THE LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS - BWS

two

There was something unsettling about the attack. I had never seen anything quite like it. The intensity of it, the victim's skull completely shattered, his rib cage entirely ripped and his organs reduced to stew made me think that whatever did that was either a creature I had never come upon or one that was very hungry. Or both. And what was even odder was the fact that the creature didn't leave any markers behind. No DNA or fingerprints were found either on the victim or at the park where he was discovered. Creatures always left DNA behind them and only very rarely covered their tracks. There always was something that helped me identify the creature and find it. Always until now.

Spending the entire morning at Royal Victoria Park looking for clues led to nowhere, and I was at the same spot where I was yesterday, clueless and worried. I doubted the creature responsible for the killing would stop there. More victims were likely to be discovered soon if I weren't able to find it myself and kill it.

It took a couple of days, but after a dozen phone calls to Dr. Stoker's office, I had finally been granted a meeting with the man. He seemed to be as busy as the Queen herself, and if it wasn't for the threat to involve Washington, I would probably still be waiting. His poor assistant almost choked on the phone at the threat, but had called me back a mere hour later to let me know that Dr. Stoker's schedule had magically cleared for an hour. I didn't feel bad for lying to her. I had run out of trails to explore, the park ending in a dead end and my investigation of the victim and his potential enemies hadn't led anywhere either. I was facing a wall, and the only trail left was the autopsy. There had to be something missed there. I had a lot of questions, and Stoker was the only one who could answer them.

It was past seven o'clock at night when I arrived at Royal United Hospital. The sky was still bright on the mid-June evening, and the warm temperature had me sweating in my pencil skirt and suit jacket before I reached the entrance door. The white blouse I was wearing underneath the black jacket was loose, hiding any sweat stain that I was sure would show if I was wearing anything tighter. I could feel the light drops of sweat pearling down my neck and between the valley of my breasts. A wave of fresh air hit me the moment I entered the hospital, and I thanked the Havens for whoever invented AC.

I was making my way out of the washroom where I had freshened up for my meeting with Dr. Stoker when my phone started ringing in my bag. I sighed at the sight of the caller ID, but picked up the call and placed the phone over my ear.

"Where the hell are you?"

"Hello to you too, Rick."

"Stop this, Charlotte," Rick snarled and if his tone didn't make it clear that he was mad, his use of my first name surely did. "You're not in Denver, where you said you were. Why was the line connected to Europe? Please tell me you're not in England."

Crap, he knew. I wasn't foolish enough to think I'd be able to fly across the world to the one place that had always been forbidden to me without him learning about it at some point. I had just hoped that said point would be much, much later.

"Before you start cursing me, I'd like to say that I had very good reasons to come here," I pleaded, also knowing that nothing I'd say would make him any less furious.

Europe was not somewhere I was supposed to go. And especially not England. Richard had made that very clear from the moment I moved in with him in Wyoming when I was fourteen, and my parents before him. I was too young when we moved from England to Canada to remember anything about our life there, but I knew something bad must have happened for my parents to be so adamant to go back to even visit. Not that we had any relatives left there, but something in me had always felt drawn to the country, something I could never explain. All three of them had made me promise to never go there, and so I did. I knew it was important to them, and that whatever they were hiding from me was scary enough to have them move to the other side of the world and never look back. I resisted the urge I felt in my blood to come here for as long as I could, but the rising number of atrocious murders in Somerset was too big to ignore. Too many innocents were being killed, and apparently British Hunters were too busy elsewhere to take matters in their own hands, so someone had to jump in. Rick couldn't possibly be mad at me for wanting to save lives.