Chapter IV: Leaving a Pretty Corpse

To my credit, after that first slip-up I did remember to stop talking to the police. Not that it really mattered, considering this was Selene and the cops here don’t hold themselves to such trivial matters as “appearances” or “the illusion of fairness”. No, they very quickly realized that I was the person they were looking for, and that I wasn’t from New Alderburg, at which point they tossed me into a jail cell and went to go see if they could find enough evidence to pin it on me.

Sitting in my jail cell, wondering if it was a good idea to try escaping or not, I had a while to think. Maria was dead. Would she have died if I’d gone with her? Even if I’d turned down the sexual offer, I could have escorted her home instead of leaving her to make it back alone, in the city, at night. Especially after I’d received Alonhall’s warning, there had still been time to turn around.

The ugly feeling started to rise up in my stomach, accompanied by the little voice in my head telling me that it was all my fault. If I’d just been there. If I hadn’t panicked at the wrong moment. If only there wasn’t yet another dead woman weighing down my conscience. 

And that was the moment when it hit me that I’d been through this before. I knew Abby’s death wasn’t my fault, so now that twisted hate-lobe of my brain was trying to find a new dead woman to blame myself for. And I wasn’t going to let that happen. Maria’s death was a tragedy, yes. I wasn’t going to let her be forgotten, yes. Whoever snuffed out a life so beautiful and full of potential was going to pay, yes. But no, it wasn’t my fault.

Right about when I came to that conclusion was when the Blackbird showed up to unlock the door of my jail cell. “Good news, Emma. You’re being set free.”

I blinked at her. “And here I thought that you were on the same side as the police.”

“I am. I also severely outrank every single woman in this building. So when I ask for the keys, I get them.”

“Ah, corruption. Wonderful.”

Alonhall folded her arms. “It’s not corruption, Emma. It’s proper protocol. Not to mention that they were going to arrest you on quite possibly the flimsiest charges imaginable. I’m doing the right thing here, if you think about it.”

“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “And I’m sure that’s the only reason you have for breaking me out.”

“Well I do like you, if that’s what you’re implying. That and I figured, well, why not get a second pair of eyes to help.”

“With what?”

“Finding out who actually did it,” Alonhall said, her voice low but brimming with excitement. “Unless you really want no part of this?”

“I can’t really escape it, can I? I’m going to have a part in this whether I want to or not.”

“Do you want to?”

I nodded. “What’s the plan?”

“I’ve already been over all of the police notes,” Alonhall said. “No witnesses, no stand-out pieces of evidence. I was thinking that we could start by taking a look at the scene of the crime.”

…

It wasn’t very long before Alonhall and I found ourselves standing on the side of the street in an unremarkable residential neighborhood. Rows of charming red-brick-and-white-stone apartments stretched off for blocks in either direction.

“Do you see that open window, up on the third floor? That’s how the killer got in. And considering the number of police inside… I think that’s how we’re going to get in as well. Up for a climb, Emma?”

I rolled my eyes. “Are you sure this is the best way in?”

“No,” Alonhall said. “But I think it’s the most informative.”

We moved through the front garden, Alonhall first, until we were standing directly below the open window. From down there, the climb looked nearly but not quite impossible. “You go first,” I said.

“Gladly.”

Alonhall took one long, slow, analytical look up and down the stretch of wall before us. Then she took a few steps back, rubbed her hands together, and ran. When she hit the wall, it was poetry in motion. She never stayed in the same place for more than a second, finding nearly invisible footholds, deflecting her momentum off of windowsills and decorative elements. It was a matter of seconds before she reached the window, entering the apartment above with a slick combat roll.

“See? It’s easy,” she said from inside.

“Oh, fuck you,” I groaned.

Still, she couldn’t be allowed to just show me up like that. I gave myself a more substantial running start, then made a leap for it. I didn’t quite grab onto the third story windowsill, but I made it more than half way, catching myself on a bit of decoration, then boosting myself higher off of a vertical protruding rib in the wall. When I caught the edge of the window with my fingertips, that was all I needed to launch myself up and over, landing inside the apartment on one knee.

“Showoff,” Alonhall muttered, then went back to examining the body.

Maria’s corpse was still in the room, thankfully covered up by a sheet. I dread to imagine what my reaction would have been if she weren’t covered; even as it was, the sight made me immediately start hyperventilating. My skin felt slick and cold and tight as I fought the tide of horror and disgust. I remembered Abby’s ring, let the memory wash over me.

I waited until I had things mostly under control before standing up, focusing on everything except the body. Even a few weeks before, it wouldn’t have been possible to focus on anything else, and I’d have probably been screaming and sobbing in a matter of seconds. I could hold together well enough to get an idea of what I was looking at. The rest of the room was a complete mess: drawers pulled out and overturned, bed tipped onto its side, containers torn open. 

“The place was ransacked,” I said. 

“Yes, but the killer left valuables behind,” Alonhall said, gesturing to a few coins scattered on the floor. “Not a botched robbery.”

“You said this wasn’t the first, right? One botched robbery I can believe, but a series of them is absurd.”

“This is the fourth. A thief wouldn’t kill this way either, she was damn well savaged.”

“Maybe the killer is looking for something specific, then?” I said. “And they don’t want anybody knowing, which is why they have to leave no witnesses alive.”

“Emma, don’t jump to conclusions. You and I both know how that tends to go for you.”

“Jackass.”

