Cause of Death: Unnatural (The Cause of Death Series) (12 page)

She said nothing, and he squeezed her arm a
little harder. "You don't get to do this to people I like, Em. Sort this
mess out with Nick and then stay away from him. That's an order."

She shut her eyes and pressed her lips
together in a thin line to stop them from shaking. Robert glared at her for a
moment and then strode into the lab.

It was a long day.

Nick wouldn't meet her eyes and Robert
wouldn't work next to her. They had thirty seven bodies to process and they did
it almost entirely in silence. The support technicians and assistants raised
their eyebrows at each other and escaped from the room at every chance they
could. The atmosphere was poisonous.

Em was
on her own
.

Toward the end of the day she found herself
alone in the lab. The three bodies she was processing were laid out on the
stainless steel benches, white sheets draped over their torsos leaving their
head and shoulders exposed. All the damage, on all thirty seven victims, was in
the neck area, and although she was obliged to double check every victim to
make sure, the damage was all the same. Teeth marks.

Em turned to the third of next batch of
bodies and was stunned to realize it was female.

A woman?
That wasn't
right. Em knew she hadn't been paying a huge amount of attention to anything
that had been going on today, but she didn't know that there had been one
female victim among the thirty seven bodies they'd found in the warehouse. She
must have been working on something else when they'd bagged this one. Maybe
she'd already left with Nick to go to his family's party. How did she miss
this?

She took a closer look at the victim. It was
a woman of about twenty three years of age.
Slim, attractive,
blond.
She appeared to have died only a few days ago, definitely much
more recently than some of the other bodies in the collection.

This was not good. So far, all the victims in
this messed up case had been male. Now there was a break in the pattern, and
that meant the killer was getting restless.
Bored.
And
a bored psychopath was never a good thing, human or otherwise.

Em bent down to take a closer look at the
victim's neck wounds. Something glistened there. Was it an earring or something
mashed into her throat?

Em grabbed some tweezers and prized the
sparkling thing out of the gaping hole that was all that remained of the
woman's neck. She had it. It looked like a false fingernail, she thought
incredulously, as she ran it under the tap to wash some of the blood off it.
She lifted the sheet to look at the victims hands. No, no falsies there.

Taking the nail over to a scope Em took a
closer look. It was actually organic, she realized, not plastic at all. It
seemed to have some kind of reptile print over it, a green snakeskin pattern...

She had the funniest feeling she'd seen this
before.

Her cell phone rang, the noise interrupting
her train of thought. She tore her gloves off, fished the phone out of her
pocket and looked at the screen. Jennifer. Em snorted with impatience.
Typical Jennifer.
She always rang in the middle of work. Em
knew she couldn't cope with Jennifer now. If this was another boyfriend
disaster Em had enough of her own to worry about. Jennifer could wait. She
dropped the phone back into her pocket and let the call go to voice mail.

Before she'd even had time to turn back to
the scale-thing under the microscope the phone rang again. Em groaned with
frustration. This had better be important.

"Jenn," she began, but Jennifer was
already talking. She was practically screaming.

"Em, Em, I need you please, please come
and help me, please." She was panting, sucking in huge gulps of air and
choking, choking on something.

"Jenn, what's happened?" said Em
urgently. She suddenly had a very bad feeling about this. "Tell me what's
going on Jenn."

"She bit me!" said Jenn
hysterically. "She's not...
 
she's
not..." Jenn's breaths turned into coughs.

She?

Em's eyes flashed to the green reptile scale
under the microscope. She knew exactly where she'd seen it before.

"Jenn, where are you?"

"I don't know. It's dark, like a
warehouse or something.
Em?
Em..." Jennifer's
voice started to pitch upwards again. "She said she's coming back."

"I'm coming Jenn," said Em and she
dropped the phone beside the scope and spun herself into smoke.

Em flew over the city.

With her mind she searched for Jennifer. She
threw her energy ahead of her, skimming through the souls of people all over
the
harborside
area. Streets, cars, pubs, clubs,
people at work, people at home. She wasn't gentle. She had the most awful
feeling she was going to be too late.

She almost missed Jennifer when she did find
her. Jennifer's soul was just a whisper, just a flicker, so faint Em nearly
passed right over it.

Em landed beside Jennifer, the black smoke of
her dark energy snapping back into her usual form in the blink of an eye.
Jennifer was lying in the damp corner of a dark laneway that ended at the door
of yet another dilapidated warehouse. Her cell phone had fallen out of her
hand. It was still on, Em noticed, the call still connected to Em's phone back
in the lab. It had only been a few moments since Em had left the laboratory,
but for Jennifer it must have seemed so much longer. The cell phone's bright
screen spilled a sad and incongruous light over the dying woman.

"Jennifer," Em said, quietly. She
knelt quickly and put her arms around the woman, pulling her onto her knees.
She hugged her close and looked sadly at the deep gashes and bruises over her
friend's body.

Jennifer stared up at Em with a puzzled look
on her face. Em could see Jennifer's eyes were deeper than they'd ever
been,
her soul was close to the surface, twisting gently and
slowly like a single autumn leaf on a twig. Jenn was cold, very cold, and it
wouldn't be long now.

"Em?" said Jennifer. "How did
you..."

"
Shhh
..."
said Em quickly. "Don't worry about that. Everything's going be okay
now." She rocked Jennifer gently back and forward, slowly and lovingly,
wishing with all her heart it didn't have to be like this.

"It was that girl," said Jennifer
urgently, "from the club." She coughed and Em felt a gush of blood
run out of Jennifer's neck and over the arm Em had around her shoulders.
"She's not ...."

