Dead Rising (37 page)

Snap out of it
. Templar training included an anatomy intensive on a cadavers, and we’d all studied drawings and photos of various supernatural methods of death. Still, this was my first up-close and personal view. Time to stop freaking out, and start doing my job.

My job as the only Templar in Baltimore, that is. Not a paladin. Not a knight. But still a Templar with the responsibilities that my birthright entailed.

I took a steading breath and bent down to examine the man, careful not to touch anything. He had on the same dark-green cloak as my companion, his eyes fixed wide in surprise, a beanbag clutched in his left hand.

“My name is Melissa Davies and his is...was Ronald Stull. We were in a role playing game, and there was a lightning strike. No, there’s no way he’s still alive.”

She knew him. I felt a pang of sorrow. It was bad enough for me to find a stranger dead in a park, but a friend. . .. Melissa was wrong, though. Ronald wasn’t killed by a lightning strike. The blue smoke began to dissipate, and I saw what I’d suspected – a sigil burned into the grass beneath the body. I’d need to wait until the police, or whoever, moved him to get a look at the entire symbol, but its presence meant this wasn’t a random magic act gone wrong. It was a hit.

“Did Ronald have any enemies?” I asked once Melissa had hung up.

Her hands shook as she stashed the phone. “What, like Zeus? No, he didn’t have any enemies, aside from the imaginary ones in our game. He was killed by lightening.”

No, he was killed by a being with an affinity for lightning, not by the electrical event itself, a being who liked to remove the lungs and heart, a being who surrounded himself with blue smoke.

A sharp pain shot through my side, and I rubbed the spot where my scar was, thinking it was a really bad time to get a muscle spasm. “Lightning doesn’t usually leave a demon sigil on the ground, or produce blue smoke.”

Melissa gave me a wary look, taking a step backward. “Copper chloride. It burns blue. And random burn patterns in the grass are not demon sigils.”

So says the woman freezing opponents with bean bags. Although I couldn’t really blame her. She didn’t grow up looking at demons-gone-wild photos or autopsies of werewolf victims. This was all fantasy to her and I was a nutjob conspiracy theorist. “Sorry, I get a little carried away with the game sometimes. How well did you know him?”

She relaxed at my explanation. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one running around this LARP in the Park who “confused” what everyday people considered to be reality and fantasy. Melissa could believe whatever she wanted, but Ronald hadn’t been carrying around copper chloride – which causes blue flame and
green
smoke. And that
was
a demon sigil. I’d swear it on the Templar tattoo inked into my right wrist.

The woman turned her back on the body, hugging herself tight. The brief downpour had become a light shower, but her cloak was soaked, her hair plastered to it in thick strands. “He joined us a few months back. Some of the guys had played online with him and asked him into the group. He was really good. Ronald could sneak up on anyone, and he was really accurate with his spells- I mean his beanbags.”

None of that explained why he was dead on the ground. Unless he’d hit the wrong sorcerer with a beanbag. “Are you two the only magic users in the group?”

She nodded. “It was nice to have a back-up, you know?”

I’d learned that wizards got captured a lot in this game. They ran out of beanbags, and with no armor fell quickly to a PVC and foam sword.

“What did he do? For a living, I mean.”

I worked in a coffee shop, and tried not to touch the bank account my parents kept dumping money into. This guy’s cloak and jeans looked a lot more expensive than my thrift-shop purchases, so I was guessing he worked for more than minimum wage.

“I don’t know. I think he was a programmer or something.”

Or something. That cloak looked nice. Nicer than the one Melissa was wearing. Nicer than I’d seen in the costume shops. There was a chance Ronald took his mage persona seriously. Really, really seriously.

The wail of a siren sounded in the distance, growing louder. I looked around and picked up a stick the wind had knocked loose, then stretched it out to lift the folds of Ronald’s cloak.

Melissa wiped the rain off her face and gestured toward the body. “Should you be doing that? I mean, aren’t you contaminating evidence or something?”

“Evidence that Zeus struck this man down? You said yourself that he got hit by lightning. It’s an accident. There is no evidence.”

She frowned. “Well, then it’s disrespectful.”

