Wild Hunt (2 page)

S
taring
at the fluttering crime scene tape that cordoned off the front of the church, my stomach flipped with nausea. This was the last place I wanted to be; the nightmares over the demon Father Matthew had summoned to take me still plagued me and made my attempts at sleep almost impossible.

“Are you all right?” Nic asked, his face illuminated by the flash of the blue and red lights cast by the cop cars that surrounded the area.

“Yeah, I just wasn’t expecting to be back here so soon,” I said honestly, hugging my arms around my body to ward off the chill that threatened to set my teeth chattering.

The activity, at least, wasn’t focussed on the church itself, and part of me hoped it would mean I wouldn’t have to enter the building. At least that way I could try and avoid the overspill of spent magic and traumatic memories that were now ingrained into the very stone walls the church was built from.

Nic wrapped his arms around me, momentarily surprising me, and I froze in his grip as he drew me in against his chest. It didn’t bother him, his arms tightening around me until the tension ebbed from my shoulders. He was warm, the welcoming musky scent of his aftershave doing nothing to mask the clean scent that was his skin.

Breathing him in, I tried to push away the fear that threatened to claw its way up my throat. I didn’t want to be here, but I had a job to do. As a member of the Elite, fear wouldn’t help me get the job done. It would help to keep me alive when there was something worth fearing, but right now my fear was irrational, especially when I’d been the one to put the demon down with my own power.

The sound of Graham awkwardly clearing his throat made me jump and I jerked out of Nic’s grip. Graham gave me a look that bordered on disapproval and I fought the urge to do something stupid just to defy him. What did it matter what he thought of my relationship with Nic? I wasn’t asking him to date him….

“This better be good, Graham. You pulled me away from something important,” I said, irritation colouring my words.

“I can see that,” he answered dryly, his gaze travelling down over the dress I wore. His disapproval intensified and then, like the expression in his eyes, it was gone, replaced with that blank cop face he was so damned good at pulling off. It made him impossible to read. But at least if I couldn’t read him, then I wouldn’t spend the entire time focussing on why he disapproved so thoroughly of Nic and me.

“Are you going to show me?” I asked, moving out of the safe circle of Nic’s arms. The second his touch fell away from my body, I felt colder and the world seemed a hell of a lot harsher than it had just moments before.

“Yeah,” Graham said, gesturing for me to follow him. “Your friend can come too; his brother is already here….” If words could wound, Nic would already be bleeding, and he shot me a curious glance as we both ducked beneath the crime scene tape that stopped any non-law enforcement from wandering onto the scene.

Following Graham across the parking lot and around the back of the church, I kept my eyes peeled for any clues that might give me some sort of warning of what exactly I was about to stumble into. But there was nothing; everything looked exactly as it should.

Except for the smell.

It gradually intensified as we headed down the side of the church—a combination of butcher shop and rot that threatened to curdle the contents of my stomach. Reaching the verge of the footpath, I paused and stared at the scene laid out in front of me.

I hadn’t been working for the Elite that long and I’d seen some pretty spectacularly awful sights in my time, but nothing could have prepared me for this….

My eyes struggled to focus, as though my brain refused to put the pieces of the puzzle together, “pieces” being the operative word. The human brain is pretty special, its primary job being to keep us alive, our organs functioning, blood pumping. But it has so many other uses, and in this instance it deliberately refused to identify what I was staring across at, as though it knew that knowledge would be enough to send me screaming into the void.

I sucked in a deep breath; I knew my mistake the second the smell hit me full force, almost rocking me back on my feet.

Blood, lots of it.

And gore.

The pieces were bits of flesh.

My eyes focussed in on one perfectly manicured hand that lay in the grass just inches from where my boots were. The second my brain allowed me to see the hand, everything else snapped into focus and I spun away. Stumbling back toward the church, I made it to a run off drain that sank into the ground before the contents of my stomach decided to make a violent reappearance.

Vomit burned the back of my nose and throat, my eyes watering with the pressure as I continued to retch. Every time I struggled to take a breath deep enough to clear my senses, I got another whiff of the scene spread out behind my back and it only sent my stomach spasming once more.

