Catherine can say that blood is, perhaps, her least favorite part of murder.

That's something they say, something about poison being the choice of weapon for women, that firearms and knives and blood are hallmarks of masculine violence. Catherine hates the sound of gunfire and thinks shooting a man is perhaps both the fastest way to kill and the fastest way to be caught. Guns and gun powder leave traces, presence, registration and serial numbers, and she once heard a lab tech brag about lifting a partial print from a spent slug buried in a man's sternum. Sheer luck it wasn't destroyed. Sheer luck brought the perpetrator in.

A knife is in many ways better and worse: better in its anonymity, in its banal traces, worse in its closeness, in its intimacy. The penetration of metal through flesh, breath mingling, eyes meeting, is the most intimate act two strangers can enact with one another. No sweaty tumble in the sheets can compare, though Catherine can admit her revulsion of all the blood.

When she sees it on her hands, she's forcibly reminded of the antiquated studies of humours. Blood is the humour of passion, of lust, a symbol of the unsound mind and the loss of inhibition. The mere sight of it is said to have sent men and women into a frenzy. Catherine thinks about Shakespeare, about Lady Macbeth, about a madwoman walking the night and furiously scrubbing her hands, unable to wash the blood from her palms and fingers. Blood, that symbol of guilt and impassioned foolery.

Catherine doesn't feel much of anything when she washes her red hands and the water runs pink around the drain. Maybe there's a sense annoyance at the gummy substance clinging to grooves of her skin, somebody else's lifeblood filling those lines of fortune carved across her palms. She doesn't smile, doesn't panic. She lathers an astringent soap until her skin is pale, pink, and unblemished once more.

The ghost of her newest victim always stands behind her when Catherine looks into the mirror above the sink. A ghost, but not in truth—not a haunting soul, but rather a lingering impression, a remnant stitched together in memory, the worst pieces of the dead like fingertips in her mind that clamp down and bruise. It is the shadow of a person, featureless, nebulous, a thousand stars spangled where the void pretends to be flesh and the cosmos meet in a spinning dance of color, of nothingness. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

She stares and never gives apologies because apologizing would mean nothing, would only negate the necessity of their death. The dead cannot be revived with a simple sorry. Better for the end to be certain. Better for the end to be desired.

Catherine stares into the nothingness assuming a human shape and does not apologize. She washes her hands.

x X x

Next to her, the ghost leans a hip on the desk's edge. Words come despite the lack of a mouth.

Do you think yourself clever enough to evade the FBI?

Catherine's eyes glance from her computer to the black shape, narrowing, but she doesn't respond. She's not mad. Not truly. Not yet.

Sightless eyes watch her, constellations roving across its adopted form as the imagined creature brushes its fingertips across her brow, over her eyes. You knew the FBI would be called in if you weren't careful. You weren't careful. Overzealous, overzealous.

She continues answering her emails. A number of the missives come from the detectives too overworked to look up menial information, such as the weather and traffic patterns and addresses, references for information, or frivolous requests for her to send flowers to their aggravated wives. Catherine thinks she's bought a bouquet for every wife on the force at some point.

Catherine turns to go to the break room and barely contains a flinch when she comes face to face with the ghost. The emptiness of it fans across her cheekbones, her narrow features, around her skinny throat. The guillotine's rope wears thin, Hangman. The blade's falling.

"Caty!"

She smiles through the ghost at Officer Castro. He is fresh-faced and not yet cynical, sandy-haired with a scar on his ear from an impetuous piercing in his teenage years. He calls her Caty because he doesn't know her name, didn't pay attention to her first patient correction, nor the second, nor the salutations on the bottoms of her emails that read Catherine Themis. Others in the precinct called her Cate or Cathy or Cat, but never Catherine, as if she wasn't worth the effort of her full appellation.

"Officer Castro," she replies with a slight nod.

"Aw, I've told you! It's Nathan, not Officer Castro."

