5. Bad Time To Lose Your Head.
There was just so much wrong with the scene, Lil realised, as they pulled up into the crowded parking lot outside of the Seven-Eleven service station. The sun was just setting, yet all of the other murders had taken place at night. It was a crowded area, whereas the others were all in isolated spots.
Upon slipping past the police barrier unnoticed and glancing inside, there could be no doubt the murder had be done by the same killer. The glass sliding doors were obscured with blood from a wide arterial spray. Likewise, blood coated the linoleum floor. Bits and pieces of the unfortunate attendant littered the shop, his head lying on its side on the counter.
“You know,” Lil said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve passed my disembodied limb quota for the day.”
“Meh,” Tome said dismissively, not looking at the corpse. “You’ve seen one dismembered body you’ve seen them all.” He made a slight whimpering sound, and stepped over an arm.
Lil shook her head. “How can this creep you out more than Delia’s plopping arm?”
“Because her arm was still alive. The plop doesn’t destroy tissue. Whereas this poor sod is well and truly shuffled off his mortal coil.”
“Hey!” an annoyed voice called out. A female FBI agent was glaring at them from across the room. “You can’t come in here.”
“They’re with me,” said Ryan, with obvious reluctance, standing up behind the counter.
“These guys the experts, sir?” the woman asked in amusement.
“Nope,” Ryan replied simply. “Well,” he asked the two. “What do you think?”
“Yep,” said Lil. “He’s dead, Jim.”
“No kidding. You think it’s our guy?”
“Well, it's always possible the poor guy fell over and accidentally fell to pieces.”
“Depends on what he was doing at the time,” joined in Tome.
“I know get fragile at this time when I watch the soaps, wondering if poor Susan will get out of the coma and marry her rich boyfriend, unaware his been replaced by the zombie of his evil brother... or was that our last client?”
“Can you two ever just give me a straight answer?” Ryan asked.
“Lighten up, Hughbert,” Tome said testily as he took out his pendulum. “You’d think somebody just died.”
“Just do your thing and get out, Merlin.”
“What’s the problem?” Lil asked. “You seem stressed. More than usual.”
“Well, looking at this crime scene, you would think there was a connection, wouldn’t you?” Ryan said.
Lil looked about the blood splattered room. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say, yes.”
“In which case, we have a serious problem,” Ryan nodded at the head on the counter. “Because then it looks like our guy is stepping things up.”
“What do you mean?”
“This guy wasn’t a vamp.”
Lil paused. “What? You’re sure?”
“Positive. I talked to his supervisor. Guy couldn’t be more human.”
“You’re right,” Lil agreed. “That is bad. Mike!”
“Over here,” Tome called back from somewhere down an aisle.
They went to join him, and found him blowing revelation dust onto a spot on the floor. As expected, the same diagram from the last murders appeared before their eyes, shimmering beneath the fluorescent lights. It was exactly the same, except the name in the centre was different. This one read in perfect English: Jerry Simon Howard.
“Shit,” Ryan said. “This makes my day.”
“He could have come in here at any time,” Tome said. “Down here he’s out of sight of the cameras...” He looked up and shared a look with Lil.
“Cameras,” Lil said with excitement. “Hugh, are the cameras...”
“Agent Santiago,” Hugh called out. The woman agent looked around. “Where are we with the security cameras?”
“Guys are in the back, still looking,” Santiago replied.
Tome stared at the agent. “Who’s that?” he asked. “Because she is hot. On my scale of one to ten she's a wowser.”
Lil kicked him the leg. “Try to focus on the task at hand,” she chided as they followed Ryan to the back room.
“What?” Tome asked innocently. “I just love a girl in uniform is all. The FBI jacket, the cuffs, the standard issue taser...”
“Oh god, spare me.”
In the back room, they found two other agents before a small, old fashioned, black and white TV. They were watching the security tape taken during the murder.
“Please tell me you got something,” Ryan said.
One of the agents looked up. “Sorry, sir. You’re not gonna like this.” He rewound the tape to the moments before the murder. On screen, they saw the interior of the Seven Eleven, coloured in glorious, grainy black and white. The camera was situated on the wall just above the head of the late Jerry Howard. They could see his head, clad in a green uniform cap, bobbing up and down in time to some music they could not hear.
Lil glanced at the corner of the screen. The time recorded was barely half an hour earlier. Ryan swore suddenly, and she looked back upwards. The right side of the screen had gone white.
“Shit!” Ryan repeated, glaring at the screen with fury. “Why couldn’t these guys just cough up the extra cash and buy a proper system?”
“Sorry, Hugh,” said one of the agents, as if it were his fault. “The distortion completely blocks out the guy...”
