Slamming the lid shut, he stumbled away from the stove.
“Aodhan!”
“Stay outside!” Aodhan yelled. “I’m fine!” I was just startled, he added, because he knew Illium, understood that for him to remain outside would push him to the edge of endurance.
“I hate this!” Illium’s voice was taut. “Hurry up and get the fuck out of there!”
His protectiveness raised Aodhan’s hackles, made him want to snap back—and the surge of frustration was exactly what he needed to deal with the ugliness of what he’d found. There are rotten human remains in the pot. He didn’t enumerate on what he’d seen—the hand floating in a watery soup, the chunks of meat that had probably come from a fleshier part of the body.
All of it putrefied to noxious green and crawling black.
Whoever this was didn’t know how to cook. It looks like they just put the remains in the water. Though his gorge roiled, he made himself finish the report. There was no sign of any kind of seasoning, no herbs. If not for the onion and tomatoes, I’d have said they were just boiling the flesh off the bones.
A pause, then Illium said, You’re okay.
His relief was sandpaper over Aodhan’s senses. I’m not going to retreat back to my lair in the Refuge, he bit back, even though he knew, he knew he was being irrational. Illium had every reason to doubt Aodhan’s stability.
Fine. Stop arguing with me and get the fuck out of there.
I need to check the rest of the house. Now that he’d seen what he thought would be the worst of it, he took a deep breath—and only then realized he’d begun breathing again at some point. Autonomic reflex. Hard for even an angel to resist.
The scent of rot coated his nostrils now, familiar and ugly.
At least he could wash his hands. There was soap by the sink, and the water still ran. It wasn’t like he had to preserve the scene for a forensic team. He and Illium were it as far as any kind of investigation. But he did check the sink and the cupboard underneath for any clues before he ran the water.
One newly clean hand fisted so tight that his tendons ached, and his neck stiff from the tension in his spine, he then made himself look in the old fridge in the corner. Meat sat stacked up in neat piles in the fridge section, cut up and put into plastic containers, or wrapped up in paper.
The freezer compartment was also packed to the gills, as was the dented chest freezer that sat next to the fridge—and some of the pieces in the latter hadn’t been sliced into chunks. He recognized a human thigh, an arm, thought there might be a head at the very bottom.
Sweat broke out over his body, his pulse in his mouth. We need to check the fridges of all the nearby properties, see if there are any chest freezers in the garages. He couldn’t remember if they’d done that, being more interested in outward signs of violence and death. I think I know what happened to at least some of the bodies. The existence of the chest freezer inside the house was likely the reason the killer had chosen this otherwise ordinary house as their home base. The rest have to be buried in the forest. Where it would’ve been impossible for Vetra to spot the graves from the air.
Can you imagine what Ellie would say about now?
The distraction worked. Aodhan stepped away from the horror in the corner of the kitchen. Of course there are body parts in the freezer. Of course. Why should the land of Her Batshitness return to normal now that the wicked witch is dead? Because that would be far too easy.
Startled laughter from Illium that Aodhan heard both in his mind and in the real world. That’s good. You make me miss her even more.
Aodhan almost smiled, and that, he could’ve never predicted only a minute earlier. Fortified by the interaction, he carried on down the small hallway lined with what looked to be family photographs. An old woman, perhaps the grandmother, with a younger couple. No children.
“Thank you,” Aodhan whispered, though he didn’t know to whom he was speaking. Maybe the Ancestors. He was just glad he hadn’t had to face the remains of an innocent, though he knew some must’ve lost their lives during this neat and tidy massacre.
Then he saw it: image after image of a child from birth to about ten years of age, that last one with one foot on a soccer ball, the child dressed in a blue sports uniform.
Fuck.
Swallowing his rage, he carried on.
Another frame held a black-and-white photo of a middle-aged man. Probably the grandfather, passing away before he got to old age. He’d been lucky.
A few other photographs, then an amateur watercolor that had been lovingly placed inside a golden frame. Beside it was an equally nicely framed cross-stitch of a rabbit in a field.