S. Cedric - Of Fever and Blood

Eva moans.

“Oh, of course, you’re not intelligent enough to understand,” the woman continues. “For you, they were all just murders, weren’t they? All you can see is the flesh. But what was at stake remains invisible to you. You have to live with death inside you to understand.”

She raises the scalpel.

Runs it in front of Eva’s face.

The inspector flinches. She doesn’t dare breathe, as the blade is too close to her eyes.

“Such pretty eyes. People say that albinos have the gift of clairvoyance. Is that true?”

Eva’s heart becomes a beating drum. She bites her tongue to remain motionless, at any cost.

The masked woman continues her monologue.

“Have you ever longed to speak to the gods, to ask of them what no mortal being could ever offer you?”

Eva breathes as slowly as possible. A drop of blood falls from the blade and lands in her right eye. She does not blink. The blade is so close. One tiny move, and the point will pierce her cornea.

She finds herself praying.

Make the monster leave, please.

She restrains a moan.

When the blade draws away from her face, Eva can’t help letting out a long whimper of relief, gratitude, or maybe terror. Or all of that combined. Her thoughts are muddled. The black river is approaching, coming to embrace her.

“I’ll let you have your eyes,” the woman tells her. “At least for now.”

Suddenly, behind the masked woman, Eva sees a black and indistinct figure. An animal with red eyes. Then a second animal and a third.

She shuts her eyes for a second, and when she opens them again, they’re gone.

“You can see them? That’s a good sign. They have come for you. They will take you when the time is right.”

Eva does the only thing she is still capable of. She spits in the woman’s face.

The woman laughs softly.

“You’re still feisty, little tiger. That’s good.”

“What do you want?” Eva utters.

“Your blood, your life, your soul. What else? I’m going to take back what you stole from me, do you understand? The ritual has been interrupted for a year because of you. One whole year lost. For a while I thought I’d lost her track. Fortunately, the gods are helping me. Thanks to you, the ceremony can start again. Nothing will stop it now.”

She raises the scalpel.

Only I had the courage to face the men across the Danube, and only I have conquered the Dacians, the fiercest nation ever known. These great warriors are fearsome, not only for their physical strength, but also because of the scriptures of Zalmoxis, who is said to dwell among them and is held in such profound reverence, he keeps sole dominion over their hearts and minds. Because of these scriptures, it is the Dacian belief that in death they do not die but instead move from one dwelling to a better one, and so the Dacians are happiest when facing death.

Vauvert put the book down.

“The Dacians are happiest when facing death.”

“Fucking barbarians,” he muttered.

He had read so many pages-and skimmed through so many others-his head was starting to spin. He rubbed his temples, his thoughts still muddled.

“In death they do not die but instead move from one dwelling to a better one.”

He was not sure he understood what that meant.

But that is what he had read-or at least what he thought he had read-in the Salavilles’ barn. He remembered the words perfectly: “Lords of death and resurrection. Leave your dwellings.”

He glanced at the photos on the wall. On one of them, the inscription written in lipstick on the bathroom wall, defied him with its big capital letters:

The books he just read corroborated everything Leroy had told him about. The first European tribes did worship a god of death. His name was Zalmoxis, which meant “Ancient God,” and wolves were his envoys to the world of the dead. Messengers of death, in other words.

“Lords of death and resurrection…”

Thoughts raced through his mind.

The worship of animal spirits was a component of many primal religions, but for the Dacians a truly dark veneration was fundamental. They made the wolf their ideal, the very symbol of their nation.

Their dream was to become one with the wolves so as to triumph over death. To “move from one dwelling to a better one,” as Emperor Trajan had written. The Dacians were eager to take the lives of others in the hope of becoming immortal.

And nowadays? What would happen if serial killers could actually free themselves from life and death?

People like the Salaville brothers, for example?

This was nonsense, of course. This kind of thing just was not possible, Vauvert kept saying to himself over and over again.

It’s nothing but folklore.

“Feast scarlet…”

He kept thinking in the silence of the tiny room. And the more he thought, the more convinced he became that the mysterious killer was actually inspired by this tradition. Whether these myths were actually true or not, she believed them, and that was the important thing. She believed them to the point of trying to resurrect the tradition.

He still had to figure out which ritual she was trying to recreate. The Dacians had many ceremonies, and all of them were gory. On some occasions, the men would pluck out the eyes of their enemies and slash their faces. There were also times when they would decapitate their enemies and display the heads on spikes. Every five years, they asked the gods of death to choose young boys to be used as human sacrifices. They were dropped alive onto a bed of spikes.

With such a catalog of horrors, a psychopath certainly had ample choice.

Pieces of the puzzle. So many pieces. And all of them red.

Vauvert’s vision was blurring.

He craved a smoke.

There was a knock. Detective Leroy stood in the doorway. He entered the office, his face grim.

“What’s going on?”

“Well, I’m not too sure,” Leroy said. “It’s about the AB negative blood we found at Eva’s place. The lab ran a DNA test.”

Vauvert took a slow breath. He had already lived this very moment.

“It is someone we know?”

“In a way. This blood belongs to Barbara Meyer.”

“The Goth victim?”

“Yes, except she’s been dead for more than three days. This is totally crazy. This girl’s blood splashed on Eva’s walls. It’s impossible!”

It was. But it was also the second time this kind of thing had happened. A new piece of the puzzle was falling into place.

Vauvert kept his thoughts to himself.

“Is there anything else?”

“As a matter of fact, there is. I went through the Salaville file again. I found something unsettling.”

“Which is?”

“The list of the psychiatric institutions they were in.”

“Yes? They were in three different ones in fifteen years. Each time, they went in together.”

Leroy raised four fingers.

“We thought there were three. It seems now that we missed a fourth.”

“It’s not in the file?”

“Yes, it’s in the file. But it’s in the appendix. It was their detox treatment. It wasn’t filed in their psych histories. They were in Rodez, at the Raynal Medical Center, to be precise. The reports didn’t mention anything else, so I dug a little deeper in the database, looking for any event we might have recorded related to this institution. And, you know what? There was an incident involving both patients and staff members who had what appeared to be hallucinatory visions.”

“You’re not going to tell me that they were seeing wolves?”