Muddy Waters (Otherwhere Book 1) Page 4

  He nodded. “Seven, actually. It’s a similar situation as the animals and the bakemono family. Wanton destruction, extremely messy, no suspects. And the bodies…” Qyll let out a breath. “We’re fairly certain it was early this morning. UPS came to deliver a package and―ah, here we are.”

  Across the lawn, around the house, hung the deep purple-green haze that signaled dark magic. Like smoke after fireworks, it drifted, thick and menacing. Foggy shapes swam in and out of it―animotoids. Supernatural cockroaches.

  In the foyer, we found Constance Pryam, Special Agent in Charge of Supernormal Investigations. She nodded to us, making her way around piles of rubble. Pryam could be forty, or she could be eighty. It’s hard to tell. She’s tall and wiry, like an Olympic sprinter. Her smooth skin, ink-black eyes, high cheekbones, and closely cropped hair make her appear otherworldly, like a supermodel from a country of warrior women, but the look in her eyes is sharp and wary.

  “Reddick,” she said, her tone crisp.

  I mock-saluted. “Present, sir.” She ignored me and motioned for us to follow.

  “Your first real crime scene, Agent Reddick. Considering you got only the cliff notes version of FBI field training, I’m very eager to see how you do on your maiden voyage.”

  I swallowed hard and forced a grin.

  The three of us went up the curving marble staircase to the second-floor. The purple vapor got thicker and more plentiful with every step. Animotoids crept in and out of my sight, devouring the black magical residue clinging pretty much everywhere.

  Uneasiness settled into my limbs. The house was―had been―beautiful. Stylish and high-tech, it was something you’d see as the “after” on a home renovation show, all glass and brushed chrome and fancy gadgets. I paused at the top of the steps, looking down into the front hall. The door hadn’t just been opened, it had exploded inward. Shards of wood were scattered everywhere. The remnants of a sophisticated home security system lay in a tangled mess halfway across the room. Anything glass had been reduced to sand. Dirt and mess everywhere. Forensics moved about, snapping pictures and taking samples.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  The first thing I thought when we got to the upper hallway was: I am surely going to toss my waffles. Right in front of Pryam. And Qyll. And the rest of the team. The second thing was that someone had dreamed up, planned, and executed an amazingly complex black magic spell. Black magic leaves a distinctive trail, like a smudge on glass―this greenish-purple residue, thick and putrid, with a very particular scent. Like rotting corpses and raw fear. White magic has its telltale signs, too. And none of those were present.

  The stench of blood and black magic was beyond overwhelming. And I’ve smelled some pretty foul things in my life―one of those stinky jungle flowers, Demon excrement, a rotten hellspawn. But this… it had become a living, prowling, snarling thing. Even though half the house had been smashed and burned to ashes, the fresh air and lingering smoke were no match for the metallic tang of Human exsanguination and plain old-fashioned evil.

  I stepped into the hall behind Qyll and Pryam. What was left of the hall. My stomach contracted. I took some deep breaths through my mouth as nausea swelled from my tripes. Both knees began to wobble. Keep it together, Reddick.

  At the far end, walls had been bashed out, the trees swaying beyond the hole. Ceilings dripped dead wiring. Stinking red fluids coated every surface. It was like the elevator scene from The Shining. On a scale of 10,000.

  I took a breath through my mouth. And another. My eyes watered.

  Qyll looked at me. “Are you all right? Are you going to vomit?”

  His eyes met mine. Something like concern swam in his, but I was too nauseated to dwell on it. I swallowed hard and shook my head, waving at him dismissively.

  “Just peachy.”

  It didn’t help that one of the FBI office clerks took to calling me ‘Easy Queasy’ and reminding me, ‘queasy does it.’ I can’t help that I have a sensitive inner ear. Or that I get easily motion sick and bad smells make me barf. Not my fault.

  We kept going down the hall.

  “The victims are in here.” Pryam pointed to a sheet of plastic hanging between ragged edges of wall. She handed us disposable latex gloves and surgical masks, which we all donned.

