“Oh, yes,” I said with some smugness of my own. “Visionary thinking. That’s what you’ve been lacking around here. I’m sure that’ll fix everything.”
“It’ll help,” Rick said without any trace of humility or worry. “But enough of that. Let’s hear about this village.” He shifted his attention to Janus. “What’s the word?”
“All dead,” Janus said. “But I suspect you already know that.”
“I’d heard,” Rick confirmed then shifted in his chair to put his other foot up on the desk. “Did you see how?”
Janus shook his head. “The bodies appeared unmarked to me, though I didn’t get particularly close.”
Rick smiled. “Feeling a little squeamish at the sight of the dead, J?”
Janus didn’t bite at the goad that was tossed his way. “I have seen my fair share, and that of several hundred others. No, I’m afraid that my problem was more oriented to a lack of experience with forensic pathology. We saw no signs of physical violence, but that doesn’t rule out poison, cardiac arrest—”
“Removal of souls,” Rick said with a pointed smile toward me. “So, you don’t want to speculate? Afraid to bet your ass that you might get it wrong and I’ll be pissed? Fair enough.” He slid a page off the desk and toward him. “Toxicology reports aren’t the fastest thing in the world, but the preliminaries for one of the victims came back pretty quick.” He looked around between all of us. “Anyone wanna guess?”
“Ooh, ooh,” I said, raising my hand, “I’m guessing they were bored to death, and that it originated from London, probably right here in this office, in your chair.” I looked around and caught Janus’s face fall. “Did I win a prize?”
“Nice,” Rick said, the smug not even dented. “Nope, you do not win.” He thought for a moment. “Although, technically, I guess, they could have been bored to death.” He threw the paper down. “The point is, it doesn’t look like poison, at least not from the preliminaries. It looks like they just up and died, keeled over while clinging to each other.”
“Are there actually poison-spewing metas that could do something like this?” I asked as a quiet settled over the office.
“Not that I know of, no,” Janus said, his hand covering his face, as though he could use it to wipe the expression off. He was distracted, unfocused, lost in his own head.
“What is it, then?” I asked. “What killed them?”
“In some of the previous cases, it has been bullets,” Bast said from behind us. “Or obvious meta powers, like a massive fire burning them to death.”
“But he’s saying there’s no obvious cause of death,” I said, pointing to Rick. “Who could just kill a room full of people like that, and not leave a sign of any sort that they’ve been murdered?”
“I don’t know,” Rick said casually, and the way he said it made me suck in a deep breath of air, the stale scent of old cigar smoke hanging in it and coloring my taste buds. He dropped his feet off the desk and leaned forward toward me, seeming to savor the very air I wanted to choke on. “No marks, no poisons, no signs of beating or bullets.” He smiled. “It’s almost like someone just touched them,” he said pointedly, with that wicked smile, “and they died.”
Chapter 15
“So it was succubus?” I asked. “Or an incubus?”
Rick shrugged, still wearing a maddening smile. “I don’t know. Could you have done that?”
“Drain an entire room of metas without having any of them fight back or leave any sign?” I gave a quick look around the room. “I dunno. Want to try it right now?”
Bast stood suddenly behind me, and I could feel Karthik tense where he stood near the wall. “I think she’s kidding,” Rick said to both of them, with a slight wave of his hand. “Unless you can devour souls from a distance now.”
“That escapes me at present,” I said. “But there’s that old saying about looks being able to kill? Maybe I’ll work on it.”
“Perhaps something associated with fear,” Janus said. “They might have died of heart attacks or something of the kind—”
“So we’re back to theories and conjecture,” Rick said, flattening his hand and laying it along the top of the desk. “I prefer to work with hard facts.” He looked us all over. “Go figure it out, then let me know what you come up with.”
“How many meta cloisters are there in the United Kingdom?” I asked. “There can’t be that many.”