Page 16 of Taken By the Ripper
“What is it?”
Instead of answering, she continued her examination by comparing the slice in the woman’s abdomen to the one on her neck. They matched.
“This is interesting.” She pointed to the end of the slit on the neck and next the abdomen. “If you see here, there is first a puncture wound a bit larger than the slice. Puncture, then slice. Almost like…” She trailed off, her eyebrows furrowing as she spotted something abnormal hiding within the stretches and folds of the woman’s intestines.
“Like what?”
Again, she didn’t answer as she snatched her tweezers and dug in as carefully as she dared. After a few missed attempts, she finally managed to grab onto the item with the tweezers and pulled it out of the body, holding it up to the light.
A black claw.
Identical to the one she’d found lodged into her window frame. But she wasn’t about to tell him that, and she wasn’t entirely sure why.
“What is this?” he murmured, taking the tweezers from her and holding the claw close to his face. “This is not human, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Not even from the creatures you supposedly hunt?”
He shook his head. “But you’re correct. This is no mere animal attack. This is something…other.”
He placed the claw on top of a handkerchief, folded it safely inside, and tucked it into his pocket.
She lifted an eyebrow. “Stealing evidence, Detective?”
The man leaned closer until the mint on his breath drowned out the other smells wafting up from the morgue. “As far as the local police are concerned, this is a knife wound. They cannot know what it really is. Panic, remember?”
“I remember.”
When she found no evidence other than the claw, she started to put the body back together and sew up the autopsy incision. Without glancing his way, she asked the detective, “What, exactly, are you hunting?”
Because now she believed him. About all of it. About the vampires and the creatures that go bump in the night.
“You saidwhatand notwho.”
She nodded. “If you aren’t hunting a vampire, then whatareyou hunting?”
He frowned and opened his notebook somewhere near the middle where he kept a bookmark within the pages. “I don’tknow. I haven’t encountered such a creature before. It doesn’t have the same hunting patterns as a vampire.”
“But the authorities don’t know you’re hunting a creature, do they? They think you’re hunting a man.”
His lips pressed into a thin line, causing his scar to become more prominent across his mouth. “The average police? No. Not at all. But those who hired me? Yes. They know that what I’m hunting is not human.”
“It makes more sense why they hired outside help then. You are an actual expert in your field. Just not the one I expected.”
Her gaze lingered a little longer on the scar on his mouth, and unfortunately, he noticed.
A smirk lifted on his face as he touched the place where his scar resided. “Those in my field call it my ‘kiss with a demon.’”
“A real demon? They don’t actually exist.” But then a cold sweat broke out across her hands, and her needle nearly slipped from her fingers. “Correct?”
His smirk refused to fade. “Some say I fought against a succubus and lived. Others say the demon’s kiss was as sharp as her bite.”
“And the truth?”
Instead of divulging the information, he simply turned with a grin stretched across his mouth and avoided the answer altogether.
Her focus returned to tying off the last few stitches. “I was curious about what you thought of my sister,” she asked hesitantly. If there was a way she could fix what Mazie accused her of doing despite its lack of truth, she wanted to try.
“Which one?” he replied distractedly.
