by Sierra Dean
What I saw almost brought me to my knees.
My hand wasn’t broken. At some point while I’d struggled with The Greek, my adrenaline had overwhelmed the veil of control I’d kept over my werewolf side since I was a baby. Instead of a human left hand, I was looking at a hideous amalgamation of a human hand and a wolf paw. My fingers were shortened, and the skin had changed to a light gray color. A fine smattering of coarse hair covered my hand, ending abruptly at the wrist. But the claws were the biggest shock. An inch long and curved, they were dark black and covered in skin and blood.
I had split the vampire open.
Even as I watched, the pain reawakened in my hand, and everything shifted back to normal. It had taken mere seconds, but watching it felt like a lifetime.
Shane looked away from the dead vampire. He hadn’t seen a thing.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded stupidly, still staring at my hand. I guess I had inherited something from my mother after all. She was one of the few shapeshifters I’d ever met who could complete selective form-shifts without being under the influence of the full moon.
My hands trembled as I picked up my gun from the cold ground.
“You need to call the Council. Get them to send a clean-up crew.” I was already jogging away.
“Wait, where are you going?”
I didn’t answer. I needed to get away from there and back to somewhere safe and warm and normal before I threw up.
Chapter Nineteen
Brigit Stewart had an amazingly normal apartment for a dead girl.
My hands were still shaking when she buzzed me up, but at least they were human hands. The question of how I’d been able to shift only one part of my body, and shift it back, was beyond the scope of my understanding to answer. If my mother wasn’t a homicidal maniac bent on killing me, she’d be the perfect person to ask. Unfortunately, she wasn’t an option.
Yet another question to ask Grandmere when I got around to calling her.
I let myself into Brigit’s living room and was surprised to find a familiar young man sitting on the couch looking both pleased and guilty.
“Hi, Nolan.”
Nolan Tate smiled, flashing his perfectly straight white teeth at me. He was a good-looking kid. A unique blend of Spanish and African-American traits gave his skin a coffee-and-cinnamon coloring. Nolan was more than just attractive, though. He was also a sweet, good-natured guy, and my immediate reaction to him was to keep him protected and safe.
Yet here he was, alone with a vampire.
“Hiya.” His grin broadened a little more.
“What are you—?”
Brigit emerged from her bedroom wearing a tank top and a pair of lacy panties. She waved at me, her megawatt smile showing no signs of embarrassment, and ducked into the kitchen. When she returned, she handed Nolan and I each a cold beer in spite of the frigid temperature outside, and skipped back into her bedroom.
“Uhh.”
“So,” Nolan said, ignoring my stunned reaction. “What brings ya here?”
“What brings you here?” I countered.
“I think dat’s sorta obvious.” This time he had the decency to blush.
Brigit came back in wearing a pair of faded denim jeans. She plopped down next to Nolan on the sofa and snuggled against his side. I wanted to point out to them that when they’d first met, Brigit had enthralled him and bitten his neck open. But I wasn’t really in a place to throw stones at their relationship choices, considering the giant glass mansion I lived in. Instead, I cracked open the beer and took a sip. It tasted rank and skunky, as most beer did.
“I have a job for Brigit.”
“Ohhh.” She clapped excitedly, like I’d just told her my American Express and I were taking her on a no-limit shopping spree. “Do I get to bite someone?”
If her excitement over bleeding another person fazed Nolan at all, he didn’t show it. The guy had spent way too much time with me and Keaty. I leaned against the closed front door and took another swig of the beer.
“No,” I replied. “But you might need to convince a few city officials they didn’t see anything.”
She shrugged, the delight fading from her face. Compared to some of the other tasks I’d had her perform, it was a little bit low on the excitement scale.
“Whatcha want me ta do?” Nolan asked.
I hadn’t plotted out a role for my new protégé, considering I hadn’t expected him to be here. That didn’t mean he would be useless to me, though. A fresh pair of eyes might be just what I needed. Especially considering how shaken up I still was after the whole claw incident.
“You and I are going to look at some dead bodies.”
The Medical Examiner’s office was in the financial district a few blocks north of City Hall. It was a shade prettier than some of the buildings around it, but that only meant the building was a little older and maintained some of the old brick charm its neighbors never had. It still had the cold gray dullness most municipal buildings did.
Since there was no warmth involved in what went on inside, nothing but the misery radiated onto the exterior surfaces. In the same way a plain building used for happier purposes, like a daycare or a charity headquarters, would look much warmer and more inviting.
Empathetic magic was a funny thing, something even the most mundane of humans were impacted by.
This building didn’t need any wards or magic spells to tell passersby it wasn’t a fun place. The structure screamed of pain and death. There were a lot of angry souls here, coming and going, waiting to be avenged. I wasn’t a big fan of ghosts, and I wasn’t thrilled about going somewhere we were almost sure to find them.
It was like being afraid of snakes and walking into the reptile house at a zoo.
But it wasn’t the ghosts I was here to see. I’d only ever met one who’d been of any use to me, and she was long gone. The rest of them were mute specters, glaring indignantly and rattling their proverbial chains. They gave me the willies. No, I was here for the bodies, not the spirits.
