Chapter 14

Next to me, Sidnee made a small noise of distress and I reached out to squeeze her hand. Seeing death was always hard, but seeing it trample one so young was devastating.

My next thought was of Aoife’s mum and her boyfriend. Poor Luke, this would crush him. He’d already been through so much; he’d barely had time for the flowers on his dad’s grave to die and now this.

I tried to put him from my mind and focus on the body. I had a job to do, no matter how hard it was. If I called it ‘the body’ then maybe I could distance it from the bright teenage girl I’d met.

Her mother had commented on how hard it was to hurt a banshee so I scanned the body for an obvious wound. There wasn’t one but since Aoife was lying on her side, there might be some marks underneath her if she’d been stabbed or shot.

We photographed everything thoroughly and clinically. By the time we were done, Gunnar was back from patching and placing the camera at the new barrier rip. He looked at the body and shook his head sadly. ‘Aoife Sullivan. She was what? Eighteen?’

‘Nineteen,’ I confirmed. It was a damned waste.

‘What is this world coming to?’ He paused for a moment. ‘We’ll have to notify the mother.’

‘And the boyfriend,’ I suggested. Luke deserved that much.

I pushed down my emotions and continued to collect evidence. Once we’d done all we could, we prepared to roll the body to see what, if anything, lay beneath her. Gunnar grasped her shoulders and I grasped her hips.

We were turning her when a ghostly apparition appeared behind the body in front of the trees. We almost dropped the body. The apparition – it was Aoife.

Sidnee squeaked and even Gunnar grunted in surprise. We all looked down at the body then back up at her floating identical twin. What the fuck?

The ethereal girl in front of us lifted a slim arm and pointed into the distance. We looked in that direction but couldn’t see anything. When we glanced back, she was staring in shock and horror at the body we were holding. She opened her mouth and screamed.

The sound was so piercing and visceral that the three of us dropped the body and desperately threw our hands over our ears to block it out. It didn’t help: you couldn’t escape a sound that was penetrating through to the marrow of your bones. It vibrated with such force that I was fully prepared to find that my brain had dribbled out of my ears.

I looked up at Aoife. ‘Stop!’ I begged her. Then it clicked. She was dead, and whatever happened to banshees on death had taken place. She’d been transformed; she was a full banshee now, a wailing spirit intent on proclaiming the dead. Unfortunately, she was the one who was dead. Man, that must suck.

The scream continued; since she no longer needed to take breath, I wondered if it would ever end. I prayed that it would soon because I couldn’t take much more. Sidnee and Gunnar were doubled over. Through Sidnee’s hands, I saw the bright crimson flare of fresh blood. Fuck.

‘Aoife!’ I barked. ‘Enough!’ I didn’t know whether she heard me or chose to end it, but she began to fade and her voice fell mute.

It took a long minute after her absence for us to come back to ourselves. I realised I was shaking; her scream had been utterly terrifying and it had fucking hurt. ‘Sidnee? You okay?’ I asked.

She was ashen, staring at her hands. The scent of her blood danced on the air and a sudden hunger took me off guard. My body was aching and it knew blood would fix it. I pushed the urge down ruthlessly.

‘I’ve got some potions. One second, Sidnee.’ Gunnar jogged to his truck and rifled in the glovebox. He came back with a small vial and some wet wipes to clean her hands and bleeding ears.

‘Thanks.’ She gave him a grateful smile then downed the vial in one and closed her eyes as it worked. ‘That’s so much better. It’s a pain sometimes being a mermaid,’ she muttered. ‘Any other shifter would shift to heal but noooo – I have to find a body of water first. Such a pain.’

‘How much water?’ I asked curiously. ‘Like, would a bath do it? A puddle?’

‘A bath, yes. A puddle – depends on the size.’

Gunnar had finished cleaning Sidnee up. ‘Can we focus, ladies?’ he asked drily. ‘We can discuss puddles, lakes and streams another time. Let’s turn over the body.’ Just like that, it was business as usual.

We carefully turned the body. Oof. Well, now we had cause of death. Aoife’s side had been crushed to a bloody pulp. Only the remnants of her clothing were holding her insides together. What could do something like that?

‘Damn,’ Sidnee uttered.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed.

I scanned the ground under the body and found something small and white. I used my tweezers to pick it up and put it in an evidence bag: it was a fake fingernail done in a French manicure. Something teased the edge of my mind; I’d seen something like that recently but I couldn’t remember where. I glanced at Aoife’s hands. Her nails were trimmed short, painted bright blue – and they were all there.

The nail was obviously an acrylic. I’d had enough experience with tips and full nail sets to know that they liked to pop off and take most of your own nail with them. I flipped it over, and sure enough it had some real fingernail attached. I’d read that you needed a lot of nail material to get DNA but I hoped for the best. I dropped it in the bag and sealed it.

Then I settled down and went back to work, finished photographing the scene and cataloguing what we’d found. I checked Aoife’s pockets and even looked inside the horrible cavity in her body; no fire gem. Her killer had taken it.

‘No fire gem,’ I called to Gunnar.

His expression was grim. ‘It was too much to hope for.’ He sighed. ‘Call it in.’

I phoned the ambulance and we waited for it to arrive in melancholic silence. We were all shaken by the violence of the death, plus it was somehow harder when it was a young woman like this. All her possible futures had ended abruptly. It was grossly unfair.

The ambulance arrived and loaded up the body to deliver for an autopsy. Now came the worst part: informing her mother. My hands went cold and my throat dry. I couldn’t imagine hearing the news that I was about to deliver. I wished I had Fluffy with me for moral support.

As always, I channelled my nervousness into my brain and tried to distract myself. Who could have done something like this? What kind of supernatural would attack in such a way?

They say that most murders are committed by someone the victim knows, most often their nearest and dearest. Distasteful as it was, the only two people who came to mind were Nora and Luke. If Thomas had kept his word it should be easy to rule out Luke – but I still needed to consider him.

‘Gunnar, what do you know about tariaqsuks? Luke said they weren’t very powerful, but could he have crushed that girl’s side in?’

‘I’m sure even a human could have done it with a heavy enough stick,’ Gunnar said.

I blinked. No way. A stick? No. A baseball bat maybe, but they’d really have to whale on the body for a while to do that amount of damage. How would they get her to stay in place long enough? Whoever had killed Aoife had to have surprised her, otherwise poof – she would have teleported away.

We looked at each other but none of us had any ideas. Another mystery. My simple theft case, which should have been so simple to solve, had rolled into murder – and this murder didn’t have an easy solution.

I let out a big breath and walked back to the SUV. Time to inform Nora Sullivan that her only child had been murdered.