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could teach me to control my abilities—the Phuri Dai of my tribe, the high Chovihani … my grandmother.
    I wasn’t sure if she would help me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to. In order to learn to control my extra senses, I would have to fully embrace them—and that scared the hell out of me. However, my mind was made up. As the room lightened with the sunrise, I shuffled to my desk and sat down to write a letter.

Chapter Four
    It all started with Talika Ross. She was the first. Detective Charlie Hale stood in the Mecklenburg County medical examiner’s office, staring at three bodies laid out on metal exam tables. He’d left his partner, Sonny DeRossi, back at the office. Sonny didn’t think there was any more information to be found from the bodies, but Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing something important.
    “Are you sure they’re related?” Dr. Karen Johanssen, the county’s resident forensic pathologist, eyed him with a look of disbelief on her pretty face. Contrary to what the television shows taught, it wasn’t that common for detectives to attend autopsies, but Karen made concessions for him because of their… history.
    Charlie and Karen had gone out a couple of times. It never went anywhere—and they certainly weren’t close enough for Charlie to confide in her as to why it didn’t—but they’d maintained a professional friendship. Despite that, Charlie knew that if he touched anything on her table, she’d chop his hand off.
    When he didn’t answer, Karen continued. “A copycat could have easily made those marks.”
    The marks—a network of uneven circles and hash marks carved deep into the tissue of each victim’s neck—were the only thing Charlie and Sonny had to connect the three victims. Charlie thought they had a serial killer on their hands. They hadn’t seen one in Charlotte since the Henry Louis Wallace murders in the early nineties.
    But he couldn’t prove it, not yet. The three victims had no known connection. The police had delved as far into their personal histories as they could, but the three lives never intersected in any way. That begged the question, how was the killer, already dubbed the ‘Queen City Slayer’ by the vultures in the news media, choosing his victims?
    He never used the same M.O.—the weapon, the mechanism of death, was never the same. The victims had virtually nothing in common; the only unifying factor was that they were all female—anywhere from age twelve to thirty-five.
    He still said nothing; Karen was visibly annoyed. “Where’s Sonny?”
    Charlie raised a brow at her. “Think I need a babysitter, Dr. Johanssen?”
    “Well, it’s hard not to notice Sonny’s not here obsessing.”
    “I’m not obsessing, I’m doing my job. There’s a common thread here, I know it. Walk me through it again.”
    Karen crossed her arms over her chest, bunching her white lab coat. She was a tall, leggy blonde with long hair and almost dainty features—except for her plump lips that practically screamed sin. Many a man in the department had tried to get her into bed and she’d have none of them. She would’ve had Charlie though, if it weren’t for one small detail, his dirty little secret—he liked men.
    Still, she was nice to look at even when she was glaring, which was most of the time. “You read my report.”
    “Cover to cover. Let’s go over it again.”
    “You’re an asshole, Charlie.”
    “This guy’s out there mutilating and killing women, little girls, and we have nothing to go on.”
    She sighed heavily, and he knew he had her. That was the kicker, the sisterhood.
    Picking up a clipboard, she walked over to the exam table closest to Charlie and pulled back the disposable blue paper sheet. Even though the autopsy had been done already, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves so as not to contaminate the body.
    “Victim number one came to us as a Jane Doe. She had no identification and there were no hits with missing