"Why?"
"Because it's too selective to be a natural anxiety like a vampire's ability to hypnotize with its eyes. A vamp can bespell one person or a room full of people, but it can't do an entire street except for one house. It's too exact. You need to be able to organize your magic for this, and that means a spell."
He picked one of the rough-looking blades of grass, running it between his fingers. "So we're looking for a witch."
"I know something about wiccan and other flavors of witchcraft, and I don't know any way a lone wiccan, or even a coven could do this. I'm not saying there isn't a human spell worker involved somewhere, but there is definitely something otherworldly, nonhuman, at work here."
"We got some blood traces off the broken door."
I nodded. "Great. I wish someone would tell me when we find a clue. Everyone, including Ted, is playing it so close to the chest, I've spent most of my time going over ground that someone else has already figured out."
"Ask me and I'll tell you anything you want to know." He tossed the grass blade to the ground. "But we better be getting back before you get a worse reputation than just dating me."
I didn't argue. Put any woman in an area run mostly by men and rumors will fly. Unless you make it very clear that you are off limits, there is also a certain competitiveness that sets in. Some men are either trying to run you out of town or get into your pants. They don't seem to know any other way to deal with a woman. If you're not a sexual object, you're a threat. Always makes me wonder what kind of childhoods they had.
Hernando stood brushing grass and dirt off the back of his pants. He seemed to have had a dandy childhood, or at least he'd turned out well. Congrats to his parents. Someday he'd bring home a nice girl and have nice children in a nice house with yard work on the weekends, and every Sunday dinner at one set of grandparents or another. A nice life if you can get it, and he still got to solve murders. Talk about having it all.
What did I have? What did I really have? I was too young for a mid-life crisis, and too old for an attack of conscience. We started walking back towards the cars. I was hugging my arms again, and had to force myself to stop. I lowered my arms to my sides and walked along beside Ramirez ... ah, Hernando, like nothing was wrong.
"Marks said that one of the first cops on the scene had his throat nearly bitten out. How did that happen?"
"I wasn't here for the first rush. The lieutenant waited to call me in." There was a trace of harshness in his voice. He was gentle, but not if you pushed him. "But I heard that the three living victims attacked the cops. They had to subdue them with batons. They just kept trying to take pieces out of them."
"Why would they do that? How would they do it? I mean you skin most people and rip off pieces, they aren't going to feel like fighting."
"I helped pick up some of the earlier survivors, and they didn't fight. They just lay there and moaned. They were hurt and they acted hurt."
"Have they ever traced down Thad Bromwell, the son of the first scene I saw?"
Hernando's eyes widened. "Marks didn't call you?"
I shook my head.
"He is such a shithead."
I agreed. "What? Did they find the body?"
"He's alive. He was away on a camping trip with friends."
"He's alive," I said. Then whose soul had I seen hovering in the bedroom? I didn't say it out loud because I'd forgotten to mention the soul to the police. Marks had been ready to chase me out of town. If I'd started talking about souls floating near the ceiling, he'd have gotten matches and a stake.
But someone had died in that room, and the soul was still confused about where to go. Most of the time if the soul hovers, it hovers over the body, the remains. Only three people lived in the house, two of them mutilated, and the boy somewhere else.
I had an idea. "These new mutilation victims, they kept fighting, kept trying to take bites out of the officers?"
He nodded.
"Are you sure about the bites, not just hitting, but like they were trying to feed?"
"I don't know about feeding, but it was all bite wounds." He was looking at me strangely. "You've thought of something."
I nodded. "I may have. I have to see the other body, the one behind the door first, but then I think it's time to go back to the hospital."
"Why?"
I started walking again, and he grabbed my arm, turned me to face him, There was fierceness in his eyes, an intensity that trembled down his arm. "You've only been here a couple of days. I've been dealing with this for weeks. What do you know that I don't?"
I looked at his hand until he let me go, but I told him. He was having nightmares about this shit, and I hadn't gotten to that point yet. "I'm an animator. I raise zombies for a living. My specialty is the dead. One thing that the living dead have in common with one other from zombie, to ghoul, to vampire, is that they must feed off the living to sustain themselves."
"Zombies don't eat people," he said.
"If a zombie is raised and the animator that raised it can't control it, then it can go wild. It becomes a flesh-eating zombie."
"I thought that was just stories."
I shook my head. "No, I've seen it."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that maybe there are no survivors. Maybe there are just dead and the living dead."
