Page 11 of The Shadowed Oracle
Dean seemed to be enthralled and confused in equal measure. It was similar to how he’d looked at her when they firstmet. Slightly wolfish, making sure sheknew he was staring. But here, now, there was something deeper, some probing interest in what lay beneath Ingrid’s hard exterior.
“You’re right,” he conceded, placing his hands on the counter.
“I know,” Ingrid said. “Now tell me about the second body.”
“About the same. Dumped in a clearing in the woods. Male, though. And minus the suitcase,” Dean added the last bit with a certain level of disinterest, then leaned in to say, “It was the third one. The third body was what really threw us.”
Ingrid waited, pleading with her eyes.
“She was naked and—” Dean stopped himself. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” Everything to that point had been graphic, but the details were outrageous enough to match the dramatics of movies and television, causing most people to be slightly desensitized. As for the emotional aspects of the more intricate details…
“Yes, I’m sure,” Ingrid said. “She was naked and… what?”
“Disemboweled.” His volume was low, more discreet this time. The patrons closest to him were enjoying a plate of pasta and meatballs, and after glancing at them, it seemed like he didn’t want to ruin their appetite. “Then she posed right inside her front door. Another inconsistency. The others were put in fairly remote places, but this one, it was like the killer wanted whoever found her to walk in and see her like that.”
For the first time since Dean had started talking about the cases, Ingrid felt a twinge of something sinister. She couldn’t help but see herself in the murdered woman’s place. Alone, in bed, being jolted awake by a masked man and attacked inside her own home. That fear was universal, but Ingrid felt especially wary of it since the messages started.
“Anything else?” she quickly said, trying to derail that train of thought.
Dean sighed. “Yeah. The victim had—I still don’t know what to call them, really. Markings, drawings, little symbols painted all over her body. On first glance it seemed religious, but now the lead detectives think it was just more to throw us off any links.”
Ingrid had an opinion on that.Why pose them all the same if the killer didn’t want links?But she kept her mouth shut. She wanted to know more about the markings.
“One of my colleagues,” Dean continued. “Andy, he speaks like ten languages. Including Latin for some reason. Heeventuallydismissed them. Normally, he’d have spent weeks at home looking for something in those old textbooks he reads. But after a few days of research, he called it quits. He said they were all nonsense. Some kind of…” He stopped, noticing a change in Ingrid. “Hey, are you… are you okay?”
Ingrid watched Dean’s mouth move, but suddenly the words and every sound around them faded out. The TV was muted, the clink of silverware oddly absent. Nothing but a light humming noise filled her ears, and a sharp pain shot up right at her temples where she usually got her pounding headaches. Only this time they were far worse, throbbing and hot, so intense she gripped at her head in an instinctual grimace.
Dean lurched forward and hunched over the bar, still mouthing questions.Are you okay? What do you need? What’s happening?
But Ingrid couldn’t answer. She couldn’t do anything. Anything but grip her head and hope the pain dissipated. She took deep breaths. She closed her eyes. She reminded herself where she was, and that she was safe. She was in her domain.
Which made it all the more disorienting when the images, so clear and cutting, appeared right in front of her. They cycled through her mind rapidly, barely distinguishable from the visions and nightmares. The only difference was that, instead ofmonsters and ghouls and rotting faces and snippets of her past, she saw markings. Indecipherable symbols.
All twenty-seven years of her life, and it was the first time she’d had an episode in broad daylight, outside the solitude of her room or her home. Yet, the most dizzying part was that Ingridknew, could feel it in her very bones that the images she was seeing were the exact symbols Dean was speaking about.
Ingrid?
Ingrid!?
“Ingrid!?” Dean’s voice finally became audible. “Are you okay?”
She clenched her jaw. “I’m okay now,” she muttered, reaching for a cocktail napkin to wipe the sweat from her palms.
“Are you sure? You were—you were frozen. What happened?”
Ingrid didn’t know how to explain, but after looking down at the soaked napkin in her hand, she had an idea. She plucked another from the dispenser and placed it on the counter. With a pen she kept tucked in her back pocket, she began sketching out what she’d seen. As vivid as the vision was, and as sure as she was of what she saw, she had to be certain she wasn’t finally losing it.
She’d peered over the edge of sanity for so long that falling seemed inevitable.
She had to make sure.
“I’m going to draw them,” she said frantically, one hand still rubbing above her ears. “Tell me if they’re… them.”
“Them?” Dean laughed.
“I’m serious,” Ingrid snapped. “Just play along.”
Dean’s expression went still, frozen in a deflated smile. Then all at once, it began to melt into something far more serious as he watched Ingrid sketch one after the other. “That’s them,” he said in a haunting whisper.
