It was four in the afternoon and my apartment was cold. Cold in that unused way, in an abandoned way. Like a husk of a room that didn't see occupation often.

Which… I guessed was fairly accurate. I made an effort not to be here long on any given day. Until the killing had started I hadn't even slept here much. It was summer, it was mildly warm, I slept in the woods. Or in Seanmháthair's house.

What was left of it…

It'd never been much of a "house," if you looked at it from a domesticated point of view. And now, with no one living there and the life gone out of it, the place I loved best was slowly going to rot and ruin. A shell, forgotten in the forest.

Though, some mice had made a nest there and a pair of foxes were attempting to raise their kits in a den they'd dug under the foundation. So as long as the new owner of the land left it lie and didn't interfere, there would be some life there. The forest would carry on without Seanmháthair and I.

Nature had a way of doing that. For which I was glad.

I was equally glad the new owner seemed intent on forgetting his purchase. At first I'd worried he'd chase me off the land, but as far as I could tell no one had been there but me since I'd turned over the keys and paperwork.

So I slept there most nights I didn't have to work early and prowled my way back to town and my studio apartment just long enough to shower, grab some food, and go to work. It was no wonder my "living space" felt unlived in.

But at least I was clean. One thing my studio offered was running water. Hot running water. And plenty of it.

I'd limped out of Malcore's office, dumped my mud-coffee in a plant that looked like it could use a caffeine boost, and limped all the way back to my shower. The limp was more or less from exhaustion and the shower cured it.

Even if it did nothing to fix the want to sleep for the next several weeks.

If anything, the water I'd dumped on myself only made the desire for sleep that much more intense. Most likely why I found myself dressed in a clean pair of boxers and a loose binder and staring gloomily at my coffee pot while it made the phlegmy, liquidy percolating sounds and steamed languidly on my counter.

I needed something to keep me awake and I needed something to keep the images of Linkin and Jayden and Jason out of my head. The fact I'd known all of them to some extent did not make finding their mutilated bodies any easier. I'd been having trouble sleeping due to intense dreams since all of this started, and when I was awake the memories wouldn't go away.

"Fuck it," I muttered, prodding the glass of the coffee pot and indulging in the slight pain of the burn. At least a tangible injury was something I could deal with on a logical level. What had been happening in Cutter's Bend was another matter entirely.

I leaned back against my fridge and shut my eyes, my arms automatically folding over my chest as I thought. Vogel's little challenge in Malcore's office was still fresh in my mind. The shower hadn't washed that away. And with everything else the main core of the back and forth wouldn't leave my mind.

He.

Vogel and I both agreed on the fact we thought the Ritualist was a he.

Of course, Vogel thought I was that he and that rankled, but not much I could do about it aside from prove it not true.

A hiss escaped me to rival the sputtering of my coffee pot and I let my head fall back against the ridge of the refrigerator door digging into my back.

Jayden had been the first sacrifice in the Ritualist's weekly parade of the macabre. I'd found him probably only a few hours after he'd been left splayed out between two trees, relatively close to Cutter's Bend.

Not that I wanted to think about it overly much, but from the first details had stood out in my mind. I'd known a fair amount about the Ritualist and what he was up to just by carefully edging around Jayden's body and not touching anything Malcore and his small group of cops would need for evidence. Only one of those things I'd known or suspected was that the perpetrator was probably male.

A fact I became surer of as time went on and more of my old schoolmates kept ending up dead.

My coffee pot had stopped wetly inhaling and spitting out dark brew, and reflectively I reached for a mug and yanked the pot off the hot plate, my mind still spinning too much for me to pay attention to what I did.

The most logical reason for my assumption the Ritualist was male was the base fact it took a fair amount of strength to take down seven young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty with quick, effective blunt force, move their bodies to a secure location, and then dismember them with what I thought must be some form of bladed weapon. Not a saw or an ax, but a blade. The cuts were too clean, too precise and perfect for anything else.

It took a powerful body to do what the Ritualist was doing. That did not mean the killer couldn't be female, but it leaned my thoughts towards a male.

Beyond that though… beyond physical probability, other things just stood out when I looked at what the Ritualist did.

His work was all about aesthetic, arrangement. Precision. He was utterly logical. Methodical. Practical. And while aesthetic might be a concern, there was nothing of art about his work. No trace of emotion or feeling. It was like a terrifying, determined void.

None of that meant the Ritualist was male, either, none of the aspects of the personality I saw at work behind his kills couldn't belong to a woman. But it felt male to me. I had a gut feeling I couldn't explain and I was running with it.

I suspected Vogel was doing just the same.

And while I imagined I should take it as some form of compliment Vogel looked at me and not only thought suspect but male, I couldn't really find it in myself to forgive the man.

"Fucker," I muttered, forcibly clattering the pot back onto the heating plate. The mug was searing my one hand and I'd slushed hot coffee over the other with how careless I'd been with the pot, but I didn't really care.