Of Life and Death Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Of Life and Death

  Here Witchy Witchy

  Book Five

  A.L. Kessler

  Copyright © 2017 Amy Kessler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the author’s express permission.

  Table of contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Blood & Ink Press thank you for supporting Indie Authors.

  To Jasmyn, thank you for all that you do.

  Thank you to everyone who made this book possible, the MU moms who let my imagination go wild, especially to Christina Marie who really let me run with the idea of a body in a box. Thank you to Jasmyn for edits, Mia for the encouragement, my betas for reading through, and Steve Rice for help on the cover. As always a huge thanks to my husband who supplies me with endless coffee.

  Chapter One

  I stared down at the box sitting on the sidewalk. Normally, this wouldn’t be my issue. It wouldn’t be the Paranormal Investigation Bureau’s issue, but this box happened to be sitting outside of the North PIB building and had a puddle of blood under it.

  I was apparently the first one Boss Man thought of when someone reported the bloody box to him because he sent me down to investigate it. The blood slowly crept out of the cardboard and onto the cement sidewalk. I sighed and pulled out my cell phone to call Detective Mason.

  “Abigail, this is unusual, don’t I normally call you?” His gruff voice came across the line. He was right, of course, he normally called me in on cases he thought were paranormal related.

  “Yeah, but I’ve got a bleeding box on the sidewalk outside of PIB, I’m not exactly sure whose case this should be. Want to call forensics and head over?”

  I heard him chuckle.

  “Have you opened the box?”

  “No.” I glanced down at it. The brown, unassuming box, came from a popular online retailer, but the blue security table had been cut and resealed with clear packing tape. It was about two feet wide and four feet long with a mailing address, unreadable, scribbled on the top, and there was no return address. Hell, there wasn’t even a shipping label on the box to tell me what carrier might have dropped it off.

  “Get some gloves and open it. Tell me what’s in it, so I know what I’m looking at.”

  It wasn’t exactly normal protocol, but I couldn’t really blame him.

  I tried not to sound irritated as I pulled some gloves out of my bag. “Okay.”

  “Maybe it’s just a dead animal or something.”

  “Yes, because someone would drop a fucking animal on PIB’s doorstep.” I got my nail under the tape and pulled it off the box. The ripping sound seemed to echo through the parking lot. I pushed the flaps opened and looked down.

  A body was crumpled into a very odd position with its torso bent over the legs, and arms crossed over the stomach, and the head was twisted at a very scary angle. Bile rose in my throat as I realized there were at least two inches of blood in the box.

  “Abby?” Mason ask.

  “Yeah, it’s not a dead animal. It’s a human body.” I put the back of my hand to my mouth like it’d keep me from throwing up. Who on earth would put that much effort into stuffing a body in a box?

  “I’ll be down there in a bit.”

  I technically couldn’t handle the case yet because other than it being on PIB’s doorstep there was no reason to believe that it was supernatural related. There was no note that I could see in the box, and the label had been unreadable, so there was no telling who the intended target was. “I’ll see you in ten.”

  I disconnected the call and stared down at the body. I didn’t want to move it until forensics got there and did their thing. I hauled my butt upstairs and to the room where security monitored the cameras.

  I knocked on the office door. It swung open and a man dressed in PIB uniform opened the door.

  “You’re here about the box?”

  I nodded. “Sure am, did you notice anything?”

  He looked away sheepishly and fiddled with his hands. “Nothing unusual came up on the camera. Not even a delivery person. There’s a small glitch at the time…”

  “Someone messed with the stream without you realizing it?”

  “We can’t have eyes on all cameras at once. That’s why we record them.”

  Of course, I knew someone who managed to avoid their cameras and mess with their streams on a regular basis. I made a mental note to talk to Boss Man about the competency of our security guys. “Show me the timeline please.”

  He led me to a wall with multiple screens spread across. Each section had a different area of the building on screen. I could clearly see the box sitting out at the front of the building.

  The agent tapped a few buttons, the screen rewound, and the box just disappeared. He hit play and I watched the little digital numbers on the corner of the screen. It took an extra second to change just as the screen seemed to shake. Then the box appeared on the screen. Almost like magic.

  “See?”

  “Whoever did it did a great job getting the box there, but a crappy job messing with your feed since you caught it.” I crossed my arms. It didn’t give us anything to go on, so there wasn’t much more I could do up here. I headed back to the box to wait for Mason to show up.

  By the time I got outside, I could hear the sirens closing in on the parking lot. The noise cut out when an ambulance and a fire truck pulled into the parking lot, leaving a ringing in my ears. Mason’s cruiser pulled into the closest parking spot, and he jumped out. His hair had grown out some, showing the salt and pepper color that matched the age shown by the lines crinkled at the corner of his eyes. “Abigail, leave it to you to find a body.”

