Raven Miller Project

Chapter 1-1

CHAPTER 1

“I think I found him!” I shouted, wiping the sweat from my face. Even though I wore no make-up, the muggy summer heat of the deep South made my skin clammy. My tear ducts watered, as if non-existent foundation was melting into my eyes. I removed a McDonald’s napkin from my pocket. Thankfully I had kept it clean and unused for just such an occasion. “Holy crap,” I groaned as the thick sweat stung my eyes. It was like the universe wanted to remind me just how much my partner and I did not belong here. “Oh, damn.” This was something no sane person would ever want to see, much less track down of her own free will. I wasn’t a cop, or even getting paid. How the f**k was this my life’s work?

The body was in bad shape; his assailants had tried to cover their tracks while clearly never having watched a true crime documentary. He was cut up, burned, even partially skinned, including the removal of his hair and facial features. What lay before me barely looked like a human. In fact, had we gotten to the body any later he would have likely been ravaged by the local wildlife. And if that had happened, the police would have had the perfect excuse to shelve the case.

Who was I kidding? Local jurisdiction for the attempted murder of a drifter: they’d shelve it anyway, maybe even have him declared dead so they could deny medical care and treat him like something less then human; like a slab of meat. But I knew he was human. I could feel his strength, his spirit. I even knew his name. “Hi, Bobby.”

If I had to guess the thought process of the psycho-b***h who’d masterminded this display, I’d have to go with a lack of time and resources. Meaning, since they could not fully or properly destroy the body, his attackers simply tried to remove the parts that would be used for identification. I just hoped that most of this was done after he was rendered unconscious, because he clearly wasn’t dead.

I placed my fingers in his mouth to feel around for the presence of teeth or a confirmation of breath. I could feel shards of bone sticking out from a broken jaw; clearly the work of a hammer, not pliers (removing teeth with pliers would have been much easier and much faster). Yup, this was a hack job. I didn’t even want to know what had become of his teeth. But on the bright side, I felt a warmth coming from the back of his throat confirming that he was in fact alive and strong enough to fight. “You’re good, Bobby. You’re good. I just pray that all this s**t happened when you were already knocked out.” Or that he was at least, at the current time, actually knocked out. If that was not the case, he was likely to jump up like a frightened zombie upon feeling my touch. And that would be creepy, even for me.

My small hands stroked what remained of the victim’s blood-stained jeans. Much to my surprise, his lower body seemed to have taken less a***e. But even without damage to his legs, hips or spine, this was going to be a difficult one. “Wow. Makes me almost wish I wore gloves,” I muttered aloud as I examined the state of his genitals. Granted, male victims cannot (usually) be identified by their p***s and testicles, but the mutilation and/or removal always seemed to be part of the disposal process. “Holy fuck.”

“And mainstream media calls women the weaker gender.” That sentiment always made me laugh. After all, I came from a long line of powerful women. Some of whom would have been drooling over the sight that lay before me. Those bitches were the true man-eaters; females who killed simply to prove they were the stronger, more deserving s*x. This was why, despite the gruesome state of the victim, I had it on good authority that the mastermind of this particular crime was a female.

The weather was uncomfortably hot, making the blood sticky and the body smell. I had to keep reminding myself he wasn’t dead; his chest was moving ever so slightly to represent breath in his still functional lungs; I just had to stay focused on my job. But as the minutes went by, my eyes were growing at odds with my other senses.

My partner just laughed as she brushed a lock of sticky gray hair from her equally sweaty forehead. “Yes, all us ladies are the weaker gender, and on Wednesdays we wear pink, right, babe?” The old hippie woman wore camo print T-shirt that showed off her strong abs. This, paired with colorful sweatpants, made her look younger than her sixty-plus years.

Did you seriously just call me babe? “I can’t believe you actually know that movie.”

Annie was old enough to remember the good old days; hippies and disco, punk rock and nuclear war. She even had a father who’d died in Vietnam. “Well, all good lesbians know Mean Girls; the Plastics, all them jokes about friendship and white Africans.” Annie’s southern twang was playfully adorable, especially when she walked with a spring in her step.

“The first movie anyway.” I pulled my ceremonial bracelets over my perfectly manicured nails. Cleanliness was a necessary, vital part of my practice, since my powers required skin to skin contact. I rubbed my moisturized, lavender-scented hands, letting the colorful wooden beads of my chunky jewelry roll over my skin. (I was a total fem-girl witch.) “You know, the second movie was a piece of s**t. What was the point of making a sequel with none of the original cast, nearly ten years later?”

Annie shrugged. “Well, there are mean girls in every generation.”

“And some of us were born from them.” I smiled at my own joke. I wasn’t a ‘Mean Girl,’ like the clique in the movie. But I credit that to my mother; if the Plastics were real, she would’ve been a founding member. And some of us murder them to steal their powers. “Annie, go check in on Lola. I don’t need her waking up to this.” I remembered putting my toddler down for a nap before arriving in North Carolina but not much after that.

