“Same as you, Marty.” I kept a pleasant expression on my face. “I’m working this case.”
“I thought the only way out of Black Hat was in a pine box.”
“That’s what you get for thinking,” I said sweetly. “Do you mind? I’m here to do a job.”
The other senior agents struck me as vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to them. They took their cues from Marty and gave me dead-eye stares that dared me to get in their way.
Asa they ignored as if he weren’t standing at my elbow, which blew my mind.
Just because I was a girl, I was less scary? Really? I mean, I wasn’t all that scary now, but I used to be.
“Báthory,” one of the guys breathed as his eyes rounded to the size of softballs.
The others flinched at the name and took a healthy step back, reminding me of the good old days when I struck terror into the hearts of my coworkers. Except those days weren’t all that great. It felt that way at the time, but the true high came from using black magic. I had to admit, I didn’t miss people being afraid of me.
Much.
“I would prefer you never speak that name within my hearing again,” I said coolly. “Step aside, please.”
Between Mr. Big Mouth blabbing my surname, and the bomb Clay would drop on their heads about who was now in charge, I doubted we’d hear another peep from the agents for the duration of the case. They would open the emails from us as lead team, file their paperwork to look good for the director, but sit in their hotel rooms watching porn or sports, eating pizza, and waiting for their free ride to be over.
The agents scattered before I got within touching distance, and I got my first look at the crime scene.
A narrow but deep creek ran through its center, and the victims had been posed on a rocky outcropping. I was glad for Clay’s suggestion I pack waders. They had saved me on the muddy hike down and would keep me dry while I conducted my examination.
The single similarity, as far as I could tell, between this killer and the Silver Stag was right in front of me.
The Stag had chosen fae girls between the ages of ten and eighteen, with healthy amounts of magic. The transformative spell was easier for him to cast and more likely to stick that way. He preferred his victims on four legs rather than two, and he had a thing for deer. Each time he completed a herd of four, he let them go. That is to say, he unpenned them. Then he hunted them down with a crossbow.
The Stag had been a black witch, but he practiced a type of magic even my ancestors found distasteful.
Rather than eating hearts to increase his power, he consumed souls.
To transform the girls, he drew their essence to the surface and fashioned the shape he wanted from it. The end result was a silvery-white spectral animal of his choosing. And when he pierced its heart with a silver-tipped arrow, the spirit parted from the flesh, allowing him to inhale it using a thrice-cursed spell.
These girls were still deer, their fur still white, and magic had frozen a tableau straight out of a painting.
A Spring Creek, the artist might name it, to highlight the vitality of the flowers on the shore and the rush of water that lent the arrangement a sense of movement. Even their eyes gleamed, bright and alert.
There were no wounds, defensive or otherwise, on the deer. They appeared well-fed, with sleek coats. It occurred to me he might have brushed them postmortem. He had taken care of the herd, but I wasn’t as convinced he had hunted them. In addition to the cleanliness of their fur, no mud caked their hooves. The creek explained how the killer washed them but not how he got them here.
The average whitetail doe weighed about a hundred pounds, and that was the nearest comparison here.
“The killer had to lift each deer individually and pose them,” I murmured. “That was after the hunt.”
“Yes,” Asa said, startling me.
Lost in deciphering the grim scene, I hadn’t noticed him follow me into the creek. “He’s strong.”
Even if he carried them in versus flushed them out, what he had done required great physical strength.
“Powerful too.” I curled my fingers into my palm to keep from touching the nearest lifelike deer to taste the dark magic trapped like dander in her fur. “The MO is different, flashier—the copycat wants us to find his work and admire it—but the manner of death…” I could see why they wanted my opinion. “These girls were transformed using the same magic, if not the same spell the Silver Stag used, and their souls were consumed as well.”
Four girls had been taken, according to the report, but I only counted three deer.
“Where’s number four?” I raised my voice to include Asa. “The file didn’t indicate one was missing.”
“You won’t get a word out of Agent Montenegro.” Billy had worked up the nerve to approach me without Clay. “He’s the strong, silent type.”