

  “$70 for a t-shirt?” I shook my head.

  “It’s not a t-shirt,” Anna said.

  “Why not? What’s the difference?”

  “A t-shirt costs twenty bucks,” Phoebe cackled. Anna knew when to give up, and finally at two o’clock we headed to lunch. The café Anna picked was in the shopping district. We sat in the back garden underneath fans that were barely winning the battle against the heat.

  “Okay, ladies, I need a favor,” I said with a deep breath. “I need you to take tickets off my hands.”

  “Play tickets?” Anna asked.

  “Sort of, it’s a revue, a fundraiser.”

  “Sounds like there’s something missing here. Dish, chica,” Phoebe commanded.

  “No dish, I bought them for Jakob and me but we’re not going to use them.”

  “Oh no, you feel like there’s a lot more to this.” Phoebe looked at me. “Don’t make me take it from your pretty little head.”

  “It’s a drag show. I thought I could convince Jakob to—”

  Phoebe’s howls of laughter cut me off.

  “Care to explain the joke?” Anna asked me, well aware that Phoebe could barely breathe.

  “Jakob has a problem with gay men. When I bought the tickets I thought I could convince him to get over it,” I offered meekly.

  “Uh-huh.” Anna gave me a stern look then turned back to Phoebe. “What’s the extent of this problem?”

  “He can’t stand to be around them, refuses to think about them, and is filled with rage when one happens to bump into him,” Phoebe listed.

  “Yeah, I’d call that a problem or, you know, homophobia,” Anna agreed.

  “He’s six hundred years old. I think we can cut him some slack.” I didn’t want to tell them what I knew about where his issues came from. It didn’t feel like my secret to tell. If I’d known it a month ago, I would’ve never bought the tickets.

  “Hey, if you want to date a bigot that’s your call,” Anna said, suddenly enthralled by the menu.

  “He is not a bigot.” I started to get annoyed at her tone. Sure, I was giving up tickets to a show but if I wanted to see it, I could go on my own. He wasn’t denying me my only chance. Besides, Anna didn’t have a right to judge without knowing the whole story.

  “Whatever you say, dear,” Anna responded dryly.

  “We’ll take the tickets, I’m sure it’ll be a fun show. Jakob’s issues are his own. Who knows maybe he has a good reason,” Phoebe soothed.

  “Right, because there are lots of good reasons to hate an entire group of people for half a millennium.” Anna had to have the last word before she would let the subject drift back to shopping. Once again, we were back to my lack of coordination. Anna gave instructions on how things went together while I tried to remember it all.

  “Wait the scarf with the print shirt? But they’re both prints,” I said confused.

  “The scarf goes with the suit and the neutral shells. The print shirts go with the solid skirts.” Anna lectured as our salads arrived. I might burn off a thousand calories at work but a morning of shopping designer boutiques had me on a diet. I suspect the diet wouldn’t last once I got to Indigo’s shop, but for now it was salads and water with lemon juice.

  “You should have her write it down for you,” Phoebe suggested.

  “Would you?” I turned to Anna with hope in my voice. It was the only way I was going to keep everything straight. Anna rolled her eyes but took out her planner and started writing. She was halfway down the sheet when my cell phone rang.

  “Detective Mors, um, we need you here right away.” The voice on the other end sounded wobbly.

  “Who are you and where’s ‘here’?”

  “Umm, sorry this is Officer White, and on campus, I mean on the college campus. There’s a murder scene, Artman told me to call SIU, but they’re going to need you. It’s a mess.”

  I grabbed the pen from Anna and got the address. I didn’t ask Officer White anything more. I’d worked with her before. Murder scenes didn’t faze her. She was part of an old witch family, so the supernatural didn’t bother her. Whatever was left, it must be pretty bad.

  I said my goodbyes to the girls, they promised to drop my packages at home. Phoebe even promised to keep Anna from molesting Jakob in his sleep. When I smiled at her joke, I didn’t realize it was the last smile I’d have for the rest of the day.

  The college campus was only a short taxi ride from the shopping district but it made a world of difference. Here the streets were made to accommodate a crush of cars, not leisurely shoppers. Parking was impossible though, as most of the campus was being returned to lush green space.

  The cab let me off at one of the green spaces. I could see a cluster of cops outside a building not too far from where a tall oak tree marked the fringe of a wooded patch. I cringed, wondering why our killer had a thing against oaks.

  Officer White picked me out of the crowd and nodded. She was standing away from the crime scene, her hair in a long blond French braid. I hadn’t seen her since we last worked together, but she still looked like she belonged in a country club. The bulky police officer’s belt didn’t rest right on her trim hips. The uniform did nothing for an athletic body that should have been in tennis whites. She was a White witch, a family so popular and powerful their name had become synonymous with good magic, but she preferred to be a beat cop.

