to just stop for a second, but then the moment passed and he was pulling the body bag open, the black vinyl splitting like the skin of a fruit.
“Jesus,” breathed Alex.
The girl’s face was fragile, blue veined. She wore a white cotton camisole, torn and puckered where the knife had entered and retreated—again and again. The wounds were
all centered on her heart, and she’d been struck with enough force that it looked as if her
sternum had started to give way, the bones fracturing in a shallow, bloody crater. Alex was
suddenly sorry she hadn’t taken Turner’s strongly worded advice and gone home. This didn’t look like a ritual gone wrong. It looked personal.
She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat and forced herself to inhale deeply. If this
girl had somehow been targeted by a society or was messing with the uncanny, the smell
of the Veil should still be on her. But with Alex’s own stink filling the ambulance, it was
impossible to tell.
“It’s the boyfriend.”
Alex glanced at the coroner. Compulsions were supposed to make anyone under their power eager to please.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Turner said so. They’ve already picked him up for questioning. He has priors.”
“For what?”
“Dealing and possession. So does she.”
Of course she did. The boyfriend was moving product, and this girl was too. But there
was a good long leap from small-time dealing to murder. Sometimes, she reminded herself.
Sometimes it’s not far at all.
Alex looked again at the girl’s face. She was blond, a little like Hellie.
The resemblance was superficial, at least on the outside. But underneath? In the cut-open places, they were all the same. Girls like Hellie, girls like Alex, girls like this one, had to keep running or eventually trouble caught up. This girl just hadn’t run fast enough.
There were paper bags over her hands—to preserve the evidence, Alex realized. Maybe
she’d scratched her attacker.
“What’s her name?” It didn’t matter, but Alex needed it for her report.
“Tara Hutchins.”
Alex typed it into her phone so she wouldn’t forget it. “Cover her up.”
She was glad when she couldn’t see that brutalized body anymore. This was nasty, ugly, but it didn’t mean Tara was connected to the societies. People didn’t need magic to
be terrible to each other.
“Time of death?” she asked. That seemed like the kind of thing she should know.
“Sometime around eleven. Hard to pinpoint because of the cold.”
She paused with her hand on the lever of the van doors. Sometime around eleven. Right
around the time two docile Grays who had never given anyone any trouble had opened their jaws like they were trying to swallow the world and something had tried to slam its
way into a chalk circle. What if that something had found its way to Tara instead?
Or what if her boyfriend got fucked up enough to think he could stab straight through
to her heart? There were plenty of human monsters out there. Alex had met a few. For now
she’d “done her part.” More than done it.
Alex cracked the door to the van, scanned the street, then hopped down. “Forget you met me,” she told the coroner.
A vague, confused expression crossed his face. Alex left him standing, dazed, beside Tara’s body and strolled away, crossing the street and keeping to the dark sidewalk, away
from the police lights. In a short while, the compulsion would wear off and he’d wonder
how he’d ended up with a gold coin in his hand. He would put it in his pocket and forget
about it or toss it in the trash without ever realizing the metal was real.
She glanced back at the Grays gathered around Payne Whitney. Was it her imagination or was there something in the bent of their shoulders, the way they huddled together by the
gymnasium doors? Alex knew better than to look too closely, but in that fleeting moment
she could have sworn they looked frightened. What did the dead have to fear?
She could hear Darlington’s voice in her head: When was the first time you saw them?
Low and halting, as if he wasn’t sure whether the question was taboo. But the real question, the right question, was: When was the first time you knew to be afraid?