It felt like déjà vu, watching the pathologist slide out another victim. This one was Harrison Moore, a middle-aged man with dark hair and a goatee. And just like the last victim, he had an ugly neck wound.
“Harrison Moore. Age forty-three,” Chief Constable Morgan said. “He was found inside the Douglas cemetery. From his belongings he appears to be a necromancer, and his job seems to be what brought him to the cemetery.”
I choked on the smell. He too, seemed to have been scared at the time of his death.
“Just like Catherine O’Connor our victim here was drained almost dry. His body was then placed in a spread eagle position. Maggie, what read did you get off this body?”
“Same as the last one, sir,” she said. “That is to say, nothing other than an overwhelming sense of fear.”
Chief Constable Morgan rubbed his mustache. “I assumed as much.”
The room was too hot and too cold at once. I couldn’t tell if it was the stench of death and preservatives that clung to the room, the gruesome body in front of me, or that I had to help locate the person responsible, but I felt lightheaded.
The chief constable didn’t seem to notice my unease. “From the timeframe of the murder,” he said, “as well as the manner he was killed and the body’s post mortem positioning, one thing is clear.”
He paused to look at Caleb, Maggie, and I. “We have ourselves a serial killer.”
***
Someone knocked on the morgue’s door, and an inspector poked his head in. “Eugene,” the inspector said, referring to the chief constable, “Can I speak to you in private for a moment?”
“Sure.” Chief Constable Morgan glanced at the three of us. “Would you three mind waiting outside for just a minute?”
I wanted to cry with joy at his words. I was going to get sick again if I didn’t get out of here.
“Not at all,” Maggie said.
We walked out of the room, and only then was I able to release the breath I’d been holding.
For a moment we all stood silent.
“A necromancer?” I finally asked. I thought I was catching on to this world, but at times like these, I really felt out of my element.
Maggie gave me a look. “One who raises the dead. Reanimates corpses.”
I curled my lip. “Why would anyone do that for a living?”
“Oh, lots of reasons. But the main one is that it pays really well. When it comes to death, people tend to underprepare and leave a lot of loose ends behind them. A necromancer can reanimate the deceased long enough to settle an inheritance dispute, find a lost family heirloom—anything really that the dead take with them to the grave.”
Throughout this entire discussion, Caleb had stayed silent. I didn’t ask him his thoughts, but his silence piqued my curiosity.
“And it works?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
I looked at Maggie like she was insane. “Then why are we not using a necromancer to find the killer?”
Maggie laughed. It was a laugh that said I still had a lot to learn. “Necromancers practice the dark arts. It takes a blood sacrifice to reanimate a corpse. And the deader they are, the heavier the sacrifice. The House of Keys does not condone such practices, so we are forbidden by law to use them in our investigations.”
I raised my eyebrows. “So even though a necromancer makes blood sacrifices, they’re still accepted in the community—but vampires aren’t?” I couldn’t understand how the supernatural community could draw an arbitrary line in the sand and declare everything to one side okay, and everything to the other side evil.
Maggie curled her upper lip. My question must’ve hit a nerve. “As far as I’m concerned, our victim is a necromancer and the perpetrator is a vampire,” she snapped. Fair point. “And until the day that changes, we’ll keep the beliefs we currently have.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Caleb said. “That’s not—”
But she wasn’t finished. “Perhaps society and even Andre himself have convinced you that vampires are harmless. They’re not. They have to feed every single night. Off of humans. Thousands of victims have died just like the man in that room.”
I could’ve guessed as much, but I’d truly never thought it completely through. I tended to avoid those topics that scared me. But now I couldn’t.
I was becoming a monster, whether I liked it or not.
No wonder the devil wants me.
***
Caleb put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re not going to be like that,” he said to me. He shot Maggie a dirty look.
“She needs to know,” Maggie said. “It’s not like those bloodsuckers are telling her the truth.”
I bristled at her words. Andre had been nothing but truthful with me. It was part of the reason I’d needed space. I’d seen and heard too much.
“And the Politia is telling me the truth?” I said to her. My anger was beginning to get the best of me. “Don’t bother answering that. It was a rhetorical question.”