Cause of Death: Unnatural (The Cause of Death Series)

Em's head had been killing her
all day. The three bodies lying on the ground in front of her weren't making it
any better.

There was an itch at the back of her head,
in a corner of her mind actually. A niggling, digging mental whine that had
been growing in intensity all day. She knew what it was, she knew what it
meant, and she sighed at the thought of what had to be done about it. But she
couldn't deal with it now. These bodies needed sorting out first. It was nearly
sunrise.

“
Em!”
Robert
barked. “Get yourself over here.”

Em rolled her eyes. Robert was trying to
be stern today.

Robert was head of pathology, a man who
had worked with dead bodies for most of his career. Late nights in the chill of
the morgue prising bodies apart for their secrets was all part of the job for
Robert. He was an expert forensic pathologist with an insight that bordered on
brilliance - and he was a sensitive soul. Em liked him. His fine taste in wine,
the vintage cuff links in his shirts, the champagne they drank when he took her
to the symphony, the dog-eared copy of War and Peace he kept by his bedside -
all these things pointed to a man who knew who he was and what he liked. It was
rare, Em thought, to find a man in this business who had managed to find the
balance between the violence and ugliness of his work, and his own ideals. She
admired that.

And she wasn't at all surprised to see
that Robert had taken a step away from the bodies and had turned his back to
them. He was talking to the cop who'd called it in, who was looking a bit green
too. Even the most experienced crime scene technician would find this scene
confronting. Perhaps that accounted for the sternness in Robert's tone - this
had shocked him, and he was trying to find refuge in some officious
rank-pulling. She nodded and decided to respect his little charade. The gore
here was horrific.

Robert put his hand on the shoulder of the
cop as the man finished his report and turned away. “Sit down for while,”
Robert said to him, as Em stood at his side.

Robert looked at her with his eyebrows
raised. It was a silent question that asked her if she was okay with all this.
It was his only admission that what had happened here had upset him and he
wanted to show his concern for Em without stepping over the professional line
he respected so much. She loved him for it. He was such a gentleman. If only he
knew
..
. Em gave him a tight little smile.

“
What do you think?” Robert asked her.

This was the question she hated. She
turned back to look at the bodies again. It was a way of avoiding his glance.
What did she think? Well, she knew it wasn't human, of course. Whoever, or
whatever, made this mess it wasn't a gang, or a drug killing, it wasn't some
prank gone wrong, it wasn't even some serial psychopath having a bit of fun.
Nothing human had killed those boys. The perpetrator was more likely to have
come from Em's realm, and probably had something to do with the whining noise
still going on in the back of her head. But how could she tell Robert that?

Generally she had a standard answer to
this question - for those cases where the victim had plainly been killed by a
vampire or a wolf. She hated lying to him, but she was good at her job, and
what he didn't know...

“
I don't know what to think,” she said
eventually. That sounded innocuous enough, didn't it? Surely this case was so
violent that even with people like Robert turning away a comment like that
wouldn't seem out of place. “I've never seen anything like it.”

That much, she thought, was true.

“
Are we nearly done?” asked Robert. “It
would be good to get them inside before daylight.”

“
Yes,” said Em. “Poll has a few more photos
and samples to do, but we're good. It would have been much quicker if Nick had
been here,” she added.

Robert let out an explosive
breath, more like a snort, and threw a hand up in the air in disgust. “Where
the hell is he?” he said. “Did you call him?” Em stayed silent. This was all
part of the officious rank-pulling, she thought. The bodies must have really
bothered him. “
I
called him two hours
ago,” Robert grumbled. “You think he might pay some attention to his boss.” He
tugged at the cuffs of his jacket. “I'm heading back to the lab, Em. If you see
him, tell him I'm going to kick his ass.”

He stalked off. Em watched him go and
admired the elegance that Robert seemed to bring to everything he did. Even
tantrums.

She sighed. There goes the weekend.

The pounding in her head seemed to kick up
a beat as she turned back to the bodies. She pressed three fingers of one hand
to the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.

This was the problem with being partly
composed of dark matter. The dark energy that flowed through Em's being didn't
mind inhabiting human space, it didn't mind that she enjoyed hanging out with
humans more than her own kind, it didn't even mind that she was half human
herself, that she ate food and drank vodka and loved
salsa
dancing
with a dozen drunken mates. What it did mind was sharing this town with the new
dark matter being who had caused this mess in front of her. The being who was
trespassing on her patch.

It wasn't one of the clan, this newcomer,
that much was clear. Em was just over a thousand years old, and her father was
lord of the clan. Em knew everyone in the Family despite it stretching over
half the northern hemisphere, and she could recognize any member's signature
mental touch. Like a fingerprint, or a pheromone, every dark matter being had
an individual pattern of energy, a shape that defined their existence in the
plane they preferred to inhabit. It was only Em who preferred to live in human
space.

The Family, the clan, were the oldest
beings on Earth, and their dark matter proclaimed their superiority over all
other creatures both dark and human. Sure, there were plenty of common
vampires, werefolk, other creatures half dark matter, half mortal, but the
Family looked down on them all.