  She didn’t come over to me, and I could tell why. Sergeant Artman was standing not too far behind her, well away from the crime scene. Artman had a problem with the SIU. He hated all things supernatural and bad mouthed the SIU every chance he got. All while he ignored cases that might involve any supernatural individuals. Worse, he encouraged the animosity that everyone on the force seemed to have for us, using childish nicknames, and mocking our techniques.

  His bad attitude had gotten him sent down from detective to sergeant. He’d worked his way back up, but then been sent down again after he botched an investigation in the sex witch killings, an investigation I had to finish for him. I knew this wasn’t going to go well.

  “Artman,” I acknowledged him. He opened his mouth to challenge me, but I didn’t give him the chance. I walked toward the bodies, and he refused to follow.

  When I got closer, I could see why. The crime scene was nothing but gore. Tissue, blood, and broken parts of bone had rained down the side of the building, soaking into the grass. The blood reeked in the summer heat. Underneath it, I smelled vomit. I could feel the death pulsing up at me from the ground. People had died here, but there wasn’t enough left of them. Like Peaceful Rest, there was too muc
h death but not enough bodies.

  I felt something on my arm and looked down to brush off a bug, but my arm was bare. I took a deep breath and walked backward from the crime scene.

  “Officer White?” I called out. Artman was gone, and she came up to me without hesitating. “What do you keep in your car? For emergency food, what have you got?”

  “Glucose packets, cherry flavor, I keep a six pack under the seat.” She looked at my eyes, trying to tell if I was going to pass out yet. “How many do you need?”

  “All of them,” I answered grimly. She sprinted to the car and returned with the tiny packets of artificial cherry goop. Squeezed from the silver tube it looked a little too close to the splatter around the crime scene. I closed my eyes and gulped. Beggars can’t be choosers. I should have been carrying my own supplies.

  I finished three packets and felt the sugar pulse through my system. I handed the other three back to her. I wasn’t sure if I’d need them but I knew I couldn’t carry them too close to the scene. There was too much dripping red there already.

  As I walked up, the sensation came back, but on my other arm now, like a piece of lint or something I should brush away. As I got closer my leg joined in, itching just enough that I had to fight not to scratch it. I waved to one of the technicians working the crime scene.

  “All right to put my hand down?”

  “You can’t make it any worse.” He looked at me as if I was crazy. Kneeling in the mud created by blood and dirt, I realized he was right. As my hand hovered over the earth, I heard a shout behind me. I whipped my head around, bringing my hand up to where my gun would have been, and the sound stopped. The gore soaked bricks and lawn, the very earth beneath me was screaming. I took a deep breath and shoved my hand on to the ground.

  It felt like I plunged into icy cold water. My vision swam and when I could see again, I realized I was seeing the death as the victim had felt it. Night, the full moon filtered by the oak tree. She was shoved up against the wall, assaulted so brutally her body shattered around him. Him. The wolf. He craned his neck down to her face, his snout inches from her lips. She flinched backward, as he bit her face. His look was pure animal, and his lust was pure hate. His body tore her in half, dislocating her legs.

  Her attacker stepped back, while his companion grabbed one leg, and a third wolf grabbed the other leg. As they pulled intense pain ripped up her body, our world began to get dark. But this wasn’t death, only unconsciousness. While the mind of the victim retreated to safety, I was still there. I watched from above now, as the two wolves ate her limbs. The third, the leader, put his muzzle into the bloody pulp of her chest and ate his way to her heart. I watched him bite down on it, blood still pumping out the veins when, finally, death came.

  “Detective?” The voice called me back, gentle and young. “I think you need to eat more.”

  It was Officer White. Her clear green eyes looked down at me filled with concern. I sat up slowly, the muscles in my legs screaming from kneeling so long. She caught my hand and helped me to stand. I felt the pins and needles set in along my muscles. I’d never gone so deeply into a death, never had it feel so real.

  “The Sergeant thinks you passed out, he made a nasty comment. I know better.” She grinned sheepishly and handed me a glucose pack. “You were out for a while. Your eyes are still gone.”

  “There was only one death here.” I blinked hard. There was no way for me to turn the power off, no way to insist my eyes go back to normal from their otherworldly state. I could only hope they wouldn’t cause too many problems for the people around me.

  “Really, De-tect-ive Mors? Is that so?” Artman had walked up behind me. “Because I’m missing half a soccer team here. Not to mention that there’s splatter from about six feet high to four feet out. But if the high and mighty death witch says ‘one person’, I guess that must be so.”

  “It is.” I looked with him with solid white eyes, no pupils, no iris, just white with flashes of color. He flinched. I called out to the other officers, tired of waiting for him to do his job. “Everybody fan out, into the woods, there is at least one other crime scene like this one and we need to find it.”

  I grabbed Officer White and headed to the woods. Artman took one look at us and stormed off. I didn’t care enough to wonder where he was going. When we were far enough away, I got the details from White. Three men and two women from the intramural soccer team were missing. They came back to the dorm through the woods, probably thinking they’d be safe because there were so many of them. No one had worried about them until lunchtime. No one had seen the blood because the building wasn’t used during the day.