He actually went pale. I touched his elbow to steady him, but he stood straight. "I'm all right. I'm all right." He looked at me. "What do you do with a flesh-eating zombie?"
"Once it's gone amok, there isn't anything anyone can do except destroy it. The only way to do that is fire. Napalm is good, but any fire will do."
"They'll never let us roast these people."
"Not unless we can prove what I'm saying is true."
"How can you prove it?" he asked.
"I'm not sure yet, but I'll talk to Doctor Evans and we'll come up with something."
"Why would the earlier vics be docile and these new ones be vicious?"
"I don't know, unless the spell or the monster is changing, maybe growing stronger. I just don't know, Hernando. If I'm right about there being no survivors, then I've had my brilliant idea for the day."
He nodded, face very serious. He stared at the ground. "Jesus, if they are all dead, then that means that this thing we're after is making more of itself?"
"I'd be surprised if it was ever human but maybe. I don't know. I do know that if it is growing stronger and the skinned ones are growing more violent,
I then the creature may be controlling them."
We looked at each other. "I'll call the hospital and get more men down there."
"Call the Santa Fe hospital, too."
He nodded and broke into a half-run across the gravel, moving through the cars like he had a purpose. The other cops were watching him, as if wondering what the rush was. I hadn't asked Hernando if they'd checked for underground hiding places. Shit. I went to find Bradley and ask him. Then I'd go back into the house one last time, see the last body, and then ... off to the hospital to answer the age-old question: what is life and when is death a sure thing?
THE MAN'S FACE stared up at me, eyes wide, glazed, unseeing. His head was still attached to his spine, but the chest had been split open as though two great hands had dug into his rib cage and pulled. The heart was missing. The lungs had been ripped, probably when the rib cage gave. The stomach had been punctured, giving a sour smell to the smaller room. The liver and intestines lay in a wet heap to one side of the body as if they had all spilled out at the same time. The lower intestine still curled down inside the lower end of the body cavity. By smell alone I was pretty sure that the intestines hadn't been pierced.
I sat back on my heels beside the body. Blood had splattered the lower half of the man's face, drops of it scattering across the rest of his face and into his graying hair. Violent, very violent, and very quick. I stared into his sightless eyes and felt nothing. I was back to being numb and I was not complaining. I think if I'd seen this body first, then I'd have been horrified, but the remains in the dining room had just used me up for the day. This was awful, but there were worse things, and those things were in the next room.
But it wasn't the body that was interesting. It was the room. There was a circle of salt around the body. A book lay within the circle covered so thickly in blood that I couldn't read the pages it was opened to. They'd taken all the pictures and videos they were going to in this room so I used borrowed gloves to raise the book up. It was bound with embossed leather, but there was no title. The middle half of the book had soaked so much blood up that the pages were sticking together. I didn't try and pry them apart. The police and the Feds had technicians for delicate work. I was careful not to close the book and lose the place the man was probably reading from. For all I knew the book had been on the desk that the man shoved against the door, and it had simply fallen to the floor, opening on its own. But to think that meant we had no clue, so we'd all pretend we were sure that the man had deliberately opened the book. In the middle of being chased by a monster that had just butchered his wife, he went for this book, opened it, started to read. Why?
The book was hand-written and I read enough to know that it was a book of shadows. It was the spell book, sort of, of a practicing witch. One that followed an older or more orthodox tradition than the neo-pagan movement Gardian or Alexandrian, maybe. Though again I couldn't be sure. I'd had one semester in college on comparative witchcraft, though now I'm sure they called it comparative wiccan. Of the wiccan practitioners I knew personally, none of them practiced anything this traditional.
I put the book carefully back where'd I'd found it and stood. The bookshelves against the near wall were full of books on psychic research, the preternatural, mythology, folklore, and wicca. I had some of the same books at home, so the books alone weren't proof of much. But the clincher was the altar. It was an antique wooden chest with a silk cloth over the top. There were silver candlesticks with partially burned candles in them. The candles had runes carved into them. Other than the fact that they were runes, I couldn't read them.
There was a round mirror with no frame sitting flat between the candles. There was a small bowl of dried herbs to one side, a larger bowl of water, and a small carved box tight shut.
"Is that what I think it is?" Bradley asked.
"An altar. He was a practitioner. I think that book is his book of shadows, his spell book for lack of a better term."
"What happened here?"