  The room was unlike anything I’d seen before. It was how I imagined a palace looked after a house party at Caligula’s. Bodies were haphazardly flung around. Their clothes hung from an enormous crystal chandelier, swinging in the breeze from the hole in the outside wall. Under streaks of filth, bone and muscle peeked through, as though every last drop of blood had been drained, leaving only the pinkish tissue. Besides the viscera and blood, there looked to be dirt blotched on the walls and the bodies, along with Zeus knows what else.

  Before I could make a whit of sense of the scene, the psychic assault started. It’s different for all practitioners, but for me, walking into a space where this level of black magic has been performed so recently is like being locked in one of those iron maidens that’s full of sharp knives dipped in battery acid, while extremely loud death metal music blares in my ear to an accompaniment of a million strobe lights. And I’m not that sensitive, even. People who have a real gift? If I was one of them, I’d be in a coma by now.

  Closing my eyes, I reached for my necklace, a silver and moonstone triple goddess pendant. I imagined a bubble of warm light surrounding me, scented with chocolate chip cookies, the arrows of black energy bouncing harmlessly off it. After several moments, tension drained from me. My years of practice were serving me well. Just like riding a bike, it all comes right back.

  When I opened my eyes again, I found Qyll staring intently at me.

  “What do you know about the victims?” I managed to ask.

  Pryam reappeared, her gaze like tempered steel. She’s Human (well, Human-ish), but has an otherworldly way of looking at things. I mean that literally and figuratively. Very soon after meeting her, you start to notice Pryam doesn’t pull any punches. “Someone with your talents could have done this.”

  “No. Nope. Wasn’t me.” I had no other way to say it. “I mean, I am certainly capable, if I really, really wanted to, but this,” I gestured to the room, “would likely end my cushy job with SI and get me sent to the Otherwhere version of a concentration camp. And I’m kinda partial to this dimension. Who else? Demons could do this. Easily. Particularly savvy Werewolves? No. Perhaps a really pissed off Vamp. But the Vamp… would have to have… drunk….” It dawned on me that what I thought was clothing hanging overhead was really skin.

  Whole, intact suits of human skin.

  I rushed into the hallway, ripping off the flimsy mask, and puked enthusiastically into a decorative ceramic vase that had somehow survived the onslaught. Several times.

  Note to self: be sure to eat another breakfast. The first one isn’t going to count.

  When I returned, it was to Qyll saying, “We know it wasn’t you. Just trying to make a list of the kind of people it would take to do this. We can’t rule out magic by anyone these days.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He glanced at Pryam then me. “SI was created to address just this. Strong magic in a realm where there has typically been very weak magic handled by inexperienced practitioners. But we’ve been noticing… Knackers, I believe people call them.”

  “We’ll talk about this later, Agent Toutant. Right now, let’s get moving,” Pryam said.

  Her gaze lingered on me for the exact amount of time it took for me to grow intensely uncomfortable.

  “So, uh, whose house is this?” I asked, my voice thin. I wiped my wet eyes with the back of my hand. I have thrown up so many times in my life in so many situations it hardly bothers me anymore, except for being a little embarrassed to have done so in front of my boss and a coworker.

  “Belongs to one of the vics. A Benjamin Koby.” She consulted her e-tablet.

  “What else?”

  Pryam glared at me. “We d
on’t have much time, Reddick. We’ll deal with the metadata later. Forensics is chomping at the bit to get up here. What can you see?”

  I nodded and drew in another deep breath, keeping my little bubble strong. The bubble is a trick I learned as a kid, when the other kids teased me for being weird, for being a Witch. What I do is relax and imagine this shell protecting me from all the bad juju and keeping all my good juju inside. The noise of the room faded until it was just me, thinking.

  I approached one of the bodies. Without skin, their eyes and teeth were totally exposed. Eyeballs staring at nothing. Rigor mortis was well past. They looked like plates in an anatomy textbook. I tried to think of that. Pretend I was looking at Gray’s Anatomy.

  “Were they wearing wigs?” One of the women had a bright purple nylon tangle beside her head.

  “There are a couple around, but we don’t know who had them on. I’m emailing you some photos of vics now. Pre-murder.”

