Hex Appeal (13 page)

Prieto caught up with me, slumped and tired but still walking fast. “Thanks for coming,” he said, not as if he in any way meant it. “According to the files, you were involved in the last one. Figured we could get your take on what was going on here.”

“Last one?”

“You’ll see.”

Up ahead, a knot of people were working—most of them crime scene technicians, collecting microscopic evidence, photographing, bagging, tagging. We stopped at the edge of the taped-off area, and Prieto waved over one of the team.

“Tell them, Greg,” he said. He made the rest of them step away to give us a clear view. Once I had it, I didn’t really need the update because illuminated by harsh floodlights, the scene told me everything.

What I faced was … monstrous.

And it was like having the worst case of déjà vu in the world … a traumatic flashback made real, flesh and blood, so much blood. I’d been here before, stood here before, seen this
before.

I don’t know how I managed not to throw up, or faint, or at least turn away, but I forced myself to look at all the details, searching for something,
anything,
that would break me out of the nightmare.

But it was all the
same.

The forensic tech studied me curiously for a second before shrugging off his questions about why he’d be talking to me at all. “Well, I’m sure you can see most of it. Victim is about eighteen years old. Pretty nasty, even for this kind of thing. You can see the mutilation from here; blood evidence tells us it was mostly done while she was still alive. She’s been dead about four hours, best we can ballpark it right now. No ID yet. Not much in the way of trace evidence, either. This is real similar to a case we had about a year ago. Same location. Same age of victim.”

“No.” I said it softly, my gaze fixed on the pale, blood-spattered face of the girl. “Not the same age as that victim. She’s the
same
victim.”

Prieto was staring at me, and I knew he’d been thinking the same exact thing but had wanted confirmation. “I thought maybe it was just a close resemblance.”

“It’s not. DNA will confirm. It’s the
same girl
, Daniel,” I said.

Prieto nodded.

The crime scene tech frowned. “Well, obviously, that can’t be the case,” he said. “That isn’t possible.”

I took in a breath. “Yes, it is. She’s been brought back by a resurrection witch, then killed again. The same way. In the same place.” I felt sick but oddly steady. I understood this now. I understood why I was here. Prieto hadn’t known, but he’d at least had a suspicion. “My God. He killed her all over again.”

The tech—Greg?—seemed to go still for a moment, as if he was running that through his head a few times for clarity. “I’m … sorry. And how exactly would you know that?”

“Because I consulted on the first case,” I said.
Consulted
was a euphemism, of course; I’d brought back this victim from the dead myself. I’d asked her who’d killed her, but she’d been so traumatized and hysterical that it hadn’t worked at all. I’d had to let her go without an answer. “They never caught him,” I said. “Detective … I think he’s found a way to relive his kills in a brand-new way—not just with trophies or memories or recordings. He’s found a way to actually repeat them.”

Prieto had gone pale because he knew what I was talking about now, and the enormity of it was starting to hit him like a falling wall. “If it’s the same man, he has six kills on his list.”

The world was spinning around me, wobbling like a top, and I had to focus hard to avoid feeling sick with it. “He just realized that it was safer to do it this way,” I said. “There’s no law against torturing and killing the dead. No law at all. As long as he can get a resurrection witch to go along with it, he can keep on going, and there’s nothing we can do to stop him. Nothing legal, anyway.”

“Fucking
hell
—” Prieto suddenly turned away, overcome and unwilling to let me see it. I waited for it to hit, too, but all I felt was a black sense of betrayal and inevitability. As if I’d known, deep down, that something would never rest safely in the grave about this case, this murderer, these victims.

Prieto paced, head down, then swung back on me. “It’s a fucking witch working with him,” he said. “One of yours. No, two of yours, right? One to create the shell, the avatar—that’s a different skill set. Then a resurrection witch to put the life back in.”

“Maybe this isn’t what it looks like.” I said that, but my heart wasn’t in it. I just didn’t
want
it to be true because no matter who did it, we all had a share of that kind of guilt.

