Cause of Death: Unnatural

She threw Nick out after that. She'd been on the verge of saying something dumb, revealing her true nature, but as she opened her mouth to explain she'd realized there wasn't anything she could say that made any sense. "I'm sorry darling, but I'm actually a thousand year old vampire halfling and I just needed a snack" wasn't going to go down very well. She'd stuffed up, and she knew it.

All she could do was apologize, which she did over and over again as she gathered up his clothes, pressed them into his arms and pushed him out her apartment door. She couldn't stand the look of disgust in his eyes, but she leaned up against the door after she'd closed it on him and listened for a long time. He pulled on his clothes and left. She slid down the door and sat there with her face resting against the wood and sobbed.

What an idiot she'd been.

When Jarek found her she was still there. He materialized in front of her, the hem of his coat trailing black smoke and smelling of the void between the worlds. With his strong hands he dragged her to her feet, then picked her up and carried her to bed.

He pulled the covers up to her chin, and kissed her forehead. She snuffled at him, still in tears.

"You poor stupid thing," he said gently. "You're your father's daughter, that's for sure."

And then he was gone.

The alarm went off at seven in the morning and she dragged herself out of bed, only to stand staring at herself in the bathroom mirror for far too long. Her cell phone bleated in the kitchen and she let it ring, but the noise did a lot to haul her back into reality. She showered, dressed and drove to work still feeling numb, dreading seeing Nick.

At the door of the lab, Robert pulled her aside. He held her arm tightly and whispered angrily.

"I can handle being just a side show for you, but I would have appreciated being told about it. I thought I entirely respected what you and Nick have together, but now I see you've gone and used him too. What the hell have you done to him? He looks terrible, and you don't look any better."

She said nothing, and he squeezed her arm a little harder. "You don't get to do this to people I like, Em. Sort this mess out with Nick and then stay away from him. That's an order."

She shut her eyes and pressed her lips together in a thin line to stop them from shaking. Robert glared at her for a moment and then strode into the lab.

It was a long day.

Nick wouldn't meet her eyes and Robert wouldn't work next to her. They had thirty seven bodies to process and they did it almost entirely in silence. The support technicians and assistants raised their eyebrows at each other and escaped from the room at every chance they could. The atmosphere was poisonous.

Em was on her own.

Toward the end of the day she found herself alone in the lab. The three bodies she was processing were laid out on the stainless steel benches, white sheets draped over their torsos leaving their head and shoulders exposed. All the damage, on all thirty seven victims, was in the neck area, and although she was obliged to double check every victim to make sure, the damage was all the same. Teeth marks.

Em turned to the third of next batch of bodies and was stunned to realize it was female.

A woman? That wasn't right. Em knew she hadn't been paying a huge amount of attention to anything that had been going on today, but she didn't know that there had been one female victim among the thirty seven bodies they'd found in the warehouse. She must have been working on something else when they'd bagged this one. Maybe she'd already left with Nick to go to his family's party. How did she miss this?

She took a closer look at the victim. It was a woman of about twenty three years of age. Slim, attractive, blond. She appeared to have died only a few days ago, definitely much more recently than some of the other bodies in the collection.

This was not good. So far, all the victims in this messed up case had been male. Now there was a break in the pattern, and that meant the killer was getting restless. Bored. And a bored psychopath was never a good thing, human or otherwise.

Em bent down to take a closer look at the victim's neck wounds. Something glistened there. Was it an earring or something mashed into her throat?

Em grabbed some tweezers and prized the sparkling thing out of the gaping hole that was all that remained of the woman's neck. She had it. It looked like a false fingernail, she thought incredulously, as she ran it under the tap to wash some of the blood off it. She lifted the sheet to look at the victims hands. No, no falsies there.

Taking the nail over to a scope Em took a closer look. It was actually organic, she realized, not plastic at all. It seemed to have some kind of reptile print over it, a green snakeskin pattern...

She had the funniest feeling she'd seen this before.

Her cell phone rang, the noise interrupting her train of thought. She tore her gloves off, fished the phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen. Jennifer. Em snorted with impatience. Typical Jennifer. She always rang in the middle of work. Em knew she couldn't cope with Jennifer now. If this was another boyfriend disaster Em had enough of her own to worry about. Jennifer could wait. She dropped the phone back into her pocket and let the call go to voice mail.

