Demon Hunts. C.E. Murphy

any footprints, so somebody must have dumped her, but yeah, she died two hundred feet from her home. Her name was Karin Newcomb. University ID. I guess most of the tenants there are students.”

      “Most of them.” My heartbeat rabbited hard enough I was surprised my voice didn’t shake. “Heather, that’s where I live.”

      “Jesus Christ. Did you know her?”

      I shook my head even as I tried to draw some hint of recognition from her profile. “I don’t remember ever seeing her, but there are forty apartments in that building. People are always moving in and out. God, how horrible.” Her death hit me harder, all at once, than any of the others had. Not because I was afraid it could’ve been me, but because I might have known her. The fact that I hadn’t was irrelevant. I found myself making a silent promise that we’d find her killer, like I’d been previously lacking motivation and only just now really meant it.

      I said, “Shit,” under my breath and tried to pull my thoughts back to what Heather’d been saying before ID’ing the girl to me. That was the only way I was going to keep the stupid little promise I’d just made. “How did they dump her? There’s no skid marks, so she wasn’t thrown out of a vehicle. She looks like she was placed here, but there aren’t any footprints.”

      Heather stalked back to my side. With her winter hat and boots on, she came up to my eyebrow, which made her taller than most of the women I knew. “I know. It’s been the same thing all over the city. No matter where we find the body, no matter how long we think it might’ve been there, there’s no indication that anybody carried it there. She hasn’t been dropped, either.” A circling finger encompassed Karin Newcomb’s form. “No spray of snow, and since neither rigor mortis nor the cold has set in, there should be some displacement of limbs if she had been. Instead she’s nestled up perfectly. It’s like—”

      She bit her tongue on the last word: magic. “Yeah,” I said, willing to go where she wasn’t. “It is.”

      I crouched, flashlight bouncing a long oval off the snow as I examined the scene with the Sight again. Individual flakes, loosely packed, turned into a river of blue glitter under my gaze, but even then I didn’t see footprints. Not in the snow, at least. The ridges beneath it, though, resolved into ten long narrow strips, five and five with a few inches of space between them. Roundish marks cupped the bases of both sets of ridges. I rocked forward in my crouch so I could feel the balls of my feet press into my insoles. Snow creaked under my boots, warning me of the impressions I was leaving behind.

      Impressions that the killer hadn’t left. Somehow his weight had been transferred through the delicate crystals and into the earth below. “Heather, I need to scrape away some of the snow.”

      To her credit, she only said, “Where?” instead of arguing with me. Up until very recently, if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have argued. Not for the first time, I gave thanks that the people around me weren’t as obstreperous as I was, then gestured to the curve of the dead woman’s back. There were other marks beneath the snow, but the crouched set had the most weight to them, as if they might last longer and give more information about what had left them.

      Heather stepped forward, her aura a brilliant, efficient red. I put the flashlight in her hand with an apologetic grimace. “I know this is your job, but I’m afraid someone else’s hands in there might contaminate what I’m seeing. If something comes up, there’ll be plenty for you to examine.”

      Her aura leeched toward ice blue, a color that became audible in her tone, too. “If something comes up.”

      I sighed. “Yeah. I might be imagining things.” It was a better answer than it’s magic. Even if she’d heard the rumors about my predilections—and she had, or she wouldn’t have bitten off her magic comment a minute ago—normal people didn’t want their police work done by psychics and shamans. I suspected someone with a degree in Forensic Sciences really, truly and deeply didn’t want it’s magic as an answer for anything.

      Heather exhaled sharply. I took it as permission and began brushing snow back from the frozen earth, trying not to disturb anything more than the narrow strips where I saw footprints in one level of my double vision. After a minute I scraped my way down to the ground, verifying that my eyes couldn’t see what the Sight did. I breathed a curse and shook my head at Heather. “There’s not going to be anything here that’ll do you any good. I’m sorry.”

      “Then you can get out of my crime scene, Detective, and let my people get back to work.”

      “Yeah, in just…” I stripped my glove off and slid my hand into the hollow I’d dug. A hillock of snow collapsed over my fingers, sending cold shivering through me.

      It had nothing on the black ice beneath my palm. It sucked away my body heat with a willful vengeance, like it wanted to drag me in and abandon me in the cold. I jerked back with an ingénue’s gasp and coiled my other hand around my fingers. The ridges in the earth had flattened, like I’d put pressure on them. The notion that cold was all they were made of, and that my warmth had negated their chill, lingered in my thoughts.

      Still cradling my hand, I pushed to my feet and turned in a slow circle, scanning the nearby earth for more of the narrow-toed footprints. Nothing: not on the ground, and not scored into any nearby trees. “It couldn’t just disappear.”

      Morrison, a few feet away, said, “It?” and Heather drew herself up more stiffly.

      I uncradled my hand and pinched the bridge of my nose with those fingers, half surprised they were willing to bend without shattering. “It. Him. Whatever. Billy, have you got…?”

      God, how I’d changed. Billy and I usually retreated to The Missing O, a coffee and doughnut shop near the precinct building, to discuss the more unusual aspects of our cases. A few months earlier if anybody had told me I’d ask him straight out, in public, if he was getting a read on a ghost, I’d have sent some nice young men in clean white coats after them. I still wasn’t quite bold enough to spell it out, but none of us—not me, not Billy, not Morrison, and probably not Heather, since Billy’s fondness for the paranormal was legendary in the precinct—needed me to. We all knew what I was asking.

      Billy came the long way around the body, his face tight. “Could be that she’s clinging to the location she died in.”

      Heather made a disgruntled sound under her breath and walked away. Billy and I watched her, neither of us wanting to look at Morrison as I said, “But you don’t think so.”

      “I don’t know.” My partner pulled his hand over his mouth. “I’ve never run into it before. Ghosts are usually tied to their physical forms, so even when the body is dumped they go with it. It could be there’s some kind of trap in place to keep them where they’re dying, though. Maybe…” He shot a guilty look at Morrison, who blew a breath from puffed cheeks.

      “Go ahead, Holliday. Let’s hear your supposition.”

      “That’s all it is, sir. Conjecture. But this guy is eating, or at least tasting, these bodies. If it’s something that feeds on human souls, then the physical desecration might be secondary to the spiritual one. It could be that chewing the bones is representative of…” He trailed off as Morrison got one of those looks that I recognized as something I usually triggered. It was one part disgust, one part disbelief and one part deliberate patience, all mixed well with resignation.

      “Feeds on human souls.”

      I said, “We’ve encountered it before, Captain,” in the smallest voice I possessed. Morrison turned his complicated expression on me, and it was all I could do to not dig a toe into the snow. “It’s essentially what Barbara and Mark Bragg were doing, sir, under Begochidi’s influence. Gathering strength by draining human lives. That’s what was putting everyone to sleep in July.”

      Morrison looked to the sky, as if beseeching God to give him strength. I peeked at Billy, who shrugged his eyebrows, and we both came to attention as Morrison spoke again. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how I’ve spent twenty years in the force without