"There's salt in the floor of the dining room."
"That's not unusual," Bradley said.
"No, but a salt circle is. I think he was somewhere further back in the house. He heard his wife screaming or heard the monsters. Something alerted him. He didn't come running with a gun, Bradley. He came running with a handful of salt. Maybe he had something else in his hands or on his person, some charm or amulet. I don't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not here."
"Are you saying he threw salt at this thing?"
"Yes."
"Why, for god's sake?"
"Salt and flame are two of our oldest purifying agents. I use salt to bind a zombie back into its grave. You can throw it on fairies, fetches, a whole host of critters, and it will make them hesitate, maybe not much more."
"So he threw salt and maybe some charm at the creature, then what?"
"I think that's why the monster stopped, and why the tablecloth full of trophies is still sitting by the table."
"Why didn't the monster go back and get the trophies after he killed the man?"
"I don't know. Maybe he finished the spell before he died. Maybe he drove it from the house. I'd like to get a real wiccan in here to look over the scene."
"Wiccan, you mean witch."
"Yes, but most of them prefer the term wiccan."
"Politically correct," Bradley said.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"What could a real wiccan tell us that you can't?"
"She might know what spell he used. If the spell drove the thing from the house, then we might be able to use a version of the same spell to trap or even destroy it. Something this man did drove the creature out of this house before it was ready to go. He forced it to leave behind its goody bag and to leave without gutting his body. It's the first weakness we've seen in this thing."
"Franklin won't like bringing in a witch. Neither will the locals. If I force everyone to bring this wiccan in, and it doesn't work or she talks to the media, then the next time you see me I won't be an FBI Agent."
"Aren't you supposed to try every angle to solve this crime? Isn't that your job?"
"The FBI doesn't use witches, Anita."
I shook my head. "How the hell did you get me in then?"
"Forrester had already brought you in on the case. All I had to do was stand up to Marks."
"And Franklin," I said.
He nodded. "I outrank Franklin."
"Then why is he so snotty?"
"It seems to be a natural talent of his."
"I don't want to get you fired, Bradley." I went to the overturned desk and started opening the drawers. There was a gun cabinet in the living room. Most people who had a cabinet full of them kept one for personal protection.
"What are you looking for?" he asked.
I opened the larger bottom drawer, and there it was. "Come here, Bradley."
He came to peer into the drawer. The gun was a 9 mm Smith and Wesson. It lay on the side of the drawer where it had fallen when the desk tipped over. Bradley stared down at the gun. "Maybe it's not loaded. Maybe he had the ammo locked in the living room."
"Can I touch it?"
He nodded.
I lifted it, and just by the weight I was pretty sure it was loaded, but it wasn't a gun I was familiar with, so I popped the clip and showed it to Bradley.
"Full," he said, voice soft.
"Full." I slid the clip back inside the gun, hitting it sharply with the palm of my hand to make it click. "He had a loaded 9 mm in his desk, but he grabbed salt and his book of shadows. He didn't waste time grabbing for the gun. He either knew what the thing was, or he sensed something about it and knew the gun wouldn't work, and that the spell would." I raised the gun up so that Bradley looked at it, the barrel pointed at the ceiling. "The spell worked, Bradley, We need to know what it was, and the only way to know that is to get a witch in here."
"Can't you take the book and just show her pictures?"
"What if the position of the book is important? What if there are clues to the spell in the circle itself? I don't practice this kind of ritual magic, Bradley. For all I know if you get someone in here, they may be able to sense something that I can't. Do you really want to take the chance that pictures and just seeing the book in their own home will be just as good as seeing it here like this?
"You're asking me to risk my career."
"I am asking you to risk your career," I said, "but I'm also asking you to not risk any more innocent lives. Do you really want to see this done to another couple, another family?"
"How can you be so sure that this is the key?"
"I'm not sure, but it's the closest thing we've seen to a break in this case. I'd hate to lose it because of career jitters."
"It's not just that, Anita. If we use anything more exotic than psychics and we fail, then the entire unit could be disbanded."
I placed the gun in his hand. He stared at it. "I trust you to do the right thing, Bradley. That's why you're one of the good guys."
He shook his head. "And to think I blackmailed Marks to get you back on the case."
"You knew I was a pain in the ass when you fought to get me back on the case. It's one of my many charms."
That earned me a weak smile. He was still holding the gun flat across his hand. His fingers tightened around it. "You know any witches in the area?"
