Chapter 1 The Field

They found her in the red ivy.

Spread like a sacrifice beneath the moon.

Lena Crowe. Thirty-four. Journalist. Obsessive. Too smart for her own good.

Now she was a crime scene.

The field was quiet, eerily so. No frogs. No wind. Just the soft patter of cold rain soaking through ivy leaves and the occasional hiss of steam from the generator powering the floodlights. It cast long, unnatural shadows across her body, every curve made stark and alien.

Detective Callum Vex stood at the edge of the perimeter tape, soaked to the bone and still sweating under his coat. Smoke curled from the end of a cigarette crushed between two fingers. His other hand trembled.

He'd seen bodies before, dozens. Some mangled. Some mutilated. One that had been eaten by dogs before anyone found it.

But this?

This was art.

The red ivy grew in thick, fleshy vines, coiling across the ground like blood vessels. It had always been strange the plant didn't match anything native, didn't behave like anything botanists could explain. But the town ignored it, like it ignored a lot of things.

Now it had a corpse blooming from it.

Lena's arms were crossed delicately over her chest, fingers curled just enough to suggest tension before death. Her nails were chipped and cracked, one bloodied to the quick as if she'd clawed at something. Or someone.

Her feet were bare, toes curled inward. Ankles raw. She'd been dragged.. no, carried. There were no drag marks, but faint indentations in the ivy where someone's knees had pressed down, careful, reverent, like a lover laying down a bride.

Vex took a step closer, exhaled smoke through his nose. The scent mingled with the copper stench of blood and the musty sweetness of the ivy a smell like rotting fruit.

Lena's throat was slit from ear to ear. Not a jagged tear-a precise incision. The blade had been sharp, probably surgical. Her eyes were open. Blue. Glazed over but still glassy, catching the light. Something about the way she stared dead, but not vacant made his stomach churn.

But it was the writing that stopped him cold.

Carved into the smooth, pale flesh beneath her collarbone each letter deliberate, shallow enough not to sever arteries but deep enough to bleed slowly, painfully were the words:

TELL THEM WHAT YOU SAW.

The skin around the letters was swollen, inflamed. Fresh. Whoever did this had taken their time.

"You okay?" Officer Jenna Rourke's voice was quiet behind him.

Vex didn't answer at first. Just stared at the body. At Lena's bare chest rising slightly with the curve of rigored ribs. At the black feathers tucked perfectly into each hand. Symbolic. Ritualistic. And deeply fucking wrong.

"She wasn't killed here," Rourke added.

"I know." Vex's voice was hoarse. "Too clean. No arterial spray. No blood pool. Whoever did this dumped her here like a goddamn altar offering."

He crouched down, eyes scanning the area around her body. Dirt under her fingernails. A cracked thumbnail. Something caught in her hair, tiny, metallic. A bead?

No. A pin.

He pulled on gloves and gently extracted it.

It was a safety pin. Bent open. Blood on the tip.

"She tried to defend herself," he muttered.

"Or leave a clue," Rourke added. "She was smart."

Too smart. And too close to something she shouldn't have seen.

"Witness?" Vex asked.

Rourke pointed toward the trees. A boy maybe seventeen, sat wrapped in a silver emergency blanket, rocking slightly, his eyes vacant. Bruised on the temple. Scratch marks on his arms.

"Name's Noah Pike. Said he was with his girlfriend when he found the body. Bella Grange. He ran. She didn't. He says she saw the body and started laughing."

Vex turned sharply. "Laughing?"

"Yeah. Then she ran into the woods. Gone. Like she vanished."

"Jesus Christ."

He took a breath, steadied himself, then turned back to Lena.

Blood had soaked into the ivy beneath her, staining it a deeper crimson. Vex had never believed in curses. He didn't believe in ghosts, or demons, or haunted towns with bad reputations.

But something about Black Vale had always been wrong.

He'd felt it ten years ago.

The last time someone was killed here.

Her name was Emily Vex. His wife. Her death ruled suicide.

And Lena Crowe had spent the last six months trying to prove that was a lie.

Now she was dead. Just like Emily.

Same field.

Same ivy.

Same message, carved in blood.

Vex took one last drag, crushed the cigarette into the mud, and looked straight into Lena's lifeless eyes.

"Who was you screaming at, Lena?" he whispered. "And what the hell did you see?"