“Don’t try to tell me this isn’t on one of
you
. It’s
witches
doing this shit. What the hell is this, eh? Legal murder?” Prieto was about one second from shoving me, from the wild, angry glitter in his eyes. “Necrophiliac sons of bitches! What kind of sick fucking sadists
are
you tweaks?”

I was glad Andy wasn’t with me. He’d have punched Prieto for using language like that in front of a lady, but I didn’t care; he was right. Sickeningly right.

I found that the words just came, all on their own. “I’m the kind that stops
that
kind,” I said. “Or dies trying.”

*   *   *

Prieto had pulled the case files, and he had them in his car. Not a stupid man, by any means. He’d assumed it was a copycat killing, but his forward thinking saved me valuable time, and it might even save a life, although the legal system wouldn’t quite see it that way.

“They’re wasting their time, your forensic people,” I said. “It isn’t a crime to kill the dead.”

Prieto sent me a scorching-hot glare. “No,” he finally said. “Resurrected people don’t have any rights, you know that. So it wouldn’t be murder to kill them, no matter how sick it is.”

“And whoever this is, he’s counting on that,” I said. “He’s a serial killer who’s discovered a way to get his thrills without nearly as much risk.” I felt sick again and had to swallow hard to control myself. “The victims will remember, you know,” I said. “Dying before. All the pain and terror. It would only be worse this time because they’ll know it’s coming.”

“You ever heard of anything like this before? People bringing back the dead for their own version of fun?” Prieto asked. I shook my head, but it was a silent lie. The resurrection business, like the mortuary business, attracted its share of mentally and emotionally broken people. The witch community generally policed its own, and as those kinds of offenders were noticed, they were dealt with. Quietly. With prejudice.

I’d heard of one or two rapists who revived the dead to attack them before letting them slip away again. A few who got their kicks torturing. I’d never heard of one turning serial killer, or someone enabling one. How had he—or, God help us, she—slipped through the cracks? And if you counted the witch who’d created the shell, that made
two
of them who were guilty and keeping their silence.

Sickening didn’t really cover it.

“So how do we start?” Prieto asked. “Do we go back to the parents?”

I shuddered. “No. The last thing we should do is let them know about this,” I said. “Bad enough they lost a daughter so horribly in the first place, but to know she went through it
again,
just as horribly … we’d be continuing their torture, not relieving it.”

Prieto looked even sicker as he ran it through his head. “Okay. So where’s our starting point?”

I held up a file. “We could try working it from the burials. An avatar witch needs a piece of the real person to make the physical body—bone, hair, flesh, blood. You start exhuming them and see if any of the bodies have been tampered with; I’ll bet you find they’ve all had samples taken. If I understand forensic rules properly, he—or she—should have left some trace evidence behind in the process—digging up a body is a messy, sweaty business.”

“And what will you be doing?”

“Tracking avatar witches. There aren’t more than a few dozen of them in this state; it isn’t a common skill in our circles, and they all have to be licensed.”

“Couldn’t it be somebody out of state? Somebody brought in just for this purpose?”

“Sure,” I said, and shrugged. “But we’re a close-knit community. Someone will know something about it, even if it’s just the supply shops who furnish what we need.”

“How am I supposed to get bodies exhumed? I need family consent,” Prieto said. “What kind of excuse am I supposed to use for that?”

“The serial killer’s struck again, but you have a revolutionary new scientific technique that wasn’t available before,” I said. “As far as I can tell, most people don’t understand science any better than they understand resurrection magic. Families will give you permission for the exhumation, almost certainly, if you tell them it will help us catch him.”

“You mean, if I lie my ass off to them.”

“Do you want this stopped, or not?” I thought about it for a few seconds, and continued, cautiously, “There’s a third thing we can do. We can keep an eye on the dump sites. He reused one, he might reuse others. These places mean something to him.”

“Well, that’s a problem,” Prieto said. “This isn’t officially a crime, and overtime’s not something we can throw around like confetti; our budget’s stretched so thin it squeaks. There are five other dump sites. Can’t cover them all, especially not during the night.”

