Copycat Killer (Psychic For Hire 1)

She wheels a second gurney a few feet closer. The body lying on it comes into my field of vision. The head is turned slightly my way. I recognize him.

With a cry of shock, I step into the room. The occupants all turn to look at me. Storm comes towards me, clearly intent on escorting me out of the room.

“Diana, you shouldn’t be here,” he says. He is undeniably jarred by my presence.

I neatly sidestep him. “That’s Raif!” I cry out, unable to stop myself.

Storm’s eyebrows draw together. “You knew him?” he says.

I shake my head. “I saw him in my dream,” I say.

I can’t believe it. He had just been in the waiting room. Alive. I was just speaking with him. And yet here he is, lying on a gurney, his eyes blankly staring at nothing, his skin tinged with grey. I know if I touched it, he would be cold.

It was his spirit, his remnant that I’d spoken to, and I’d not suspected a thing. He’d asked me for my help, but he was already dead.

I only realize I am shaking when Storm places his hands on my shoulders as if to steady me. “Are you alright?” he asks.

I nod my head even though I feel nauseous. There is a horrible smell in here. It must be coming from Lynesse. One glance at her body shows me the red ruin of her torso. It has been savaged, the cuts deep enough to reach into her internal organs. I look away quickly, gasping for breath to steady my heaving stomach. I cannot barf. I cannot embarrass myself like that.

“Diana, we should to talk in the waiting room.” Storm has a firm grip on my upper arm now.

“No. I promised to help Raif.” Pretending that I am perfectly fine, I take a shaky step towards Raif’s body.

“When?” Storm says. “In your dream?”

I shake my head. “Out there in the waiting room. He was there. He spoke to me.”

“He was there?” says the coroner skeptically.

I nod. “Part of him was still there.”

The coroner’s eyebrows rise almost into her hairline. “And here I was thinking I had all of him,” she says.

But Storm seems to have no such doubts. “What did he say to you?” he demands.

I open my mouth to tell him everything but the little voice inside my head snaps it shut. She gives me the moment I need to think. Storm already has more information than me. If I give him what he has asked for, there is no way I will solve the case before him.

“Nothing much,” I murmur. “He was… He wasn’t himself, wasn’t making sense. He was already mostly gone.”

I take another step closer to Raif. It is bad enough to be looking at his dead face, but I can also see the edges of the red gaping wound at the back of his head where his skull has been bashed in.

I want to look away but I can’t. I had seen that damage happen in my dream, but it had been different. The wound had been blue. The blood had been blue. One particular species of otherkind has blue blood.

“He was an incubus,” I say almost to myself.

The coroner consults her clipboard and then shakes her head. “No record of him being an incubus,” she says.

“He was,” I insist. “I saw it in my dream.” When Storm looks like he is about to demand every detail, I say, “That’s pretty much all I saw. I didn’t see the killer. If I had, I would have told you by now.”

“Any chance of confirming it?” Storm asks the coroner.

She shrugs. “It’s difficult. Their blue blood turns red on exposure to air and following death, and this victim has been dead for days.”

“There must be a test,” I insist.

She shakes her head. “That kind of magic isn’t my field. Incubae pretty much have human-seeming physiology after the blood turns red. No way of me knowing unless he was registered as an incubus, and we have no record of that.”

“Otherkind shouldn’t have to be registered,” I mutter.