Em, being part human, had learned to live
with the contempt of the clan, although with her father as lord, no one had
ever dared show that contempt in front of him. Em had a unique position in the
Family - honored and slightly feared for her father's sake, sneered at for her
human mother's sake, held in awe for her ability to manipulate dark matter and
often forgotten for her habit of living in the mortal world.

She'd found a place in one of the mortals'
crowded cities. Humans had amused her at first, but a few hundred years later
she had learned to love them. They had an endearing way of evoking feelings in
her, feelings like love and hope and determination, and other delicious things
like fear and suspicion and hate. A human soul was delectable, but Em had
learned to live on more mundane flavours these days, with an occasional pint of
blood, of course.

Forensics had seemed the perfect way for
her to live in a human city. She could clean up the little messes made by the
lower vampires before the authorities found them, and when she couldn't get
there quick enough, in the lab she could hide those tell tale signs and make a
blood killing look like a regular shooting. Whenever she felt the urge, a cull
of the lower vampires provided some exercize, some entertainment, and kept her
senses keen. And living surrounded by so much human death she felt she had
learned a lot about human life, and she liked what she'd found there. Humans
had a strength she admired.

The three dead men on the road in front of
her hadn't been killed by any of the lower vampires, that much was clear. The
common vamps were messy and ate like animals, but they certainly lacked the
imagination for a kill like this. These victims looked like they had been
mauled by a company of pit bulls. Pit bulls with talons like knives and teeth
like ten inch daggers. But the energy signature said there was just one killer
at work here.

Em was confused. She'd felt a new presence
in town a few weeks ago, and she'd thought she'd known exactly who it was - one
of her father's consorts, a ghastly woman known as Alina, someone Em had hated
for a few hundred years or more. Em had felt Alina's arrival and almost
shivered with a ghoulish joy. She was certain Alina had left her father's side
without his permission. She grinned again at the thought. He would eat Alina
alive as soon as he found her. And she completely deserved it. Em had just been
waiting for the right moment to report back to the lord of the clan. She was
biding her time, waiting to see what Alina was up to, and besides, she'd found
she was reluctant to see her father again, hesitant about sinking back into her
own realm. Too much time with the humans, she thought wryly.

She hadn't thought for a second Alina was
doing something like this. And this throbbing in her head wasn't Alina either.
It couldn't be.

She sighed again at the mess in front of
her. They were such young men - fit, beautiful, full of energy. Whoever had
done this had wasted them.

“
Not pretty, is it?” said a voice behind
her.

Nick.

Em looked at him. He looked crumpled, with
a five o'clock shadow, like he hadn't slept at all. Anyone who looked at his
rakish smile, his tussled hair, the way his upper arms so completely filled his
shirt would think he'd spent the night at a club wooing some gorgeous young
thing, but Em knew better.

Nick's sister had three young kids and the
youngest was sick, really sick. When the littlest one and his mum were in
hospital for days on end, Nick and the rest of his siblings took care of the
other two, sleeping on the sofa, packing school lunches and delivering the pair
to school and after school activities. Nick had obviously pulled the night
shift tonight.

“
Sorry I couldn't get here any quicker,” he
said. “It was 3am. I couldn't get anyone else over to Lucy's to care for the
kids.” He ran his hand through his hair and grimaced. “Is Robert mad?”

“
Only a bit,” Em said. “I'll protect you.”
She smiled, and Nick rolled his eyes.

“
What the hell happened here?” he said. Em
saw his expression tighten a little as he completely took in the scene. So, the
violence here upset him too. In a way, the notion that both her men found this
repulsive pleased her. She'd chosen them well. She just wondered who she'd
choose if she had to choose between them.

“
Something new,” Em said. “We'll figure it
out. Can you work with Poll please, Nick. Robert wants us off the street by
sunrise.”

Nick raised an eyebrow at her and shrugged
into his crime scene jacket. “Sure thing, boss,” he said, with a slight smirk
on his face. Em remembered how Nick enjoyed the dynamic of her being his
superior in the workplace, how he enjoyed it in other locations too, but with
this mental itch still tugging at her brain she wasn't in the mood to play
along.

“
Just do it, Nick,” she said. “I need
to...”

Her phone rang. Em glanced at the screen
and frowned. Jennifer? At five in the morning? What the hell?

“
I've got to take this,” she said, and
turned her back on Nick. She felt rather than saw him throw a hand in the air,
in much the same way as Robert had done earlier, and stalk off towards Poll. At
least he'd get some work done.

“
Jenn?”
Em said
into the phone. “What's up?”

Her best friend was in an impressive state
of hysterics. Through the sobbing Em heard, “We broke up. He dumped me. He said
he never even loved me.”

“
Who?” said Em, and then caught herself.
She couldn't think with this pounding in her head. “He's a jerk, Jennifer.
You're better off without him. Where are you? Jenn?”

There was more wailing on the other end of
the phone. “We were at the Harbor Bar. It was supposed to be our anniversary.”
She sobbed again and Em held her forehead again with her spare hand. “He's
driven off and left me here. And...”