I walked down the corridor, my boots whispering against the floor, and opened the door to the waiting room that fronted the coroner’s office. Padded chairs against the walls, dusty plastic palm trees in the corners, a glass table topped with several tissue boxes. The functional furniture was nice enough, but it was still a thoroughly depressing place. Even worse, I could hear the walls wailing with the cries of everyone who’d been unfortunate enough to come here and identify a dead loved one. Soon Jade’s sobs would be added to the ones already here. The mournful notes made my own heart squeeze tight.
The frosted-glass door at the back of the waiting room buzzed open, and Bria stuck her head out. “There you are. Ryan’s ready for you.”
I walked through the opening and stepped into a room that was mostly made of metal. Stainless-steel vaults, each one fronted with its own door, lined two of the walls, while several long metal tables took up the center of the room, each positioned above a drain in the floor. It was several degrees cooler in here, and goose bumps rippled down my spine, despite my heavy winter clothes. A sharp tang of lemony antiseptic hung in the air, as though someone had just cleaned out a refrigerator.
Dr. Ryan Colson, the coroner, stood beside one of the tables, his blue scrubs looking shockingly bright against the dull metal. The soft lights made his black hair and goatee gleam like wet ink against his ebony skin, and his dark hazel eyes were kind and sympathetic behind his round silver glasses.
“Dr. Colson.”
“Please,” he said. “Call me Ryan.”
“Okay, Ryan. But only if you call me Gin.”
He nodded. “Gin.”
My gaze flicked past him to the table. Elissa’s body had already been stretched out on the metal, with a blue sheet draped over everything but her face and her toes, whose nails were painted a fun, flirty pink. My stomach turned over again.
“I haven’t started my official autopsy yet, but the causes of death are pretty obvious,” Ryan said in a low, somber voice. “Blunt-force trauma to the head, face, and torso, along with manual strangulation. One of the blows to the head probably knocked her out before the strangulation occurred. That’s my hope, anyway.”
He reached out and rested his hand on the table beside Elissa’s head, almost as if he were trying to comfort her, even though she was far beyond anyone’s reach now.
“It’s a bit hard to tell with the cold weather, but I’d estimate that she’s been dead at least twenty-four hours. I’ll know more when I do the full autopsy, but that’s not why you’re here.”
I shook my head. “I wish none of us were here tonight.”
A sharp knock sounded on the door, and we turned toward the frosted glass. Ryan went over and opened the door. Jade stood in the waiting room, with Sophia hovering behind her.
Jade was wearing the same crimson coat she’d had on at the Pork Pit earlier today, but her face had been scrubbed free of its usual makeup, and her blond hair had been pulled back into a messy ponytail, making her look younger and far more vulnerable than she had at the restaurant. Her puffy eyes were bloodshot, and she twisted a white silk handkerchief around in her hands. She’d probably been crying ever since I called.
Jade looked at me a moment before her green gaze locked onto the body on the table. She froze, as if she were as dead as Elissa. No one moved or spoke, giving her time to process the ugly, ugly scene. Jade stayed ramrod-still for the better part of a minute before a single, violent tremor shook her body. Then she started shaking and couldn’t stop. Her lips trembled, her fingers spasmed, her legs wobbled, and she would have crumpled to the floor if Sophia hadn’t reached out and steadied her.
To my surprise, Ryan stepped forward and gently took hold of Jade’s elbow. “It’s all right,” he said in a soft, soothing, sympathetic voice. “I know how hard this is. Whenever you’re ready, Ms. Jamison. Just take your time.”
Jade stared back at him with a blank expression, so far down in her grief that she wasn’t really seeing him. After several seconds, she nodded and let him slowly lead her over to the table. Sophia stayed by the door, while Bria and I both stepped back away from the table.
Ryan had combed out Elissa’s long blond hair and had cleaned the blood off her face, trying to make her look as normal as possible, but her features were still a bruised, battered mess.
Jade gasped and pressed her fist to her mouth, shocked by the sight of her dead, beaten, strangled sister. Another violent tremor ripped through her body, as though she was going to collapse under the weight of her emotions. Jade reached out and grabbed Ryan’s hand, squeezing his fingers as if to push back her own feelings and steady herself. Ryan winced at her tight, bruising grip, but he didn’t remove his hand from hers.
“Can—can I see a little bit more of her?” Jade whispered. “Just down to her shoulders? Please?”
Ryan nodded. “Of course.”
He gave Jade’s hand a little pat with his free one, and she finally realized that she was still holding on to him. Jade grimaced and let go. Ryan nodded his thanks, then stepped forward and lowered the blue sheet a few more inches, revealing Elissa’s collarbones and the curve of her shoulders.
Jade leaned over the table, her gaze roaming over Elissa’s face, trying to see her sister through all the bruises, swelling, and broken bones.
Bria opened her mouth to ask for a positive ID, but Ryan shook his head, telling her to wait.
I looked at Jade, expecting tears to start pooling in her eyes and more tremors to start shaking her body as the hard, inescapable truth sank in. She braced her hands on the side of the table and dropped her head, her gaze locked onto Elissa’s left shoulder, as if she couldn’t bear to look at her sister’s battered face any longer.