I grinned at him. "No, but I bet Ted does." I shook my head. "I've never hugged an FBI agent, but I'm tempted."
That made him smile, but his eyes stayed cautious, unhappy. I was asking a lot from him. I touched his arm. "I wouldn't ask you to bring in a witch if I didn't think it was our best shot. I wouldn't ask just on a whim."
He gave me a long look. "I know. You are one of the least whimsical people I've ever met."
"I would say you should see me when I'm not neck deep in corpses, but it doesn't really matter. I don't get much lighter than this."
"I've checked the cases you've helped the St. Louis PD solve, Anita. Gruesome stuff. How old are you now?"
I frowned at the question then answered it. "Twenty-six."
"How long have you been helping the police?"
"About four years."
"The Bureau switches its agents off the serial killer shit about every two years. Whether they want to transfer or not. Then after a break, they can come back."
"You think I need a break?"
"Everyone burns out eventually, Anita, even you."
"Actually, I'm thinking about a vacation when I get home."
He nodded. "That's good."
I looked up at him. "Do I look like I need a break?"
"I've seen it before in other agents' eyes."
"Seen what?" I asked.
"Like your eyes are a cup, and every horror you see is another drop added. Your eyes are full of the things you've seen, the things you've clone. Get out while there's still some room for things that don't bleed."
"That is damn poetic for an FBI agent."
"One friend stayed with it until he had a heart attack."
"I think I'm a little young for that," I said.
"Another friend ate his gun."
We stared at each other. "I'm not the suicidal type."
"I also don't want to see you in jail."
My eyes widened. "Whoa. I do not know what you're talking about."
"The state department confirmed Otto Jefferies is a retired government worker, but they couldn't access the rest of his file at the present time. I've got a friend at the state department with a level two secret clearance. He couldn't access Otto Jefferies' files either. He's a total black out, which means he'sa spook of some kind. You do not want to get involved with the spooks, Anita. If they try to recruit you, say no. Don't try to find out who Otto really is, or what he did. Don't get nosy or you'll end up in a hole somewhere. Just work with him, leave him alone, and move on."
"You sound like you're talking from personal experience," I said.
He shook his head. "I'm not going to talk about it."
"You brought it up," I said.
"I told you just enough to get your attention, I hope. Just trust me on this. Stay the fuck away from these people."
I nodded. "It's okay, Bradley. I don't like ... Otto. And he hates women, so don't worry. I don't think it would occur to him to try and recruit me."
"Good." He put the gun back in the desk drawer and closed it.
"Besides," I said, "what would the top secret set want with me?"
He looked at me, and it was a look that I wasn't used to getting. The look said, I was being naive. "Anita, you can raise the dead."
"So?"
"I can think of a half a dozen uses for that one talent alone."
"Like what?"
"Prisoner dies in interrogation. Doesn't matter. Raise him up again. A world leader is assassinated. We need a few days to get our troops ready, raise the leader for a few days. Give us time to control the panic, or stop the revolution."
"Zombies are not alive, Bradley. They couldn't pass for a country's leader."
"From a distance, for two or three days, don't even try and say you couldn't pull that off."
"I wouldn't do it," I said.
"Even if it meant that hundreds of lives could be saved, or hundreds of Americans could be evacuated in safety."
I looked at him. "I ... I don't know."
"No matter how good the cause seems at the beginning, Anita, eventually it won't be. Eventually, when you're so far in you can't see daylight, they'll ask things of you that you won't want to do."
I was hugging myself again, which irritated me. No one had approached me to do anything on an international level. Olaf thought I was good for only one thing and that did not include helping the government. But it did make me wonder how Edward had met him. Edward was spooky, but was he a spook?
I looked up at Bradley's so serious face. "I'll be careful." Then I had a thought. "Did someone approach you about me?"
"I was thinking about offering you a job with us." I raised eyebrows at him.
He laughed. "Yeah, after looking through your file, it was decided that you're too independent, too much a wild card. It was decided that you not thrive in a bureaucratic setting."
"You got that right, but I am flattered you thought of me."
His face went back to serious, and there were lines in his face that I hadn't seen before. It made him look forty plus. Most of the time he didn't. "Your file got flagged, Anita. It got moved up the line. I don't know where to or who asked for it, but there is government work out there for the independent wild card if they have specialized enough skills."
I opened my mouth, closed it, and finally said, "I'd say you were joking but you're not, are you?"