She wished she hadn’t.
A pool of blood had seeped through the crack between the door and the landing. It had soaked most of the top step and was now spreading downward. In the silent darkness of the stairwell, Eureka heard a droplet fall from the top step onto the one where she was standing. She inched away, repulsed and afraid.
Dizziness gripped her. She leaned forward, intending to rest her hand on the door for a moment to regain her balance—but she flailed backward as the door gave way under the slightest pressure of her touch. It tumbled, like a felled tree, into the apartment. The door’s weighty thud was accompanied by a damp slap on the carpet, which Eureka realized had to do with the blood pooled behind the door. The impact sent red splatters sloshing up onto the smoke-stained walls.
Whoever had been here had taken the door cleanly off its hinges and, before leaving, had propped it up so that it still looked bolted from the outside.
She should leave. She should turn around right now, rush down the stairs, and get out of here before she saw something she did not want to see. Her mouth filled with a sickly taste. She should call the police. She should get out and not come back.
But she couldn’t. Something had happened to a person she cared about. As loudly as her instincts screamed Run! Eureka could not turn her back on Madame Blavatsky.
She stepped over the bloody landing, onto the fallen door, and followed Polaris into the apartment. It smelled like blood and sweat and cigarettes. Dozens of nearly extinguished candles flickered along a mantel. They were the only source of light in the room. Outside the single small window, an electric bug-killer zapped in a steady beat. In the center of the room, sprawled across the blue industrial carpet, in the first place Eureka suspected and the last place she allowed herself to look, was Madame Blavatsky, dead as Diana.
Eureka’s hand went to her throat to choke off a gasp. Over her shoulder, the stairwell to the exit looked endless, like she’d never make it without fainting. On instinct, she felt in her pocket for her phone. She dialed 911, but she could not bring herself to press the call button. She had no voice, no way to communicate to a stranger on the other end of a line that the woman who’d become the closest thing Eureka had to a mother was dead.
The phone fell back inside her pocket. She moved closer to Madame Blavatsky but was careful to stay beyond the spread of blood.
Clumps of auburn hair lay on the floor, surrounding the old woman’s head like a crown. There were bald patches of pink skin where the hair had been ripped from her scalp. Her eyes were open. One stared vacantly at the ceiling. The other had been torn completely from its socket. It dangled near her temple, hanging on by a thin pink artery. Her cheeks were lacerated, as if sharp nails had dragged across them. Her legs and arms were sprawled at her sides, making her look like a kind of mangled snow angel. One hand grasped a rosary. Her patchwork cloak was slick with blood. She had been beaten, shredded, stabbed repeatedly in the chest by something that left much larger slashes than a knife. She’d been left to bleed out on the floor.