Free Grim Rites by Bilinda Sheehan Page B

belonged to a man, and despite the blood and viscera surrounding him, he’d obviously been tall and well-built but that wasn’t what interested me.
    Leaning closer, Victoria held a pair of gloves out to me and I took them without a word, sliding my hands into them before taking the arm in my hands. Focusing on the mark, I ignored the feel of the bones as they slipped around beneath the skin, lending the arm a jelly-like consistency that made the hairs on the back my neck stand to attention.
    My heart lurched in my chest and my breath caught in the back of my throat as I stared down at the tattoo. I’d seen it before. In fact, I’d seen it a few hours before, scored into the wall of Nic’s bathroom.
    Dropping the arm, I jerked backwards and barely kept my balance as my booted foot slipped on one of the many bloody trails leading away from the body.
    “What’s wrong?” Nic asked, peering over my shoulder at the body.
    “So it’s true, then?” Victoria asked, and from the expression in her eyes, I could tell she knew exactly what the tattoo meant.
    “You’ve seen it before?” I said, my breaths coming hard and fast, making it sound as though I’d just run a marathon.
    “Yes, but not in a very long time…” she said, and turned her gaze from me, but I’d seen the sorrowful look in her eyes before she’d gotten the chance to look away.
    “What’s wrong,” Nic repeated, a little more impatiently.
    “It’s a witch hunter,” I said, dropping my voice to stop the other Elite officers and forensic guys from picking up on what I was saying.
    “You said they were all gone, wiped out,” Nic said, moving around me to get a closer look at the body.
    “Yeah, I thought that right up until I found the mark in your bathroom.”
    Victoria raised an eyebrow in my direction and I shook my head. Now was not the time to go explaining the complication that was Nic’s murdered older brother who happened to be a witch hunter.
    “So what does this mean, then?” Nic said, studying the mark on the body.
    “I don’t know … beyond the obvious,” I said, my stomach sinking into my boots.
    “They know you’re here,” Victoria said, voicing the words I was too afraid to speak aloud myself. “The Saga Venatione have come to King City.”
    I nodded and Nic shot me a look filled with fear. “Have they come for you?”
    I shrugged, “Me or Lily; either way, having them here is really bad news….”
    As though today couldn’t possibly get any worse.

Chapter 10
    “ D o they know what happened yet, what could have caused something like this?” I asked.
    If the witch hunters were in King City, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t exactly make them leave. In fact, the best I could hope for was the ability to fly beneath their radar so they didn’t ever find out I was here in the first place.
    So far, I was doing a wonderful job, if the pile of dead shifters outside my apartment was anything to go by. The demon mark stung me and I cringed, rubbing my hand across it almost instinctively.
    “At first they thought it was a jumper, but as you can see, there aren’t exactly any buildings in this part of town tall enough to create this kind of mess,” Victoria said, gesturing to the surrounding shop fronts.
    She was right; the only body I’d ever seen that looked vaguely similar had come off a forty-storey drop. There was nothing in this part of town that even remotely resembled that. Downtown maybe, but here, definitely not.
    “The body wasn’t moved. Where we found him is where he died,” she continued.
    “Yeah, way too much blood for him to have been moved. I don’t suppose they’ll know actual cause of death until they do the autopsy?”
    She shook her head and turned back towards the scene as the forensic guys slipped the victim into the black body bag. Every time I thought of him as a victim, I felt an overwhelming swell of pity. Even now, knowing he was a witch hunter, knowing that given the