Before she'd even had time to turn back to the scale-thing under the microscope the phone rang again. Em groaned with frustration. This had better be important.

"Jenn," she began, but Jennifer was already talking. She was practically screaming.

"Em, Em, I need you please, please come and help me, please." She was panting, sucking in huge gulps of air and choking, choking on something.

"Jenn, what's happened?" said Em urgently. She suddenly had a very bad feeling about this. "Tell me what's going on Jenn."

"She bit me!" said Jenn hysterically. "She's not... she's not..." Jenn's breaths turned into coughs.

She?

Em's eyes flashed to the green reptile scale under the microscope. She knew exactly where she'd seen it before.

"Jenn, where are you?"

"I don't know. It's dark, like a warehouse or something. Em? Em..." Jennifer's voice started to pitch upwards again. "She said she's coming back."

"I'm coming Jenn," said Em and she dropped the phone beside the scope and spun herself into smoke.

Em flew over the city.

With her mind she searched for Jennifer. She threw her energy ahead of her, skimming through the souls of people all over the harborside area. Streets, cars, pubs, clubs, people at work, people at home. She wasn't gentle. She had the most awful feeling she was going to be too late.

She almost missed Jennifer when she did find her. Jennifer's soul was just a whisper, just a flicker, so faint Em nearly passed right over it.

Em landed beside Jennifer, the black smoke of her dark energy snapping back into her usual form in the blink of an eye. Jennifer was lying in the damp corner of a dark laneway that ended at the door of yet another dilapidated warehouse. Her cell phone had fallen out of her hand. It was still on, Em noticed, the call still connected to Em's phone back in the lab. It had only been a few moments since Em had left the laboratory, but for Jennifer it must have seemed so much longer. The cell phone's bright screen spilled a sad and incongruous light over the dying woman.

"Jennifer," Em said, quietly. She knelt quickly and put her arms around the woman, pulling her onto her knees. She hugged her close and looked sadly at the deep gashes and bruises over her friend's body.

Jennifer stared up at Em with a puzzled look on her face. Em could see Jennifer's eyes were deeper than they'd ever been, her soul was close to the surface, twisting gently and slowly like a single autumn leaf on a twig. Jenn was cold, very cold, and it wouldn't be long now.

"Em?" said Jennifer. "How did you..."

"Shhh..." said Em quickly. "Don't worry about that. Everything's going be okay now." She rocked Jennifer gently back and forward, slowly and lovingly, wishing with all her heart it didn't have to be like this.

"It was that girl," said Jennifer urgently, "from the club." She coughed and Em felt a gush of blood run out of Jennifer's neck and over the arm Em had around her shoulders. "She's not ...."

But Em shushed her. "I know, Jennifer. I know all about her. And don't worry, she'll pay for this Jenn. I promise you that."

Em realized a tear had landed on Jennifer's forehead.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" said Jennifer.

Em said nothing for a moment as a few more tears fell onto her friend. She nodded.

"It hurts," said Jennifer in a small voice. She sounded like a child, and suddenly Em knew what she had to do.

She allowed a little wave of dark energy to ripple softly over Jennifer. It was like a mist, or a fog, and it curled around Jennifer's body until it covered her completely. Em strengthened it a little, gently, so as not to hurt her friend, and then she commanded it to settle deep down within Jennifer's body.

Jennifer shivered for a moment, and then her eyes cleared a little. The energy absorbed her pain. Em could feel it, stabbing and burning. She gathered up the pain and stored it away for a while. She had a feeling she might find a use for it later.

She brushed Jennifer's hair back from her forehead, tucked it carefully behind her ear. Then she gently wiped away the tears that had begun to pool in the corner of Jennifer's eyes. From the hollowness and emptiness she felt in the pit of her stomach Em searched for a smile to give her friend. She hoisted the smile onto her face and tried to shine all her love right through it.

Jennifer's chin quivered. "I'm frightened," she said.

Em hugged Jennifer one more time and then smoothly pushed her energy into her friend's mind. She filled Jennifer's mind with warmth and light and whispered softly, "It's going to be okay, Jennifer. You'll see. It's going to be beautiful."

