11
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My heart, my breath, every small tic, twitch, and tremor in my entire body just stopped, shocked into stillness by the sickening sight before me.
Then, in the next instant, movement, breath, and sensation all rushed back into my body, and I could feel my eyes slowly growing wider and wider, until it seemed like those two spider runes filled my entire field of vision.
The longer I stared at them, the more the symbols actually seemed to move, to quiver, to pulse, as though the bloody circles were connected to my own heart, frantically pounding in my chest. All I could do was stare and stare at those two spider runes—my runes—peering up at me like evil eyes and mocking me from a dead woman’s hands.
“Are those runes . . . were they made with . . . her blood?” I asked, my voice as shocked and breathless as I still felt.
“Actually, they were drawn with lipstick,” Ryan said. “But yes, those are definitely spider runes. I told Bria and Xavier the second I saw them.”
“But how—who—why—” The words sputtered out of my mouth, but I couldn’t get them to form a coherent sentence. Just like I couldn’t form a coherent thought right now.
No, that wasn’t true. Too many thoughts flashed through my mind one after another, all of them lightning strikes scorching my heart to ash. What connection, if any, could I possibly have to this woman? And why draw my spider runes on her palms? Was it a warning that I was next? That the killer wanted to make me as bloody, broken, and dead as this poor girl?
The questions just kept coming and coming, with no answers in sight. I felt like I was standing in a dark tunnel, and all I could see were the bright lights of the oncoming train, about to mow me down.
Bria shook her head, making her hair fly out around her shoulders again, as if she were trying to rattle this horrible sight right out of her mind the same way that I was. She laid a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Gin, are you sure that you don’t know this woman? Take another look at her.”
Ironically enough, she was treating me the same way I had treated Jade a few minutes ago, trying to soften the stinging, sickening blow of something that could never, ever be softened. Anger roared through me that my own sister was trying to handle me like I was some sort of victim.
I started to snap at Bria that of course I didn’t know this girl, but I forced myself to rein in my rage. None of this was Bria’s fault, and lashing out at her wouldn’t help anything, especially not the dead girl. So I forced myself to bend down and take another look at her, just as my sister had asked.
I carefully examined the girl, once again trying to look past the beating, bruises, and swelling and see her as she had been in life—her eyes, her nose, her smile. But her features remained as strange to me as before. I didn’t know this girl. I had never seen her before. I was sure of it.
So I moved on to what I did know: my spider runes.
My stomach squeezed, but I ignored the hot, bitter bile rising in my throat, bent down, and peered at the runes. Now that I was looking more closely at them, I could see that they’d been drawn with bright red lipstick, not blood, just like Ryan had said.
And I noticed something else odd. The rest of her was a bruised, battered mess, but her palms were absolutely pristine, with no blood, dirt, grime, or anything else marring the surface of her skin there, except for the two symbols. And it wasn’t just that she had my spider runes drawn on her palms; it was how clear, precise, and neat they were, each one essentially a carbon copy of the other.
Someone had taken his slow, sweet time marking her up.
My own hands snapped into tight fists, my knuckles cracking from the sudden, intense pressure, and the spider rune scars embedded deep in my own palms started itching and burning, almost as if someone was tracing over them with a tube of lipstick. The scars pounded in time with my heart, until I thought that blood was going to come bursting out of the marks, forced out by my own rage, disgust, horror, and shock.
Slowly, I forced myself to relax my fists, unclenching them one finger at a time, and my right hand crept up to the spider rune pendant hanging around my neck. It had been a present from Owen, one that I’d always loved wearing, along with the matching ring on my finger, a gift from Bria.
Until this moment.
Now the pendant felt as heavy as an anchor, dragging me down, down, down, and the ring was a circle of rot around my finger, spreading out to infect and destroy every single part of me. Just feeling the pendant and the ring touching my body, along with my Ice and Stone magic rippling through the surface of the silverstone jewelry, made me sick to my stomach again.
The spider rune pendant slipped through my cold, numb fingers and thumped against my chest, as hard as a sledgehammer beating against my heart, and I had to clench my hands into fists again to keep from ripping off the jewelry and trying to tear the scars out of my own palms.
“Gin?” Bria asked in a soft voice, cutting into my turbulent emotions. “Do you know her?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen her before. I’m sure of it. But the spider runes . . .” My voice trailed off, and it took me a moment to finish my thought. “They’re exactly like mine.”
Even though it was the very last thing that I wanted to do, I forced myself to uncurl my fists again and held out my hands, palms up, so that Bria and Ryan could see my scars. They both bent down, comparing the marks on the dead girl’s hands to the ones branded into my palms. I made myself keep my hands open, even though I felt completely exposed, as if I had been stripped naked and staked out in a public square for everyone to gawk at.
After about a minute, Ryan straightened up and cleared his throat. “It would seem that whoever drew the runes on the girl is familiar with your actual scars. Or at the very least your pendant. You wear that necklace quite a bit, don’t you?”
“All the time now,” I muttered. “All the damn time now. Out in the open where everyone can see it. What a fucking fool I am.”
Ever since Owen had given it to me, I’d always been so proud of the pendant, since it was something from my childhood that I’d thought was lost forever. Even more than that, ever since I’d become head of the underworld, a small part of me had liked people knowing my symbol—and especially fearing it. I just never thought that someone would take my spider rune and do something so horribly sick and disgusting with it.
And I still couldn’t puzzle out what it really meant. If someone wanted to warn me that I was on their hit list, that they were coming for me, that they wanted me dead, there were far easier ways to do it. Why not spray-paint the symbol on the front door of the Pork Pit? Why not scratch it on the hood of my car while it was parked near the restaurant? Why not just burn it into the front lawn at Fletcher’s house, if they wanted to be truly dramatic?