“Cheery place,” Nolan said.
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s not so bad,” Brigit chimed in, always trying to be the silver lining, no matter how black the cloud. “I mean…the…uh…” She screwed up her face and stared at the building, attempting to find the indefinable thing that might make it redeemable. Given enough time, she could find something nice to say about Mussolini, even if it was just that his name rhymed with fettuccine. “The doors are awfully pretty,” she concluded.
The doors were a nice touch. Big, dark wood, they were intricately carved with depictions of angels on one side and devils on another. Quite a fancy statement piece for a place where bodies got diced up into their component bits.
I sent Brigit in first so she could convince the desk clerk we were expected. Given my success with Gabriel earlier in the evening, I might have been able to do it myself, but Brigit could turn the thrall on and off like a light bulb. She’d been a vampire less than a year, and she was already proving to be a natural at being undead.
A few minutes later she stepped back through the doors and waved us in. The desk clerk smiled at us like we were old friends. He was a plump, blond man with patchy red skin, but his smile was the warmest I’d seen all night.
“Have fun, y’all.” His head bobbed like he was agreeing with his own statement.
Brigit patted him on the cheek as we passed and slipped his magnetic keycard out of his front pocket. My little ward, a grownup. Made my heart glow with a peculiar sort of pride.
Beside the elevator bay was a black board with white letters on it announcing which offices and departments were on which floor. The main autopsy bays and body storage, more politely called “Processing” and “Morgue”, were located on the second basement level. I knew a few morgues around town where they’d started storing bodies on the higher levels, in better-lit rooms. Those were favorites of the vampire council, because any dead vamps who ended up t
here turned to ash come daylight.
I wanted to see if there was anything on these girls that might indicate something otherworldly had killed them. Anything other than Gabriel. It wasn’t common for me to cross my fingers and hope a vampire had killed someone, but at least if that was the case, swift justice was at my disposal. I wouldn’t even need to make a phone call to issue the warrant. That power was mine now.
We rode the elevator down, and I tried to ignore Brigit and Nolan’s cutesy whispering and playful touching. I couldn’t wrap my head around the two of them as a couple. The door opened into a sterile white hallway that reeked of ammonia and bleach. Our shoes squeaked on the floor as we moved, it was so clean. There were four doors, one on each side of the elevator, and a matching one across the hall from those. Each was marked with a number and a chart on the door to indicate the bodies held within.
“We’re looking for Fitzpatrick, Keller and Ferris,” I informed them.
The three of us split up to check the doors for the corresponding names. I hit pay dirt on the last door. All three women and one Jane Doe were stored within. Brigit used her stolen keycard to provide us access to the room. Inside, the room temperature was a good ten degrees cooler than the hall outside.
All the better to keep your corpses fresh with, my dear.
Built into the back wall were six metal cabinets. In the middle of the floor was a table on wheels, a light stand and an empty instrument tray. On one side of the room were several glass-paneled storage units containing everything from cotton balls and rubber gloves to scalpels and bone saws. I knew what was in each cabinet because the doors contained a meticulous list of the contents.
The antiseptic smell was stronger in here than in the hall as well. I opened one of the storage cabinets and handed Nolan and Brigit each a pair of rubber surgical gloves before putting on my own. I didn’t need us leaving anything behind that might prove we’d been in this room. Fingerprints in the elevator and the exterior hall were one thing—anyone could get there and likely dozens of people a day touched those surfaces. A poorly placed fingerprint on a body, on the other hand, could lead to some unpleasant implications.
The middle two drawers on the back wall were unmarked, which led me to believe they must be empty. I started with Trish Keller, who was in the top left-hand drawer. Lucky for me and my stunted growth, the top drawer came out at chest height, so I didn’t need to find a stepladder to get a good look at the body.
She was sheathed in an opaque white bag, which I unzipped to reveal her naked, blue-gray body. Nolan made a small noise, but Brigit leaned over my shoulder to get a better view.
“Ew,” she said, summarizing my own feelings with perfect brevity.
“Just think, Bri, you could have looked like this too if I hadn’t intervened.”
“Thanks.”
I’d been teasing, but her gratitude sounded genuine. When she’d first been turned, she wanted to kill me for it. Now she seemed legitimately thankful.
“Nolan, can you find me the chart for Trish Keller?” I pointed to the door where several metal clipboards were sorted into their own divider slots next to the magnetic swipe pad. There were six slots and only four folders, confirming my suspicion about the empty drawers.
He came back and tried to hand me the clipboard, but I was too busy scanning Trish’s body for any sign of partially healed vampire bites or other supernatural residue.
“Whatcha lookin’ for?” he asked.
“See if there’s anything unusual in her blood work. Elevated levels of adrenaline. Higher than usual concentrations of hormones. A higher than usual amount of testosterone.” As I listed each telltale sign of shapeshifter blood, Nolan replied in the negative. Trish’s blood was clean, with the exception of high blood alcohol and traces of cocaine.