Annie stifled a laugh. “Our little hell spawn is almost three. Trust me, she’s woken up to worse. And before you get your panties in a bunch, you know I mean that in the kindest way.”

“I know,” I said as I tied my hair back. “My curious tiny angel, she always wants to play in the blood. But last time I let her get into my tool kit, I almost lost a finger.” I was, of course, kidding. I adored my daughter’s passion for medicine and forensic science. Black magic, however, was a little more than what I wanted her exposed to. And black magic was a big part of my therapeutic process.

Annie rolled her eyes and chuckled with her sweet southern elegance as she fanned herself with her hand. “I will leave you to your work.”

“Thank you, Miss Annie,” I replied as I returned my focus to my patient. “Twenty-seven-year-old Roberto Gian ‘Bobby’ Reyes, occupation: freelance model and graffiti artist. Your drifter a*s got cut up worse than Humpty Dumpty.” But unlike the nursery rhyme, I was more than capable of putting him back together again. I just needed to focus on what was still there. “Show me you’re still in there. You may look like a side of beef, but you still have some fight left in you.” I took a breath, continuing my search for a connection point.

“I bet you have such a kind soul. This kind of thing only tends to happen to nice young men who get caught up in the search for love. You meet a sweet girl, who tells you all the right things. Then after a night of drinking and/or drugs, your pretty little girlfriend cuts off your junk and leaves your mutilated body on the side of a North Carolina highway. At least according to the police report.”

The publicly released police report was drafted only after the arrest of nineteen-year-old university student Ramona Quinto. The local girl was found to be in possession of an artifact; tattooed skin that used to be part of Bobby’s upper arm, wrapped around an eyeball (all of which was carried on a keychain). Without a location for the body, the police didn’t have enough to charge her with assault or murder. They just kept her in custody on charges of conspiracy, offering her deal after deal for information about the ‘actual killer.’ Since there was no way a good little Christian girl could have been acting on her own. Sexist assholes.

“How you doing, Bobby?” Since I wasn’t able to feel for a life force, I pulled out a penlight, shaking it a bit to get the battery to activate. “You still there, sweetheart?” I asked out loud as I focused the light onto his eyes.

His dark pupils twitched, followed by a blink. I couldn’t help but c***k a smile. The man was alive, or at least what remained of him was. “Good job.” I reached for his left hand, giving it a tender squeeze. Now that I’d found a point of life, I could feel other energies rippling through his muscles, nerves and blood. “This world has dealt you one hell of a bad hand, but just know I believe in you, Bobby.”

I moved on to tending his wounds, stabilizing his body enough to move him. “I’m pretty sure you just met Ramona and she saw you as an easy mark. But damn, not even livestock deserve this.” I’d seen many discarded lovers of witches; beautiful men and women, thrown away like garbage. But most witches have the decency to finish them off by devouring the heart. To leave a victim like this was an act of pure hate.

A clattering sound coming from behind forced me to turn my head. “Annie, are you serious?” My partner was leaning against our car. She held our squirming toddler in one arm and her police scanner in the other.

“Mama Raven!” Lola was a curious little girl. Her long, jet-black hair was pulled back in pigtails highlighting her adorably round cheeks. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” I was the one who’d gotten her dressed that morning. (Annie liked to keep her hair in braids, a process that took well over an hour.) And my partner would’ve never allowed Lola to wear her beloved sunshine-yellow off-brand T-shirt with a neon pink pony that attempted to mimic a certain popular series. That thrift-store find was her favorite and as such had not been washed in nearly a week. Not that we ever did much laundry anyway. And she wore no pants, only a pull-up as she flailed her little legs in the muggy heat. My little girl laughed and giggled; to her, everything was play. Such innocence was truly inspiring.

Annie did not appear to have heard me as she was muttering profanity under her breath. “f**k it. Earth to Raven!”

I could hear her losing her grip on the scanner. Would it really kill her to let Lola see it for a while? “What’s up? Did you catch something?”

“Not yet, but we can’t risk it,” Annie muttered, shifting Lola in her arms. “We need to get him the f**k out of here before the local cops start arriving.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch; I’m going as fast as I can. You can’t rush this s**t!” I groaned. Annie clearly didn’t want to be here. Not in the sweaty armpit that was North Carolina, or accompanying me on the investigation of a possible witch and her male victim. There was nothing in it for Annie; no politics, no fame, no taking down the one percent, or whatever. That was all the stuff she cared about, what made her who she was.

My words bought me only a few seconds of quiet before Annie returned to her bitching. “And by that, I mean we need to get the f**k out of here, before we’re locked away, finger printed and sent to a high-security military prison off the coast of Cuba.”

I paused, tapping my fingers on my leg in frustration. It was obvious she just wanted help with the baby but lacked the social skills to simply ask. If necessary, I could hold Lola on my back or even keep her next to me strapped into her car seat.

Unfortunately, the sudden gap in productivity only shut my partner up for all of sixty seconds. “Well, you’re going to have to try and hurry up, Raven, darling. Is the dumbass fuckboy stable enough to move or not?”