But Em shushed her. "I know, Jennifer. I
know all about her. And don't
worry,
she'll pay for
this Jenn. I promise you that."

Em realized a tear had landed on Jennifer's
forehead.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" said
Jennifer.

Em said nothing for a moment as a few more
tears fell onto her friend. She nodded.

"It hurts," said Jennifer in a
small voice. She sounded like a child, and suddenly Em knew what she had to do.

She allowed a little wave of dark energy to
ripple softly over Jennifer. It was like a mist, or a fog, and it curled around
Jennifer's body until it covered her completely. Em strengthened it a little,
gently, so as not to hurt her friend, and then she commanded it to settle deep
down within Jennifer's body.

Jennifer shivered for a moment, and then her
eyes cleared a little. The energy absorbed her pain. Em could feel it, stabbing
and burning. She gathered up the pain and stored it away for a while. She had a
feeling she might find a use for it later.

She brushed Jennifer's hair back from her
forehead, tucked it carefully behind her ear. Then she gently wiped away the
tears that had begun to pool in the corner of Jennifer's eyes. From the
hollowness and emptiness she felt in the pit of her stomach Em searched for a
smile to give her friend. She hoisted the smile onto her face and tried to
shine all her love right through it.

Jennifer's chin quivered. "I'm
frightened," she said.

Em hugged Jennifer one more time and then
smoothly pushed her energy into her friend's mind. She filled Jennifer's mind
with warmth and light and whispered softly, "It's going to be okay,
Jennifer. You'll see. It's going to be beautiful."

Em found the single silken thread that kept
Jennifer's soul tethered to her body. She wrapped her mind around it. She
reached back into Jennifer's thoughts and pulled forward all the happy memories
she could find - childhood memories, her mother's embrace, the teddy bear she
slept with till she was twelve, the flowers her grandmother grew, the roses her
first boyfriend had bought her, a beach party, a favorite dress, the smell of
warm fresh bread, the taste of chocolate, good times with friends...

Em looked down at Jennifer. Her face was
calm, her breathing had slowed. There was the hint of a smile at the corners of
her mouth.

Em cut the thread.

Jennifer's soul flew up and out of sight, and
Jennifer's mind shut down. Em choked back a sob. She lay her friend's body
carefully back down on the ground and stood up.

"Raeisa!" she called, with all the
fury she could summon.

* * *

Raeisa slithered out of the warehouse. The
dress of reptilian scales had gone. It appeared to have dissolved into skin and
spread to cover her entire body. She was naked, covered from head to toe in
green scales, and her red hair tumbled loosely down around her shoulders. The
snake patterned fingernails had hardened into long, sharp claws. Raeisa was
still human in shape, but she was plainly more lizard than she was girl. She
was also taller than she was before, and she swung her naked scaly hips with
careless seduction. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.

"You didn't even take her, did
you?" she said scornfully, stepping over Jennifer's body without even a
glance. She walked in a slow circle around Em, smirking as she took in the
redness in Em's eyes and the sorrow on her face.

"You didn't even feed off her soul. A
beautiful, fat, stupid soul like that one and you just let it go." Raeisa
laughed and touched a finger to the blood that was running from her lip. She
opened her mouth as she wiped off the smear and then, walking around to face Em
over Jennifer's body, she licked the blood from her finger and looked at Em
through half closed eyes. "Don't you find it dull, Emilia?" She
strung out the syllables in Em's name mockingly. "Or do you like playing
by the rules? Don't tell me you never indulge on a weakling every now and
then?"

"What are you?" said Em, quietly.

Raeisa smiled and put her hands on her hips.
"I'm a
halfling
," she said. Her smile
quirked downwards into a lewd smirk and she drew out the next words slowly
watching Em closely to see if they had the desired effect. "Just like
you."

Em sucked in a quick breath. She was going to
devour Raeisa, but she wanted to know a little more first.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

"Do what?" said Raeisa, in an
amused tone. "Oh, you mean drain my way through the sweetest tasting men
this city has? Used to have, I mean." She giggled. "I started small,
of course. I believe you met my first few meals."

Em snorted. "You mauled them."

"I was a little messy at first, I will
admit. It took me awhile to figure out where the nerve
centers
were. And then I made an interesting discovery... All that lovely heat that
comes out of the human body when it's aroused. Very warming for a lizard like
me, and it concentrates the energy in the soul in such a delicious
manner..."

"You're sick," spat Em.

"I am what I am," Raeisa spat back,
suddenly angry. "It's not my fault they made me this way."

They?
Em
stiffened. They who? Not the Family, no one she knew about. And if 'they' had
made Raeisa, they might have made others like her. Where? How?

Em shook her head. She couldn't think about
that now. Raeisa was strutting around her again, widening the circle, inviting
Em to take a place out in the middle of the lane, setting the field of battle.
And she was licking her lips with too many kinds of hunger. Em's patience ran
out.

"You're nothing like me," spat Em,
and gathered her dark energy for the attack. It took only a millisecond, but somehow
Raeisa was quicker. The lizard girl blinked and suddenly the headache that had
been plaguing Em for weeks exploded into agony inside her head. It was like
Raeisa had thrust a burning poker through her eye. The front half of her mind
was on fire and Em's hands rose automatically to clutch at her forehead.

Raeisa
sprang,
claws
on both hands and feet out and pointed at Em's torso. Em was blinded by the
pain in her head and Raeisa's attack caught her completely off guard. The
lizard's talons plunged deep into her human flesh and the weight of the girl
pushed them both back into the gutter. Em's head hit the pavement with a bone
crashing thud. Raeisa stepped casually off Em, planted her feet solidly on the
ground and raked her claws downwards through Em's body, an unholy smile
twisting her face as she did so.