Steve McHugh - Born of Hatred

There were no glyphs or marks that lit up under Olivia's use of her element. If I'd been standing in front of her, I'd have seen her irises turn a pure light blue, but that would have been it. Whereas sorcerers manipulated elements using magic, elementals were one with the element itself.

Olivia pulled open the top cabinet draw and removed a thick file from inside. She passed it to me, before she removed a second of equal size and began going through it.

I took mine over to the desk and opened the cover, immediately understanding why it was locked up. The front page had a picture of a man in full police uniform. According to the information written beneath it, he was over six feet tall, and weighed twenty stone. His name was Peter Jarvis, thirty-six and a serial killer responsible for sixteen murders in two years. The six victims were the same as those that had been in the files on Vicki's desk.

"So, why was she reading through the victims' files?" I asked.

"Because of this." Olivia passed me the file she'd been reading, which contained a picture of Peter with a young blond woman. They were stood in front of a large oak tree somewhere in a forest. They both appeared young and in love, the smiles genuine as they held one another. "This is Vicki."

"Your agent was dating a serial killer?"

"Yeah. It led to her drinking problem," Olivia said. "Like I told you, she had some anger issues."

"Anyone else know this about her?"

Olivia shook her head. "Just me. Peter used to beat her pretty badly. He nearly killed her once, just before she left him. She said she drank to forget what had happened. Sometimes she would wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of him coming after her."

"According to his file, he died in prison two years ago."

"His cellmate slit his throat. Vicki took a week off, and drank herself silly. I remember because Amber called me, worried that she was going to kill herself."

I bit my tongue, stopping myself from saying what I was thinking, but Olivia pretty much said it for me. "What the fuck have you got yourself into, Vicks?"

I grabbed one of the files inside the cabinet and started reading. related to a series of murders committed between five and seven years previously. Each of the victims had been young, pretty and murdered in brutal fashion. Their cars had been discovered on the major motorways around the New Forest, and their bodies found tied to trees with their hearts cut out.

"Fucking hell," I whispered. “Why wasn’t this house searched before? Hell, why didn’t you mention that Vicki’s ex was killing people in the same way as the current murders?”

Olivia snatched the file from me and started reading it. “Fuck. I swear I didn’t know the details of the murders. It was a human crime; I was far too busy to take notice. Even with it involving Vicki, I still didn’t find out much about what happened. She wasn’t exactly chatty about it, and I was swamped with work.”

“And the house?”

“Reid told me some human cops did it on our orders, just a cursory check… damn it, I fucked up.”

“We’ll ask Reid why he didn’t find anything.”

I opened the drawers on the desk, found a rucksack inside one, and used it to place the files inside. "They might come in handy," I pointed out.

We had one last look around the basement, but after finding nothing, decided it was best to head back upstairs.

Olivia's phone rang almost immediately and she walked off to answer it, leaving me alone to search the large living area of the house. Paintings were hung on walls, and a near empty bottle of vodka sat alone on the coffee table. Apparently, Vicki still had issues.

On a sideboard against the far wall sat rows of photos, all in elegant frames. Most of them were pictures of Vicki and Amber smiling, but one was a picture of seven women, including Amber and Vicki, all dressed up for a party. I picked up the photo and stared at it, until the realisation of where I'd seen them before clicked in my mind. They were the other victims. I turned it over n my hands and removed the photo from the frame. A date of four years previously was written on the back in pen.

I raced back to Olivia who'd finished on her call. "We got the bastard," she said with a smile.

I passed her the photo, fully aware that it would deflate her happiness. "I think we have a really big fucking problem."

Olivia's enthusiasm was quickly dampened when I showed her the photo, and the realisation that Vicki knew not only Amber, but all five of the remaining victims. And that every single person in the photo was now dead, or missing.

"You searched the victims' houses. Did any of them have the same photo?" I asked as Olivia placed the frame back where it had come from.

She shook her head, appearing slightly dazed, as if the photo had literally knocked the sense out of her. "Damn it, Vicks. Where are you?"

"We'll find her," I said.

"I hope so. Neil should be waiting for us by now, maybe he has some answers."

"Why are we at a human police station and not LOA headquarters?" I asked when we arrived at the police station.

"I might be able to answer that," Agent Reid said, as he stepped out from between a pair of parked cars. He dropped a cigarette onto the floor, and put it out with his foot. "Had to find a nice dark place to hide for a smoke," he said. "I'm meant to go to the designated smoking area, but I don't have the time to hunt for it."

"I have to admit, I was wondering about the locale myself, Agent Reid," Olivia said.

"As the humans are the ones taking the glory for the arrest, we might as well bring the prisoner here for questioning. There are runes on his manacles that stop him from changing. He's not going anywhere, and it gets the humans a little good publicity before he vanishes into a deep dark pit somewhere."

Olivia wasn't buying it. "The real reason, Agent."

Reid glanced at me before answering. "I wasn't sure that he would last the night at LOA headquarters. I'm pretty certain he would have had an accident."

"How many non-Avalon are there inside this station?"

"About ten," Reid replied. "There's up to a hundred and fifty during the day, normally about thirty or forty cops at night, but most of them are out working."

Reid opened the door for Olivia, and the three of us walked into the florescent-lit reception. "This way," Reid said. He entered a four digit code on a keypad and pushed the door open.

There were no human police on the way to the rear of the building where the interview rooms were, but when we arrived it was easy to figure out which room Neil was being held in. The two huge guards standing at rigid attention outside the door sort of gave it away.

We walked past the guards and into a small room which contained two metal chairs, a recording device and a small table. One wall was made of one-way glass, allowing us to stare at Neil Hatchell who sat in the next room, on one side of a bare table. His wrists were bound with thick steel manacles, which were then chained to the floor. The manacles and chain were both inscribed with runes.

His long, dirty-blond hair had been joined by the beginnings of a beard. His clothes — a pair of beige combats and a black hooded top — appeared to be old. The combats were frayed just above his shoeless feet. His fingers were dirty, and he had a smudge of redness on his cheek, along with red and puffy eyes. He kept twitching, scanning the room for whatever he expected to pounce out on him. He couldn't have been more a perfect suspect for a murder if he'd actually brought the body to the police himself.

He was ignoring Agent Greaves, who seemed to take the "yelling at the prisoner" approach to interviews. On a person like Neil, who didn't even seem to be taking notice, Greaves might as well have been talking to himself.