Infernal: Bite The Bullet by Jess Raven, Paula Black

vision, I picked up another
bundle of photographs. I was so engrossed in the details that even though I’d
known his picture was in here somewhere, Daniel’s face came as a surprise.
    As I looked down at the image I’d dreaded finding,
I felt as though my chest cavity was being prised open. Shocked, I saw that
just like the others, his skin had been defiled with bloody symbols. Yet there
had been no mention of them in the pathology report Oliver Dalton showed me.
How was that possible, unless Lazarenko was right, and the detective was
somehow involved?
    My tears splashed onto the picture and the bundle
fell from my hands, scattering on the bedspread. This was my kid brother, who’d
covered over the cracks in our lives with laughter. Who used to overeat because
our mum was never there for us, and then got bullied for his weight. The ugly
duckling who grew into a handsome swan.
    Was this how he died?
    Were all these people dead? Or were they
somewhere, suffering? For the first time, I began to wonder if death wasn’t the
kinder outcome.
    Is this what Konstantyn Lazarenko feared his
sister had been dragged into? No wonder he was going to any lengths to find
her.
    I scrubbed the wet tracks from my cheeks with the
back of my hand and opened Konstantyn’s laptop. The thing took forever to boot
up, and when it did, I was met with a formidable looking log-in screen. No
surprise it would be encrypted. Flexing my fingers, I tried a few passwords:
Mariya, Lazarenko, a few serial killer names for good measure. Every variant I
could think of. Nothing. I scrunched up my face in frustration, ready to give
up, when I decided to take one last shot. I typed in Gilles de Rais. Nope.
Still locked out and all my attempts had frozen the screen. I snapped down the
lid of Lazarenko’s laptop and reached for my own.
    I got into my own easy enough and ran a search on
Gilles de Rais. Wikipedia threw up a detailed article about a French aristocrat
from the time of Joan of Arc. Some dude from the fourteen-hundreds wasn’t going
to help me. Except as I read through, it became apparent this wealthy Baron and
his sidekick priest had dabbled in alchemy and witchcraft, and had sexually
assaulted, tortured and butchered hundreds of innocent children in the hope of
summoning a demon named Barron.
    That was just creepy as fu –
    My apartment buzzer went off and I yelped, leaping
out of my skin and off the bed in a scatter of photos. My heart thudded hard as
I crept out of my room to the video entry monitor.
    Oh, shit.
    The screen showed Detective Dalton standing on the
porch, looking twitchy.
    He pressed the bell again, and again more urgently,
and I jumped every time. Twitchy was contagious and I was already on edge.
    What the hell did I do now?
    I was going to have to answer the thing, before he
broke down the door and caught me red-handed with Konstantyn’s pictures. I
double checked the lock on my door, just in case, before pressing my finger to
the intercom button.
    “Detective,” I said. “Sorry, I was in the bath.
This isn’t a good time.”
    He looked up and I could see his eyes seeking the
camera on the porch. When he found it, he looked straight into it, and my spine
shivered at the mask of concern on his face.
    “Neva, I got your voicemail. I called you right
back, but you weren’t answering your phone.”
    That was a lie. He hadn’t called right back. There’d
been no call-back in the time between my leaving the message and the police
bearing down on us. It was as though they’d been lying in wait all along. Damn
it .
    “Yeah, sorry about that. I seem to have lost my
phone.” I laughed airily, while cursing Konstantyn for making me apparently
justifiably paranoid. “But I’m fine, really.”
    “You mentioned a name? A possible suspect?”
    “Yeah, about that,” I said, forcing some
embarrassment into my voice. “I may have overreacted. My dance instructor,
Konstantyn, invited me back to his place for a drink after work. I