  I went to stand under the chandelier, trying to keep my breath steady. A photographer finished up her work, looking green about the gills as she hurried out of the room. “What about these?”

  “We brought one down. It’s over there.” Qyll pointed to a table by the window. I forced myself to stay calm and think about our art class in high school. The drawing teacher told us to think in terms of lines, shapes, negative space. Don’t think of it as a truck, think of it as a series of vertical and horizontal lines and the spaces around them. Don’t think of it as a naked person, think of it as a series of curved spaces. Don’t think of them as skinless Human beings…

  This is how I approached the specimen on the table. It was as though the inside had busted through the skin, a little bit like the front door had busted into the house. A jagged rip cleaved the dermis from forehead to groin.

  “It’s like… the insides… came out of a suit of skin. What on earth?”

  “It’s a mystery,” Qyll said drily. “Oh wait, what is it we pay you for again?”

  “Look, I’m just thinking out loud,” I shot back. “You don’t have to be an asshat about it.”

  I walked around the table, thankful for the breeze wafting in through the gaping wall, and concentrated harder. Seeking, probing. The flashes in my mind coalesced into a lightning storm. A tremendous heat swelled around me.

  Finally, I said, “Definitely blood magic. Very powerful. Very dark. But there’s an element of chaos here. Like, something went wrong, maybe? Someone was angry. Even if the skin was intact, which would suggest the killer took his time, the motivation was pure anger.”

  Pryam snorted. “What a shock. Toutant, stay here. I’m going to see about these footprints.” Her heels squished on bloody carpet.

  I concentrated again. Images swam before me. I’m not a strong Sensitive, but I can manage a sneak peek. This time, I caught a glimpse of some people milling around, sipping from martini glasses and laughing. Then one of them screaming and running for their life, but what threat set them off, I had no idea. “For blood magic, you have to have some of the, well… victim’s blood. Obviously. Occasionally, hair works or other parts of the body, such as bones or teeth.” Qyll frowned. I picked my way through the room, nudging things aside with the toe of my red cowboy boot. “There’s no summoning circle here that I can see, no marks of a source of power. I mean, it could be drowned out by all the blood. But smart money says, the killer had to be a puppet. A hired thug on borrowed power, controlled from somewhere else.”

  I have a tendency to over-explain to him, which he has never commented on, but often I get the sense he’s patiently waiting for me to shut up.

  So I kept on. “This looks like pretty unusual magic, some old Earth juju. I don’t know much about it, except a few lessons on, DON’T DO OLD BLOOD MAGIC UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. You can do little bits in certain circumstances, but you really should stay away, if you can help it.”

  “We haven’t had much experience with blood magic in the time SI has been organized,” Qyll said. “I can make an inquiry with our archives department.”

  I sighed. “Well, just by the very nature of the violence… You can’t do this kind of crap in a post-Rift world without conjuring some serious power. This? It’s not only illegal, it’s crazy-dangerous because it’s usually people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing. But I will know more once I understand who these people are. Or, were.”

  The look on Qyll’s face stoppered my babbling mouth.

  Things since the Rift have been odd, to say the least. For reasons no one can yet explain very well, the barrier between our world―what’s now referred to collectively as Earth―and Otherwhere got thin.

  Real thin.

  So wispy, in some places it vanished altogether. Otherwhere is the place you might have known as “the spirit world” or “faerie.” Sometimes, it’s Heaven or Hell. Hades, Valhalla, Takama-ga-hara, the Summerlands. It has a lot of names depending on who’s doing the talking. There are rules about what can and can’t happen when the worlds and their various inhabitants intersect. That’s where the FBI Supernormal Investigations Department comes in. On the Earth side, anyway.

  “Is there a weapon? A non-magical one?” I peered around at the detritus.

  Qyll shook his head. “Not one we can find. Nor can we locate the source of the damage to the building. It obviously had to have been something big. Like a Siberian snow troll. Or a…” He groped for words. “Bulldozer. A crane, perhaps, but there are no tire markings in the garden to support that theory.” He pointed. “These three are Human. The other four worked for Antaura. Bacchus and Jezebel Demons. None of them alone would have been strong enough to inflict this kind of structural damage. Or cause this type of carnage. And none are typically associated with murder. They’re more the type to get drunk and have a weeklong orgy.”

