Ilona Andrews - Hex Appeal

“No.” I said it softly, my gaze fixed on the pale, blood-spattered face of the girl. “Not the same age as that victim. She’s the same victim.”

Prieto was staring at me, and I knew he’d been thinking the same exact thing but had wanted confirmation. “I thought maybe it was just a close resemblance.”

“It’s not. DNA will confirm. It’s the same girl , Daniel,” I said.

Prieto nodded.

The crime scene tech frowned. “Well, obviously, that can’t be the case,” he said. “That isn’t possible.”

I took in a breath. “Yes, it is. She’s been brought back by a resurrection witch, then killed again. The same way. In the same place.” I felt sick but oddly steady. I understood this now. I understood why I was here. Prieto hadn’t known, but he’d at least had a suspicion. “My God. He killed her all over again.”

The tech—Greg?—seemed to go still for a moment, as if he was running that through his head a few times for clarity. “I’m … sorry. And how exactly would you know that?”

“Because I consulted on the first case,” I said. Consulted was a euphemism, of course; I’d brought back this victim from the dead myself. I’d asked her who’d killed her, but she’d been so traumatized and hysterical that it hadn’t worked at all. I’d had to let her go without an answer. “They never caught him,” I said. “Detective … I think he’s found a way to relive his kills in a brand-new way—not just with trophies or memories or recordings. He’s found a way to actually repeat them.”

Prieto had gone pale because he knew what I was talking about now, and the enormity of it was starting to hit him like a falling wall. “If it’s the same man, he has six kills on his list.”

The world was spinning around me, wobbling like a top, and I had to focus hard to avoid feeling sick with it. “He just realized that it was safer to do it this way,” I said. “There’s no law against torturing and killing the dead. No law at all. As long as he can get a resurrection witch to go along with it, he can keep on going, and there’s nothing we can do to stop him. Nothing legal, anyway.”

“Fucking hell —” Prieto suddenly turned away, overcome and unwilling to let me see it. I waited for it to hit, too, but all I felt was a black sense of betrayal and inevitability. As if I’d known, deep down, that something would never rest safely in the grave about this case, this murderer, these victims.

Prieto paced, head down, then swung back on me. “It’s a fucking witch working with him,” he said. “One of yours. No, two of yours, right? One to create the shell, the avatar—that’s a different skill set. Then a resurrection witch to put the life back in.”

“Maybe this isn’t what it looks like.” I said that, but my heart wasn’t in it. I just didn’t want it to be true because no matter who did it, we all had a share of that kind of guilt.

“Don’t try to tell me this isn’t on one of you . It’s witches doing this shit. What the hell is this, eh? Legal murder?” Prieto was about one second from shoving me, from the wild, angry glitter in his eyes. “Necrophiliac sons of bitches! What kind of sick fucking sadists are you tweaks?”

I was glad Andy wasn’t with me. He’d have punched Prieto for using language like that in front of a lady, but I didn’t care; he was right. Sickeningly right.

I found that the words just came, all on their own. “I’m the kind that stops that kind,” I said. “Or dies trying.”

Prieto had pulled the case files, and he had them in his car. Not a stupid man, by any means. He’d assumed it was a copycat killing, but his forward thinking saved me valuable time, and it might even save a life, although the legal system wouldn’t quite see it that way.

“They’re wasting their time, your forensic people,” I said. “It isn’t a crime to kill the dead.”

Prieto sent me a scorching-hot glare. “No,” he finally said. “Resurrected people don’t have any rights, you know that. So it wouldn’t be murder to kill them, no matter how sick it is.”

“And whoever this is, he’s counting on that,” I said. “He’s a serial killer who’s discovered a way to get his thrills without nearly as much risk.” I felt sick again and had to swallow hard to control myself. “The victims will remember, you know,” I said. “Dying before. All the pain and terror. It would only be worse this time because they’ll know it’s coming.”

“You ever heard of anything like this before? People bringing back the dead for their own version of fun?” Prieto asked. I shook my head, but it was a silent lie. The resurrection business, like the mortuary business, attracted its share of mentally and emotionally broken people. The witch community generally policed its own, and as those kinds of offenders were noticed, they were dealt with. Quietly. With prejudice.

I’d heard of one or two rapists who revived the dead to attack them before letting them slip away again. A few who got their kicks torturing. I’d never heard of one turning serial killer, or someone enabling one. How had he—or, God help us, she—slipped through the cracks? And if you counted the witch who’d created the shell, that made two of them who were guilty and keeping their silence.

Sickening didn’t really cover it.

“So how do we start?” Prieto asked. “Do we go back to the parents?”

I shuddered. “No. The last thing we should do is let them know about this,” I said. “Bad enough they lost a daughter so horribly in the first place, but to know she went through it again, just as horribly … we’d be continuing their torture, not relieving it.”

Prieto looked even sicker as he ran it through his head. “Okay. So where’s our starting point?”

I held up a file. “We could try working it from the burials. An avatar witch needs a piece of the real person to make the physical body—bone, hair, flesh, blood. You start exhuming them and see if any of the bodies have been tampered with; I’ll bet you find they’ve all had samples taken. If I understand forensic rules properly, he—or she—should have left some trace evidence behind in the process—digging up a body is a messy, sweaty business.”

“And what will you be doing?”

“Tracking avatar witches. There aren’t more than a few dozen of them in this state; it isn’t a common skill in our circles, and they all have to be licensed.”

“Couldn’t it be somebody out of state? Somebody brought in just for this purpose?”

“Sure,” I said, and shrugged. “But we’re a close-knit community. Someone will know something about it, even if it’s just the supply shops who furnish what we need.”

“How am I supposed to get bodies exhumed? I need family consent,” Prieto said. “What kind of excuse am I supposed to use for that?”

“The serial killer’s struck again, but you have a revolutionary new scientific technique that wasn’t available before,” I said. “As far as I can tell, most people don’t understand science any better than they understand resurrection magic. Families will give you permission for the exhumation, almost certainly, if you tell them it will help us catch him.”

“You mean, if I lie my ass off to them.”

“Do you want this stopped, or not?” I thought about it for a few seconds, and continued, cautiously, “There’s a third thing we can do. We can keep an eye on the dump sites. He reused one, he might reuse others. These places mean something to him.”

“Well, that’s a problem,” Prieto said. “This isn’t officially a crime, and overtime’s not something we can throw around like confetti; our budget’s stretched so thin it squeaks. There are five other dump sites. Can’t cover them all, especially not during the night.”