Page 46 of An Oath at Midnight

It was quiet back here. Silent.

“Can you scent anyone nearby?” she asked.

“No.” But I tilted my head back and scented the air again just to be sure.

Fuck.

“What is it?”

“Blood. A lot of it.”

Magnolia stared up at me, her gorgeous eyes wide. “It’s another murder, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t actually asking, she already knew. We didn’t need to go in there to know what we were about to find, but we had to anyway. The door was locked, so I quickly picked it. As soon as it opened, the scent of death hit us, sweet and sickly.

I turned on the flashlight and shone it around the room. It was the old workshop and mainly empty besides a few tires and a car completely stripped of anything worth anything.

The scent grew stronger as we walked deeper into the wide space.

The door to what I assumed was the office, was ajar. Mags motioned to it before I could.

I walked ahead and pushed the door open, Mags right behind me. Fuck.

The room smelled like fear and decay, and the scene before us was something I’d never seen before. I tried to stop Magnolia from walking in, but she wasn’t having it. This was her task, and no matter how gruesome this was, she had to see it for herself. I kept my arm around her middle, holding her close to me, and good thing because her knees gave out when she saw it for herself.

People killed for different reasons: a sense of justice, or a need for revenge, or to feel powerful. Some killed because it turned them on, giving them some kind of sadistic pleasure. Some just couldn’t deny their predator’s nature, no matter how hard they tried.

And some killed out of raw anger, or hatred. That’s what we were looking at here.

Mags’s hand flew to her mouth and she retched. “Who would do something like this?”

I didn’t move any closer, not wanting to disturb the scene, and shone the flashlight at the dead witch. Their eyelids were swollen mostly shut, but I could tell there weren’t any eyeballs behind them. Their mouth had been sewn shut, and I was pretty sure their teeth had been pulled out first. “Someone who wanted to make a point.” I trailed the light lower. The face would be impossible to ID, since it was barely more than pulp. “Someone filled with rage.” The witch wore blood-soaked trousers, and his shirt was in tatters on the floor. There was bloody wire dangling from the ceiling, where I could only assume their hands had been strung up above their head on an iron hook, before both arms had been cut off, and taken. “The witch is male.” They’d been sliced open, their organs spilling out.

“A wallet,” Mags said, motioning to the floor.

Leaving that behind was no mistake. “They want to make it easy for the body to be identified.”

Mags grabbed an old rag from the desk and crouched to pick it up. She flicked it open. “Fuck.” She looked back up at the body again. “That’s Calvin Adler.”

Well, fuck. “And with Willow missing—”

“They’ll pin this on her as well,” Mags said.

“He’s from a prominent family. They have money, influence, power,” I said, eyeing the scene, searching for any clues as to who would have done this. I stepped closer, carefully so I could check his back. “They carved Judgment into his flesh.”

“Like the others,” Mags said.

“He’s missing his heart as well,” I said and took a closer look. “Maybe some other organs too. And those slices around his shoulder, they’re clean. His arms weren’t just hacked off, care was taken there.” It was the only part of him that showed any control.

“Why? What the hell does that mean?”

I did another quick search of the room. “We need information on the other killings, what was done, if any limbs or organs were taken.”

Mags put the wallet back on the floor where she found it. “We need to get out of here. There might be cameras?”

“There aren’t.”

She looked up at me. “How do you know?”