Angela Campbell - Something Wicked

Alexandra mentally exclaimed for everyone to give her some space. At least, she hoped she didn’t yell the words aloud.

The three figures all fell silent and backed away, and that’s when she spotted the fourth figure, standing behind them all.

A gargled, sickening sound was coming from the naked man. His face was mangled and bloody. No features were distinguishable.

He reached out a hand toward Alexandra, and she screamed.

***

“Not that I’m complaining or anything, but you guys almost never come by here when we’re doing this. What gives?” Dr. Jeffrey Watkins removed the bloody gloves he wore and then washed his hands in the sink and flicked water off his fingers.

As one of five professors and medical examiners on the pathology staff at the university, Watkins was the only one Dylan had met, and he sent up a silent prayer of thanks for his one piece of good luck today. It would have sucked if he’d had to explain himself to someone new.

Dylan veered around the medical instruments that always gave him the heebie jeebies and tried not to look at the corpses barely covered on the examining tables a few feet away. The pretty, young autopsy technician Dylan didn’t know gave him a brief smile and left the room.

“My captain wants this case solved, and soon.” He gestured toward the body he was here to investigate. Candice Christopher. Twenty-two, a recent honors college graduate, and too damn young to be lying on that table. “I thought I’d come see if I could get a jump on that report.”

He didn’t mention that he’d hoped to shake the supposed psychic he’d been saddled with too. Guilt tugged at his conscience. Bringing Alexandra here had been a stupid thing to do, but the sooner he got rid of her and put his focus back on solving this crime, the better.

He’d have liked to have gotten to know her a little better, spend some more time in bed maybe, but that plan had been shot to hell and back.

Besides, the idea of someone pretending to be psychic sent his blood pressure up a few millimeters. Psychics made him think too much about his older brother, Zach, who was as dead to him as the bodies in this room.

A clang of metal in the sink snapped his attention back to the medical examiner.

“You’re in luck. Charlie told me this one was a rush job, so we did this one first,” Watkins said, mentioning the coroner both he and the police department dealt with regularly. “I haven’t finalized our report yet.”

“Did you find anything I should know?”

Watkins nodded and moved toward the body, slid the sheet lower and pointed out a small swollen spot on the woman’s arm. “Same as the others. Our guy used a needle to inject about 10 milliliters of chloroform. She was dead of cardiac arrest within minutes. The rest was done to her afterward.”

“So it’s the same suspect?”

Watkins nodded and tugged the sheet back up. “This one was a little different. I found sand under the fingernails on her right hand and salt water in her lungs, but that’s not what killed her.”

“Water?” Dylan blinked in surprise, remembering Alexandra’s words from earlier. “So she wasn’t killed in the cemetery?”

“Hard to say for sure, but I doubt it. She’d been dead about eight hours before she was found.”

What was he supposed to make of that? No way had she been in that cemetery eight hours before someone found her body. Some of the ghost tours trampled through that graveyard up until midnight, and her body had been found around two this morning by a homeless guy looking for a place to sleep.

That was a short window of time for someone to have carried a dead body off the street, positioned it grotesquely and gotten away without being seen. Someone had to have noticed something. Dylan made a mental note to check with the directors of the city’s night tours to find out which one had last been by there and when.

The sound of a scream diverted his attention, and he turned just in time to see Alexandra burst through the double doors to the autopsy room. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide and crazed as she stumbled toward him. His hands reached out to steady her as she fell against him, her fingers clasping his arms with an iron grip. Her hair whipped around her shoulders as she glanced frantically behind her.

What the? Was she being chased?

“Dylan!” she cried, sagging against him. “Oh, thank heaven!”

“What happened?”

She squeezed his middle, but he was too preoccupied with figuring out what the hell was going on to respond. His protective instincts kicked into gear and he tried pushing her away and behind him, but she was stuck to him like a leech.

Watkins hurried to the doors, opened them and glanced both ways down the hallway. The other man’s shoulders relaxed as he turned around, his expression just as puzzled as Dylan’s probably was.

“I don’t see anyone,” Watkins said.

The tension began to seep from Dylan’s muscles. “Sorry. She’s with me.”

Pushing herself away, Alexandra closed her eyes and shook her head, gesturing wildly. She danced around in the same spot, wiggling her fingers in that way little girls did when they were grossed out or had to pee. “No. No, you can’t see them. One guy…his face is all…” she shuddered as she waved a hand in front of her face. “Mangled. He’s dead. They’re all dead. They all want…” She opened her eyes and looked at him. She’d stopped trembling. “Dylan, can we please leave?”

Her nose scrunched. The odor in the room was hard for most to stomach. Her pallor turned an unnatural gray. She looked like she was about to toss some cookies.

“Mangled?” Watkins repeated. He thumbed over his shoulder and started walking toward a second examining table, where a body was covered with a light blue sheet. “Are you here for this guy too?”

Watkins ripped back the sheet, and Dylan felt his stomach lurch. A man—or at least, he assumed it was a man by the width of those broad shoulders—looked like he’d been in one hell of a fight, eyes swollen and bloody, nose either missing or sunk in, and a deep gash in—

Dylan had to look away.

“This guy was in a boating accident. Not a homicide.” Watkins threw the sheet back over the poor schmuck’s face, but it was too late.

Alexandra made a squeaking sound deep in her throat and sagged against him. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her body went suddenly limp.

He caught her seconds before she would have hit the ground.

***

“Alexandra? Alexandra, honey, are you okay?”

The echo of a woman’s voice and a warm, gentle touch on her cheek teased at the edges of Alexandra’s consciousness like an annoying alarm radio set on low. She stretched out to hit the snooze button, wanting nothing more than to snuggle deeper into the darkness, but her fingers touched nothing but air.

“Alexandra, it’s me. I’m here.”

She knew that voice. Blinking her eyes open, she saw Rebecca Collins leaning over her. She sucked in a deep breath and reached out to hug Dylan’s mother. The older woman engulfed her in return, rubbing her back and murmuring, “There. You’re all right. You just had a bit of a scare.”

The fog cleared and Alexandra remembered. The spirits harassing her for help, demanding attention, and Mr. Hamburger Face freaking her the heck out by physically shoving her against the wall when she asked him to leave her alone. He hadn’t realized he was dead, and had gotten violent when she’d tried to coax that truth into him. And then the old woman had appeared behind them all, exuding malice and negativity as thick as cigarette smoke. It was almost as if the woman was controlling the dead people, commanding them to overwhelm Alexandra. Well, it had worked! Alexandra had lost it.