A bottle of water appeared next to my head and I grabbed it gratefully, rinsing my mouth out in a desperate attempt to regain control. A tissue appeared next, and I used it to scrub my face and the cold clammy sweat that covered my forehead.

Straightening up, I expected to see Graham; instead, Jason stared down at me, his expression a mixture of pity and curiosity.

“Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first to lose your lunch here. I’ve never seen anything like it before myself,” he said, his tone almost friendly as he glanced at something just behind me.

“Let me guess, you weren’t one of the weak stomached idiots?” I said, silently berating myself. The one thing you were never supposed to do was vomit on top of the crime scene. At all costs, that should have been avoided, and if I’d allowed my brain to keep me in ignorance, I’d have managed it….

He gave me a tight-lipped smile and stalked over to Graham and Nic who still stood staring out at the mangled mess of bodies. Swallowing back some of the water, I did my best to compose myself before turning back to face the scene. I’d made enough of a fool of myself; I didn’t need to do it again.

The scene hadn’t changed. It still looked as though someone had run a crowd of people through the propeller of a plane. Making my way slowly back over to Graham, Nic, and Jason, I tried not to focus on the details, but I couldn’t shake the memory of the manicured hand from my head.

“What did this?” I asked, finally controlling my roiling stomach long enough to ask a question.

Graham shook his head and continued to stare out at the scene, but the unaffected expression he wore was simply a cleverly created mask. The slight flinching around his eyes gave away the fact that he was just as bothered by the scene as everyone else.

The sound of someone else vomiting had me closing my eyes and fighting to control my own physical reactions. My senses were still raw and the least little thing could set me off. But it at least made me feel a little better to know I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t control such a violent bodily reaction.

“Your guess now is as good as mine,” Graham answered. “It has all the hallmarks of an animal attack, but what kind of animal do you know that would do something like this?”

“Rogue shifters maybe?” Nervously, I scrubbed my hands against the side of my dress. I could still remember the feel of the shifters blood on my hand. The moment they’d attacked me, I’d blacked out, but snippets were slowly coming back to me. I’d enjoyed killing them all, and as much as I tried to pretend it was all the fault of the demon mark, part of me just didn’t buy it.

Graham nodded but I could tell he was lost in contemplation. “True, but shifters don’t do things like that,” he said, turning and pointing at the back of the church.

Gratefully, I turned away from the gruesome scene and stared up at the huge magical symbol burned into the back wall of the church. From the corner of my eye, I could make out a slight cobweb of glittering magic that still clung to the runic mark—or at least that was what my brain decided it was. Despite resembling a rune, it was like none I’d ever seen before.

“Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what it means?” Graham asked.

I shook my head; this was so far outside my area of expertise. I wasn’t even sure where to begin to figure out what it meant.

“It’s Fae,” Jason said, the control in his voice causing me to shoot a sideways glance in his direction.

“How do you know?” Nic said, staring up at the symbol with the same level of morbid curiosity I knew my expression resembled.

“I’ve seen one like it before. Only pictures—drawings, actually. The Vatican has an extensive library not available to the general public. Some of the things you can learn about…. Well, it’s eye-opening,” he said, catching my eye.

It wasn’t a threat but it certainly wasn’t far off. Whatever he was learning from Lily, he still hadn’t quite worked out what role I played in it all. The moment she wanted to spill my secret, the game would be over….

“What does it mean?” I asked, meeting his hard gaze with one of my own.

“No idea; no one knows where or what it means, just that every time it’s appeared, there’s always a trail of bodies following it.”

I didn’t answer him; there wasn’t any point, we all knew about the trail of bodies. There was certainly enough of them spread across the old cemetery behind us. But without a translation for the symbol, we were working blind, and that was never a good thing, especially if we really were dealing with the Fae.

“I thought they stayed on their side of the Veil?” Graham asked.

“Not all of them,” I blurted out before I could catch myself.