“It's not distortion,” came Tome’s ever knowing voice. “It’s your killer.”
The four agents turned to regard him.
“Say again?” said Santiago.
“Let me guess,” Ryan replied impatiently. “Our killer cast some sort of hex on the camera so it wouldn’t record his image, right?”
Tome gave him a funny look. “What are you talking about? That’s some grade-A bollocks right there, Hughbert. Who would bother to do that? I think someone’s been reading a few too many books about a certain boy wizard.”
“What Mike, in his ever patient and understanding way, is trying to say,” Lil put in, “is that there’s nothing wrong with the camera.” She was staring at the screen intently. The distortion slowly spread across. She thought she could see the victim turning his head towards the new thing that entered the shop, then he was lost in a sea of white.
Barely five minutes passed before the picture began to improve. The whiteness slowly drifted back across the screen, before disappearing completely. The automatic doors slid shut behind it. The previously ordered shop was now like the bloodbath outside, the victim’s head resting on the counter grotesquely.
Lil shuddered, and caught a brief glance from Tome that looked almost concerned, before Ryan interrupted.
“Alright, so you’re trying to tell me that this poor guy was killed by... what? A big ball of light?” he asked.
“Essentially,” Tome said with his typical unsettling grin. “Yes.”
There was a cold silence, as the four FBI agents shared a look. It suggested they had all just had the simultaneous thought that, if necessary, they could take the crazy guy if they rushed together.
“Look,” Lil said, and no one missed the sudden edge in her voice. “Cameras don’t lie. They can’t. You can tinker with them, alter the picture, but essentially, anything that it captures is the truth. Just light on a sensor. You can’t change that. It’s the human brain that alters things. Makes things... easier to comprehend. Just look at the victim. If a giant walking ball of light came in, you think he’d be somewhat taken aback. But look at him. He looks right at it. What he sees and what the camera sees are two different things.”
“But that,” Tome nodded to the screen. “Is what your killer is. Purely, and unequivocally.”
Ryan massaged his temples, while the woman agent, Santiago stared from Tome to Lil, looking as if she was hoping for the punch line.
“That still leaves us in the dark,” Ryan said finally. “This thing could l
ook like anyone.”
“Well, I think we can narrow it down,” Tome said. He leaned down to the agents working the VCR. “Rewind it back, say an hour before the killing. I want to see everyone who came in in that time.”
The agent looked to Ryan, who nodded in consent. He rewound the tape to the right point and played. The Seven-Eleven returned, as did the victim, calmly stealing money from the till.
“Fast forward,” Tome ordered. He watched intently as the action sped up. Customers coming and going at break neck speed. He didn’t shift his gaze, except to glance back at Lil, who was backed into a corner and staring at the screen in silence. When he looked back, his eyes widened. “Stop! Go back to that last one.”
The last customer walked backwards through the doors, went about his business, and then walked backwards out again. When played forward, Tome grinned broadly.
“Gotcha, you slimy bastard,” he said triumphantly.
Lil looked up. The customer on screen was entering the store. He was covered completely from head to toe. A black hood covered his head, hanging low over his face and he wore thick leather gloves. It all seemed rather out of season. She knew a vampire when she saw one.
Jerry Howard seemed completely oblivious to the new arrival as he dealt with another customer. The dark figure walked purposefully into the store without paying the attendant any heed, and marched down the aisle where Tome had only just found the summoning circle. He or she pretended to study the items on shelf briefly, before ducking down out of sight.
“He’s drawing the circle,” Tome said.
After only half a minute or so, the figure popped back into view. Jerry Howard seemed to start in surprise. His head turned to follow the vampire as it strolled calmly back to the door, as quickly as it had come.
Then the vampire stopped.
Lil watched with interest as he turned to look his next victim. Jerry Howard’s head was moving animatedly. He was talking to the vamp. And the vamp was responding.
“Shitty cameras,” an agent remarked. “He’s face on and we can’t even make him out.”
“His face is covered. A vamp won’t walk around exposed,” Santiago replied.
“They know each other,” Tome said.
“How can you tell?”
“Look at the victim,” he explained. “If you were a Seven-Eleven attendant and some prat walked into the store dressed like that, wouldn’t you be worried? This guy’s calm. He’s just making small talk. He knows the bugger.”
The FBI agents leaned in closer.
“I think you’re right,” Santiago said.
Tome gave her his most charming grin, which tended to be only slightly less off putting than his usual one. To Lil’s surprise, she actually smiled back.
Ryan ejected the tape forcefully and pushed it into Santiago’s hands.
“Take it to the lab, and make sure the nerds do everything possible to clean the picture and give us something worthwhile,” he told her.