Em found the single silken thread that kept Jennifer's soul tethered to her body. She wrapped her mind around it. She reached back into Jennifer's thoughts and pulled forward all the happy memories she could find - childhood memories, her mother's embrace, the teddy bear she slept with till she was twelve, the flowers her grandmother grew, the roses her first boyfriend had bought her, a beach party, a favorite dress, the smell of warm fresh bread, the taste of chocolate, good times with friends...

Em looked down at Jennifer. Her face was calm, her breathing had slowed. There was the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Em cut the thread.

Jennifer's soul flew up and out of sight, and Jennifer's mind shut down. Em choked back a sob. She lay her friend's body carefully back down on the ground and stood up.

"Raeisa!" she called, with all the fury she could summon.



* * *



Raeisa slithered out of the warehouse. The dress of reptilian scales had gone. It appeared to have dissolved into skin and spread to cover her entire body. She was naked, covered from head to toe in green scales, and her red hair tumbled loosely down around her shoulders. The snake patterned fingernails had hardened into long, sharp claws. Raeisa was still human in shape, but she was plainly more lizard than she was girl. She was also taller than she was before, and she swung her naked scaly hips with careless seduction. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.

"You didn't even take her, did you?" she said scornfully, stepping over Jennifer's body without even a glance. She walked in a slow circle around Em, smirking as she took in the redness in Em's eyes and the sorrow on her face.

"You didn't even feed off her soul. A beautiful, fat, stupid soul like that one and you just let it go." Raeisa laughed and touched a finger to the blood that was running from her lip. She opened her mouth as she wiped off the smear and then, walking around to face Em over Jennifer's body, she licked the blood from her finger and looked at Em through half closed eyes. "Don't you find it dull, Emilia?" She strung out the syllables in Em's name mockingly. "Or do you like playing by the rules? Don't tell me you never indulge on a weakling every now and then?"

"What are you?" said Em, quietly.

Raeisa smiled and put her hands on her hips. "I'm a halfling," she said. Her smile quirked downwards into a lewd smirk and she drew out the next words slowly watching Em closely to see if they had the desired effect. "Just like you."

Em sucked in a quick breath. She was going to devour Raeisa, but she wanted to know a little more first.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

"Do what?" said Raeisa, in an amused tone. "Oh, you mean drain my way through the sweetest tasting men this city has? Used to have, I mean." She giggled. "I started small, of course. I believe you met my first few meals."

Em snorted. "You mauled them."

"I was a little messy at first, I will admit. It took me awhile to figure out where the nerve centers were. And then I made an interesting discovery... All that lovely heat that comes out of the human body when it's aroused. Very warming for a lizard like me, and it concentrates the energy in the soul in such a delicious manner..."

"You're sick," spat Em.

"I am what I am," Raeisa spat back, suddenly angry. "It's not my fault they made me this way."

They? Em stiffened. They who? Not the Family, no one she knew about. And if 'they' had made Raeisa, they might have made others like her. Where? How?

Em shook her head. She couldn't think about that now. Raeisa was strutting around her again, widening the circle, inviting Em to take a place out in the middle of the lane, setting the field of battle. And she was licking her lips with too many kinds of hunger. Em's patience ran out.

"You're nothing like me," spat Em, and gathered her dark energy for the attack. It took only a millisecond, but somehow Raeisa was quicker. The lizard girl blinked and suddenly the headache that had been plaguing Em for weeks exploded into agony inside her head. It was like Raeisa had thrust a burning poker through her eye. The front half of her mind was on fire and Em's hands rose automatically to clutch at her forehead.

Raeisa sprang, claws on both hands and feet out and pointed at Em's torso. Em was blinded by the pain in her head and Raeisa's attack caught her completely off guard. The lizard's talons plunged deep into her human flesh and the weight of the girl pushed them both back into the gutter. Em's head hit the pavement with a bone crashing thud. Raeisa stepped casually off Em, planted her feet solidly on the ground and raked her claws downwards through Em's body, an unholy smile twisting her face as she did so.

Em screamed and felt the human side of her boil with pain. Breathlessly she scrabbled around re-gathering her energy, and as Raeisa raised her hands for a second strike, Em dissolved into smoke and flew out of her grasp.

