“I never imagined that’s what a serial killer looked like,” said Ronns. The two-way mirror revealed an image of a man whose features spoke nothing of his dark habits. He sat still, observing the perfect corners of the room and the table as if looking for mistakes in their design.

  “I never imagined a serial killer would use magic to bring back his favorite kill and murder them again,” said Kallis preparing to take a sip of coffee, but changing his mind once Myra and Ori entered the room on the other side.

  “I never said this, but this guy isn’t so bad,” said Ronns. “Though I still don't get what he is.”

  “It’s not hard being good at catching criminals when you can use magic to find them. It’s like a cheat code, really not the same level.”

  “Oh, oh, here we go.”

  “Please state your name for the recording,” Myra began, pointing him to the camera in the corner.

  “Callus Jorven,” said the accused, blinking slowly.

  “Mr. Callus, have you, on different occasions, within the span of seven years, performed orthopedic surgery on Marus Olif, Vika Laman, Salen Rok, Polllar Rolek, and Treman Golder?”

  “Yes, yes I did.”

  “Were the surgeries performed at the hospital you are currently a resident in?”

  “They were, and they were all successful. I know you think I had something to do with their deaths but it's rather ridiculous to assume the person who helped them heal is the one to blame.”

  “Have you seen this before?” Ori cut in placing a blue labeled book on the table. It was old and worn out to the point it barely held onto its pages.

  Callus took a long look at it and then averted his gaze like he was suddenly sickened by it.

  “No.”

  “No? We found this in your office. How do you suppose it ended up there if it wasn’t yours?”

  “I don’t know. I have many books in my office. How am I to know what’s there and what isn’t? Please, this interrogation is unnecessary, I have patients to attend to, and you are wasting my time.”

  “Do you know the meaning of Furik A'Roshet?” said Myra laying a photograph of the inscription on top of the book, and shoving it a little closer to him. “Can you tell me what it is?”

  The doctor’s face darkened at first but then a smile appeared, not like a natural smile that comes on its own, but a forced thing meant to hide something deeper. “I do not.”

  “I own your flesh,” Ori said leaning in so his eyes met the killers and made him uneasy. “Do you admit to inscribing those words into the bones of the five children and later killing them for sport?”

  “Have you anything to support such unfounded claims? Is this book all you have?” He pushed it away and leaned back into the metal chair. “Like I said, stop wasting my time.”

  “Should I tell him?” Ori turned to Myra, with a spark of anticipation in his eyes.

  She smiled, keeping her eyes on the killer. “Please do.”

  “Furik A'Roshet is not a spell.”

  “What do you know?” Callus mocked, but under the table, his leg was bouncing up and down. His defense was being shattered with no effort whatsoever. He was broken long before he entered the room.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “The real knowledge behind those words had been lost for so long, only pieces of the story survived,” said Ori. “Now if you’ve actually read this book, you’d know that. But you couldn’t, could you?”

  The tension in the room grew beyond the scale of anything the station had witnessed before. The other side of the mirror was now packed with curious visitors from other departments, with Kallis and Ronns stuck somewhere in the crowd.

  “You are not gifted, Callus.” Ori continued. “Magic does not flow through you. Did that hurt? Were you bullied as a child and wished for power? It never came, did it?” Each sentence he spoke pushed the man further towards the edge until all he could do was burst out in anger and pull on the chains that bound him like a wild animal caught in a trap. His eyes reflected an emotion people like him were not accustomed to.

  “You know nothing,” he said looking at the ceiling. "All of this is a trick isn't it? You have no real evidence, do you?"

  “I know you are afraid,” Myra concluded. She did not know how, but she could almost see there was something on his mind. “Is fear what drove you to kill them? Fear of them becoming something you couldn’t? You wanted power over the gifted, because you yourself had none. I pity you.”

  “No.” his voice became slightly twisted. "I had nothing... what's that supposed to be?"

  His attention was suddenly drawn to the a recording from a security camera on the small screen Myra was holding. It was the footage they got from the train station.

  "This is you, isn't it?" she said zooming in to the blurry shape on the screen, that shifted through the crowd and disappeared off the platform. It looked almost like a speck of dust on the lens, no one would notice or mistake for a person. "It must have cost a fortune."

  "But you could afford it, you are an steemed surgeon after all," Ori butted in. "It's funny how technology and magic can coexist. The cloak of invisibility is still in fashion, hasn't it?"

  "Let's face it. You were lucky the first time, we had no idea what we were looking for, and that's on us. You managed to kill all five of your victims without leaving as much as a hair on the crime scene, so what changed this time? You chased Marus down the rails and into the park just like before, and killed him by stabbing him in the back. Funily enough, each time you did, you got better at it, almost like a perfect crime. Except..." she shuffled through a few more frmaes on the screen until she found the one she was looking for. It was from another camera, used to measure the temperature of the rails, installed as a safety measure aginst magical terorrism form the past. The footage showed the perfect shape of a cloaked man, down to the details of his face.

  "No!" Callus wimpered. "That's not... possible."

  "You'd be surprised to learn that back when those cloaks were made, there were no infrared cameras. What barbaric times," Ori joked, but was the only one to find it funny. "I will ask this only once, though. Why did you kill them?"

  “I killed them all for they were mine to kill.” The words came out like a blast from a cannon. He could not hold them in any longer. "Mine. Mine alone."

  “Good. We are finally getting somewhere," Myra concluded, somewhat surprised by how easily he admitted to everything. "But why bring Marus back? Did you run out of perfect victims or did you specifically enjoy killing him and only him?”

  “I did. I enjoyed that quite a bit. I can humbly say I got very good at killing that brat.” The killer had now fully lost composure and appeared more like a snake than a person. Whatever made him kill, also made him quite angry about it.

  “But you didn’t... do it yourself, did you?” Ori said slowly as he tapped on the folder covers, pacing his words. Something in the air was changing, as they got another step closer to the truth. “Because at the end of the day, it takes a skilled mage to do what was done. You are just a puppet with a storybook.”

  “Who brought the dead to life?” Myra hissed slamming the table with a dozen photographs of identical people, spilling everything from her folder out to the open. “Who had you hunt again? Who’s helping you? Huh?”

  “Nobody. I did it all alone.”

  “You couldn’t,” Ori croaked. “No amount of delusion can fix that. So speak, or we will resort to other methods.”

  “I don’t know," the man cried, rattling his chains. "I did not want him to come back. But he came to me. He taunted me again. He had no right to be alive. I killed him, his life was mine. I had to do it… I had to kill him again. Why was he at the station? Why was he there? Why was he alive?” He stopped talking and slammed his head on the table letting blood run down his face. He would have cracked it open had several officers not come to take him away.

  "Gods, I was not expecting that reaction," Myra whispered as she gathered her things from the table. "At least he won't be near patients any time soon. Eight years for it to end like this, what the hell... wait, what was that you said earlier. What other methods?"

  “Memory extraction,” returned Ori heading for the door.

  “Memory e- isn’t that banned by the law?”

  “He doesn’t know that,” Ori added as his coat twisted around the corner and he was out of sight.

  “Well, I guess that was…” Ronns said after finishing a cup of coffee that wasn’t his own and counting all the heads in the room with them.

  “Tense.” returned Kallis.