White walls gleamed back at me, as did white appliances, and a gleaming marble countertop in the narrow kitchen. It was an old house, but still a weird layout, having the kitchen between the living and dining rooms. The kitchen looked like it had been remodeled not too many years ago. Recipe books in alphabetical order lined a wall-mounted bookshelf on the opposite side of the kitchen from the oven. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or dust anywhere.
Past the kitchen was a dining room, also as neat as a pin. Through French doors lay a hall with stairs nearby that led up. There were two doors in the short hall. One opened to a laundry room. The other, at the end, led to stairs going down to a basement.
We went upstairs.
Upstairs were bedrooms. From the bedroom farthest from the stairs came the rotten stench of death days old.
I looked at Tully again, and saw my own fear mirrored in his eyes. We walked down the hall, slowly, carefully, listening. But there was only silence.
We found Therese spread-eagled on the queen-sized canopied bed, her lifeless eyes staring up at the stars painted in the canopy.
She was about forty, and nude. Marks like those from a whip covered her breasts and abdomen. Her once white skin had gone gray, where it could be seen through the dried blood that caked nearly every inch of it. Dried blood pooled on the bedspread beneath her.
I swallowed back bile and looked away, sucking in big gulps of air.
Tully stood in the doorway, taking the scene in. A muscle in his neck throbbed and his eyes glistened.
I forced myself to turn back around and examine Therese.
Aside from the whip marks, she had scratches from claws on her arms and legs, hundreds of scratches. The whip marks had barbed edges to them, and then it hit me, and I gagged.
The whip had been a barbed tongue. A manifestation of some sort. I fought back the bile that rose in my throat.
Tully walked around the bedroom, examining shelves, his face pinched. He looked like he wanted to retch, too.
Murdered. Our local sentinel had been murdered. I forced myself to take a closer look. The claw marks and barbed tongue lashings pointed straight at manifestations.
But how had they gotten past her ward?
“Shall I check the rest of the house?” Tully asked quietly.
I nodded. “I’ll go over this room and the body.”
He left, and I turned to the rest of the room. A crystal ball balanced on a silver tripod perched on a writing desk in the far corner of the room. Pens filled a jade cup off to one side of the desktop. There was an honest to gods fountain pen, in a holder, next to it, and a yellow legal pad beside it. Five leather-bound journals filled a shelf above the desk. None had any writing inside.
That was odd. I checked the nearby bookshelves. One whole shelf was empty. No books, and nothing else. No knickknacks, or artwork, nothing. It stood out like a sore thumb.
There was a cot next to the wall opposite the foot of the bed, with a woolen blanket.
I opened the drawer in the nightstand beside the desk and found a box filled with hypodermic needles. The pharmacy label said Alkeran. I checked my phone. That was an injectable cancer treatment for multiple melanoma. Skin cancer that had metastasized.
I went to her closet, opened the door. There were three pairs of blue jeans, and some worn t-shirts. Blouses that looked like they’d been there for some time. Three sets of medical scrubs.
She’d been sick and wanted something comfortable to wear, and thus the scrubs?
Then I remembered she’d been on medical leave.
My stomach clenched at the death stench.
I went to the door, glanced back at her blood-covered corpse, and closed my eyes, trying to concentrate. My eyes still watered from the stink, but I wanted to be close to Therese’s body. To think.
She’d battled cancer when someone murdered her. I thought for a moment, trying to concentrate what I’d just learned going over her room, trying to think of anything else.
Therese had been a writer, with a desk in her bedroom. A shelf that had nothing on it. I narrowed my eyes. Where were the journals?
Answer: someone had taken them. Presumably the murderer.
I left the bedroom. My stomach was in knots, and sweat ran down inside of my shirt. I struggled to push the horror of Therese’s death to the back of my mind. I had to focus, so that I could figure out what had happened here, and why she had been killed.
One of the things they teach you at the R.U.N.E. academy is detachment. There’s actually a series of three required classes dealing with the topic of detachment. We had to study Buddhist texts, Stoic philosophy, and meditation, with the goal of being able to detach ourselves from the emotion of the moment we were in and look at the situation objectively.
At least, that’s what we were supposed to accomplish in those three classes.
I nearly washed out of the Academy, thanks to those three classes.
I hated detachment. Hated the idea of it, the practice of it. I cared, so sue me. I cared a lot about things, about the arcane, about the ordinary, about people, about manifestations. I cared about right and wrong. Sure, everybody at the Academy did, or at least said they did. But I didn’t want to let go of that care and the emotion that went with it.
I stood just outside the room where Therese Sprig had died, in blood and pain, and remembered all those exercises on detachment I hated so much. “Reframe how you look at it,” that was how Professor Myles had put it. She had emphasized that to us over and over again. So, I thought about how I had walked into a