Any one of those things would have immediately gotten my attention. So why put the symbols on a dead woman instead? Was he just mocking me? Or was something else entirely going on here?
I didn’t know—but I was going to find out.
The killer might think that he was taunting me, using my runes in such a sick, disgusting fashion, but all he had really done was piss me off. He wanted to get my attention? Well, he had it now, in fucking spades. I was going to hunt down this blackhearted son of a bitch, and he was going to pay for what he’d done to this poor, innocent girl.
More than he’d ever imagined.
“Gin,” Bria said in a low, warning voice. “Take it easy.”
I looked at her, and she pointed at the table. Ice crystals flowed out of my fingertips and ran across the metal table, quickly creeping toward the girl’s body like a tidal wave of frost. A sign of my own cold, cold rage.
I yanked my fingers off the table and forced myself to tap down my magic, pulling it back inside my own body where it belonged. “Sorry.” I looked at Ryan. “I didn’t mean to hurt anything or destroy any evidence.”
“You didn’t.” He gave me a sad smile. “Besides, she’s well beyond any sort of physical hurt or pain now.”
He looked down at the woman, his face creasing with more sadness. Like most people in Ashland, Dr. Ryan Colson had had his own share of tragedy. His younger brother had been shot and killed right in front of him when they were both just kids. I wondered if he was thinking about the brothers and sisters who might be missing this girl, whoever she was.
After several seconds, Ryan shook his head, as if chasing away his own bad memories and heartache. He raised his gaze to mine again, his face even more somber than before. “There’s something else you need to see, Gin. Something to do with this girl.”
My heart clenched, and my gut twisted. What now?
Bria frowned. “Do you mean . . .”
Ryan gave a sharp nod. “Yeah.”
“And you think that this girl . . .”
“Yes. Unfortunately.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them, not understanding their shorthand sentences, but they stared at each other instead of me, once again having some silent conversation that I couldn’t follow.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Bria sighed. “Nothing good.”
Ryan turned to me. “Follow me, please, and I’ll explain it all.”
• • •
Curious and more than a little wary, I followed Ryan out of his office and through the waiting room, with Bria trailing along behind me. Sophia and Jade were gone, although Sophia had left a note on the waiting room table saying that they were in the restroom and would be back in a few minutes.
Ryan left the waiting room and led us down a couple of hallways before stopping in front of an old wooden door that was set in the very back corner of this level. I looked over at Bria, but her face was grim, and she stood right alongside Ryan like the two of them were soldiers in some battle that no one else even knew about.
There was no sound this far back in the basement, not even the faint hum of the distant elevators or the gurgle of water running through the overhead pipes. The air was absolutely still and even colder here than it had been in his office, as though this part of the basement was completely cut off from all heat, life, and ventilation.
Ryan pulled out a ring of keys, flipped through them, and stuck one of them into the lock. He opened the door and stepped aside so that Bria and I could enter first. Then he slipped into the room behind us, closed the door, and hit the switch on the wall.
The overhead lights slowly winked on one by one, as if waking up from a long winter’s nap. I blinked against the harsh glare and studied the area before me. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves covered all the walls, and several more free-standing shelves took up a good portion of the back of the room. Heavy-duty cardboard boxes lined each shelf from top to bottom and side to side, and each box had its own unique numbers and names written on the cardboard in permanent black marker. The air smelled old and musty, and a heavy coating of dust covered many of the boxes and shelves, as though they’d been brought down here years ago and totally forgotten.
“This is the cold-case storage room,” Bria said. “One of them, anyway. For crimes that go unsolved. Lots of those in Ashland.”
I nodded. I’d heard her talk about this room in passing, about sending evidence down here for safekeeping or bringing up the boxes when she got a long-awaited break in a case, but I’d never been here myself. Then again, I wasn’t a frequent visitor to the police station; it was one of the few places in Ashland that I avoided like the plague.
Ryan disappeared back behind a row of shelves. Several faint scrape-scrape-scrapes sounded, as though he was pulling a cardboard box down from up high on one of the shelves. A few seconds later, he reappeared with a box in his arms, walked over, and set it down on a metal table in the center of the room. He looked at Bria, who nodded. Ryan pulled a small knife out of his pants pocket and used it to carefully slice through the red evidence tape that was wrapped around the box.
“A knife in your pocket? You’re a man after my own heart, Colson,” I drawled, trying to lighten the mood.
He flashed me a grin and continued his work. A few seconds later, he slid the knife back into his pocket, pulled the lid off the box, and set it aside. I stepped forward and peered down inside, not quite sure what to expect, but all I saw were thick manila file folders.
One by one, Ryan pulled out the folders and carefully, neatly arranged them on the table. Once all the folders were out of the box, he flipped them open and drew out a photo from the top of each file. He turned the photos around so that I could see them and lined them up side by side. There were a dozen of them, and they all showed the exact same thing.
A dead woman.
At first, I wondered what the point was, but then I took a closer look at the photos, and I began to see the similarities. Each woman was lying on a metal slab in the coroner’s office, cold and still in death. Each one had long blond hair and had probably been young and pretty—until someone had beaten her face to an unrecognizable pulp. Ugly, purple bruises also ringed each woman’s throat from where she had been strangled.
I moved down the row of photos, staring at them all in turn. But they were all so similar that they could have been carbon copies, and one face melted into the next and the next until they all seemed to solidify into a single dead woman. My breath caught in my throat, and my stomach churned as I realized exactly what I was looking at.
“All these photos, all these women. You’re saying that this girl tonight and all the rest of these poor women are connected . . .” My voice trailed off for a moment. “You’re saying that there’s a serial killer in Ashland.”