  “At least this isn’t a building blowing up, or a car, or a barn.” I shrugged a shoulder. “It’s been a few months since something else has happened.”

  He nodded. “Things have been quiet since your last big case.”

  The last big case had included skinned werewolves and a massive break in the blood-starved vampire case. Mason didn’t know about that last part though because I had been working with the vampire king. Levi, my adopted father, king of all vampires, and I was still pissed at him for hiding something like that from me. “Yeah, luckily for me and PIB, only smaller cases have come in.”

  “What’s considered a small case for PIB?” He raised a brow and motioned to the box. “This?”

  “Oh you know, a body here a body there. We’ll see what this turns out to be before I even claim it as a PIB case.”

  A couple people in white jumpsuits came up, and I stepped away from the body. They’d do their thing and then determine if it was a supernatural cause of death or not.

  “For your sake, I hope it is, it’ll give you something to do,” he muttered. “I’d hate to think that a human was capable of something like this.” He motioned to the scene. I was sure he’d seen worse from humans, just like
I’d seen worse from the supernatural world, so his comment struck me as odd. I didn’t push though, not at the moment.

  “I’m going to go back to my office now, let me know what they find if it’s of interest to me.” I gave him a little wave, and he snorted.

  “I know where to find you if I need you,” he called after me as the door shut.

  I shuffled through the reception area, giving Mandy a wave as I made my way to the hallway. The light reflected off the tile while I made my way to the stairs. I still couldn’t bring myself to take the elevator after the south PIB building blew up because of a magical bomb placed in the building’s elevator. The blast had killed a few of our Agents, and the verdict was still out on my partner. He was dead on paper, but there was evidence that suggested otherwise.

  I swiped my badge over the scanner to open my office door. The tumbler clicked, and I walked, not even glancing at the empty desk to my left. PIB hadn’t assigned me another partner yet, but they hadn’t removed the desk yet either.

  I was over my grief and had moved on to action. I would learn why Nick’s body disappeared, why his badged ended up at my uncle’s, and why his fingerprints were on my destroyed car. I walked over to the window. The glass panes overlooked the parking lot and gave me a great view of the mountains.

  Below me, I saw the forensic people still working on the body in the box. I wondered if anyone else in PIB had gone out to try and take the case. As far as I was concerned, they could have it. I didn’t want it. Lately, I didn’t want any of my cases. The last year had been such a blow between Nick dying and learning that Levi was the king.

  I heard a knock on my door, and I turned to see Detective Mason through the glass window. I walked over and let him in, motioning to the chair at the empty desk.

  “What’s up?”

  He sat down and looked at me. “The body seems to be human, the cause of death looks to be multiple stab wounds right down the spine. The neck was broken, but we’re pretty sure that it was done postmortem.”

  “So, so far, everything about this is pointing to human.” I sat down and met his gaze. “So it’s your case.”

  He nodded. “But I’d still like to have you close by since the case is on PIB property. I’ll need someone here I can touch base with. Do you know who else saw the box?”

  “Someone found it this morning and reported it to Boss Man; he didn’t say who. You’d have to ask him. He called me down from the office.”

  “And why you?”

  I laughed. “I have no idea why. Apparently, he thought I’d be best to handle a box that was bleeding. I’m not sure if there’s protocol for this or not.”

  “Is that your official statement?” He crossed his arms. “Is that what everyone here is going to tell me.”

  I met his gaze. “My official statement is this. I went out to see the box when Boss Man called me. I called you as soon as I realized that the box was bleeding. I don’t know if he went down there to look at it or not.”

  “Alright then. I’ll make sure to talk to him.” He turned to leave. “You doing alright Abby?”

  “Moving forward.” Mason wasn’t privy to the information about Levi, so I knew he wasn’t talking about that. He did know about Nick’s situation. He’d been the one to discover that Nick’s fingerprints were on my car after he’d been proclaimed dead.

  He stopped for a moment at the door. “That’s the only way you know how to do things, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  He didn’t say anything as he left the office and turned down the hall. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment. There wasn’t much I could do right now. The body wasn’t officially mine, and anything else I wanted to research about Ira and Levi, I couldn’t because it’d raise red flags in the system.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. I could take a break for some coffee. Yeah, coffee sounded good.

  I sat in the coffee shop down the road from the building. I’d walked because the fresh air was good for my brain. I huddled in the corner table, playing on my phone and taking an occasional sip of coffee. The shop wasn’t busy this morning. The meeting room towards the back had a group of people that were quietly talking, giving no clues to what kind of meeting it was. The baristas kept busy cleaning up behind the counter or around the tables, a few of them moved to the beat of the pop music that played overhead.

  This was better than the office where there was a body shoved in a box. And yet, I couldn’t turn my brain away from it. It wasn’t even my case, and I felt like I should have been there, looking it over.