After several seconds, Jade shuddered out a long, slow breath. I tensed. This was it—this was the moment when the tears, sobs, and heartbreak would truly begin.
Jade drew in another breath and slowly let it out. I stepped forward to put my arm around her shoulder, to try to comfort her in whatever small way I could, but she lifted her head, her lips stretching up into an enormous smile, despite the tears cascading down her face. She held out her hand, stopping me.
“That’s not her,” Jade said. “That’s not Elissa. That’s not my sister.”
• • •
Jade’s words echoed through the room, bouncing off the walls and freezing me in place, as though I were as cold, dead, and stiff as the bodies inside the metal vaults.
For a moment, I just stared at Jade, not sure that I’d heard her right. Bria and Ryan were doing the same thing, shocked expressions on their faces. Then her words sank in, and my brain started functioning again.
I looked at Jade, then at the body, then back at Jade. “Are you sure? Maybe you should take another look—”
Jade shook her head. “I don’t need to take another look. That’s not Elissa. My sister has a small birthmark on her left shoulder. It looks like a little half-moon.” She pointed to the dead woman’s shoulder. “This woman doesn’t have a birthmark. I don’t know who that is, but it’s not Elissa. I’m sure of it.”
More tears streamed down her face, and her entire body sagged with relief. Once again, Jade would have fallen to the floor if Ryan hadn’t grabbed her elbow. She looked up at him, then grabbed his face in her hands, pulled his head down to hers, and pressed a loud, smacking kiss to his lips.
“Thank you!” she said, her voice high and giddy. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
She kissed him again, once on either cheek, before finally letting him go. This time, it was Ryan who reached out and grabbed the table to keep from dropping to the floor.
“Um . . . thank you too?” he mumbled, his silver glasses a bit crooked from Jade’s enthusiastic smooches.
She beamed at him for several more seconds before reality slowly set back in. Jade frowned and looked at the dead woman again. “Th
at poor, poor girl. But . . . if that’s not Elissa, then where is she?”
And just like that, the last of Jade’s euphoria vanished, and misery filled her face again. Her shoulders slumped, and her breath escaped in harsh rasps that made her whole body tremble.
“That could still be Elissa,” Jade whispered in a grief-stricken voice. “That could still be her . . . She could still be dead . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and fresh tears streaked down her cheeks. Jade whirled around and hurried away from the table, as if she couldn’t stand to be in here a second longer. Sophia was still waiting by the door, and she put her arm around Jade’s shaking shoulders and steered the other woman back out into the waiting room. Sophia nodded, telling me that she would stay with Jade, and shut the door behind them.
That left Bria, Ryan, and me alone in the morgue with the body. Bria bent back down over the woman, studying her face again and trying to see her true features through all the bruises and swelling. I did the same, although after a few seconds, the girl’s face blurred in front of my eyes, and I found myself thinking about Elissa again.
Jade was right: Elissa could still end up here dead on a slab if I didn’t find her.
And I had no idea how to do that.
Bria finally straightened up and shook her head, making her blond hair fly around her shoulders. “This woman didn’t have any ID on her. No purse, no wallet, no phone. If her fingerprints or DNA aren’t in our system, it’ll be difficult to figure out who she is. Much less where she came from and who might have killed her.”
“You don’t think it happened at Northern Aggression?” Ryan asked.
Bria shook her head again. “No. There was no blood anywhere around the body. Not pooled on the ground underneath her and not spattered on any of the Dumpsters around her. She was definitely murdered somewhere else. The killer just used the club to get rid of her body. He probably thought that she wouldn’t be discovered for a couple of days, until the next time the trash got picked up.”
I’d never envied Bria her job of dealing with all the crime in Ashland, especially when it came to something like this, a young life cut short in such a brutal, violent fashion. If the girl wasn’t in any of the police databases and no one had filed a missing person report on her, it could take Bria days, if not weeks, to figure out who she was. That sort of delay would most likely ruin any chance that she and Xavier had of finding out who had done this.
“There’s something else,” Ryan said. “Something you need to see, Gin.”
I looked at him.
The coroner straightened his glasses and stared back at me, his hazel gaze sympathetic, as if I were the one who’d come here to identify a dead relative instead of Jade. “I noticed something in my initial examination of the body. Something that was impossible to miss.” He cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. “You’re not going to like it.”
“What is it?” I asked, wondering what this dead girl could possibly have to do with me.
Ryan hesitated, obviously not wanting to deliver whatever bad news he had, and glanced over at Bria. She crossed her arms over her chest, her lips tightening into a grim slash in her pretty face. They kept staring at each other, having some silent conversation and debate that I couldn’t follow. It reminded me of the strange look Xavier had given me upstairs. The three of them knew something that I didn’t.
Something bad.
“Spit it out,” I said. “No matter how horrible it is, I can take it. Trust me.”
Ryan kept staring at Bria. Finally, my sister sighed and nodded, giving him permission. He nodded back at her, then reached down and gently pulled the dead woman’s arms out from underneath the blue sheet. He looked at me again, then slowly turned the woman’s hands over so that her palms faced up where we could all see them.
