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I nodded. “True. So you’ve videotaped it, gotten all your pictures?”

“We know how to do our job, Ms. Blake.”

“I’m not questioning that, Captain. I need to know if I can move the body around, that’s all. I don’t want to fuck up the evidence.”

“When you’re done with it, we’ll be bagging it up.”

I nodded. “Okay.” I stared down at the body and suddenly could see it. All of it. I hugged my arms across my stomach to keep my hands from covering my eyes. The nose had been bitten off so that it was just a bloody hole. The lips were torn away until teeth and the bones of the jaw were visible under the drying blood. The muscles of the jaw were missing on the side facing me. Whatever had done this hadn’t just taken a quick bite. It had sat down and fed.

So many bites, so much missing flesh, but most of it too shallow to kill. I said a short prayer that most of the bites were postmortem. Even as I prayed, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a good answer; there was too much blood. She’d been alive through most of it. Intestines spilled out of the ripped jeans in a dried nest covered in thicker things than blood. The outhouse smell of her lower intestines being ripped would have faded by now. One smell dies, but there’s always another. Her body had started to ripen in the summer heat. It is a smell that is hard to describe, both overwhelmingly sweet and bitter enough to gag. I took shallow breaths and stepped onto the dried splatter.

Something moved through me like a phantom blow. The hair on the back of my neck tried to crawl down my spine. That part of my brain that had nothing to do with cars or indoor plumbing and everything to do with running and screaming and not thinking at all, was whispering now. It was whispering that something was wrong. Something evil had been here—not just dangerous, evil.

I waited to see if the feeling would grow stronger, but it faded. It faded like a bad memory, which probably meant I’d walked through the edge of some kind of spell—or rather, the remnants of one, a nasty one.

You didn’t call something this evil without a circle of protection either for the sorcerer to stand in or for the beastie to be put inside of. I searched the ground, but there was nothing but blood. The blood didn’t form a circle of protection. It was just splatter, mess, no pattern.

I should have known there wouldn’t be anything that obvious. The police aren’t practitioners of the arts, though that is beginning to change, but you can’t be a cop long and not look for signs of magic when the shit is this strange.

The scene looked undisturbed, but that didn’t mean it was undisturbed. If someone were really good at magic, they could make you not see something. Not true invisibility. Humans don’t do that. Physics is physics. Light hits a solid object and bounces. But they can make the eye reluctant to see, so that you keep looking past something and your mind doesn’t register it. Like looking for a set of car keys that is sitting in plain sight, lost for two days.

I squatted beside the body. I didn’t have the coveralls I usually wore at murder scenes and didn’t want the blood to soak into my jeans. I was still hugging myself. There were things here that someone didn’t want us to see. But what?

Henderson called, “We found the wallet. Do you want the ID?”

“No,” I said. “No.” I wasn’t being clever. I just didn’t want a name, an identity for the thing at my feet. I’d done the trick of turning the body into an it. It wasn’t real. It was just something to be studied, examined. It had never been real. To think anything else at that moment would have had me vomiting all over the evidence. I’d done that only once, years ago. Dolph and the gang had never let me live it down.

The eyes had been clawed out and left to dry into blackened lumps on the cheeks. Long hair was plastered along the side of the face, stuck to one shoulder. Maybe blond hair from the color. But it was hard to tell with all the soaked blood. The long hair made me think female. My eyes