Chapter 1 · The Rain and the Thirteenth Body (2)

He turned and walked into the dark. Just before the shadows swallowed him, he glanced back, and the crimson of his eyes looked like two stars going out.

"Little star. Don't touch the Thirteenth Body's chest."

"Why?"

"Because someone left you a message inside its heart."

The dark closed. The morgue went silent. Liora stood alone, and the black rose in her pocket smelled of a night that had never existed.

Marcus was white as paper. "Liora… I didn't… I didn't see anything, right?"

"You saw everything," she said. "But you'll convince yourself it was a dream."

She went back to the table. Took a breath. Opened the Thirteenth Body's chest.

Her professionalism shattered.

The body's eyes were open. They weren't dead eyes—a burning starfield was reflected in the pupils. The lips moved, and the voice that came out was hers:

"He lies. He always lies. Trust the blade."

The voice died. The body crumbled from the fingertips, turning to ash in seconds. The fluorescent light blew out. The morgue plunged into perfect dark, and the only light left was the black rose in her pocket, pulsing faintly, like a living heart.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Screen light cut the dark. A message from Lucas, the assistant district attorney, with a photograph attached.

It was a morgue tag. She read it twice, because the first time couldn't be right.

It didn't say Thirteen.

It said:

LIORA VOSS — NUMBER ZERO. WELCOME HOME.

The rain beat down harder.

Outside, on the wet black street, a man in a black suit stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the single lit window of the morgue. Rain slid off him like it was afraid of him.

"So it begins again," Kael Ashveil murmured, to no one, to everyone, to the night itself. "Let's see who's been playing with my star."

He stepped into the dark, and the city didn't notice he'd ever been there.

The night shift at the NYC OCME was quiet, which meant everyone was terrified.

It was 2:00 a.m. Marcus had reorganized the evidence board twice. Millie had drunk four cups of the morgue coffee, which was not a beverage so much as a dare. And Liora Voss, the only person in the building who could look at the thirteenth body and feel anything other than nausea, was sitting at her desk, reading the file she had definitely not stolen from her own crime scene.

"You're doing it again," Marcus said.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at a corpse's file like it's a crossword puzzle that bit your mother."

"It's a murder case, Marcus. That's my job."

"It's your murder case. Which means it's all of our murder cases, because that's how teams work, and you've been sitting there for three hours reading the same page." He sat across from her. "What's on your mind, Voss?"

Liora closed the file.

"Tell me something," she said. "If you found a corpse with a tag that said ZERO, what would you think?"

"I'd think the killer had a sense of humor."

"And if the same corpse had been posed in a way that—" She stopped. "Never mind."

"No, no, finish the sentence. This is the most exciting thing that's happened since the vending machine ate Millie's dollar."

"The pose matched a symbol in an astronomy book from 1904. The symbol isn't in any police database. And the person who found the body—" She paused. "The person who found the body knew things he couldn't have known."

"Like what?"

"Like what I was going to find before I found it."

Marcus was quiet.

"Voss," he said carefully, "are you telling me the witness is the killer?"

"I'm telling you the witness is something. And I don't know what."

The door to the autopsy bay swung open. Millie stuck her head out, phone in hand.

"Voss, you're going to want to see this. The precinct just called. Another body's come in."

"Another one?"

"Same tag. Same pose. Same smell of a crime scene that shouldn't smell like anything."

Liora was already moving.

The new body was a man in his fifties, found in a stairwell three blocks from the first scene. He'd been dead less than six hours. And pinned to his collar, in the same precise, unreadable script, was a tag that read: ONE.

"One," Marcus said. "Last time was zero. Now it's one. That's not random."

"It's a sequence." Liora's voice was flat. "Zero, one, two, three. Something's counting."

"Counting what?"

She looked at the body. At the tag. At the pose—arms spread, eyes open, face arranged in an expression that could have been peace, or could have been surrender.

"I don't know," she said. "But I think we're running out of time to find out."

Outside, in the rain, a figure in black stood at the edge of the streetlight, watching the morgue's windows.

He had been watching for three hours.

He had counted every light that came on, every silhouette that passed, every time her shadow moved across the blinds. He had memorized the rhythm of her footsteps on the concrete floor, the way she stopped at the window, the way she looked out at the rain as if she could feel him watching.

He could have gone inside. He could have knocked. He could have said the words he'd been saving for twelve thousand years.

But the tag was in place. The sequence had begun. And the Court's Keepers were everywhere.

"Not yet, little star," Kael Ashveil murmured to the rain. "Soon."

He was gone before the streetlight flickered.