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Borrowman handed him over to one of the officers on scene with the instructions to take him back and process him. Let him call a lawyer, for all the good that would do him. A female officer was helping the wife, along with an EMT on scene, which was likely for the best. The poor lady would need years of therapy to handle this shock. I felt so bad for her.

I paused Borrowman where he was. “He wasn’t working alone.”

He groaned from the depths of his soul, eyes squinching shut. “Of course he wasn’t. Of course this case has to get worse. Can you read from his lines how many others?”

“Two. He’s got a very strong tie with one of them, a bond if you will, the other was more an acquaintance?”

“I’ll look for the other two,” he promised me, expression and lines resigned. “Just look at one more room for me before you go.”

“Uh, okay? You do realize I can’t read a room, though?”

“I thought you were an expert at reading a room,” he deadpanned.

I shot him quite the droll look. “Being punny, are we?”

“Morbid humor’s my only coping mechanism until they let me drink on the job.”

“Eh, that’s fair. Alright, show this damn place to me so I can leave. I want a shower. By that I mean I want to stand under water hot enough to boil me alive with a scrub brush in one hand and vodka in the other.”

“Dammit, Jon, stop putting tempting visuals in my head, I’m stuck here for hours yet!” Grumbling, Borrowman marched back inside. “It’s in the basement.”

I followed reluctantly. “No, why? Why would you drag me into the basement of this horror show?”

“You really think I want to go down there again? It’s bad enough I have a visual already, I don’t actually want a better look.” He shot me a glower over his shoulder even as he stepped down into a stairwell going down. “But I don’t know what to do with this thing. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know if its safe to even touch it, and your mom took one look and said it was psychically charged and she’s not dealing with it. So you’re my only hope on answers.”

Uh-oh. If Mom had noped out, that was a really bad sign. I started praying for myself.

Now, basements in the South were actually quite rare. With the water table being as high as it was, most basements had a lot of flooding problems, and most people were smart enough to just not go there. Underground bunkers had been a thing in the Sixties, but those had water issues as well, and most people used them for storage of goods that wouldn’t be ruined if they got a little wet. I’d never seen a full sized basement attached to a house in Tennessee before.

I hoped to never see another.

Stepping into this space, I realized it was somehow worse than upstairs. It’d likely been meant to be an entertainment space—the projector, large screen on the far wall, and bar along my left side were obvious indications—but the energy down here was awful. Phantom impressions of death lingered everywhere, blood was everywhere, stacks of bones lined the walls, and the stench was so vile I nearly threw up just stepping into the room. There was even a whole wall of shelving of jars holding…ewww, were those BRAINS?! Oh my fucking god, they were jars of brains. What in the Hannibal Lecter was this shit, seriously. I’d need something stronger than vodka at this rate.

Bad as this all was, though, I didn’t see what Borrowman needed my eyes for?

He kept walking, though, around the bar, and into another room just off this one. I followed him onto a tiled surface. Oh, I bet this was the pool changing room, as it’s right off the patio—

Fuck. Me.

What in the hell was that?!

I stopped dead, taking the abomination in carefully, as my eyes weren’t even sure what I looked at. There was a silvery, shallow bowl, placed in the center of the room, on top some sort of stone pedestal. Surrounding it was pure energy, transparent but threaded with blood red lines, small and circular, like a tube? There must’ve been close to a hundred, each tube stacked closely together and crammed around the basin, pouring—was that blood?!—into the bowl. On the far right wall was a dead corpse, but it was almost mummified, like the life had been sucked right out of it.

I found it interesting no one had even put crime tape around the corpse and grateful, too. They were right to keep their distance. Something was very, very off in this room. I had a bad feeling that body was a result of this…thing, whatever it was.

My first thought was sacrificial altar of some sort—which would jive with what I read off Carrington, that man was deep in some kind of twisted, psychotic belief system—but what horrified me was something else entirely.

I latched onto Donovan’s arm tightly and ordered hoarsely, “Get Mack’s Seiji on the line. Now.”

He whipped his cellphone out, but demanded, “Why? What are you seeing?”

“That thing’s tied into something I don’t understand, it’s all psychic energy, but…” I turned my face up to his and I could see my horror reflected in his eyes, “I can read the energy. I can read the blood like a living person is standing in front of me. Get him on the line. Now.”

2

I sank onto my couch with a long sigh, sake in hand, a plate of snacks in my lap. Ah, bliss. I was alone at home, which was a rare moment. Ever since Lachlan and I had started dating, he’d basically lived with me. A situation had arisen at home, though, and he’d flown back three days ago to deal with it.

I missed him already. He was such an amazing fiancé and, not to brag, one of the best anchors I’d seen. Having him gone felt like I functioned without a limb. I’d grown very dependent on him in a very short amount of time, clearly.