Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(34)

She beamed at him for several more seconds before reality slowly set back in. Jade frowned and looked at the dead woman again. “That poor, poor girl. But . . . if that’s not Elissa, then where is she?”

And just like that, the last of Jade’s euphoria vanished, and misery filled her face again. Her shoulders slumped, and her breath escaped in harsh rasps that made her whole body tremble.

“That could still be Elissa,” Jade whispered in a grief-stricken voice. “That could still be her . . . She could still be dead . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and fresh tears streaked down her cheeks. Jade whirled around and hurried away from the table, as if she couldn’t stand to be in here a second longer. Sophia was still waiting by the door, and she put her arm around Jade’s shaking shoulders and steered the other woman back out into the waiting room. Sophia nodded, telling me that she would stay with Jade, and shut the door behind them.

That left Bria, Ryan, and me alone in the morgue with the body. Bria bent back down over the woman, studying her face again and trying to see her true features through all the bruises and swelling. I did the same, although after a few seconds, the girl’s face blurred in front of my eyes, and I found myself thinking about Elissa again.

Jade was right: Elissa could still end up here dead on a slab if I didn’t find her.

And I had no idea how to do that.

Bria finally straightened up and shook her head, making her blond hair fly around her shoulders. “This woman didn’t have any ID on her. No purse, no wallet, no phone. If her fingerprints or DNA aren’t in our system, it’ll be difficult to figure out who she is. Much less where she came from and who might have killed her.”

“You don’t think it happened at Northern Aggression?” Ryan asked.

Bria shook her head again. “No. There was no blood anywhere around the body. Not pooled on the ground underneath her and not spattered on any of the Dumpsters around her. She was definitely murdered somewhere else. The killer just used the club to get rid of her body. He probably thought that she wouldn’t be discovered for a couple of days, until the next time the trash got picked up.”

I’d never envied Bria her job of dealing with all the crime in Ashland, especially when it came to something like this, a young life cut short in such a brutal, violent fashion. If the girl wasn’t in any of the police databases and no one had filed a missing person report on her, it could take Bria days, if not weeks, to figure out who she was. That sort of delay would most likely ruin any chance that she and Xavier had of finding out who had done this.

“There’s something else,” Ryan said. “Something you need to see, Gin.”

I looked at him.

The coroner straightened his glasses and stared back at me, his hazel gaze sympathetic, as if I were the one who’d come here to identify a dead relative instead of Jade. “I noticed something in my initial examination of the body. Something that was impossible to miss.” He cleared his throat, suddenly uncomfortable. “You’re not going to like it.”

“What is it?” I asked, wondering what this dead girl could possibly have to do with me.

Ryan hesitated, obviously not wanting to deliver whatever bad news he had, and glanced over at Bria. She crossed her arms over her chest, her lips tightening into a grim slash in her pretty face. They kept staring at each other, having some silent conversation and debate that I couldn’t follow. It reminded me of the strange look Xavier had given me upstairs. The three of them knew something that I didn’t.

Something bad.

“Spit it out,” I said. “No matter how horrible it is, I can take it. Trust me.”

Ryan kept staring at Bria. Finally, my sister sighed and nodded, giving him permission. He nodded back at her, then reached down and gently pulled the dead woman’s arms out from underneath the blue sheet. He looked at me again, then slowly turned the woman’s hands over so that her palms faced up where we could all see them.

He was right. It was impossible to miss.

Something had been drawn on both of the woman’s palms in what looked like bright red blood, a distinctive symbol that was as familiar to me as my own face: a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays.

I sucked in a breath.

My spider runes were on the dead woman’s palms.





11


For a moment, I couldn’t speak. My heart, my breath, every small tic, twitch, and tremor in my entire body just stopped, shocked into stillness by the sickening sight before me.

Then, in the next instant, movement, breath, and sensation all rushed back into my body, and I could feel my eyes slowly growing wider and wider, until it seemed like those two spider runes filled my entire field of vision.

The longer I stared at them, the more the symbols actually seemed to move, to quiver, to pulse, as though the bloody circles were connected to my own heart, frantically pounding in my chest. All I could do was stare and stare at those two spider runes—my runes—peering up at me like evil eyes and mocking me from a dead woman’s hands.

“Are those runes . . . were they made with . . . her blood?” I asked, my voice as shocked and breathless as I still felt.

“Actually, they were drawn with lipstick,” Ryan said. “But yes, those are definitely spider runes. I told Bria and Xavier the second I saw them.”

“But how—who—why—” The words sputtered out of my mouth, but I couldn’t get them to form a coherent sentence. Just like I couldn’t form a coherent thought right now.