She simpers, and the ghost drifts behind him, shadows spiraling across his throat, tightening in silent question. Catherine almost scoffs. The ghosts always want to know why not this one? They question her, silent and judgmental, wondering what brought about their end, what separates them from the living who do not earn a visit from the Hangman's noose and knife. Catherine's answer is always the same.

Because you deserved it.

"Did you need something?" she asks, her voice light, eyes training on the badge pinned to the front of his navy shirt. Dedwich Police Department. Protect and Serve. The ghost of Howard Perez fades in the peripheries.

"I wanted to ask if you'd already had lunch."

"Yes," she lies. "My break was earlier."

"Oh." The slight creasing about his brown eyes belies the officer's composure, and Catherine ponders how long he was watching her, waiting to ask her to a meal. She makes no apologies for the lie and waits to see if he'll call her on it, if Nathan Castro will try. "That's...maybe tomorrow, then?"

"Maybe." Catherine swivels in her chair again, tucking her knees beneath the desk, straightening the ironed hem of her skirt.

"I'll see you later, Caty."

"Have a nice lunch, Officer Castro."

He leaves, sullen but hiding it in the adopted machismo, and Catherine watches him go, taking in the exaggerated swagger, the bustle of the bullpen around him. Her eyes linger on the suspects lurking in the holding cell, some leaning on the bars, others sitting on the benches, some grim-faced and anxious, others simply too inebriated to function, never mind that it is barely past noon. There's a particular smell that clings to the place; vomit and dust, bleach and oil and whatever foreign food one of the detectives nuked in the microwave that day, and the odors compete for dominance over the softer scents of cheap cologne, cigarettes, and old shoes. Some of the detectives put out air fresheners on their desks, but Catherine has long forsaken that battle.

In his office, the captain paces back and forth by the window, the cord of his desk phone following him like a lifeline. The ghost stands in the room with him, blurred by the blinds and the man's rapid movements and the hazy burn of the fluorescents against the brighter afternoon sunlight.

He's on the phone with the FBI.

A bold jump in assumptions. Catherine takes in his agitated gait, the muffled thump of his voice, and decides her assumption just might be correct, if incredibly vague. Protocols need to be followed: allocations of duty and a roundup of facts, paperwork, files. The black suits from the Bureau have only visited her branch of Dedwich's police force once during Catherine's tenure, and she remembers the expectation, the metaphoric kowtowing, and poorly disguised sneering. Like hungry mutts, the Dedwich detectives resent rolling over and showing their bellies to the passing wolf.

Will you be clever enough to survive?

The ghost is behind Catherine now. It radiates cold like a new blanket of morning frost, and her skin prickles against the sensation, seeking to throw off the phantom touch that is nowhere but in her own imagination.

You should run now. Overzealous. Overzealous.

Catherine stands, staples a thin packet of documents together, and goes to hand it to one of the younger detectives. Everet Butcher looks up from beneath his teetering burden of unsolved murders, the man glassy-eyed, weathered, stretched too thin, and he sighs a quiet thanks for the newest stone thrown on his chest. Dedwich is a dangerous place. The dead cling to the walls, watching, judging, bordered in white and have you seen me?

She knows some of those faces have been claimed by others, by different monsters who adopt humanity's visage and slink through the yawning shadows of the underworld. She likens those missing faces to poor, fragile-winged sparrows who flew too close to the predator's swiping paw and paid the ultimate price. Some are children. Some are elders. They are all creeds and races, religions, genders, and they smile together from a wall of the forsaken until their face disappears behind someone else's, and they are again forgotten.

The ghost seethes. Why pity them? You helped put them there.

Catherine grinds her teeth as she resumes her seat at her desk, her posture sharp, her muscles tight. She squeezes the edge of a pen too hard, and it snaps, prodding the meat of her palm. Catherine glances down at the small bead of blood welling on her skin. No, she didn't put those faces there, because Catherine Themis doesn't hunt sparrows; she hunts the beasts who aspire to be monsters, and she has gotten very, very good at it.

She brings her hand to her lips and licks the wound clean.