“She could very well be trying to make it look like robbery, and doing a poor job,” Alonhall said. “Or purposefully making noise to draw attention. Perhaps she is stealing something other than money, and nobody has noticed because it’s something we wouldn’t think to look for. Something you have to understand, Emma, is that in an investigation, it is best to wait for all of the—”

“I get it,” I said through gritted teeth.

All of the detritus of Maria’s life was scattered around like it had no meaning. Portraits smashed, old diaries and notebooks torn apart, knickknacks scattered across the floor and stepped on. Somewhere among all of that might have been some evidence, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where any of it might be. 

I picked up a piece of paper. Most of what Maria had been writing on—and she wrote quite a bit—had been on cheap pulp paper, where you could still see some of the fibers. But this one sheet was rich stationery, complete with an elaborate pattern around the edges, like the frame of a painting, printed onto the yellowish paper in faint red ink. The paper’s contents took a moment for me to decipher. It was a list of times, marked out in the Selenian style. It wasn’t until I read the extra note at the bottom that I realized what I was looking at.

Don’t be late again!

It was a schedule for Maria’s job. The Society must have provided the expensive stationery paper. I set it down, then wandered back over to the window. Maria’s room smelled faintly of death, though thankfully she’d only been dead for about twenty hours: not long enough to rot. I needed the fresh air regardless. But the sight of the window stirred something in my memory. 

“Alonhall. You said that the killer entered through the window?”

“The door was shut when she was found, and the lock on the window had been forced open. It’s not a difficult deduction to make.”

“But this is a third-floor window. We were able to get up here, sure, but you’re trained at this sort of thing, and I’m… me. Is there any other way the killer could have made it up to the window?”

There was a pause. “No, I suppose not.”

“That narrows it down quite a lot. We’re looking for someone who has your kind of training. An athlete, a professional assassin, a climber. Or we’re looking for someone who’s as fit as me, though I don’t want to know who might fit that description.”

“The method of murder certainly suggests something abnormal,” Alonhall said with a shrug.

I swallowed nervously. This moment had been inevitable from the instant I agreed to help Alonhall with her investigation. That didn’t make it any easier to take a deep breath, open my mouth, and ask, “How did she die? Describe it to me, I can’t look.”

There was a faint rustle of Alonhall raising the cloth, while I stared out of the window. “Fuck,” Alonhall said. “Brutalized. That’s the only word I can use. Skull’s shattered, neck snapped, flesh torn to ribbons. Fuck.” She dropped the cloth and stood up. “It’s bad, Emma. Very bad.”

“I thought you killed people for a living.”

“I do. With knives. And guns. I am used to the sight of blood. What I am not used to is the sight of a woman’s head being treated like a fucking chew toy.”

My stomach didn’t like that image one bit. I retched, but managed to hold it down. “Don’t say it like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Alonhall almost whispered.

“It’s fine. I guess I’m glad I had you describe it. Don’t want to throw up on her, not after everything else has happened. But that does tell us something about our killer.”

“That she is utterly ruthless, and viciously bloodthirsty.”

I nodded. “But more importantly, she has to be strong. You said the skull was shattered? The skull is strong bone, shattering it requires a lot of force.”

“And Maria still managed to get a hit in,” Alonhall said. “I can see why you liked her.”

“What?”

“She was holding a fountain pen. I don’t think that that’s her own blood on it, which means she got at least one stab in before going out.”

Somehow, that detail captivated my attention. She’d stabbed her attacker with a fountain pen. I turned away from the window, my fascination overpowering my disgust, and walked up to the body. The cloth covered all of her, forming an outline of her splayed form. Maria was right handed, that much I remembered, so I crouched down by her right side and nudged the cloth out of place. Clutched in her hand, the muscles tight with rigor mortis, there was indeed a fountain pen. 

I understood why Alonhall thought that the blood on it wasn’t hers. It had clearly been stabbed into something, not merely splattered, from the way the blood was soaked into the deepest crevices of the nib. Most of it had dried to an ugly brown, but there were still a few spots where wet red remained. It was a beautiful pen, the handle wrapped around in what looked like ivory. I reached out to touch it.

And the blood moved. Like iron filings before a magnet, the few droplets that remained wet suddenly started to flow and shift, forming into strange cross-hatched ridges of blood held together by surface tension. For a moment I thought it must have been some bizarre hallucination, but over the next few seconds I realized it was reacting to me. When I shifted my hand, the blood shifted in turn. 

“Oh no. No, no, no, no, no.”

“Emma, don’t stay over there longer than you have to. It’s not necessary to hurt yourself for this.”

I shook my head. “The blood on the pen, it’s reacting to my enhanced EV field. Normal blood doesn’t do that.”

“EV field? Élan vital? So that’s how you can heal like that. I like it.” She sounded like a cat who’d just figured out how to climb onto the top of the fridge. I ignored her. 

“What this means, then… We aren’t just looking for someone who has the same level of fitness as me. The killer has the same powers as me.”

SaffronDragon

It's nice to be able to write a character who's actually starting to overcome their previous flaws, or at least trying to. Not that it means Emma is entirely comfortable around the dead. Then again, who is?

If you want to be able to read the next two chapters right away, you can click the link below to check out my Patreon, where I also have a patrons-only discord server and, on top of that, a collection of exclusive short stories for your perusal. My Patreon is currently my sole source of income, so every dollar of support that people can provide there is so incredibly important.

Otherwise, see you in two weeks, June 23rd, for Chapter V: Would You Kindly?