Getting back into her skintight dress was a bitch, but she didn’t bother to zip it all the way. She hustled out to her car, grabbed the gym bag she always kept in her trunk—or at least since the first time a junkie suspect had thrown up on her—and jogged back into the house.
The bathroom was tidier than she would have guessed for a bachelor living alone, but she wasn’t about to question that bit of good fortune. She twisted the knob to turn on the water and spent a few blissful minutes under the hot spray while she soaped, lathered, and rinsed. Wrapping a towel around herself, she fished a toothbrush and comb out of her bag and made quick work of her teeth and hair. One of the things she loved about modern hairstyles was that she could wear it really short. Easy and low-maintenance. So much better than when women had had to keep it long and wear it coiffed.
On her way out the door, she grabbed a travel mug from the kitchen cabinet, filled it to the brim with the coffee Jack had left, and screwed on the lid. Within moments, she’d keyed in the security code to lock the doors behind her, and she was in her car, heading for the address she’d been given. Taking a swig of coffee, she sighed when the caffeine began to buzz through her system. She’d have liked a little more time to sit and enjoy it, but no such luck.
“Crime waits for no man. Or woman.”
The place was pristine. The living room was freshly dusted, the wood floors polished to a high gleam.
Usually there was an air of something not quite right about a crime scene, but this apartment? Was spotless. Nothing looked out of place.
Until Jack turned the corner into the hallway. There, the house turned into a gruesome mockery of the cleanliness he’d seen before. Here, the stench of blood assaulted his nostrils and he coughed. Broken pictures dangled from nails on the wall. A large round hole showed where something had been shoved through the drywall. If he were going to hazard a guess, he’d say it was someone’s head that got slammed through. A tooth had been knocked loose from someone’s mouth and lay in the middle of the gore-splattered carpet runner.
Whatever had happened here had been unmistakably brutal, with unspeakable rage behind it.
In the bedroom, he found he was right. Crime scene analysts swarmed the room, collecting evidence. Hairs, fibers, fingerprints. Every inch of the place would be gone over, using human technology and Magickal spells to decipher any clue that might tell them who ... or what ... had done this.
But Jack’s gaze skimmed over the other agents and went straight to the bed. A petite blond woman’s dead body lay sprawled facedown on the mattress, her pajamas soaked in her own blood. The damage in this room was even worse than in the hallway. She’d been shot twice, and that was just the start of her wounds. Twin puncture wounds scored the side of her neck, with dried crimson stains trailing down from the gaping holes.
Her face seemed locked in an expression of horror, her blank eyes open and staring.
One of her front teeth was gone, a bloodied socket in its place. Her lips were split and swollen, and huge bruises slashed over the pieces of skin he could see. The rest of her flesh was sickening in its ghostly paleness. A blackened mark was burned into one bare arm, and Jack knew the sign of dark, evil magic when he saw it.
“Welcome to the party.” A redheaded woman shot him a glance as she set down a kit to collect evidence and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Tess Jones, the MCU’s new medical examiner. Also the maid of honor at the wedding the day before, though her finery had been exchanged for sensible pants, loafers, and a jacket emblazoned with FBI on the back.
She was probably one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, and she was smarter than she was pretty, which was saying something. Still, when she’d stood next to Selina in the wedding party, he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off of the slender elf.
“What happened?”
The redhead arched her eyebrows. “I just got here, but it looks like a vampire drained her. Completely.”
“Black magic.” He nodded to the mark he’d noticed.
“Yeah, I saw that.” Tess’s gloved hand motioned to it. “Usually the fanged races can’t cast spells very well, but it could just be the darkness of the Magickal who did this.”
“Magic can be funny that way.” And the vampire would have to be one dark SOB to leave that kind of mark behind without casting a spell. Jack tugged a pair of gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on. Stepping closer, he crouched down to get a better look at the body. The woman appeared to be in her midthirties, but age in Magickals could be deceiving.
Aside from the dark mark, the blisters down her arms and legs were obviously from one of the Magickal allergies. Werewolves reacted this way to silver, vampires to sunlight, witches to bronze, and Fae and elves to iron. The scorched, broken flesh over her body meant she’d been worked over pretty thoroughly. A few puncture marks indicated she might have been stabbed by the metal she was allergic to.
Her nails were broken and bloody, multiple bruises standing out on her too-pale skin. She’d put up one hell of a fight.
“Are we looking at sexual assault?” She wore clothes, but those could have been put on postmortem.
Tess took a breath. “I don’t think so, but I won’t have anything conclusive until I run some tests.”
“Luca said over the phone that the FBI was called in because she’s a federal official. A bureaucrat, not a field agent, though. He didn’t give me a name. What do we know about her?” He turned to look at one of the CSUs who was dusting for prints. The man nodded and silently handed over a wallet that had been sealed inside a plastic bag. Washington State driver’s license. Credentials that said she worked for the Bureau, but he’d never met her. “Mary Winston. Age thirty-three. Or so this ID says.”
“She’s not thirty-three, that I can tell you.” Tess scraped whatever skin cells there were out from under the victim’s fingernails. She might have clawed her attacker in the fight, which would give them some DNA to work with. “The Bureau database and the All-Magickal Council will have her real age and any other aliases they’ve issued her to cover her real identity from the mere mortals of the world.”
Jack cast her a wry glance. “Well, this mere mortal will run down her information with the FBI and the Council later.”
“I was a mere mortal not long ago.” The redhead flashed a small, tight grin that showed a hint of an extended werewolf canine.
“I know.” He refocused on the body decomposing before them. “What race of Magickal is she?”
Not one of the fanged races, he didn’t think. She would have healed too quickly to still be showing this amount of damage. Not an elf, because her ears didn’t have that subtle point to them. Since there were only five races of Magickals, that left witches and—
“Fae.” Luca stepped into the bedroom. “I’d guess Fae. That’s what her blood smells like to me.”
A palpable tension filled the room, as it always seemed to when Tess and Cavalli were in the same vicinity. On the one hand, Tess was the best coroner Jack had ever worked with, so he could see why Luca had insisted she be assigned to the Magickal side of the FBI rather than let her stay with the Normals. On the other hand, there was a certain level of masochism on his boss’s part that Jack didn’t even want to contemplate. As long as it didn’t affect their work—and both were too professional to let that happen—Jack tried to ignore it. The rest of the unit was doing the same, as far as he could tell.