Page 36 of Villains Never Die

Charles closed his mouth and led us to the side of the building, the lot of us giving the security cameras at the main and back entrances a wide berth. I had cloaked us all in shadows and light, distorting the image, but if Rook’s cameras could look past it, the Council’s certainly could too.

“There’s a side entrance no one watches. They bring bodies through here when they don’t want people to know about them.” He gulped, adjusting his glasses. “Like this one.”

The steel door screeched loud enough to give all of us a moment’s pause before we decided no one was running to investigate and it was safe for us to go inside. Rook lit the way as Charles led us past blind spots in the cameras’ eyes and guided us to another steel door.

“I think it’s down there,” he said. “I’ve never been inside, though.”

I unlocked the door with a quick flick of my fingers and looked inside at a set of stairs that led down deep into the basement of the building. The air chilled as we went down single file into a large morgue with at least three dozen coolers filled with or awaiting bodies.

“Which one?” Rook asked, staring at the numbered compartments.

I pulled a clipboard with a numbered log off the wall and scanned the list of names. At the bottom was the aliasJane Doeand the designator4-A. I read it aloud and Rook counted rows until he found the correct compartment, which sat far above our heads.

“Um, this thing, I think,” Charles said, pointing to a button at the side of the cold storage unit that worked a hydraulic lift. Rook climbed a ladder near the tall wall of coolers while I moved the lift so it was level with the door we needed. Rook slid the body out on rollers and we lowered it back down.

Pale and cold, the woman’s face was mostly intact, but blood still caked on her chin where her tongue had been cut from her mouth, and neither of the arms resting by her sides had hands.

“Oh God, it’s Kathy!” Charles clamped both hands over his mouth and turned away from the corpse.

“Who is Kathy?” I demanded, growing impatient with his weak-stomached theatrics.

He refused to turn back around. “She is—was—the file clerk. She kept all the Council’s records. She was so nice…”

Rook glanced around until his eyes landed on a filing cabinet against one wall. He moved to it and opened drawers, flipping through folders.

A file clerk. I doubted she was someone with particularly powerful magic, nor anything rare. If that were the case, I was wrong about who the killer was hunting.

“Got it,” Rook said, pulling a file from the drawer. He opened it and skimmed the page. “Fifty-nine, employed by the Council. Hands and tongue were removed postmortem. No sedation spells or other magical traces on her.”

“Just like the others,” I agreed.

“Look at this.”

I moved to peer over his shoulder, where he pointed to a line with an asterisk next to it.

*wait 4 your demise, 5alvation denied

The message, marked casually in neat handwriting on the report, added like an afterthought. I wondered where the Council was keeping the originals that were found with the bodies.

“Why do you think they used numbers here instead of letters?” Rook asked, voice low so Charles wouldn’t hear. He was still cowering in the corner.

“I don’t know, but I think I was wrong about who he’s targeting. She and Blackwell weren’t exactly equals in the Council, and I’ve never heard of her, which means she probably wasn’t doing anything nefarious after hours.”

“There has to be some connection.”

Nothing immediately came to mind, so I stood over the body to examine it more closely before we returned it to its compartment in the cold wall of corpses. Her hair was tattered and muddy from wherever she was killed. Her office casual clothes were equally grimy. The skin had shriveled around her wrists where her hands had been dismembered, and while I knew none of the victims had visible killing wounds, I verified it for myself.

Something blue snagged the corner of my eye as I examined the jagged cuts where her left hand was severed.

“What’s this?”

Rook slid over from whatever he’d been reading to see what I meant. There were smudged blue letters on the skin of her forearm.

“Ballpoint pen,” he said. “She probably wrote a note to herself.”

“No, look.” I pointed at them. “They’re all backwards. They rubbed off on her from something.”

Rook shrugged. “She works in an office. She probably rested her arm on a report too long or something.”