He was right. It was impossible to miss.
Something had been drawn on both of the woman’s palms in what looked like bright red blood, a distinctive symbol that was as familiar to me as my own face: a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays.
I sucked in a breath.
My spider runes were on the dead woman’s palms.
11
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My heart, my breath, every small tic, twitch, and tremor in my entire body just stopped, shocked into stillness by the sickening sight before me.
Then, in the next instant, movement, breath, and sensation all rushed back into my body, and I could feel my eyes slowly growing wider and wider, until it seemed like those two spider runes filled my entire field of vision.
The longer I stared at them, the more the symbols actually seemed to move, to quiver, to pulse, as though the bloody circles were connected to my own heart, frantically pounding in my chest. All I could do was stare and stare at those two spider runes—my runes—peering up at me like evil eyes and mocking me from a dead woman’s hands.
“Are those runes . . . were they made with . . . her blood?” I asked, my voice as shocked and breathless as I still felt.
“Actually, they were drawn with lipstick,” Ryan said. “But yes, those are definitely spider runes. I told Bria and Xavier the second I saw them.”
“But how—who—why—” The words sputtered out of my mouth, but I couldn’t get them to form a coherent sentence. Just like I couldn’t form a coherent thought right now.
No, that wasn’t true. Too many thoughts flashed through my mind one after another, all of them lightning strikes scorching my heart to ash. What connection, if any, could I possibly have to this woman? And why draw my spider runes on her palms? Was it a warning that I was next? That the killer wanted to make me as bloody, broken, and dead as this poor girl?
The questions just kept coming and coming, with no answers in sight. I felt like I was standing in a dark tunnel, and all I could see were the bright lights of the oncoming train, about to mow me down.
Bria shook her head, making her hair fly out around her shoulders again, as if she were trying to rattle this horrible sight right out of her mind the same way that I was. She laid a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Gin, are you sure that you don’t know this woman? Take another look at her.”
Ironically enough, she was treating me the same way I had treated Jade a few minutes ago, trying to soften the stinging, sickening blow of something that could never, ever be softened. Anger roared through me that my own sister was trying to handle me like I was some sort of victim.
I started to snap at Bria that of course I didn’t know this girl, but I forced myself to rein in my rage. None of this was Bria’s fault, and lashing out at her wouldn’t help anything, especially not the dead girl. So I forced myself to bend down and take another look at her, just as my sister had asked.
I carefully examined the girl, once again trying to look past the beating, bruises, and swelling and see her as she had been in life—her eyes, her nose, her smile. But her features remained as strange to me as before. I didn’t know this girl. I had never seen her before. I was sure of it.
So I moved on to what I did know: my spider runes.
My stomach squeezed, but I ignored the hot, bitter bile rising in my throat, bent down, and peered at the runes. Now that I was looking more closely at them, I could see that they’d been drawn with bright red lipstick, not blood, just like Ryan had said.
And I noticed something else odd. The rest of her was a bruised, battered mess, but her palms were absolutely pristine, with no blood, dirt, grime, or anything else marring the surface of her skin there, except for the two symbols. And it wasn’t just that she had my spider runes drawn on her palms; it was how clear, precise, and neat they were, each one essentially a carbon copy of the other.
Someone had taken his slow, sweet time marking her up.
My own hands snapped into tight fists, my knuckles cracking from the sudden, intense pressure, and the spider rune scars embedded deep in my own p
alms started itching and burning, almost as if someone was tracing over them with a tube of lipstick. The scars pounded in time with my heart, until I thought that blood was going to come bursting out of the marks, forced out by my own rage, disgust, horror, and shock.
Slowly, I forced myself to relax my fists, unclenching them one finger at a time, and my right hand crept up to the spider rune pendant hanging around my neck. It had been a present from Owen, one that I’d always loved wearing, along with the matching ring on my finger, a gift from Bria.
Until this moment.
Now the pendant felt as heavy as an anchor, dragging me down, down, down, and the ring was a circle of rot around my finger, spreading out to infect and destroy every single part of me. Just feeling the pendant and the ring touching my body, along with my Ice and Stone magic rippling through the surface of the silverstone jewelry, made me sick to my stomach again.
The spider rune pendant slipped through my cold, numb fingers and thumped against my chest, as hard as a sledgehammer beating against my heart, and I had to clench my hands into fists again to keep from ripping off the jewelry and trying to tear the scars out of my own palms.
“Gin?” Bria asked in a soft voice, cutting into my turbulent emotions. “Do you know her?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen her before. I’m sure of it. But the spider runes . . .” My voice trailed off, and it took me a moment to finish my thought. “They’re exactly like mine.”
Even though it was the very last thing that I wanted to do, I forced myself to uncurl my fists again and held out my hands, palms up, so that Bria and Ryan could see my scars. They both bent down, comparing the marks on the dead girl’s hands to the ones branded into my palms. I made myself keep my hands open, even though I felt completely exposed, as if I had been stripped naked and staked out in a public square for everyone to gawk at.