“I’ll take the one that comes next in the series,” I said. “Just in case he sticks to the pattern.”

“Not by yourself, you’re not,” Prieto said.

“Andy could—”

He made a sharp movement and cut me off. “I want one of mine in on it,” he said. “I’ll find a volunteer. You want to bring Toland along, that’s on you, but I need somebody who isn’t on the side of the witches.”

That was insulting, but I understood his position, really. He didn’t trust witches in general, and if he sometimes, grudgingly accepted me, that was only a temporary thing.

“Fine,” I said. “You put whoever you want with us. But I’m definitely going.”

Prieto nodded, got out of the car, and began giving orders to break down his investigation.

Andy and I would find these people.

And when we did … hell would descend if Andy had anything to say about it.

*   *   *

I braced myself at the front door for the smell. On top of the trauma of the evening, I wasn’t sure that I could really face it, but I needed to see Andy. I needed to talk to him about all this, pour my heart out, tell him just how awful I felt. He was the only one I
could
tell.

I unlocked the door and came inside, locked it, and realized that I was holding my breath, dreading the moment … but I forced myself to relax.

And the smell that washed over me was nothing like what I’d been imagining. It was unbelievably sweet and clean and lovely, and I found myself closing my eyes in an explosion of sensual ecstasy. I moaned in utter satisfaction and sank bonelessly into the nearest chair as it rolled over me and through me, taking all of my day’s frustration and exhaustion along with it.

The ultimate aromatherapy.

“Wow,” I said dreamily.

“See?” Andy said. I opened my eyes—I hadn’t even realized that I’d closed them—and saw him standing in front of me, arms folded, smiling. “I promised it’d get better, didn’t I?”

“Wow.” It was all I could really manage. The only thing I could compare this feeling to was that of waking up safe in his arms in the hush of the early morning after a fantastic night of sex and sleep. “That is—wow.” I was a pretty fair potion maker, but this—this was a master class, and it was beyond amazing.

Andy helped me stand up, then he put his arms around me and kissed me, and for a man wearing a girly apron he kissed with a lot of authority and great skill. It took awhile before I was able to get my head together enough to murmur, “What
is
that stuff?”

“I damn sure hope you don’t mean what I just did with my lips because I thought I gave it a real good effort, and it was pretty clear—”

“The potion, Andy.”

“Little something I developed back in the day. I made it mostly for you,” he said, meeting my eyes and holding them. “Just wanted you to not feel so damn bad every day you come dragging home from that office place. It’s not right that you work so hard like that.”

“I know, I know, you can earn money, I’m sure it’s against your Old West code to have your girl out working for living. But I—we—need the paycheck. The resurrection business isn’t what it used to be. The last job I had barely covered a month’s mortgage after I paid for supplies.”

“Don’t you mock my code, ma’am, it was the way I was brought up. It rubs me raw not to take care of a good woman the way I should.” He hesitated, then said, “I’ve got something for you.”

“Something more than this? Because this is
amazing.
” I inhaled that intoxicating aroma again. It was the human equivalent of catnip, that smell.

“I’ve been taking on some side jobs,” he said, and dug something out of his pocket. “Here.”

It was a roll of cash. A huge roll. I blinked, weighed it, and focused on the numbers that showed at the front.

That was a
hundred-dollar bill.
“Andy…” I took the rubber band off and fanned the cash out. It was all hundreds. At a quick estimate, I was holding at least five thousand dollars. “Oh my God. How—?”

“Told you. Side jobs.” He smiled and kissed my nose again. “Make you feel any better?”

“My
God.
That’s just—” I blew out a breath, searching for some word to describe how I felt, and failing miserably. “Amazing. Thank you.”

His dark eyes were intent on me, a little wary, but mostly pleased. “So I did all right?”

“You didn’t have to do this.” I put my hand gently against his face, and he kissed my palm without breaking eye contact. “We don’t know how much energy you can expend without hurting yourself. Doing anything magical without me … that’s dangerous, Andy.”

He shrugged. “Spent most of my life on the edge, sweetness. Ain’t like dangerous is new territory to me.”