Free Grim Rites by Bilinda Sheehan Page A

Zeck. Part of me was beginning to wonder if she’d allowed Zeck to capture her, just so she could get close to him. But if that were true, why wait until I got there to strike? It just didn’t make sense. Just something else to add to my list of questions for her.
    “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to share your secret, but I really do trust him, Victoria; you can too.”
    She glared down at me, her lips thinned down until they were barely visible. Finally, she nodded, the anger slowly ebbing from her eyes, and her shoulders dropped as she began to relax.
    “Fine, let’s get this over with. I don’t know about you but the smell is really beginning to bother me,” she said, the weariness in her voice surprising me.
    I didn’t disagree with her. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but knowing what caused it made the smell denser, more cloying. Following her up into the alley, we moved around the van and the scene became instantly apparent.
    The body lay on the ground at the end of the alley—well, what was left of the body. It looked more like a mangled heap of raw meat. The last time I’d seen something even close to it had been during my Elite training, and we’d been on assignment with one of the trainers. He’d taken us to a fake scene, one where the victim had been pushed from the 40th floor of a skyscraper. It wasn’t something I would ever forget, and staring at the human remains at the end of the alley, I knew this would go with all the other carnage I’d witnessed.
    “This is going to give me nightmares for weeks…” I said, locking my shoulders to prevent the inevitable shudder that threatened to roll through me.
    Victoria shot me a curious glance. “Considering the things you can do, why would this give you nightmares?”
    Her question caught me off guard and I stared at her, my mouth simply opening and closing as I struggled for an answer. It was a fair question. I’d raised demons; one of them had even murdered my father, ripped him limb from limb. I was still new to the job, but the cases I’d worked had been some of the most gruesome King City had to offer.
    “Because only a few hours ago, this was a living breathing human being and now he is so much raw meat,” Nic said. And he was right. Whatever had done this to him was still out there. He’d been a person with hopes and dreams, and now all of that was gone, simply wasted as his blood continued to run in little trails down the alley.
    She turned and gave the scene laid out before us a contemplative look before nodding. “I suppose I see your point.”
    “Do things like this not bother you?” I asked, unable to keep my curiosity under wraps.
    “Physically, yes, the smell and—well, visually, it’s disturbing, but ultimately, it’s a life lost like so many others. I’m more concerned with what happened and catching the one responsible.”
    There was something clinical in her statement that made me uncomfortable. She wasn’t wrong; it was another life lost like so many others and really I needed to get my head in the game and focus on catching the guilty party. But it didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t separate the body with the person who, up to a few hours ago, had a future until it was violently ripped away.
    “So why did you think this was in my wheelhouse anyway?” I asked, moving carefully across the blood-soaked ground. The closer I got to the body, the more apparent it became that the dark trails were in fact blood tracks.
    “A few things,” she said, walking up to the body and crouching down next to it.
    I followed suit, and watched as she used one gloved hand to lift the victim’s arm. It flopped awkwardly and I knew without needing to read a forensic report that the bones were broken. The skin shifted as though it wasn’t connected to anything within and I felt my stomach roll.
    Victoria turned the arm over and I caught sight of the mark through the bruising around the wrist. The body had clearly