An Aura of Hope: A RWBY Fan Fiction

Jackson's Dilemma

Another body.

That's the fourth one this month.

And the month was only half over.

And Officer Darryl Jackson had had enough of it. He'd been the lucky officer at Vale PD to be tasked with leading this case. Over the past two weeks, they've received four calls about dead bodies--if you could even call them that. They were really just piles of bones and dust inside of clothes. It was absolutely bizarre. The bones were practically fossils: no bone marrow, no DNA, no ways of confirming whose they were.

And there was almost never any evidence that it could've been murder. Only the first one, which was found in an alley between apartment buildings near a dumpster, had footprints other than the victim's around it. There was the man's--they assumed the victim was male from the clothing it was found in, but that was by no means a certainty--dress shoe prints, as well as prints of military-grade boots and stiletto heels were found at the scene. But there was one odd coincidence at every scene, the amount of cat prints. It seemed as though each cat that came within a block of the body had gotten a little souvenir of their own.

But Jackson didn't believe in coincidences.

He thought the cats had something to do with it, something his colleagues ridiculed him for. "They're just cats, Jack. Get over it," they'd say. But even if the victims were simply mauled by cats, that wouldn't explain the lack of struggling at the scene or the absence of marrow in the unbroken bones, blood, and DNA overall in the victims.

All they had to go off of to figure out who they were was to check for people who had recently gone missing. None of the victims had any ID on their persons at the time the police had gotten there.

Something bigger was going on here, and Jackson knew it.

Question was, what?