Maybe it was naïve, but I figured girls at Ivy League schools were less likely to have hard drugs in their systems. College was certainly different than I gleaned from watching Animal House and Road Trip, if doing lines of blow was more common than doing keg stands. If Gabriel wasn’t responsible for Trish’s death, maybe her party lifestyle had contributed to her murder. It was definitely something to consider.
I zipped her bag and continued the search, next checking Angie Ferris, who was rooming downstairs from Trish. Same thing, no signs of bites or violence, nothing weird in her blood. By the time we’d pulled out Misty’s body I was giving up hope of finding proof that would clear Gabriel. These girls had died of something natural. Sure, it was still murder, but their killer didn’t appear to be anything more than a normal, messed-up human.
We stowed Misty’s body, and I was about to call it a night, when I looked at Jane Doe’s locker above Misty’s. Why was this girl in here with them? The other three made sense, because they were a part of an ongoing investigation, but what about the unknown?
“Nolan, grab Jane Doe’s chart for me, please.”
He didn’t ask any questions, just went to grab the clipboard as I opened the final cabinet and pulled the sliding tray out.
The first thing I noticed was potentially more disturbing than anything we’d seen with the other girls thus far. It wasn’t anything about the condition of her body—she looked like most dead girls do. You know…pasty, cold, generally corpsey. What creeped me out about Jane Doe was something much more mundane.
I knew her.
I didn’t know her name, but the mousy brown hair and the chubby roundness of her features came screaming back to me. We’d locked eyes across a dim office, right before she’d jumped out a third-floor window at the museum earlier that week. But I knew perfectly well the fall hadn’t killed her. I’d checked for a body.
Yet this was the same girl.
“Nothin’ in the blood,” Nolan told me before I asked.
“I don’t want to know about her blood.”
“Whatcha wanna know?”
“What’s her date of death?”
“Uhh.” He paged through the sheets until he found what he was looking for. “Says she died ’bout two weeks ’go.”
“No.” I shook my head and took the clipboard from him. “That can’t be right. I saw this girl a few days ago, and she was very alive then.” But he wasn’t mistaken. The Medical Examiner clearly believed her body had been dead for over two weeks. It had only been found the previous day, however.
“If she’s been dead for two weeks, shouldn’t she, like, be rotting or something?” Brigit queried.
She had a good point. There should be more decomposition happening, but the girl appeared to be well-preserved. Curiouser and curiouser. Then I remembered something else about her from the night we’d encountered one another.
Since Nolan was now the one standing closest to the body, I asked, “Can you unzip the bag so I can see her shoulder?”
He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose but didn’t argue with me.
If this was the same girl I’d encountered at the museum, she should show some sign of the gunshot I’d landed on her shoulder. I needed to know if it really was the same girl and not my mind playing tricks on me.
Nolan peeled back the body bag to expose Jane Doe’s bare white shoulders. All three of us leaned over the corpse, and I half-expected her to open her eyes and stare back at us. But nothing happened. And there were no scars on her shoulder or anywhere else on her body.
“What the hell?” I said, unable to understand why there was no evidence of the wound. I wasn’t willing to accept I was wrong about it being the same girl. The resemblance was too uncanny.
When we pulled back, the dead girl’s eyelid had opened, and she leered at us with her one constricted pupil, her face contorted in a sinister, frozen wink that was more creepy than comical. Brigit, Nolan and I all stepped back in unison. I knew bodies did messed-up things postmortem, but it was hard not to imagine that she was staring at us. I was suddenly all too aware that we were in the middle of a room full of corpses, and the heebie-jeebies set in full force.
I did the on
ly thing I could think to do. I zipped the bag back up, pushed the tray back in and closed the cabinet with a final, satisfying click. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I swore the rank of decay was hanging heavy in the air, and I feared it had sunk into my clothes, hair and pores. I would spend hours in the shower washing the smell of death off me.
When we left, Brigit gave the smiling desk clerk his card back.
None of us said a word.
Chapter Twenty
My original plan had been to go straight from the Medical Examiner’s office to Columbia to talk to Mayhew again. But with the smell of rotten corpse clinging to me, I needed a hot shower and a change of clothes before I went anywhere.
There were any number of places I could have stopped between the financial district and the Columbia campus, but I still felt like I reeked of death and had corpse stink oozing out of my sweat. The only shower that would do was my own.
When I unlocked my door, I almost tripped over Desmond’s work shoes. Kicking them out of the way, I shucked my boots off next to his. The water was running in the bathroom, so Desmond had probably gone to the gym after work and just gotten home. If he’d been in a hurry to go from the office to a workout, it would explain his haphazard shoe disposal. Of the two of us, he was almost always the neater one.
Who was I kidding? He was always the neater one.
I contemplated waiting for him to finish in the shower, but the stench wafting off me was too much to bear. Stripping in the middle of the hallway, I stalked into the bathroom and climbed into the steaming shower stall. Desmond’s brown hair and olive skin looked especially dark against my garish pink tub and rose-print wallpaper.
He also seemed surprised to see me.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, his voice slipping into the husky growl he reserved for bedroom conversation.