Santiago looked as though she was going to complain, but instead nodded and went off looking irritated. Ryan ran a hand through his hair.
“This is getting ridiculous,” he muttered as he walked through the blood splattered shop. “Another body...”
“Pieces of,” corrected Tome.
“My main suspect’s made of light, probably being controlled by what may, possibly, be a vampire.”
“You look stressed,” said Tome seriously. “Are you stressed, Hughbert?”
“What do you think? The director’s been all over my ass. Wasn’t too happy about how I let you two in on the case either.”
“Aw, I’m sure he just needs to meet us, right Lil?” Tome looked about, but couldn’t find her. “Lil?”
She came out of the back room, looking rather downcast.
“You okay?” asked Ryan.
“Sure,” she replied dismissively. “I don’t suppose you found anything that connects our victims yet?”
“Nope. As far as we know, there is none. Do you have any idea what that thing is?”
He expected a stupid comment from Tome, but the other man fell strangely silent, and looked at Lil. When she didn’t answer, he said simply, “Not sure. We’ll look into it.”
Ryan looked from one to the other. Lil figured he knew they were lying.
“Well,” he said finally. “Let me know when you do.”
“Sure. Mike, let’s go.” She hurried out of the store and went to the car. To Tome’s surprise, she climbed in the passenger side. Normally she never let him drive.
When they were out of sight of the store, Tome turned to her.
“Are you sure it was smart leaving Hughbert in the dark?” he asked.
“He wouldn’t understand,” Lil replied. She fished something out of her pocket.
“Yeah, but... We don’t know for certain...”
“Oh, come on, Mike,” Lil snapped in agitation. “How many Descended Beings will look like that on camera?”
Tome pretended to think about it. “Well, there is the Hum'um'nekraturater Demons of the fifth level. They glow in the dark to attract moths.”
“You just made that up.”
“Yeah, but it sounded real didn’t it?”
Lil shook her head. “We both know what it was,” she said in a low voice.
Tome looked over at the object she was examining. It was a wallet.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“Back there,” Lil replied. “It’s the victims. I found it in a jacket in the back room while you were all watching the security tapes. Odd that the FBI missed it.”
“And that you didn’t turn it in,” Tome said, his voice a mixture of surprise and reverence. “I think you’ve been hanging around me too long. Ryan’s going to go off his nut. What’s in it?”
Lil pulled out a driver’s license, the small picture of the now deceased man stared back at her forlornly. There was also twenty dollars, which Tome deftly reached over and took from her grasp while driving with one hand.
“Thanks.”
“You would really steal from a dead guy?”
“What? He’s not going to need it.”
“Want his credit cards too?”
“Of course not. What kind of low life do you think I am? You know those things are too easily traced.”
Lil shook her head. She pulled a small strip of paper out of the wallet and examined it in the dim light.
“Bingo,” she said excitedly.
“What?”
“It’s a prescription. For Haemothrax.”
Tome looked over, and narrowly avoided hitting another car whilst driving straight through a red light.
“Anti-vamp drugs?” he asked.
“Strong stuff too.”
Haemothrax was considered a last ditch attempt at drug therapy to cure a person of vampirism. It was prescribed in cases where the patient was almost fully converted, which normally happened only rarely, such as when a person had been bitten by a vampire with an exceptionally powerful bloodline, or when they, for various reasons, did not receive the standard over-the-counter anti-vampirism drugs in time. People only did the latter for a few reasons. Either they were too stupid to realise they had been snacked on by a member of the undead, and a person tends to notice a pair of fangs sinking into a vital blood vessel, or they had been trying to convert into a vampire, but had changed their minds at the last moment.
Tome tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and purposefully ignored another driver who was swearing loudly at him.
“So he was a vamp, or at least, near enough of one,” he said. “I suppose that’s good news. Okay, maybe not for the bloke with his nads in the ice box...”
“And look at this,” Lil said. She sounded triumphant as she held up a photograph that was in the wallet. Tome looked at it closely, somehow managing to avoid hitting two parked cars and a cyclist without looking.
It was a photograph of Jerry Howard, standing on a beach looking happy, with his arm aroun
d a pretty blonde woman. For a moment, Tome didn’t see what was so important. Then he peered closer at the woman.
“I know her from somewhere...”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to place her,” Lil said. “Seeing as how you were cowering in the corner when we saw her last.”
It hit Tome like a ton of bricks which, incidentally, he almost did, swerving at the last second to avoid a truck full of them.
“She was in the morgue,” he realised. “One of the victims from last night. Bloody hell, there is a connection.”
“But,” Lil said thoughtfully. “But... She just got in the way, she wasn’t the target.”
“And our dead guy was,” Tome finished. He sighed. “At this rate, we are never going to get paid.”
