The Third Case

The grove sprawled before us like a question mark carved into the earth, its proximity to the kitsune village lending an uncomfortable intimacy to our investigation. I found myself adrift in unfamiliar waters—the comfortable certainties of human criminology had abandoned me like fair-weather friends.

In my former life, murder possessed a terrible logic. Humans killed for reasons I could catalog and cross-reference: passion, greed, ideology, the simple intoxication of power over another's breath. Even when animals took human life, it followed the predictable patterns of instinct—territory, hunger, fear. The variables were finite, manageable.

Among these creatures, whose minds were like living, inscrutable organs operating on a biological logic I had never studied, my training felt like an old, inaccurate anatomical chart, making me question if my knowledge of the living had always been so superficial—a doubt the vampire in me answered with a whisper, insisting my new nature was a sharper scalpel, an innate surgical skill for dissecting the truth from the diseased tissues of deception others grew around it.

I pushed the thought aside with practiced discipline. Such arrogance was a luxury I could not afford.

"Tell me," I said, addressing our small company as we surveyed the ravine's jagged mouth, "how many species in this realm possess intelligence comparable to our own? Enough to plan, to use tools with deliberate intent?"

Xiao Ru's ears drooped slightly as she considered the question. Yoko's coils shifted with nervous energy, as Momo, perched upon her back like a broken ornament, let out a sound that might have been bitter laughter.

"Thousands," Xiao Ru said finally, her voice carrying the expectancy of unwelcome truth. "Perhaps tens of thousands, if you count the various subspecies and hybrid forms."

A sigh escaped me, carrying with it the last remnants of my hope for a simple case. The investigation had just expanded from a needle in a haystack to a needle in an entire field of haystacks, each one potentially concealing a murderer with motivations I could not begin to fathom.

"Walk me through it," I said, settling into the familiar rhythm of crime scene reconstruction. "Each step, exactly as it happened."

The pixie's finger trembled as she pointed toward the treeline's ragged edge. "There—I felt eyes upon me from those shadows. When I ventured into the grove, it struck."

My gaze followed her direction, noting the deep gouges carved into the earth like claw marks left by some titanic hand. The soil bore the rusty stains that spoke of violence, though the recent rain had diluted the evidence to mere suggestions of what had been.

"Show me where you fell," I instructed, approaching the ravine's lip. The pixie indicated the descent with a weak gesture, and I could make out faint disturbances in the mud below—boot prints, perhaps, or the drag marks of a struggle, all having been made a faint palimpsest by the water's slow and scholarly hand.

Without conscious thought, I stepped over the edge. Instead of the expected plummet, I found myself drifting downward like a feather caught in honey, tiny motes of light sparkling beneath my feet. The discovery of this new ability registered as little more than a footnote to my investigation.

A soft displacement of air announced Ashley’s arrival beside me—one moment absent, the next simply there, as if reality had folded itself to accommodate her passage. Except it wasn’t Ashley it all—it was in fact, the one and only, Xiao Ru. I recoiled, for Ashley’s head was no longer her own, her features softening and reshaping themselves with the slow, wet plasticity of clay being worked by an unseen sculptor, her ears pulled upward into vulpine points as if by a thumb and forefinger, the entire architecture of her face remade before my eyes.

"Kitsune magic," she explained cheerfully. "Though it only functions across very short distances."

"You're full of surprises," I murmured, but my attention had already shifted to something more pressing. A dead tree stood sentinel at the ravine's heart, its trunk split by what appeared to be lightning's violent kiss. Within that blackened wound, something glittered with unnatural luminescence. Somehow, I felt I would have never noticed such a thing as a mortal, as my eyesight seemed to have increased substantially so.

"Is this normal?" I asked, pointing toward the strange residue. "This… aftermath?"

Xiao Ru tilted her head in that considering way of hers. "Lightning often leaves traces of its energy behind. The residue could be crystallized essence, still vibrating with the storm's memory."

I wasn't certain whether this qualified as the most absurd thing I'd ever heard, or if the Makai's laws simply operated according to principles that would reduce my former world's physics to childish speculation.

"Can we collect a sample?" I called up to our serpentine secretary.

Yoko's response echoed down with admirable efficiency. She descended slithering hither, the pixie clinging to her back like a wounded bird. A translucent blade materialized in her hands—conjured from what ether, I could not say—along with a matching vessel. Her movements were surgical in their precision as she carved away a portion of the glittering residue.

As she worked, something caught my peripheral vision—a scrap of tissue-thin material clinging to a low branch, bearing what looked suspiciously like a stain. I plucked it free with careful fingers.

"Another container, if you would," I requested, and Yoko produced one with the same mysterious magic that was rapidly becoming her signature trait.

With our evidence secured, I cast a final glance at the black river that had carried our witness and victim to safety. The office beckoned with promises of analysis and answers—or at least, the comfortable illusion that such things were possible in this realm where lightning left memories and foxes folded space like origami.