It
was
disrespectful to be examining a dead man’s garment while his body was still warm, but once the EMS people got here, I wouldn’t have the chance.

Green cloak. Real velvet by my reckoning. Satin lined. It wasn’t new from the wear around the hem and the faint stains on the lining, but it had been well taken care of. On the inside of the cloak I could see tiny slits – the openings of pockets. And I was willing to bet they weren’t filled with beanbags either.

“I hear the ambulance. Can you go meet them and show them where to go?”

She hesitated, eyeing me with suspicion.

“I just moved here six months ago and have never been in this park before today. I’m not even sure where my car is at this point.”

Melissa nodded. “I’ll be right back.” She eyed my stick. “Stop poking him, for heaven’s sake.”

The moment she was out of sight, I did more than poke him. In spite of the dangers of touching a demon-slayed corpse, I dove right in, digging through the cloak pockets and mentally cataloguing spell components. Rue, wormwood, gold filings, salt. A whole lot of salt. I didn’t have much time, so any papers I found I pocketed, feeling a twinge of guilt. Melissa knew him. I was hoping she knew him well enough to help the paramedics notify next of kin.

By the time the medical personnel rounded the knoll, carrying a stretcher and led by Melissa, I was standing beside the body, stick tossed aside and an innocent look carefully composed on my face.

“Holy crap.”

I didn’t think trained emergency staff were supposed to be quite so shaken by the sight of a dead body. After all, they’d probably been first on the scene to far more gruesome murders than this. Or not. With the blue smoke cleared, Ronald’s chest cavity looked like he’d been part of some horrible sacrifice. Ribs were cracked and spread upward like bony towers. Lungs and heart were completely missing, leaving a bloody, muscle lined hole where the organs had been.

They sat the stretcher down and eyed the body. “I’m thinking the lightning hit the ground, then rebounded and took him in the back.”

Melissa gagged and turned her head. I leaned closer, wanting to see both the sigil and the back of the body. If the paramedic’s hypothesis was correct, then the guy’s backside would be a blackened, burned mess. Maybe they were right. Maybe my paranoia over the recent vampire and necromancer events was making me see magic around every corner. Ronald had a bunch of spell components in his pockets. He could have had copper sulfide and other stuff in the ones his body had blocked me from searching. He could have been killed by lightning that left an odd pattern on the ground.

Or not. The two men rolled the body over. His backside was untouched beyond the blood that had seeped under him and stained his cloak. And the burn mark on the ground was clearly a sigil.

“What the hell? Rob, take a look at this.” The two men shook their head over the burn mark, commenting that it was the weirdest lightning strike they’d ever seen.

Me too. Usually there was a blackened smoking tree, or a charred piece of earth with a circular section of burned and melted foliage radiating out from the impact area. Not this weird, squiggly burn. I tried to commit it to memory, wondering how crass I’d look if I took out my cell phone and snapped a picture. Probably pretty crass. Sigils were tricky though. One mark reversed, or slightly higher, called a completely different demon. That’s why this particular form of magic required a detailed practitioner, and why it had a high rate of casualties. Had Ronald practiced magic outside of his LARP activities? If so, this might have not been a hit, but simply a case of a sloppy summoning coming back to bite him in the ass.

Like mine. I hugged myself, remembering the violent demon who had appeared instead of Vine . I’d barely managed to shove him back to hell. And I was well aware that if someone else summoned him and he got loose, he could very well come after me.

Was that what happened with Ronald?

Melissa and I followed the stretcher to the ambulance, all of us walking in silence. The rain had tapered off to a light mist. Once the sun came out, the humidity would be unbearable. I couldn’t wait to shed this plastic armor, and I’m sure Melissa felt the same about her sodden cloak. She was worse off, drenched clothing wise. The plastic armor had at least shielded some of my body from the rain, but she’d been soaked through. Her hair was stuck to her face and neck, the headdress absurd on top of it all. I touched a hand to my own hair, thankful for the braid that I always wore when fighting. It might not be the most flattering hairstyle for me, but at least I didn’t have wet hair clinging to my skin.

The police were at the ambulance, as were the press. I recognized one of the reporters, and she nodded to me. Janice. Was it just last week we’d met to discuss the Robertson murders? She was going to think this was an odd coincidence, me being here.
I
thought it was an odd coincidence my being here.

