Page 8 of The Shadowed Oracle (The Bonded Worlds #1)
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. He eventually dismissed 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 of monsters 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 Ingrid knew , 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.
They were all perfect renditions of the symbols he’d been fussing over and photographing for a week.
“How?” he asked.
Ingrid shook her still pulsing head. “I see them. I’m as confused as you are, but I see them.”
“But how did you know? How did you know that they were the same symbols?”
“I just do.”
Dean shuffled through multiple expressions in quick succession. Amazement. Fear. Excitement. Yet, oddly, doubt was not one of them. He’d skipped skepticism and gone right to analyzing.
In a sobering push, she realized she’d just given a police officer very clear evidence of her possible involvement in the crimes.
She should’ve kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t thinking. Wasn’t her usual self.
“I don’t know whether to be in awe of you,” Dean said finally, his eyes still wide. “Or to be afraid of you.”
“Probably the second one,” Ingrid said dryly. “I know I am.”
“This has never happened to you before?” Dean asked.
“No.” Not once. And considering all the wretched and unfortunate things the world had thrown at her, there were plenty of opportunities for this strange gift to surface—to help. But it hadn’t.
It all felt like a dream.
Ingrid could only stare out into the distance, her mind going completely blank while her senses heightened. The noise from the kitchen now seemed more intense. The traffic outside in the parking lot felt closer. The voices around her suddenly seemed clearer, too.
Then one of those voices cut through, louder than the rest. A gravelly intonation with well-trained delivery.
It was the news anchor blaring above from the TV.
“ A gruesome story coming out of San Bruno this morning. Police found the body of a young man, posed and mutilated in his apartment after receiving numerous noise complaints from neighbors. Authorities are now linking this homicide to five others. All perpetrated, they say, by one man. Our own Jim Lyles was at the scene earlier today with Lieutenant Walls of San Bruno P.D., where he gave a lengthy, cautionary announcement. ”
Ingrid’s eyes were glued to the screen. She could feel Dean looking at her, but paid him no attention. She watched as the newscast played a few exposition clips. First of the apartment complex where the sixth murder took place, then clips of the caution tape and the coroner’s vehicle outside of it.
A quick transition cut to a man that Ingrid assumed was the aforementioned Lieutenant came next. He was dressed in full uniform, his hat in his hands as he spoke.
“ Sufficient evidence has been collected to lead us to this conclusion. And due to the wide scope of victim profiles, we thought it best to inform the public. ” He looked directly at the camera, listing the specific street names and coordinates of all the murders.
“ If you are living in these areas, or are just outside of them, we urge you to take every precaution possible. ”
Off-screen, another masculine voice cut in: “ Are there any suspects? ”
“ Yes. But that’s all I can provide at this time. We are working tirelessly to apprehend the perpetrator. ”
A different voice, and another microphone appearing on screen. “ Anything we should look out for? Descriptive information of the suspect? ”
Lt. Walls cleared his throat. “ Be safe out there. ”
The screen graphics crudely shifted back to the studio and the upbeat background music played once more. Ingrid could barely stomach it all. Now that she’d been so hollowed out by those images of the symbols—the killer’s symbols—it felt too real, too close.
She turned away, but just as her eyes fixated back on Dean, something called out to her. Directly spoke to her. As if the news reporter had stuck his head out from the screen and whispered it in her ear.
A name.
“What did he just say?” Ingrid asked, stumbling over the words. “The name,” Ingrid repeated, pointing upward to the TV. “Did they just say a name?”
Dean swallowed hard. “Do you know him? The sixth victim?”
“Yes—or, I don’t know. What was the name?”
“Kyle,” Dean said, seeming confident it would soothe whatever tension Ingrid had built up.
But it hadn’t. It made it worse. So much worse.
“Kyle what?” Ingrid hissed. “Twyker?! Was it Twyker?”
The shrillness of her question caused Dean to flinch, sending him back slightly in his seat. He took a moment to refocus and recalibrate.
This was twice now, within just a few minutes, that Ingrid had shared information she wasn’t supposed to know.
Information only someone heavily involved would know.
Ingrid could feel him scoping her out again, but she didn’t possess the awareness to explain, to try and recount the series of events that led her there.
All she could think about was what that last message had said.
I’ll take care of him.
His eyes hardening, Dean nodded. “Kyle Twyker. That’s his name. Or, was his name. It was Kyle Twyker.”