  I waited until we were inside the tree line and opened myself to the woods. I’d never be an earth witch, I couldn’t even keep houseplants alive, but I was hoping something would pop out at me. Nothing did. The first crime scene had screamed, from here I didn’t even hear a whisper. I focused my concentration and pulled the power into the core of my being, gathered it, then threw it out. Beside me, I heard White gasp as my power hit her. She felt solid but uninteresting. She was too alive for me. My ability moved on, finding something off to our right.

  “This way,” I opened my eyes and pointed. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Ask, I won’t answer if it bothers me.”

  “What’s your name?” Danny had invited her to join the SIU once. Lieutenant French would take her in a second. As far as I knew, she hadn’t done anything about it. She’d handed me food and helped me, I didn’t think knowing her name was an invasion of privacy.

  “Everyone calls me Glenda.” Her voice was flip.

  “I didn’t ask what they called you.” I stopped walking, turned slightly, and started again. “I asked your name.”

  “Jess,” she said shyly. “Well, Jessa, actually, because my Mom is British.”

  “I’m Mallory.” I thought about it for a minute. “I have no idea why or what it means.”

  “Consider yourself lucky. With generations of witches, everything means something. I was supposed to be psychic, hence the name.”

  “But you’re not?”

  “Not enough to be called ‘she sees,’” she shrugged. “Sometimes the pressure to be a witch in my family is a bit much.”

  I nodded, thinking about Anna’s vanity license plate, a gift from her father that proclaimed her a witch. I couldn’t imagine that kind of pressure.

  “Detective? Over there.”

  I followed the line of her finger to a sandy spot off the trail. It was a tiny drop of blood, enough to make me believe she really did see. I followed the trail until I found another. The pattern opened up, drops became splashes. I threw my power out again, looking for the body, but there wasn’t one. The blood had just enough energy left to tell me there was one death here. It still wasn’t enough.

  I had Jess call the forensic guys over. Ten minutes later her radio squeaked to life. The scientists had gotten lost on their way to us and stumbled onto another crime scene. I could hear vomiting on the other side of the radio. I knew without asking that they had finally found a body. In a sick way, I was grateful. A body meant something the lab could process, something we could use for evidence.

  I handed the scene off to Officer White and stomped through the woods in my cute strappy sandals in search of answers. The third scene was the worst of all, a macabre piece of art done by a lunatic working with blood and body parts. An arm hung from a branch, ripped away from its shoulder. A leg was half hidden by a bush, the exposed flesh slashed into ribbons by claws. There was blood everywhere, the killers must have been covered in it. There was a face with eyes still wearing contacts and the skull half-missing. I tried my best not to touch anything. I didn’t want to feel whatever had done this. It was bad enough feeling my skin tingle and jump at the death surrounding me.

  We worked on the crime scenes for hours. I jumped from one to the other, answering questions and making decisions. I issued orders like I was in charge. It was twili
ght before I realized I was. I felt stupidly out of place in my going shopping outfit and furious that Artman hadn’t bothered to come into the woods. Just when I decided to storm out and drag him in, Detective Auster showed up. As we greeted each other, he held up his hand.

  “Don’t tell me what he did. If you do, I’ll have to tell you what he said on the phone, and you don’t want to know.” I swallowed my questions and all of the nasty comments I was going to make. He watched me, waiting for me to lose control, when I didn’t he went on, “Brief me on the crime scene and then head home. We can bring up Artman’s bullshit to the lieutenant on Monday morning.”

  I stopped to call Jakob to pick me up, then as gracefully as I could, I led him through the crime scenes. We finished the circuit of the three and headed back to the collection of squad cars. I could see a media circus brewing on the other side of the street. It was fully dark, but the cameras had lights on them. The news never needed to sleep. The killings at Peaceful Rest had made the headlines. A second set of killings would drive the city deeper into paranoia. I turned back to Detective Auster, with a final thought.

  “I saw three wolves attacking the victim by the building. All three ate her, but one raped her first. I don’t have any idea why, but that scene is psychically hot. Be careful of it. The rest of them are pretty quiet.”

  “One of the girls was a spirit witch. Not that anyone would know, she wasn’t strong, and she kept it hidden. She could project though, when she was happy everyone in the room was happy, when she was sad everyone started crying. Apparently she’d started to get it under control some, but her parents were worried it was why she went missing. Maybe that’s why you can feel so much of her death. Maybe she was projecting when she died.”

  I shivered at the memory of the ground screaming at me, at the memory she had left for me of her gruesome death. “I will be so happy to get away from this crime scene.”

  “Gee thanks, Mors,” he shook his head.

  I heard Jakob whisper my name. I turned expecting to find him next to me. He was fifty feet away standing next to the parked car. I smiled insanely at his ability to whisper to me from so far away.