The police took down our names and information. It all seemed straight forward. No crime scene photos. No yellow tape. Just a guy killed by a lightning strike, and our information to insure all the boxes were filled out on the form.

“It hit the ground right where we found him,” Melissa told them. “We were in a role playing game. The others are at the other end of the park, but we were out doing reconnaissance. The lightning hit, and there was static everywhere. The thunder nearly deafened me. When the rain came down, we ran for shelter, and that’s when we found him.”

Straight forward. The police turned to me and I nodded. What else was I going to say? That I suspected the victim of black magic? That I believed a demon had killed him rather than a random act of nature?

“They say your odds of getting struck by lightning are about the same as winning the lottery,” Janice murmured. She’d moved close behind me and was staring at my foam sword with curiosity. “Too bad he didn’t buy a PowerBall ticket.”

I doubted one would have negated the other. And I was now wondering the odds of being killed by a demon. Probably a lot higher if the victim was involved in the dark arts.

The ambulance left. The police left. Melissa left after texting her group to tell them the news of Ronald’s passing. In short time I was standing on the curb in the light rain, alone aside from a reporter who didn’t seem inclined to get back into her warm, dry car.

“Can you show me where you found him?”

I hesitated, not sure whether Janice just had a morbid fascination with scenes of death, or whether she suspected something. I wanted to go back anyway to get a picture of the sigil before it was disturbed. Not that I wanted Janice or anyone else seeing me taking a photo of a spot where a man had supposedly been electrocuted to his death.

“Sure. There’s blood though.”

The idea of blood didn’t seem to bother the reporter. She fell in beside me, shortening her stride to keep pace with my shorter legs. “What were his injuries?”

Yep. Morbid. Creepy. There are things you expect a reporter to ask about, and things you don’t. This was in the things you don’t category. “Nothing on his back besides bloodstains. It looked like he took the lightning strike to the chest.”

There. That should do it.

Nope.

“So burned, blackened skin and fabric? Or melted? Most lightning deaths are from heart failure caused from the electrical charge, but a direct strike would have left burns.”

This woman missed her calling. Why was she a Baltimore City reporter and not off in a CSI crime lab, or working for the FBI?

“His rib cage was blown outward. Heart and lungs were missing. Judging from the small amount of blood and the damage to his cloak, I’d say the wounds cauterized with heat that also burned his clothing.” There. That ought to shut her up.

And I just realized that I sounded as if I should be in a CSI crime lab or working for the FBI, not whipping up lattes part time in the Inner Harbor.

Janice stopped. From the shock on her face I wondered if I hadn’t gone a bit too far in my description. “You said his ribs were exposed, like something inside had exploded them outward? And heart and lungs were missing?”

“Yeah.” I backpedaled, realizing that I was sounding way to knowledgeable, and pretty callous. “I’ve never seen lightning hit anything beyond a tree, though. And I’m no medical professional. I’m sure I was mistaken.”

The reporter shook her head and began walking at a more rapid pace. I jogged to keep up. “Over there.”

I pointed and we swerved left to stand over the patch of ground with the sigil. Ronald’s body had smudged the outline a bit. Hopefully enough of it was undisturbed to get an idea of what demon it referenced. Now if only the reporter would go away so I could snap a picture.

“Holy crap! David said one of their players had been killed – like really killed, killed. Is this where it happened?”

I looked up to see Brandi somewhat out of breath beside me. The rest of my team was jogging up. So much for a private moment to snap a picture.

Luckily Brandi didn’t have the same scruples as I did. Nor did anyone else in the group. Everyone chatted excitedly and took photos of the sigil, exclaiming that they’d never known someone to get killed by lightning.

“Umm. It’s kind of tragic that this happened to someone.” I tried to interject some humanity into the moment that was quickly becoming a paparazzi frenzy. “He was just here LARPing, and then he was dead. It could have happened to any of us.”

“Could it?” Janice asked, leaning down to swipe a finger across the burned grass. She’d already taken her own picture of the sigil. “Why wasn’t there a fire? And why is the burned section greasy?”