It was a cold Saturday evening; much colder than was usually
the case for September. It was the sort of cold that was unsettling, that
reached into the very depths of the human soul and reminded it of times long
passed and of creatures that stalked the night, not concerned with the cold –
creatures that hunted, that fed upon human flesh. It was the sort of cold that
frightened people.
The snow crunched underfoot as Hannah and Ryan lazily
wandered along the street from the theatre. Her chestnut hair cascaded around the
shoulders of her thick winter coat, pushed back at the top of her head by a
pair of pink fluffy earmuffs. She glanced behind at the trail of footsteps they
had left behind them, at how much larger his footprints were than hers. She
smiled and looked at Ryan, the moonlight glancing off of his raincoat and
deepening its already dark green colour. His hair was tucked away neatly in a
dark grey beanie cap and his pale blue eyes moved to observe her. They were content with each other’s company,
not showing any reaction to the cold other than the cloud of their breath upon
the air. Ryan draped his arm around her shoulders like a shawl and held her
close. They shared a joke and Hannah’s laughter filled the empty street with a
warmth otherwise distant from the frosty September night.
Ryan noticed a crunch of snow out of synch with their own
footsteps and he stopped, holding Hannah closer to his own chest as he looked
around.
The street around them was empty. Only the distant sound of
traffic could be heard. There wasn’t a single visible soul with them on the
street.
“What is it, why did you stop?” Hannah asked, glancing at
him nervously.
“It’s nothing. I thought I heard something...” He smiled and
squeezed her to try and ease her tensions before slowly walking once more. Ryan
tried to shake the thought out of his mind that he could still hear the third
set of footsteps. Ryan convinced himself that it was the sound simply echoing
in the sidestreets and alleyways and playing tricks on his mind. Sure, that was
it, he reassured himself.
Hannah and Ryan never saw the beast that attacked them. They
never saw the long, razor sharp claws that cut through cloth and flesh alike.
Hannah and Ryan felt no pain as they fell to the floor, their bodies already in
shock. As their eyes began to dim and their world sank into darkness, they
finally noticed how cold it was. Hannah and Ryan convulsed as their life oozed
from them, soaking through the snow, staining it black under the moonlight;
part shiver, part death spasm. As the last few dregs of consciousness slipped
from their bodies, Hannah and Ryan saw a shadow loom over them – they saw eyes
like embers shimmering through the darkness above them as a mouth all too wide
and with too many teeth shifted into a malicious, hungry grin that caught the
moonlight reflecting from the snow. Perhaps it was the delirium of the cold and
their dying haze, but Hannah and Ryan saw as an inhuman tongue lashed from the
gaping maw and licked their dark blood from its claws, a piercing clicking
noise uttering from the beast’s throat.
The shadow was mocking their final moments; mocking and
watching, savouring its kill as much as it seemed to savour the taste of their
blood...
***
“Damn it all, Grace! Why don’t you warn me coming onto a
scene like this?” Darren covered his mouth and held back a gag in the depths of
his chest and throat as he observed the two corpses on the sidewalk, already
beginning to take on a shade of blue from being left in the cold all night. A
fresh fall of snow had clung to the bodies and the forensics team had already
begun dusting away the excess to reach the lower layers that had been stained
by the victims’ blood. Tatters of clothing dotted the scene, as did slivers and
chunks of flesh where the bodies had been ripped apart. Darren noted a distinct
lack of blood around some of the portions of person littering the snow.
“Sorry, D, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Grace
DeLance, an officer of the Detroit police’s homicide department, looked to
Darren with an amused twinkle in her hazel eyes. Morgue humour... Darren had
come to expect no less from Detroit PD’s rising star. It was a natural human
coping mechanism, and one that she had developed to a fine art.
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to spoil my lunch...” Darren
glanced around once more, noticing the earmuffs next to the woman’s corpse,
once pink, once fluffy, now thick and sticky with deep red blood, no doubt hers
and her partner’s, “Unlike whatever killed these two...”
Grace tilted a brow and narrowed her eyes at him, “Come again?”
She hadn’t noticed. Darren smiled.
“These portions of flesh here, here and here,” he gestured,
one hand still over his mouth, “There’s no blood around them. They were cut
from the corpses post-mortem, post exsanguination.” He crouched by the male
body and squinted, “Also, they don’t match the wounds exactly; there are parts
missing, meaning either whatever killed these poor bastards had its own buffet,
or took souvenirs...”
Darren stood and stretched, taking a deep breath through his
mouth before looking at the forensics team busying themselves around the crime
scene.
“Call them off.” Darren said, turning his attention back to
Grace.
“What?”
“You heard. They won’t find anything.”
Grace pouted. She suited pouting, Darren thought.
“What do you mean we won’t find anything?”
Darren moved a hand around, as if drawing a circle around
the scene with his mind, “The snow. Whatever prints or other such markings on
the bodies or around the area would have been washed away with the melting snow
and then covered over with the fresh fallen stuff on top of that.”
The fact that Darren already knew that whatever had done
this wouldn’t leave any marks of identification was probably a little beyond
Grace’s level of understanding, for the moment. He knew he’d have to level with
her eventually, but for now, he just told her the things she needed to know.
“If there’s anything else, Officer DeLance, you have my
number. I’ll follow up some leads, chase down some contacts, see what I can
find out,” Darren pushed back the hem of his white leather jacket and stuffed
his hands into the pockets of his faded stonewash jeans. The wind caught his
ruddy blonde hair and blew it out of his face. Grace DeLance caught sight of
her reflection in the silver lenses of Darren’s aviator sunglasses and sighed.
“Fine, I’ll call you, Mr. Riley, but if you find something
first, you’re to come straight to me.”
“I will...” He wouldn’t...
Darren glanced to the sky, the sun pale as it shone through
the frosty sky. Something had broken from the Join, and he knew he was the only
one capable of hunting it. So much for lazy Sundays, he mused...
Yeah, still on my Dresden Files vibe. I'm really getting excited by Darren and can't wait to introduce you to more of his world(s... Hint hint. Spoiler?)
But for now, God bless and much love.
Adios!
Craiggy.
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