  All I could manage was, “Shit.” Antaura, AKA the Red Queen, owns a famous―or infamous, depending on who you ask―local hotspot that straddles the Earth and Otherwhere. Called Queen of Hearts, it caters to, well, anybody from here to the end of Otherwhere. Rumor has it, it procures for you whatever you want, be it heroin, gourmet foie gras, or a threesome with a couple of randy satyrs. You can have all three, but that’s extra. Of course, a bunch of Bacchus and Jezebel Demons would be in her employ. I can see them hanging out in her clubs, encouraging people to guzzle their fill or get down to the sexy times―basically indulge any and all physical desires.

  In the years after the Rift, the Red Queen had set up shop half in half out of Earth and put order to a certain breed of criminal chaos in the entire southeastern U.S. She isn’t allowed to perform rituals or do magic on anybody in Earth. But she hires low-level Demons and Humans who have, shall we say, flexible morals, to do it for her, and in turn, keeps them in line―out of Human jails and off everybody’s radar. I heard she started in Atlanta then moved her operation to Louisville and manages her people from here. Bully for us.

  “What about the rest?” I wandered the room, trying not get distracted by the stench. It really was enormous.

  “We have an accountant―married―and a housewife with a couple of kids. A seminary student. And the Demons. No connection we can find yet, besides the Demons working for the Queen,” Qyll said. “We found this, but have no way of knowing if it’s from the victims. Someone found it on the floor in the hall.”

  It was a torn and bloodied business card for the Church of the Earth, Gardener Dr. Isaiah West, Head Pastor. “Could be from the seminary student. Is this your connection? I mean, Bacchuses in a church led by a self-proclaimed Prophet is odd, but you know what they say…”

  “They’re right.” Qyll prodded a chunk of a god-knows-what with a pencil. “The truth is stranger than fiction.”

  While the Red Queen was busy putting a scaly fist to a vast company of Human and Otherwhere drifters, a slew of new churches popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Religions began to fuse together and follow a set of principles set forth by an international conglomerate called Ter
ram Divina.

  The scariest of these was Church of the Earth, headed by a man calling himself the New Prophet. West was born in Texas to a cattle rancher and a schoolteacher. His birth certificate says his name is “Lawrence Gerald Grosh.” He changed it to Isaiah since the Christian Bible takes its stance on monotheism in the book of Isaiah, and West because one of the signs of the Apocalypse is supposed to be the sun rising in the west. I’ve seen him on television. He’s a slippery blend of attractive and charismatic that makes thinking people afraid.

  He started his megachurch in the 1980s, and by the time the Rift happened, he was ready. His followers claimed he performed miracles. His sermons gathered thousands in person and millions on TV or streaming online. Eventually, he declared himself the New Prophet, chosen by the One True God to deliver believers to Heaven and escape Armageddon.

  West’s crop is into God in a creepily hardcore evangelical way. They preach that the end times had begun and the Book of Revelation is being played out before our eyes. They are also really into the Earth and how it’s God’s gift to Humans and stuff like that. Most of the churches have trees or flowers in their logos. Often, the liberal-minded sorts refer to the more zealous followers of Terram Divinia as “treevangelicals.”

  “Can you tell me more about the particular spell? How did they do this?” Qyll waved a hand toward the bodies.

  I shook my head. “If I even thought about doing this, man… it’s not good. This is pretty black. I can look in my books and get back to you. You know I can’t mess around much with black magic.” The pleading in my voice irritated me, but I couldn’t help it. If the Arcana found out I was so much as researching it in depth, I was in for seven worlds of hurt.

  “Then we’re at a standstill,” Qyll said, frustration coloring his words.

  “Okay, okay!” I put my hands up in defense. “I’ll see what I can do. Who put iron in your Wheaties?” He glowered at me and turned to stomp off, but ended up colliding with Pryam.