The pain in her head was so great she was forced to take human form again within moments and she reappeared a few meters behind Raeisa.

The lizard looked confused for a moment as her prey disappeared beneath her talons, but she turned around with a haughty smile and began to walk slowly towards Em again.

"Nice trick, vampire," Raeisa purred. "Don't think it's going to save you though."

Em sucked in air and blinked madly as if it could help clear the pain behind her eyes. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten about the headache. She couldn't believe she hadn't seen what was right in front of her all along. Raeisa had been there every time this headache had become unbearable. And like an idiot Em had flown to her best friend's rescue without even thinking that Raeisa would be waiting for her.

Her eyes flicked to Jennifer lying on the pavement behind Raeisa. In a second she bundled up the pain she had taken from Jennifer just before she died. It took far more concentration than it should have. The throbbing agony in her mind was making even breathing difficult. Em knew she had to stop this headache or she would never be able to fight back properly. Her human form was useless, her dark energy hampered by whatever power Raeisa was wielding.

Raeisa was standing in front of her now, a look of triumph on her face, her hand raised, claws outstretched. This was it, thought Em.

Em drew in every atom of strength she possessed and threw the tightly wound ball of Jennifer's pain at Raeisa. She staggered as it left her. She stumbled forward, held out a hand to catch herself and with the other hand still clamped to her forehead could only hope that it had worked.

Above her Raeisa groaned, and a second later the pain in Em's head flickered out like a candle.

Em's eyes snapped open. It was like drinking in pure oxygen, ice cold water flowing through her veins, white hot power cursing up her spine. Instantly, Em's dark energy pulsed out like an explosion and sucked in power from every solid thing around her. Utterly recharged and rippling with energy, Em grinned.

Slowly, Em stood up straight and raised her eyes to meet Raeisa's.

The lizard girl stared back for a moment, her green eyes still defiant. Then way, way too late, Raeisa read the dangerous message written in Em's eyes. Her face changed as is someone had slapped her. The smugness fell away and was replaced by an empty kind of horror. She whimpered.

"Bites, doesn't it?" said Em, softly.

The girl took a few steps backwards, panic beginning to build in her body. She stumbled, her hands flapped at her sides, her head shook from side to side as if she didn't want to believe what she was seeing.

"Run," breathed Em.

Raeisa lunged away from Em in terror, but Em slipped into dark matter and encircled the lizard girl in exactly the same moment. It was like squashing a bug, thought Em, as she wrapped her dark energy tighter and tighter around the squealing girl.

Part of Em watched Raeisa's struggles dispassionately. She intensified the layer of dark energy around the lizard girl, pushing all the fear and pain she could into the net that entrapped her. Raeisa was howling, spinning and twisting in agonized horror, her own supernatural energy beginning to glow under the torture that Em was forcing on her. Em dragged her energy deep into Raeisa's being and ripped and tore her way through to the girl's core. There was her soul at last, an ugly black thing pulsing at the center of Raeisa's existence. Em gathered her power and sharpened it ready to attack. She wanted Raeisa to feel every single one of the gashes that had rent her friend Jennifer's body.

Jennifer.

Suddenly Em stopped. She looked at the being that twisted in pain in front of her, and she looked at the body of her friend lying in the damp blackness of the road.

Em sighed, then snorted wryly. Look what you've done to me, Jennifer, she thought. You, and Nick, and Robert. Humans, in general. What am I doing? I'm a monster.

In a moment, all the lethal, vicious revenge dissolved inside Em. Sure, the hatred was still there, and she was still going to waste this psychopathic lizard hybrid in front of her, but the fun suddenly went out of it. Em realized she was tired. Tired of all the death she'd seen lately, all the pointless, stupid deaths. She'd been dealing in death for nearly a thousand years, and it had taken a bunch of mortal human friends to teach her that life was more important. More ... enjoyable. More ... meaningful.

Did that make her human? Em wondered. Is this what my mother felt? Is this why her father had loved her human mother? Is this why Em was even alive in the first place? Em stopped at that thought. That was way too much to deal with right now. But the thought warmed her. I'm becoming more human, she thought. I like it.

Em dropped Raeisa onto the road, reached into her chest and pulled her heart out.