Warm Blood Cold Case - Part 1

The blood was still warm when Casie arrived at the scene, which meant either the killer was long gone or still very close.

She ducked under the yellow tape, her green eyes scanning the alley with methodical precision. The victim lay crumpled against a brick wall, but something about the positioning felt wrong—too deliberate, like a message rather than the aftermath of violence. The puncture wounds on the neck were clean, almost surgical, but the medical examiner wouldn't arrive for another twenty minutes.

"What do we know?" Rick's voice cut through the morning fog as he approached, his sandy hair already disheveled despite the early hour.

"Male, mid-thirties, no ID yet." Casie knelt beside the body, careful not to disturb the scene. "But Rick—look at this."

She pointed to the victim's hands, positioned palm-up in an unnatural arrangement. Carved into each palm was a symbol she didn't recognize, still bleeding freely despite what should have been time for coagulation.

Rick crouched beside her, his blue eyes narrowing. "That's not random violence."

"No," Casie agreed, her fingers unconsciously touching the silver pendant at her throat. "This is ritual. And whoever did it wanted us to find it exactly like this."

From the shadows at the mouth of the alley, a figure in an expensive dark coat observed their discovery with the patience of centuries, before melting back into the urban maze with inhuman silence.

Rick's phone buzzed against his jacket. "Third one this month," he muttered, checking the message. "Captain wants us downtown in an hour."

Casie stood slowly, brushing dirt from her knees. The scent lingering in the alley made her wolf stir uneasily—something old and predatory that didn't belong in the city. She forced herself to breathe through her mouth, but the metallic tang of blood mixed with something else, something that made her skin crawl.

"The other victims had similar markings?" She kept her voice level, professional, even as every instinct screamed at her to track whatever had left that scent.

"Close enough. Different symbols, same placement." Rick was already photographing the scene with his phone, getting shots from angles the crime scene photographer might miss. "ME thinks it's some kind of cult activity, but the wounds..." He paused, studying the punctures more closely. "What kind of blade makes holes that precise?"

Casie didn't answer immediately. The wounds looked familiar in a way that made her stomach clench, though she couldn't place why. Her fingers traced the air above the victim's neck, careful not to make contact. "Not a blade," she said finally. "These are too round, too deep. More like—"

"Like what?"

She caught herself before saying what her instincts whispered. Like fangs. Like something that shouldn't exist outside of nightmares and old stories her grandmother used to tell.

"I don't know yet." The lie came easily, professionally smooth. "We need to canvas for witnesses before the scene gets contaminated."

But even as she spoke, Casie knew they wouldn't find any witnesses. Whatever had done this moved in shadows deeper than the city's alleyways. And usually in the realm of black market dark magic, which is forbidden but some in the supernatural communities still practiced it but something like this done to humans could expose all those from that community regardless of their involvement.

The thought sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with the October morning. If this was connected to her world—the world she'd deliberately left behind when she chose law enforcement over pack politics—then every supernatural being in the city was now at risk of exposure.

Rick was already heading toward the street, notebook in hand, ready to begin the methodical process of knocking on doors and asking questions that would yield nothing. Casie lingered by the body for another moment, letting her enhanced senses catalog details she could never put in an official report. The killer's scent was fading, but beneath it lay something else—fear. Not from the victim, but from whatever had killed him.

Whatever had done this was afraid of something even more dangerous than itself.

"Blackwood!" Rick called from the mouth of the alley. "You coming?"

She took one last look at the symbols carved into the victim's palms. The lines were too precise, too ritualistic to be random violence. Someone was sending a message, but to whom? And why use human victims to do it?

As she turned to follow Rick, a piece of paper tucked beneath the victim's jacket caught her eye—something the initial sweep had missed. She glanced toward the street where Rick was already questioning a homeless man who'd been sleeping in the adjacent doorway, then quickly retrieved the paper with her pen.

The note was written in a script she recognised from her childhood, before she'd turned her back on pack law and ancient traditions. Three words in the old language that made her blood run cold:

*The Hunt Begins.*

Casie pocketed the note without a word, her mind already racing through implications she couldn't share with her partner. Someone was targeting humans with supernatural methods, and if the old families got involved, the careful balance she'd spent years maintaining would shatter.

She just hadn't expected the war to come to her doorstep quite so soon. She had left everything behind three weeks after her mate rejected her right in front her pack, and 16 allied ones at her coming of age on her 18th birthday, after that her siblings turned her back on her and her parents even kept their distance she left her families pack a month later so she no longer had to deal with their concept. No reason just didn’t think she was worthy enough to be his Luna, she had no idea why but regardless it now no longer mattered but she had spent ten years living in the human world for her to be pulled back into the world that had turn their back on her.