  My phone rang, interrupting the game I had been playing. Mason’s number flashed on the screen, and I answered it. “Agent Collins.”

  “Abby, where are you? I stopped back by your office and found it empty.”

  “I’m out having a coffee break. Want to join me?”

  “I’ll swing by and pick you up.” He called out something I couldn’t hear; he was probably talking to one of the other men on the scene.

  “What for?” I sipped my coffee and leaned back in the chair. “Did you find something interesting on the body?”

  “Well the box, yeah, but we have another body that arrived, this time to a group of women.”

  I tried to wrap my mind around things. “A group of women?”

  “Well, it’s a moms’ group. The box was addressed to their founders.”

  I swallowed the bit of panic climbing up my throat. “Please tell me that there were no kids around when they opened the box?”

  “They haven’t opened it.” The door of his cruiser slammed shut. “They noticed the blood and called us.”

  Bodies in boxes shipped to a moms’ group. This was new territory, even for me. “Okay, I’ll meet you outside. Do you want coffee?”

  “Yeah, I feel like we’re going to need it to get through our day.” He hung up before I could ask him what they had found in the box. He was only a couple blocks away, so I wouldn’t have to wait long, but I couldn’t help but feel that he purposely avoided giving me that information. Which made me wonder what he had found in the box.

  I walked up to the counter and ordered him a plain black coffee and then made my way outside to wait for him.

  His cruiser pulled up, and he waved me over. I climbed in and handed him his coffee. “Just the way you like it. Black, plain, bitter.”

  He chuckled. “Coffee as it’s meant to be.” He raised the cup as if saluting me. “Let’s go see the new body.”

  Mason navigated his way through the emergency vehicles and press that had already gathered at the house. I wondered how the press had found out so quickly, but it didn’t matter, they were here, and soon the news of bodies in boxes was going to be all over the media.

  I got out of the cruiser and looked around. The swanky neighborhood wasn’t one that I would pick for such a package to appear. The multi-level houses with perfectly landscaped lawns dotted the street, all the same shape, color, and feel. It reminded me of something out of a movie. No, this wasn’t where bloody bodies usually showed up.

  Mason cleared his throat. “Your least favorite person is here.” He jerked his head to the left, and I saw the tabloid reporter who was the biggest pain in my side, Stephanie.

  Her hair was done up in a tight bun, and her red lipstick made her face pale. Glasses perched on the end of her nose, adding to the sexy secretary look she always seemed to be sporting. The black jacket blended into the pencil skirt that barely covered her butt, leading to long legs in stilettos.

  I turned away from her and headed towards the PIB crime tape that had been put up. “Why is this labeled as a PIB case again? Not even an hour ago we decided that it wasn’t my case.”

  “When you see what’s under the blood, you’ll understand.” He followed me and motioned for me to go faster. “She’s coming.”

  There were a lot of bad things that Stephanie could unbury about me to put in her tabloids, but most of it seemed to focus on my love life, or lack t
hereof right now. The last piece I had read talked about how murders of local wolves had torn my werewolf lover and me apart. It wasn’t the truth, but it was the best she could come up with.

  Mason and I slipped under the tape before she could catch up to us. I let out a sigh of relief; I didn’t want to deal with her today. There was a group of women standing with a police officer on the porch, each with a glass of wine in their hand. I looked down at my watch, it wasn’t even eleven yet, but of course, if someone sent a body to my home, I might have busted out the wine as well.

  Mason motioned to where forensics had gathered. “Take a look.” He hated to give away anything that might influence my opinion, but this was ridiculous. I’d seen the body at the PIB office; my opinion was already starting to form.

  Forensics had the body stretched out and in a body bag, but it wasn’t zipped up yet, so the contorted face of the woman was visible. I looked down at the blood-matted blonde hair, hair-pinned curls plastered to her carefully made-up face. Not a single drop of makeup was out of place, had it not been for the blood, she would have looked like a sleeping doll.

  I looked down at the box, same type of box as the one at PIB, a popular online retailer box, taped with unassuming packing tape, but this time the label was readable. I pulled out latex gloves from my bag and put them on.

  I wanted to know what I was going to find in the box; anxiety was already knotting my stomach as I flipped the edges open. I reached into the inch of blood that pooled in the bottom of the box, and my fingers touched a raised object.

  A shock jolted through me, and I cried out as the jab of pain hit my heart, raising the hairs on my arms and touching my magic. Fuck. The blood in the box disappeared as if the box absorbed the already congealed liquid, and it formed into a magical rune.

  At first, I thought it was the language of The Cult of Ra, an Egyptian-based cult that thought it was their duty to make sure people were practicing magic as they saw fit, but the base was different. The base wasn’t a coven language that I knew off the top of my head. But we were dealing with a witch or a warlock that was using some very serious black magic.