The Wolf and The Veil

Chapter Eight

The body was pale. Alarmingly so, like marble, the bruises blooming like flowers under the alabaster skin. Oliver wasn't surprised by the morbid version of a blue sky that lay half buried in the dirt. An arm outstretched, a knee bent inward, the man was strewn out like a discarded rag doll.

Whoever he was, he wasn't himself anymore. Whatever made him blush or cry or love or feel anything at all didn't exist outside of a beating heart. The victim was nothing but a shell for a ghost, if you believed in that sort of thing, which Oliver Holt certainly didn't. He'd seen enough death to know that the spirits of the dead didn't linger, and why would they? There was nothing for them here, in the cold and the wet of the forest floor. The world didn't slow down to mourn its dead, it merely moved on. It was the only thing the world seemed to know how to do with any semblance of ease. So, Oliver moved on, careful to watch his steps.

Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.

He'd managed that long enough; his film camera sturdy enough to survive the harshest of winters, or thickest of summer heat waves. His film never jammed or warped, never faded or scratched. He was an old fashioned guy, he supposed, looking around at the two officers using digital cameras to gather evidence, but there was something about the film that made everything clearer.

He'd pass the photos off to his boss, Alice, and they'd be filed away by a rookie cop or evidence clerk. Oliver didn't tell them, of course, that he kept some for his private collection. He wasn't one of those perverts with a sock drawer full of dead bodies, he just liked to make sure that cases like this wouldn't be forgotten. He would chip away at them from time to time, making sure that the case files matched up with the evidence, and that everything made sense, if it ever could. Death was a senseless thing, picking off people like old scabs. No rhyme or reason sometimes, there could be no logical answers for a question that didn't have any logic, after all.

Drifter Pines didn't have a lot of deaths that weren't old age or car accident related, but this one was special. Special wasn't the right word, really. Intriguing was too glamorous, and Oliver groaned as he thought about the extra security he'd need to take to make sure his film wasn't stolen once word got out. And given the way the area was getting more and more congested with lurkers, it already had.

His boss would suspect a cougar or a wolf given the nature of the scene; the chaos, strewn clothing, and fresh claw marks that dug deep into the flesh of the victim. It was a fair enough assumption, and the evidence would support it, but Oliver knew there was more to the story. The victim was a witch. Or a hipster. It was getting harder and harder to tell lately, with everyone wanting the aesthetic but none of the commitment. But he'd heard rumors amongst the town - whispers in the grocery store, scary stories around bonfires at the beach - of a local coven. They weren't into dark stuff, from what he gathered, but rumours were a risk that like matches, so often turned to wildfire.

Drifter Pines even had its own occult shop, though whether there was any validity to its claims of finding your true love or curing death, Oliver was doubtful. He'd seen what real magic could do. Had felt it a little over a year ago when he first crossed into Hollow Hills; a buzzing under his skin, a current that made every hair stand on end until it suddenly stopped. He'd researched that evening, for anything that could explain the burning, and after clicking out of an unruly amount of ads for chlamydia testing, he'd found that protection spells could be cast around towns, but only by very powerful witches.

The victim had ceremonial tattoos, too, which further cemented Oliver's witch/hipster theory, so Alice had called in an occult professor from Hollow Hills. How an occult professor could make any money in their Podunk county, Oliver didn't know, but he was curious to meet him. Henry something, he hadn't caught his last name, but he'd learn it soon enough.