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“What are you talking about?”
“I found the symbol.”
“Okay. Where was it?”
Silence.
“Doc?” I prompted. “Where was it?”
“Jesus, Kara. You’re not going to believe this, and I have absolutely no explanation for how the symbol got there. I mean, there are no entry wounds to explain it…. I suppose it’s possible, but—”
“Doc! Where the hell did you find it?”
“It was … on the inside of her uterus, Kara. Just, for the love of God, please don’t ask me to explain how it got there.”
After I hung up, I sat in my car and stared at the phone. If I’d ever wanted physical confirmation that these murders were arcane in nature, I’d just gotten it. Could a demon have placed that symbol? Tessa had said that there were two sources of the traces. Could the killer be summoning and using a demon to help? Once again, I was way out of my depth.
Explain that one, Harris.
Chapter 13
I went home and scanned the sketches of the runes and sigils into my computer and emailed the scans to my aunt, but Tessa had no familiarity with any of them, to my disappointment. I need some expert advice. I need to summon a demon. A sliver of unease ran through me at the thought, which in turn angered me. I couldn’t be afraid to summon. I couldn’t just stop being a summoner. It was too important to everything that I was now.
The door to the basement beckoned to me, but I found myself hesitating. I still didn’t know how the last summoning had gone so badly awry. That one had been as close to a disaster as any summoner could get—and still survive. And I survived that only because… why? I got lucky? The question continued to plague me despite every effort to push it aside. I was more than willing to give myself a compliment or two, but I knew that I was no drop-dead beauty with the looks and charm to stop a Demonic Lord in his tracks.
I was stalling. If I was going to summon, tonight would be a decent night to do so. There was no moon, which lent a certain stability to the proceedings, though potency was low. It was easiest to summon during a full moon, especially for higher-level demons, but I had no intention of getting crazy with this. Maybe I could summon Kehlirik again? He owed me a favor, which meant that it would be fairly safe to summon him. And surely a reyza would be able to identify those runes.
I considered it for several minutes, but finally, reluctantly, discarded the idea. It was true that I wouldn’t have to expend as much energy for protections and bindings, but the mere act of summoning a twelfth-level demon would take more potency than would be available during the dark of the moon. I’d have to wait until the next full moon to summon Kehlirik.
Tonight I would make do with just a very low second- or third-level demon, hopefully one who could give me some clue about what was going on with these bodies and translate the runes and sigils for me. A very small and simple summoning.
In fact, it might be best that I’m doing this while the moon isn’t full, I decided. With luck, the lack of potency would prevent anything unexpected from happening again. Though it would be a lot easier to prevent something from happening if I knew just how the hell it had happened in the first place!>“I’ll let you know the instant I find it, Kara,” he told me after I’d reminded him for the sixth time that I really needed to know where he finally found the symbol.
That he would find it I didn’t doubt. But I wanted that info quickly, to prove to the Feds and Harris that I had a fucking clue.
Now you just have to prove to them that you aren’t fucking crazy, I reminded myself, as I entered the room and plopped my notes onto the table. The others glanced up at me, then returned to their perusal of the photos spread before them. Each murder from both series had been separated into a section of the table, with the photos of the facial reconstructions or IDs at the top and the crime scene photos distributed below.
I cleared my throat, and they all looked back up at me with a variety of expressions: Kristoff frowning, Harris glowering, and Garner smiling.
“The, uh, old bodies were all too decomposed to make any sort of ID,” I began, gesturing to the pictures of the clay faces, “so the previous investigators had a forensic anthropologist work up some reconstructions, just to get a starting point.”
“Any luck?” Agent Garner asked.
“Four IDs were made, confirmed with DNA,” I said.
“Not bad.”
“I don’t know how much time y’all have had to read through the case files,” I said as I began to sort through my notes. “One thing I did want to point out is that the symbol is not always in an obvious location.” I resisted the urge to look pointedly at Harris.
Kristoff nodded, frown still on his rugged face. “The one where it’s on the tongue is particularly gruesome,” he said, as if he were describing an ice cream flavor.
“Yeah, and they’re also all premortem injuries,” I continued. “In fact, the injuries on each of these victims show that they were inflicted over a period of several days, sometimes up to a week.”
“All of the victims died of ligature strangulation?” Garner asked.
I shook my head. “The first eleven victims were killed in a variety of ways—stabbing, shooting, drowning, you name it. Victims twelve and thirteen from before the three-year break were strangled with a ligature, as were these last three. On the first two of these latest deaths, the pathologist said that there was indication that the ligature had been tightened and released several times, judging by the bruising pattern on the strap muscles. He’s performing the autopsy on this latest one today, and he said he’d call with his findings.”
Kristoff leaned back and crossed his arms. “Repeated strangulation. More torture.”
