Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

“Her ribs have been cracked. Her heart is not damaged. Her heart is gone.”

I cocked my head. “Gone? ” Just when you think you’ve seen everything.

“That’s what I said,” Kronen agreed mildly. “I think we’re done here. Zip her up and I’ll get her back to the morgue.”

“I want her autopsied ASAP,” Lane said. “This isn’t some hooker we’re dealing with. This is somebody’s daughter.”

Kronen gave a stiff nod and gestured for the coroner’s assistant to zip up the body bag.

Lane noticed me glaring at her after a second. “What?”

I crossed my arms. “A hooker is somebody’s daughter, too.”

“You know what I meant,” Lane said. She at least had the grace to turn colors under the sodium lights.

Just because the body leaves the scene doesn’t mean there isn’t still a crapton of work to do. The rest of the SCS trickled in, and I assigned them each to a sector of the scene to process it.

David Bryson, whom I’d known in Homicide, looked rumpled and red-eyed from lack of sleep. Andy Zacharias, a rookie detective who’d been initiated into my squad by being the hostage of a bunch of off-the-reservation Thelemite cultists, looked like he’d either been awake waiting for my call or mainlined a whole lot of caffeine.

“Andy.” I corralled him, as Bryson and Batista started looking for tire tracks along with a CSU tech.

“You look nice, ma’am,” he said, gesturing to my upswept hair and makeup. “Date interrupted?”

“None of your damn business, Andy,” I said cheerfully. “I need you to find the security office and pull their footage for this part of the port. If we’re lucky, everything is on tape and we can wrap this up before the weekend.”

Hunter Kelly was the last to arrive, and with Andy shooed away from anything that would actually get him into trouble, I caught him at the yellow tape. “I need to ask you something.”

Kelly, who’s built like a surly Irish tree trunk and about as expressive, grunted. “Shoot.”

“Is there something that a witch would need a human heart for?” I said. Kelly was a warlock, a battle witch, and I figured if anyone would know about the icky, slasher-film stuff he would.

Kelly shrugged. “Lots of things. You can eat your enemy’s heart for prowess in battle. You can preserve it to bind someone to you in spirit for eternity. And it’s a punishment.”

“That, I agree on,” I said. “Losing internal organs usually isn’t a fun, lighthearted romp through the park.”

“It’s a punishment for betrayal,” Kelly said. “Cut out the heart of the one who broke yours. That sort of poetic bullshit. Never put much stock in it, myself.”

That I’d buy. Kelly was many things, but he wasn’t a romantic. “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I have to head to the morgue for a body ID. Have Batista call me when you’re finished here, and keep an eye on that bright-eyed moron from SVU. She’s way too eager.”

“Got it,” Kelly rumbled. I took one last look at the pier and the black water beyond as I walked back to my car. What had brought the girl here?

And with her missing heart, who the hell was I chasing for her murder?

CHAPTER 2

The morgue at night is the sort of place you’d expect zombies to congregate, or maybe a pack of particularly lame Goth vampires, if such a thing existed. In a city where Wendigo, werewolves, magick-users and trolls all shared space, it was sort of refreshing to know I didn’t have to worry about Dracula sneaking up and making me into a Slurpee.

I found Kronen in scrubs, washing his hands in the steel sink off of the autopsy bay. “Before you cut her open, I need to notify her parents. Can you give me an hour?”

Kronen kicked off the water and nodded. “It would be prudent, I think. She’s very young—I checked her mouth for trace and her wisdom teeth aren’t even close to erupting. I’d put her age at perhaps fifteen.”

Even with my job, there were times I wondered what the world was coming to, when magick-users ripped out a teenage girl’s heart and left her for the sea to take.

“Mind if I use your computer?” I asked Kronen. He graciously pretended not to notice my grim expression.

“Please. I’ll ask an attendant to take our poor girl to the viewing bay, shall I?”

“Do that,” I said, pulling up the department search utility. The Dubois family wasn’t hard to find—Nathaniel and Petra. A Cedar Hill address and no criminal records. The slick, pretty faces on the DMV photos didn’t look like they even had a daughter, never mind one who would end up dead on a city pier.

I picked up the phone on the morgue wall, anyway. Looks weren’t everything—to the casual eye Iwas a too-tall, dark-haired, reasonably pretty thirty-something woman. There was no clue to what was lurking under my skin, until the monster came out, in my eyes or my teeth or my claws.

“Hello?” A groggy answer, with a Latino accent. I looked at my watch. It was almost one A.M. I worked nights when I was in Homicide, and time has always been fluid for me, anyway.

“Hello. This is Luna Wilder, with the Nocturne City police. I need to speak to the Dubois family.”

“Okay, okay. Hold, please.” The phone was set down with a clunk and a moment later a male voice came over the line.

“You people better have a damn good excuse for calling me in the middle of the night.”

“Mr. Dubois?”

“Who else would it be?”

Oh, he was leaving himself wide open there. The gravity of the news I had to deliver stopped me from saying anything grossly unprofessional, but I can’t say it wasn’t tempting. “Mr. Dubois, I’m afraid I have some bad news. I need you and your wife to come down to the city morgue as soon as possible.”

A slow breath on the other end of the line. When Nathaniel Dubois spoke again, he was subdued, almost scared.

“Could you tell me what this