The three men standing next to me turned to give me a curious glance. “Well it’s true; Faeries find it hard to conceal their true natures, but they’re not the only species of Fae. Plenty of others have far more powerful glamour.”

It wasn’t a lie—after all, Victoria’s glamour was extremely powerful to conceal what she was. But, as she’d explained to me, a changeling’s ability to blend in relied on glamour; Faeries were far too vain and egotistical to try to pass for human.

“Where’s Victoria? If this is Fae, then she should be here; she could probably tell us what the symbol means….”

Graham coughed awkwardly and glanced to the side, and from the hardening of Jason’s expression, I could tell they’d “forgotten” to contact her.

“You knew it was Fae before I got here, didn’t you?” I said, unable to keep the angry accusation from my voice as I turned on Graham. The demon mark tingled and burned against my shoulder as though feeding on the anger that bubbled in my veins.

“Jason might have mentioned it,” he said, refusing to meet my challenge.

“And you thought it a good idea to leave the one Fae expert you’ve got working for you out of all of this?”

“I thought it was a good idea…. We don’t truly know what changelings are capable of,” Jason answered instead. I fought the urge to whirl on him and wipe the smug look from his face.

“Graham, why didn’t you call her?” I demanded, clenching my hands into fists.

“Because I don’t trust her … yet,” he added quickly, and glanced in my direction. Graham’s expression softened and I could see the guilt in his eyes.

How could I blame him for not trusting Victoria? Hell, I wasn’t even fully sure just how much I could trust her, and here I was holding it against Graham for having the same thoughts.
Hypocritical
didn’t even begin to cut it.

And even that wasn’t fair; she’d more than proven herself. Not trusting her wasn’t right; she deserved to be here, to be just as involved in what was happening as the rest of us. Maybe even more so, if it truly was the Fae we were dealing with.

“Call her, Graham,” I said letting my anger go.

Jason started, “I don’t want….”

Finally, I turned on Jason and shot him a dirty look. “What you want in this doesn’t really matter. This isn’t your case; you have no say over what happens here.”

“I am Saga Venatione, this is just as much my case as it is yours….”

Sighing, I pushed my hand back through my hair. The wind was beginning to pick up, whipping the stray red strands around my face, causing the smell of my strawberry shampoo to mingle with the smell of death that pervaded the air.

“No, it isn’t. You’ve got jurisdiction when it comes to witches and you’ve got the witch you were after—she’s in custody. This is an Elite case through and through.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if I was right or not, but I needed to say something to slow him down; he was far too determined to butt into everything. That made him dangerous, and I really didn’t need a witch hunter watching over my shoulder at every move I made on the case.

“She’s right, Jason. This isn’t your case, it’s mine.” Graham said, his sudden support catching me by surprise.

Jason didn’t say anything, but I could tell from the way his lips thinned and the little vein his temple pulsed that he was seriously pissed. He’d probably find a way to make this his case, but until then, at least we had control, and that was all that mattered.

“I’ll call Victoria,” Graham said, turning away and crossing the small pathway at the back of the church, leaving me alone with Nic and his brother.

“You’re in way over your head on this one,” Jason said softly.

“What makes you think that?” I asked, doing my damnedest to keep the eagerness from my voice.

“The Fae are dangerous; if this is them and they’ve decided to come out of the woodwork, then we’d all better hope and pray that they send someone else to clean up this mess….”

If I didn’t know better, I might have thought there was a hint of fear in Jason’s voice. But he was a Saga Venatione, and from everything I’d ever read about them, they didn’t get frightened. Hell, they were the ones to fear; Shadow Sorcerers had cowered before their power, allowing themselves to be completely wiped out. And Jason frightened me; the thought that there might be something out there that he was afraid of … well, it didn’t exactly fill me with joy.

“Will they send someone to clean it up?” I asked.

Jason shrugged and turned his full attention on me, his eyes probing mine, searching for something only he knew to look for. I felt him, felt what he was calling out to my magic, but the demon mark was far more powerful now and unlike before, Jason’s abilities had no sway over my Shadow Sorcerer side.