But there usually weren’t a half dozen bodies found over the course of several weeks, all of them looking like they’d been pre-Christmas-dinner appetizers. Charlie Groleski had been missing for sixteen days, though aside from the gnawed flesh, his body was in pretty good condition. The media had started calling global warming “climate change” instead, and the longer, colder winters Seattle had been experiencing the past few years ran with that appellation. We’d gotten our first solid freeze in mid-November, and nothing had fully thawed out since, including poor dead Charlie.

Billy had his way of looking at a crime scene: through the deceased’s words, if at all possible. Mine was different, and I’d learned early on not to contaminate what my normal vision could see by accessing the Sight right away. Once I saw the world that way, it lingered, influencing everything else.

Winter, viewed through eyes that saw the breath and life pulse of the world, was heart-achingly beautiful. The earth itself lay dormant, a dark forgiving depth scored by brilliant pulses of light that were the living things traveling on its surface. Billy stood out as a flare of fuchsia and orange, and I glanced at my own hands to see familiar silver and blue dancing over my skin. Everyone had an aura, and their well-being could be read through that burst of color.

Whatever colors Groleski had once sported, they were long gone, swallowed by death. I wasn’t looking for them, though. I was looking for marks in the earth: anything that would show me something of the madman who’d killed and eaten half a dozen people in the greater Seattle area over the past two months. It took a god to actively obscure himself from the Sight, but time and the winter season could wipe away the traces a killer might leave behind. I’d never tracked someone in summer, but I had the idea that the softened earth would hold an impression longer. Someday I would probably find out if I was right.