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Present Day
“A murder?” My eyebrows lift. “Why is Vlad calling you about a murder?”
But Phoenix is already sprinting back toward the car. I follow and wonder if this is my life now, chasing the beautiful backside of my wife. I blink and try to shake the word out of my head. No. Not my wife. Not in any meaningful way. I’ll just torture myself thinking like that. Then again, a little torture can be fun sometimes. After enough time, there’s nothing else to do but give in and enjoy the pain. I could enjoy the torture of being near Phoenix, even if it means never touching her.
She only stops once we’re back at her car. “Vlad owns the police in the city. Well,” she amends. “He owns the city. And the only murders that are allowed here are the ones he orders.”
“Still, why call you?
“He doesn’t usually. But this one’s different. He sent in some forensic photos.”
She tosses me her phone before turning the car on.
“What the fuck?” I say, almost dropping the phone as I look down at the bloody images. “How many bodies is that?”
“Just one,” she says, and I turn the phone around. There’s just so many pieces. And blood everywhere.
“It’s on campus, so we don’t have to go far.”
“On campus?” I ask.
“It’s a student. That’s one of the dorm rooms.”
Grimacing, I flip through the images on the phone. Over the past ten years, I made it my mission to not only become familiar with all things involving human technology but to master it. Still, I find their ability to capture moments with a picture or video impressive. I zoom in on various parts of the image as I look around the room. You can barely see the outline of the furniture because of all the blood.
It’s not that I haven’t seen gruesome things before. After some battles, the bodies were piled three feet deep on the battlefield and stunk in a way that took years to wash off.
I set the phone back down between us, swallowing some of the breakfast that’s threatening to come back up as Phoenix parks again. It’s just been a while for me.
It was easy to pretend after I first woke in the woods that this civilization had gotten things right and left all the bloodshed behind. Then I did a little traveling and realized they’d mostly just outsourced the suffering to other parts of the world or the neighborhoods they didn’t live in.
And here it is, right in Vlad’s tidy little kingdom, blood not spilled by him and his kin for once.
Police are putting up perimeter tape as students gather outside the six-story concrete dormitory, chatter going through the crowd, wondering what’s wrong. Phoenix strides confidently forward, and I stay at her side.
When we get up to the perimeter tape, a policeman holds up his hand. “No one gets through.”
But Phoenix just smiles at him, and she’s never looked more beautiful or alluring as she says, “But you want to let me and my friend through.”
The police officer’s face immediately turns to one of absolute adoration as he pulls back the cone holding the tape. “Yes, Mistress, anything for you.”
It’s creepy as fuck. But Phoenix strides through as if nothing is amiss, and I follow her. I mean, I knew about her compulsion power, but seeing it in action is another thing entirely. It makes me even more determined never to fawn over her or let her see my hunger for her. And even more ashamed of the naïve fool I once was.
Police are interviewing students in various pockets in the lobby, but we head straight past them and jog up the stairs since the elevator has been shut down. The scene is on the fifth floor, apparently.
Again, people try to stop us, and again, Phoenix does her thing, gaining us easy passage onto the floor and into the room.
The stink of spilled blood hits me halfway down the hallway, and I can tell it affects Phoenix even more than me. Of course it does.
Phoenix enters first and makes all the policemen and forensic evidence-gathering folks inside file out. Several glance back at her with longing, worshipful gazes. If I think it’s uncomfortable, what must it be like for her? I feel doubly determined not to be another fucker longing after her when she’s just trying to live her life. She didn’t ask for any of this.
I enter the room once it’s clear and immediately lift a hand to cover my nose. Because I’ve looked at the pictures, I assume I’m prepared for what I’ll see when we get into the room. But if I thought it was hard to hold back my gag reflex in the car…
The thing is, back in the day, I wasn’t as useful in the thick of battle as my brothers were. I was the guy they sent ahead to weaken the enemy by ruining the crops and starving everyone. I was great in a siege. It was the others who had to get up close and knee-deep in the gore.
But this… this is straight-up carnage worthy of any medieval battle. My eyes narrow as I look around, trying to take in everything at once. Yes, there’s blood, viscera, and guts everywhere, but it’s also so… orderly.
“Did they use some sort of machine?” I ask. “Something that chopped him up all at once and spread him around so… neatly?” It feels like the wrong word to use considering the horrific mess, but at the same time, the chopped-up body parts look very parallel. There’s a calf on the left and a calf on the right. Same with his lungs, chopped cleanly in half and laid out like a puzzle ready to be put back together.
