The morning light was thin and cold when he found Reina in her office.
She was sitting behind her desk, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her, her ginger hair loose around her shoulders, her gold eyes fixed on something he couldn't see. She didn't look up when he entered, didn't acknowledge him at all, just sat there in the gray light with her hands flat on the desk and her face carved from stone.
"You look terrible," she said finally.
"You said that yesterday."
"It's still true." Her eyes flickered to him, then away. "You haven't been sleeping, the stress has been getting to you hasn't it?" She waved her pen at his stomach, poking him slightly.
Hoshimi didn't answer. He crossed to the chair across from her, sat down, and waited.
The silence stretched between them, thin and fragile. Outside the window, the courtyard was beginning to stir, students emerging from their dorms to pick their way through the rubble, survivors of a war they hadn't asked to fight.
"The message you sent," Reina said finally. "The killer is Dominic."
"Yes."
She reached for her cigarette, took a long drag, let the smoke curl toward the ceiling. Her hands were steady, her face unreadable, but something in her posture had changed. Something that might have been tension or might have been fear.
"Evidence."
"He fits the profile. The attack pattern matches Jack the Ripper's methods. He's been blacking out since the Mirlo estate. His reincarnation is surfacing."
"Jack the Ripper." Reina's voice was flat. "You're basing this on a name he gave you under duress."
"It's not just the name." Hoshimi leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees. "The timing fits. The mana signature at the crime scene was unstable, fragmented and the flash of mana that I saw from him matches Audrey's wounds, at least from what I remember. Like two souls fighting for control. And Seraphina said he was the last one to see Audrey alive."
"Seraphina didn't say that."
"She told me enough."
Reina's eyes narrowed. "You interrogated Seraphina."
"I questioned her. There's a difference."
"Is there?" She stubbed out her cigarette, the movement sharp, controlled. "Dominic reported to me about you holding Seraphina hostage, be glad that I didn't report this to the higher ups, he doesn't know, no one knows about your relationship with me except for Sophia. Or else they wouldn't have reported it to me."
Hoshimi didn't answer.
"You wanted to force his reincarnation out. You wanted to see if the killer would surface when you threatened someone he cared about." Reina smiled. "Stop making me cover up your shit ya little bastard, this could get me in trouble, he's a head of a major witch family, his position could get me fired."
"It worked."
"It worked." Reina leaned back in her chair, studying him with those gold eyes that missed nothing. "Yeah but you're riskin my job here."
"Anyways, Sarah's been really eccentric lately, I'd like to say that she's working with Dominic but there's no evidence of it, she's actively trying to hinder me."
"Let's get back to Dominic, he's the killer." Reina's lips curved. "Or the thing that's wearing his face. Which means you've identified a threat, but you haven't neutralized it. You haven't even confronted it directly. You just... gathered information."
Hoshimi's jaw tightened. "I don't really see how we could put Dominic under arrest, usually this would be enough to detain him, but he's the next head of the Walkers, they have a lot of political power and money on their side, we need hard evidence."
"Evidence." Reina said the word like it was foreign. "You're looking for evidence. In a case where the murderer is a reincarnated serial killer."
Hoshimi sighed, laying his head down on her desk.
"Dominic is not even technically guilty of the murder either, it's his reincarnation, how the hell are we supposed to arrest the reincarnation but not the person?"
Reina leaned her elbow on the table and her chin on her palm. "There are two ways you could do this, the harder way being to dig through what's left of the machines from the Mirlo Estate and somehow learning how to operate them or secondly, framing Dominic as well."
"Huh?" Hoshimi raised an eyebrow. "Frame him? How am I supposed to do that?"
"Don't ask me, it's your job to figure it out, be glad that I'm even giving you suggestions like this, my position doesn't give me very much free time." Reina shrugged. "You should probably sneak in some human flesh into his meals or photoshop him into pictures with Epstein, but I doubt that one will work."
"You're just feeding me bullshit information."
Reina watched him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a file. It was thick, worn, the edges soft with handling. She slid it across the desk toward him.
"What's this?"
"I came to the same conclusion that you did, be glad that I did this in my free time, it's a file." She paused. "On Sarah Williams."
Hoshimi's hand closed on the file. The paper was warm from her touch, heavy with whatever was inside.
"She's not on any registry," Reina continued. "Not the Academy's, not the government's. She appeared six months ago with perfect documentation, perfect references, perfect scores on every test. It wouldn't be that weird, after all we had Sophia Miller before, but I could not get any information on her past, it's as if she just came into being half a year ago."
"From what I've seen, she treats people like they're beneath her, like she's some sort of divine being."
Reina's eyes narrowed.
[Could she be…? She's another Primordial. There's no way she isn't. I can't believe that three of them have manifested within the same century. Hoshimi shouldn't know about this, at least not yet]
"Well that's not surprising, the elder Shaw girl has the same god complex." Reina leaned back, her hands folded on the desk. ""
Hoshimi opened the file.
The first page was a photograph. Sarah Williams, smiling at the camera, her amber eyes bright, her brown hair falling in perfect waves. It was a school photo, the kind they took for yearbooks, and she looked like any other student. Young. Innocent. Ordinary.
"That was the only photo I could find on her."
The next page was different.
Subject: Sarah Williams
Known abilities: A mutation that allows her to generate white orbs that can either attract or pull any object
Affiliation: Unknown.
He flipped through the pages, reading faster now, the words blurring together. Reports from the invasion. Witness statements. Magical analysis of the attack on the courtyard. And at the back, a single sheet of paper with a handwritten note.
The bodies disappeared. All of them. We collected seventy-three casualties from the courtyard. By morning, there were none. The morgue was empty. The cameras showed nothing. The only trace was a single footprint in the ash, small, bare, too light to be anything but a child's.
Hoshimi closed the file. His hands were steady. They were always steady.
"Sarah was the one who wanted the bodies," he said.
"She really did get rid of them efficiently." Reina nodded slowly. "Not even a single trace of them left, I guess the friction created from her little orbs must've burnt them alive."
9 days until Seraphina's death.