Lil didn’t reply. To be perfectly frank, getting paid was the most furthest thing on her mind at that moment. The only thing she cared about was the fact that, unless Tome turned out to be right, and there was such a thing as a moth eating Hum'um'nekraturater from the Lower Realms, the thing that was killing vampires in Chapter City was an Ascended Being.
An angel.
And to the best of Lil's recollection, the only angel that had ever had the inclination in recent times to descend down the Plane of Existence was the archangel Sarael. As it happened, he also happened to be her father.
This really was turning out to be a bitch of a day.
Lil Shreiber knew very little about her biological father, at least nothing that she could believe conclusively. Her mother had died when she was young, and she had been raised by her Grandmother, a woman with all the grace, tact and understanding of a torch welding witch hunter in 17th century Salem. Grandmother Shreiber was always quick to point out to her youngest granddaughter that anything she heard about angels walking the earth in mortal guise were most likely the deranged rantings of an uncommitted mental patient. Said mental patient being Lil’s mother.
Despite this constant barrage of nay saying, often filled with helpful phrases like “work of the devil” and “perversions of darkness”, Lil never really let herself believe that her mother was insane. But her stories of Lil’s father were, to be honest, out there. Tome often said, that when she had told him the things her mother had told her, he had a strong desire to smile, nod, and sidle to the door. And he actually believed her.
Lil’s mother insisted that her father had been Sarael, an archangel from the Higher Realms. He was a creature of light, who had come down to their Plane of Existence for reasons she could never completely explain. Like all extra-planar creatures, he had to take on a mortal form on the Plane of Existence. Presumably, he had fallen in love with Lil’s mother, but had been forced to return to his own realm by other angels. Apparently, he hadn’t exactly gone quietly.
This story always intrigued Lil when she was younger, mostly because the idea of being half-angel was exciting, and because it would have made her special, rather than being, as her grandmother often put it, duller than a book entitled the “History of Fences”. Of course, apart from her hair and eye colour, she didn’t exactly inherit any useful powers from her father. No flying. No healing the sick or raising the dead. Her ability to come up with a childish quip at inappropriate moments was all her. Angels needed to take mortal form on the Plane of Existence, so naturally, their children were all mortal as well.
It wasn’t until she got older, and started noticing the oddities of the world around her, that she started truly believing the stories. Lil lived through the final years of the equal rights for undead movement. By this time, walking corpses were the norm. Nobody cared if they were living next door to a dead man, provided he didn’t stink the place up. The presence of undead people, the acceptance of it, as near as Lil could figure, blinded them to the unusual nature of the world. Lil once saw a man with a goat’s head being chased down the road by a man in a bath robe, when no one else bothered to spare the two a second glance.
Lil didn’t think she was special for noticing things no one else did. Rather, she was normal, and the world itself was completely off its head. She already had a fair idea of the worlds that existed beyond the one that most people looked at by the time she met Michael Tome. They became friends, mainly because unlike most people at the time, she hadn’t tried to kill him. Some years later they started their detective agency.
Tome did it because he had skills that could make him money. Just not through any moral means. Scrying helped pay the bills without having to curse anyone, and end up doing time like most of his old gang of warlocks.
But Lil took a job as close to the unseen side of life as possible because it could help her find out about her father. She wanted to know about him, why he came to earth, why he left. At the very least, why she was a blonde when every one else in her family was a brunette.
Only now, that wish could very well blow up in her face. Sure, it seemed like a very long shot, that of all the Ascended Beings in the universe the first one she would meet down here would be her father. But the very thought gnawed at her.
Once a creature ascended, it didn’t descend again. Not without reason. Unless it did something very, very bad, like a certain figure who featured heavily in the bible, and owed Tome money (and never intended to pay, having refused flat out to ever do business with him again). Sarael, however, had come down once, and had only left after much fuss, and having started more than a few forest fires if the stories were to be believed. What if he had returned after all this time? What if it was her father, who had somehow been enslaved in a soulstone and was being forced to kill vampires?
Worst still, what if he wasn’t being forced?
Lil's silent musings were interrupted by a sudden shrill ringing that made her jump. She took her mobile phone out of her jacket and answered. Someone had sent her a text message.
Tome looked over as she gulped loudly.
“What? Should I be worried?” he asked.
“Take the next left,” Lil said simply. “Our client wants to meet us.”
“Oh. Okay. You want me to drive us into the river? It might be less painful.” He gulped aswell.
Lil didn’t want to dwell on what Von Drais would do if he knew that not only were they no closer to finding the killer, but that there was another victim. At best, he wouldn’t pay them. At worst... She decided not to think about that. Not if she ever wanted another peaceful night’s sleep.